Veganism: Motivational Methods for Vegan Advocacy, by Casey T. Taft, Book Review.

a bonus yen irony of ironies it seems
like the whole book falls into exactly the trap it's trying to avoid and it just idiosyncratically picks and chooses the things that the offer author finds gratifying or amusing to talk about and treats them as effective activism with absolutely no empirical basis without even rigorously arguing it without even looking at an honest and open minded way at the type of anecdotal evidence we all have it is unbelievable to me how unsophisticated this argument is in its use of the data if you can even call that data that's the only thing I can praise here is when he's saying other people's approaches are not scientific and then the bizarre thing is this book proceeds to offer you an approach that is itself totally unscientific as you mentioned one more thing I should degress his experience as a clinical clinical psychologist is also incredibly biased because the people he's talking to are either paying money to receive his advice on how to change their lives as a clinical or they're stuck in his office because a court order a judge or some kind of police authority forced them to sit in his office and listen to his advice that is totally different from the type of situation we're in as vegans trying to motivate people to take an interest in doing the right thing for the right reason and become vegan ah that new CN this is yet another video apologizing for not presenting a book review this is a non book review or no it's a book non review that's what it is so you guys know I've been forcing myself to read a doctor Casey Taft's book motivational methods for vegan advocacy and I mean you know this book is just a waste of your time it is just a waste of your time the only part of the book I can praise is where he is in just a few pages attacking the methodology of some of the other groups that make pseudo scientific claims these are within the social sciences but that make seemingly scientific claims about what is and what is not effective advocacy now i think i'm going to make another video about that dealing especially with the animal charity evaluate errs so let's see if I can just get the name of that charity right yes I did get a right AC e animal charity evaluate errs and other groups making pseudo scientific claims about the effectiveness of different forms of activism and so that's that's the only thing I can praise here is when he's saying other people's approaches are not scientific and then the bizarre thing is this book proceeds to offer you an approach that is itself totally unscientific now I made a comment on Twitter the other day I'm new to Twitter I said look a lot of these claims about what is effective activism are inherently absurd because when it comes right down to it we're talking about propaganda and propaganda is a form of art effective activism is effective art now why did I say that I'm insinuating that there are limits to what we can approach in a metrical scientific way to some extent we're going to have to embrace the richness and diversity of human experience and the ineluctably unscientific reality of the fact that one work of art you know moves an audience emotionally and another doesn't whether you're talking about cinema or painting or performance art or stand-up comedy it is peculiar I mean it's all so peculiar sometimes you have a work of art and at the time its first made it doesn't find an audience it doesn't resonate with nights and then decades later for some reason it gets rediscovered you know when it goes from being unknown to being famous the arts are full of these kinds of contradictions and I do think propaganda is an art I do have a background in social sciences I do think the social sciences have some important lessons for us to consider in veganism but I mean this is bizarre Casey Taft's approach it's just a series of these self-selected incredibly biased anecdotes that only fav his own argument I'll just give an example this isn't very 109 he just says even the most offensive non-vegan who is in the pre contemplation stage of change has the potential to someday go vegan I have heard many vegans tell me that they once used to troll vegan Facebook pages making hateful comments about loving the taste of animals and yet they ended up going vegan so you know okay again this is not brilliantly written the argument really just is it consists of a long series of totally disorganized self-selected antecdotes like that one time I had this conversation on the internet and one time I talked to for somebody on facebook or via email once I talked to this guy and like it is unbelievable to me how unsophisticated this argument is in its use of the data if you can even call that data I've worked as an editor of nonfiction academic nonfiction especially and you know many people with PhDs they think about writing a report in a way that's completely abstracted from the audience no thought whatsoever has gone into how this book would be useful for the person reading it I say as as an editor when I was given a manuscript of a book very often written by some with a PhD most of my projects were I would often have to confront the author and say look here near the start of the book you got 30 pages that are totally worthless to the audience for this book to the reader for this book and sometimes that would get offended to get angry and fight over to something but they had never thought who is going to read this book who is this for how is this book going to be useful this person and among other obvious implications of just thinking that way think about the audience reading for is not providing information they already know right like who is going to read this the title is motivational methods for vegan advocacy a clinical psychology perspective so only people who are already really experienced with these exactly these types of [ __ ] anecdote experiences nobody is going to read this book who is at such a level of June ignorance they would be blown away by these animals like wow really you once talked to a guy on facebook who said he used to be a troll and that was me Wow let's go me more like none of this is going to be new or surprising to the very small audience of people like myself who would read it and then what's done with with that data and the various kind of ethical and normative claims here it's it's both it's not to me the problem is not that it's pseudoscience I've already explained I think in some ways what we're talking about here is much more art than science this just cannot be useful so I already have another video that's already up on YouTube where talk about the peculiar role of social justice as a concept in case etfs approach to this i believe i believe the title that video is simply veganism is not a social justice movement um it's a very poorly written book it fails both in living up to its own scientific pretensions and it fails to be useful in a more broadly heuristic education or artistic sense now do I think that the challenge for motivational methods indiana visit do i think that the challenge for motivational methods in vegan advocacy do i think that is a purely artistic challenge no I think there were actually a lot of lessons we can take from the social sciences and Social Science methodology I said this really briefly in my last conversation with mod vegan I said look you know I know what it's like to do real outcome evaluation in the social sciences we have a baseline and a midline and Ed line you know I I know how those methods are used I know how outcomes are measured you know you they have all this pretentious language in that field you design the instruments and carry out the field work and do the study and so on um at a minimum with no budget just us having a conversation here on YouTube or via Skype I think there's really like a philosophical sense in which we have a lot to learn about effective activism from social science research methods can we actually use those methods to improve what we're doing here and now and veganism in 2017 I think the simple answer is no because nobody has the budget and also nobody nobody is going to be intellectually honest about what those findings are and nobody has the the rigor or the even the motivation to use those findings in in a meaningful way now Casey Taft himself gives me a great example of this early on in the first couple chapters sorry if ribs chapter 10 chapter 2 quite early on in the book Casey dismisses most of the social science research that's gone into effective activism so far by saying that it is completely worthless to ask meat eaters what would or would not be effective vegan activism for the same reason he claims that it would be useless to ask racists to ask people who may be for example neo-nazis uh what would be effective in educating them to you know be more accepting of blacks or Jews or whoever it is they're the racist against now to me that is just mind-blowing Lee self-evidently wrong and makes me think that Casey Taft even though he has this background in clinical psychology had absolutely no understanding of what this kind of social science research is or why it would matter for veganism the exact opposite of that statement is true it's incredibly important and incredibly worthwhile for example to go into prisons and talk to white people who are members of neo-nazi gangs and talk to them but why they're racist and how they first joined the game what their motives are what their worldview is it is actually this is I mean the exact opposite is what he's saying is how social science research works it's so important to reach out to and try to understand those people and understand the contradictions they have in their lives like most of those guys tell you about people who identify as as racists they do at the same time have cooperative relationships with black people and Portuguese people at their workplace and then yet they go home and they're racist so you can talk to them about how they live how they balance this ideology with the reality of you know some of them I know it sounds ridiculous some of them literally do have non white friends and yet they're racist and it's crucially important interview people who are going through the stages of them some people say deprogramming you know of exiting maybe a cult-like racist group and then to interview them afterwards to do you know baseline midline edline study and talk to them about what was effective for them this is the absolute bread-and-butter this is the basic you know this you know you can you claim that you care about social science research and having a rigorous scientific approach understanding what is what is it affecting being accuracy and yet the most basic kind of broadly philosophical concepts we could take from the social sciences veganism are dismissed right in right in chapter one so that is bizarre to me that is surreal and throughout the whole book again I think it's partly just the Casey Taft is a is a bad author you know he just states things really in a religious fashion as if he's in a position to declare self-evident truths with no empirical basis and no examination and no argumentation of self doubt he'll just say something like well at the cognition stage the most important element of veganism to argue is the ethical argument because he just makes these claims about how you should present veganism in terms of ethics rather than other factors disregarding even the few scientific studies that are talking about here the probably the only scientific finding we have right now by the way about what is effective in in people remaining vegan very interest is the sense of revulsion the sense of disgust that people who cultivate an aversion to that they find me revolting stay vegan and uh many who don't feel that way go back to eating dead obvious that's the kind of thing you learned through social science research is that Ashley feelings of a version and discussed that meat is gross and so on there and dairy and eggs and someone that's actually an important part of people becoming and remaining vegan which maybe is not flattering to you ideological maybe you prefer to think it's a purely ethical case or purely political decision or something but it's not so that kind of thing can can show up in social science research um like you know again so there's there's art and science and stand up comedy here I talk for ethics for hours and hours on my channel but I would be the first person to admit and all due humility some people have zero interest in the ethical arguments just on a case-by-case basis just idiosyncratically and it'll never matter and on the other hand being brutally honest and even insulting with some people especially I've got to say with with heterosexual men can off to have a really lasting impression on them as you mentioned one more thing I should degress his experience as a clinical clinical psychologist is also incredibly biased because the people he's talking to are either paying money to receive his advice on how to change their lives as a'kla or they're stuck in his office because a court order a judge or some kind of police authority forced them to sit in his office and listen to his advice that is totally different from the type of situation we're in as vegans trying to motivate people to take an interest in doing the right thing for the right reason and become vegan right if someone paid me in the role of a therapist to coach them becoming vegan totally different scenario if somebody is forced to sit in my office and be counseled by me because the judge sentenced them to do so many hours of counseling with with a therapist that's totally different and he is completely utterly biased by this experience these professional experience as going to go therapist it doesn't realize how utterly in applicable most of this stuff is irony of ironies it seems like the whole book falls into exactly the trap it's trying to avoid and it just idiosyncratically picks and chooses the things that the author finds gratifying or amusing to talk about and treats them as effective activism with absolutely no empirical basis without even rigorously arguing it without even looking at an honest and open minded way at the type of anecdotal evidence we all have before my digression I was just saying look I like to talk about ethics I like to talk about politics I don't even want to guess what percentage of my fellow human beings want to hear those arguments least of all in relation to veganism my experience on planet earth whether it's in Laos or Cambodia or Canada very few people are sincerely interested in having a lecture on ethics under any circumstances least of all really should because very few people are really interested in politics it's a very loud minority because people talk about politics get on TV every night but it's really if you're being honest to yourself it's it's a minority and if you're not in a context where someone's either paying money for a therapist or being forced to talk to a therapist by a judge you start to even if it's just an anecdotal way see that you know in accordance with the great diversity of human personality types all kinds of different methods turn out to be effective even if they are in a theoretical sense meth largely wrong there's a lot of material here on how to be a good listener which I think honestly I think is it absolutely zero used anyone who would you know read this book like how you're supposed to sit down as he does in his office of the therapist and make the person feel validated and listen to and heard and all this [ __ ] you know even if it's wrong all of us if your experience is a vegan you know examples for your own life where you may be said something rude and contemptuous and dismissive to someone but it struck home and the honesty of it stayed with them and inspired them to become vegan or at least inspire them to become reduced tarian I especially in my interactions with heterosexual men I've often pointed out for one thing a lot of heterosexual men like it when you don't [ __ ] them and if we're being all the way on us this is pretty much a guide to how to [ __ ] people so they often just respond to the honesty even if it's a little bit brusk or a little bit insulting and you know the same way that you know a coach may motivate people in a sport not by saying this is going to be easy you're going to be so good at it you can motivate people also by talking about how hard something is going to be right like you don't have to come into this saying oh but veganism is so rewarding and it's so easy and you can do it and everyone else finds it easy you can say yeah you know what it's hard it's hard emotionally it's hard practically yeah it's gonna [ __ ] up your lunch schedule it's gonna [ __ ] up you know every time you go on a date with a woman yeah it's a burden yeah it's hard but guess what it's the right thing to do and what are you too weak or too stupid or too lazy or too cowardly to do the right thing you can have those kinds everybody's think if given that this is just working from a mess of anecdotes and it's picking and choosing those anecdotes in this kind of dishonest way my opinion you know the head dotes don't favor this kind of methodology at all because again anecdotally you can't have the experience many of you will have had it repeatedly you just say to somebody contemptuously when they tell you that oh they think veganism is morally correct but they could never do it themselves because it's inconvenient or for some specific reason you know you may say something pretty contemptuous like well you know what a thousand years ago the world seemed to be full of men who were willing to stand up and fight and die over a point of moral principle and these days it seems like everyone is so lazy and so self-indulgent that it's too much to ask from the stand up and do the right thing because it's the right thing to do and you might say something even more insulting you might say to them yeah well I guess you're just a coward I guess you're not willing you know to take this incredibly tiny risk of trying to be vegan because you know it's the right thing to do I guess you're in various words you may let them know that you perceive them as lazy and immoral a bad person and so that's breaking every rule in this book and yet that same person may come back to you months later and say wow you know what you said really stuck with me and now I really try to be vegan maybe they're not vegan maybe the become reduce of teryan but maybe they become vegan too I've had those kinds of interactions on the internet I've had them face-to-face with people I've had so many situations where i was talking this person and i thought they were just wasting my time and I was being quite brusk and insulting and then I heard back from the months later that they did become vegan now am I going to build a methodology out of that no I mean this is like what are you gonna do what do the social science methods tell us about stand-up comedy you know what kind of social science methods tell us even I mean look I have a background in academic religious studies maybe there's more that we can learn from you know how religions are preached how people convert and D convert from religious beliefs I don't know probably a lot of the social sciences have different rules to teach us but i guess the fundamental delusion that each of these academic authors brings the game is they tried to argue that the social sciences have one lesson for all of veganism for all vegan activism and advocacy and you know we have to we have to support their conclusions and look all this stuff comes down to cultural and linguistic factors also i already think this book is a piece of [ __ ] if you're living in can to the united states do you think even Casey Taft himself would have the delusion that you could take his conclusions and apply them to Japan apply them to Taiwan apply them to Scotland let's call I've lived in Scotland it's significative an even France even Germany cultures where meat and meat eating are so different and you know in saying that already now you realize just how anecdotal and just how incoherent the daddy you're working from is so what do you think within the United States do you really think it's going to be the same in New York City as it is in Texas do you really think it's going to be the same for talking to white white wealthy people as opposed to maybe you know poor or middle class Hispanic people like so again as as thin as the pretense of scientism is in this kind of study then when you bring in those cultural factors you know it gets it gets so so thin as to be observed I can tell you in kc textbook i think the basic problem is that he just did not put any thought whatsoever into who his audience was who would actually read the book and what would be useful for them to know and I do think it lacks the incredibly high level of honesty and rigor and humility that it would take to really reflect on you know the incoherent and anecdotal reality of what does convert people to being vegan and then try to take steps forward in drawing up some kind of you know conclusions or lessons from that as I said on Twitter you know part of the puzzle here is simply that propaganda is an art form so when we are talking about effective advocacy we are talking about effective art and that is almost a paradox almost a contradiction in terms I banos yen