7 ms·

If news like this upsets you, there's an easy solution: just stop eating fish.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Which solves exactly nothing, until a significant chunk of the world's population does the same too. And then we'll have depressing articles about poor fishermen who found themselves unemployed and unemployable. The problem is unfortunately very complex and in need of some large-scale, targeted effort.
- cageface 8y ago
  This is the appeal to futility fallacy and can be used to make an argument against doing just about anything. By not eating fish you become part of the solution instead of part of the problem. And the poor fishermen are going to be unemployed soon enough at the current rate of overfishing because there won't be anything left for them to catch anyway. The bycatch for sushi fish is even worse than the figure given in the article: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/sushi-obsession-is-destroying-our-oceans/ http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/sushi-obsession-is...
  - ItsMe000001 8y ago
    It's not a "fallacy", the problem is real. Check your mental model with reality. Disregard the "if" that your mental model relies on ("if enough people did it it would work") and look at what actually happens, and do so separately for different issues, because they all have different contexts and complexities. If those "if"s that your argument depends on never materialize in the real world then the model you use is useless. "Possible" vs. "likely".
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    It's not an appeal to futility, it's pointing out the reality of the problem. My marginal impact on the problem is negligible. The issue only manifests itself on a very large scale. Therefore, any solution involving "just stop eating fish" needs to explain a strategy to achieve this change of behavior on a large scale. Note that simply telling people on the Internet to change is not a working strategy - for each individual, again, the impact is marginal, but individual sacrifice required is great, so most people will just shrug and go on with their lives. Want to make a change? Sure, stop eating fish if you want to signal your commitment. But don't stop at that, because at this point you've achieved nothing. Work to have more impact. Some particular bottom-up and top-down areas I can outline that mesh nicely together: - Work to make the idea of not eating fish more popular. If you can convince a few hundred thousand people to stop eating fish, then maybe it'll actually show up somewhere on some spreadsheet in a fishing company. Be careful not to become like PETA though - if you're too hard about the topic, people will start eating more fish just out of spite. - Make it easier for people to stop eating fish. That involves creating and popularizing new foodstuffs that are substitute to fish, but have better ecological footprint. - The ultimate goal: work towards making the cost of fish products correctly account for externalities. That is, making them (much) more expensive. This involves finding ways to correctly estimate the costs of ecological impact, and then convincing regulators to make fishing industry pay this cost in taxes. Also, you'll want to fight various fishing subsidies that further hide the true costs. You'll make enemies along the way. But this is something that must happen, as it is the real solution. The previous two examples I gave are only supportive to this one. Fish must get more expensive. That's the efficient way of achieving a mass change of behaviour.
    - cageface 8y ago
      Those are all good ideas, I agree, and I commend anyone with the dedication to pursue them. But even just not eating fish and setting a positive example to your friends and colleagues etc is still worth doing. I became vegan because of the example of a friend and several of my friends, while not vegan, have been eating less meat & fish as a consequence of my example and are more conscious in the choice of the meat & fish they do eat. I'd love to see the animal agriculture industries forced to pay for their externalities but I doubt it's going to happen any time soon. But in the meantime a lot of positive change has come just from people being made more aware of where what they eat comes from and what it costs to get it there. Non-dairy milks have become so popular, for example, that they've put a huge dent in the dairy industry's profits.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Not denying that changing your habits and setting an example for your friends has some impact. I'm only trying to frame it in the relation to the problem. Its marginal first order effects are negligible. This concept was hard for me to accept emotionally too, in the space of energy use - whether or not I reduce my usage of electricity and gas has near-zero immediate impact on anything except my wallet. Such is the problem of scale. The irony is, that the very same thing that's individually almost meaningless, is also the solution once everyone follows it. And there's a point in the middle somewhere, when the idea becomes popular - like vegetarianism today - and suddenly its impact becomes much greater than before. It gets noticed by the market, it starts flowing through feedback loops and begins affecting everything else. One person in a million refusing to eat fish is meaningless. One in a thousand starts to sound like a business opportunity, and business begets more business. The trick is, how to get from here to there. Basically, how to start and sustain a movement. I guess my whole point here is: if you care about a social problem then do your individual thing (here: stop eating fish). But don't stop there, try to do more. Try to speed up the change instead of just changing yourself and hoping others will follow. If we know anything about society, we know this: there are two primary motivators for changing behavior - things that impact one's sense of identity/ego, and things that impact one's wallet. Popularizing fish abstinence is an ego-based solution. Taxing the fishing industry is the economics-based one. We should pursue both.
  - pcthrowaway 8y ago
    Lab-grown fish is going to be a very ecologically sustainable solution hitting the market in the next few years, which will also leave the "poor fishermen" out of work. Like the drivers displaced by autonomous vehicles, I don't think that should stop us from seeking more sustainable and efficient models, instead it should be a wake-up call to our governing class that we need to reexamine our wealth distribution programs.
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  "And then we'll have depressing articles about poor fishermen who found themselves unemployed and unemployable." They'd still be better off than the fishermen who are enslaved. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/02/01/582214032/was-your-seafood-caught-with-slave-labor-new-database-helps-retailers-combat-abu https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/02/01/582214032/wa...
- leroman 8y ago
  You are simply wrong. I am vegetarian now for 10 years, I have been hearing the same de-motivational talk since I started. (but less so now) Ten years ago there were not so many vegetarians or vegans, now Israel (I read) is one of the leading countries in the ratio of vegetarians in the population. Don't be discouraged, if you stop eating fish, friends will hear and some will get inspired and do the same. Eventually many will make the same decision. These processes take time.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    "Just stop eating fish" is not a solution, in the same sense that one brick does not make a building. You need very many bricks, and you need a very significant amount of people to stop eating fish for the problem to be solved. Popularizing fish abstinence - now, that's an outline of a solution.
    - ramblerman 8y ago
      Perhaps, but bringing your own house in order before marching on to tackle the world is not bad advice. There is a lot of 'feigned indignation' in this world, and big plans whereby everyone has to change, and then we will see progress. I couldn't give up fish, not right now. So I applaud anybody who would actually take that step, over writing a few bullet points as to how we should tackle the problem.
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      I think we just need to accept that a portion of the population will not follow these rules, and that this portion alone is enough not to reach the critical mass required to reach that solution "inflexion point". Even if I'm wrong saying that... how long will it take to reach critical mass? How much destruction will be caused attempting to reach it? Individual-centered solutions can't work efficiently enough for these things to change without personal incentives. We need incentives, replacements, regulations. Look at the difference between those two worlds: World 1: "Don't use those free plastic bags! Buy a reusable bag instead for more money! It's the responsible thing to do!" World 2: "Plastic bags cost $0.06 each." Which one has less plastic floating in the sea?
- quicklime 8y ago
  > And then we'll have depressing articles about poor fishermen who found themselves unemployed and unemployable. But think of all the uplifting articles we'll have about new jobs on farms!
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  You must be the change you wish to see in the world. Or to put it another way: try not to contribute to creating a world you don't want to live in.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Sure. My point is that just "being the change you wish to see in the world" is nowhere near enough for actual change to happen.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        And too often ends with it.
Arnt 8y ago
WTF? I'm also upset by the large percentage of slaughtered animals that isn't eaten. Do you have an easy solution for me, just stop eating those species of animals? I'm also upset by the large percentage of vegetables that's thrown away by the shops. Do you have an easy solution for me, just stop eating vegetables?
vfc1 8y ago
Exactly, it makes sense. Why contribute to an industry where there is so much human slavery involved, still in 2018 (source - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/23/thai-seafood-industry-report-trafficking-rights-abuses https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/23/t...)?
belorn 8y ago
If you want to make the situation better, start eating eating fish from invasive species or fish from overpopulated lakes caused by eutrophication. Here in Sweden it seems more the rule than the exception that fresh water lakes are overpopulated, and yet the prescriptive method is to eat less fish and more farmed vegetarian options which means more fertilizers and more runoff creating even more eutrophication in lakes. There is no easy solution to sustained ecological balance. Only by actively counteract the imbalance by positive action can a balance be maintained.
mac01021 8y ago
You also have to stop all the other people who aren't upset from eating fish. So... not so easy.
JTbane 8y ago
Or eat farmed fish.
koboll 8y ago
That couldn't be farther from a solution. Boycotts do next to nothing in the face of collective action problems.

Which solves exactly nothing, until a significant chunk of the world's population does the same too. And then we'll have depressing articles about poor fishermen who found themselves unemployed and unemployable. The problem is unfortunately very complex and in need of some large-scale, targeted effort.

cageface 8y ago
This is the appeal to futility fallacy and can be used to make an argument against doing just about anything. By not eating fish you become part of the solution instead of part of the problem. And the poor fishermen are going to be unemployed soon enough at the current rate of overfishing because there won't be anything left for them to catch anyway. The bycatch for sushi fish is even worse than the figure given in the article: http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/sushi-obsession-is-destroying-our-oceans/ http://www.onegreenplanet.org/environment/sushi-obsession-is...
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  It's not a "fallacy", the problem is real. Check your mental model with reality. Disregard the "if" that your mental model relies on ("if enough people did it it would work") and look at what actually happens, and do so separately for different issues, because they all have different contexts and complexities. If those "if"s that your argument depends on never materialize in the real world then the model you use is useless. "Possible" vs. "likely".
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  It's not an appeal to futility, it's pointing out the reality of the problem. My marginal impact on the problem is negligible. The issue only manifests itself on a very large scale. Therefore, any solution involving "just stop eating fish" needs to explain a strategy to achieve this change of behavior on a large scale. Note that simply telling people on the Internet to change is not a working strategy - for each individual, again, the impact is marginal, but individual sacrifice required is great, so most people will just shrug and go on with their lives. Want to make a change? Sure, stop eating fish if you want to signal your commitment. But don't stop at that, because at this point you've achieved nothing. Work to have more impact. Some particular bottom-up and top-down areas I can outline that mesh nicely together: - Work to make the idea of not eating fish more popular. If you can convince a few hundred thousand people to stop eating fish, then maybe it'll actually show up somewhere on some spreadsheet in a fishing company. Be careful not to become like PETA though - if you're too hard about the topic, people will start eating more fish just out of spite. - Make it easier for people to stop eating fish. That involves creating and popularizing new foodstuffs that are substitute to fish, but have better ecological footprint. - The ultimate goal: work towards making the cost of fish products correctly account for externalities. That is, making them (much) more expensive. This involves finding ways to correctly estimate the costs of ecological impact, and then convincing regulators to make fishing industry pay this cost in taxes. Also, you'll want to fight various fishing subsidies that further hide the true costs. You'll make enemies along the way. But this is something that must happen, as it is the real solution. The previous two examples I gave are only supportive to this one. Fish must get more expensive. That's the efficient way of achieving a mass change of behaviour.
  - cageface 8y ago
    Those are all good ideas, I agree, and I commend anyone with the dedication to pursue them. But even just not eating fish and setting a positive example to your friends and colleagues etc is still worth doing. I became vegan because of the example of a friend and several of my friends, while not vegan, have been eating less meat & fish as a consequence of my example and are more conscious in the choice of the meat & fish they do eat. I'd love to see the animal agriculture industries forced to pay for their externalities but I doubt it's going to happen any time soon. But in the meantime a lot of positive change has come just from people being made more aware of where what they eat comes from and what it costs to get it there. Non-dairy milks have become so popular, for example, that they've put a huge dent in the dairy industry's profits.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Not denying that changing your habits and setting an example for your friends has some impact. I'm only trying to frame it in the relation to the problem. Its marginal first order effects are negligible. This concept was hard for me to accept emotionally too, in the space of energy use - whether or not I reduce my usage of electricity and gas has near-zero immediate impact on anything except my wallet. Such is the problem of scale. The irony is, that the very same thing that's individually almost meaningless, is also the solution once everyone follows it. And there's a point in the middle somewhere, when the idea becomes popular - like vegetarianism today - and suddenly its impact becomes much greater than before. It gets noticed by the market, it starts flowing through feedback loops and begins affecting everything else. One person in a million refusing to eat fish is meaningless. One in a thousand starts to sound like a business opportunity, and business begets more business. The trick is, how to get from here to there. Basically, how to start and sustain a movement. I guess my whole point here is: if you care about a social problem then do your individual thing (here: stop eating fish). But don't stop there, try to do more. Try to speed up the change instead of just changing yourself and hoping others will follow. If we know anything about society, we know this: there are two primary motivators for changing behavior - things that impact one's sense of identity/ego, and things that impact one's wallet. Popularizing fish abstinence is an ego-based solution. Taxing the fishing industry is the economics-based one. We should pursue both.
- pcthrowaway 8y ago
  Lab-grown fish is going to be a very ecologically sustainable solution hitting the market in the next few years, which will also leave the "poor fishermen" out of work. Like the drivers displaced by autonomous vehicles, I don't think that should stop us from seeking more sustainable and efficient models, instead it should be a wake-up call to our governing class that we need to reexamine our wealth distribution programs.
jonhendry18 8y ago
"And then we'll have depressing articles about poor fishermen who found themselves unemployed and unemployable." They'd still be better off than the fishermen who are enslaved. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/02/01/582214032/was-your-seafood-caught-with-slave-labor-new-database-helps-retailers-combat-abu https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/02/01/582214032/wa...
leroman 8y ago
You are simply wrong. I am vegetarian now for 10 years, I have been hearing the same de-motivational talk since I started. (but less so now) Ten years ago there were not so many vegetarians or vegans, now Israel (I read) is one of the leading countries in the ratio of vegetarians in the population. Don't be discouraged, if you stop eating fish, friends will hear and some will get inspired and do the same. Eventually many will make the same decision. These processes take time.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  "Just stop eating fish" is not a solution, in the same sense that one brick does not make a building. You need very many bricks, and you need a very significant amount of people to stop eating fish for the problem to be solved. Popularizing fish abstinence - now, that's an outline of a solution.
  - ramblerman 8y ago
    Perhaps, but bringing your own house in order before marching on to tackle the world is not bad advice. There is a lot of 'feigned indignation' in this world, and big plans whereby everyone has to change, and then we will see progress. I couldn't give up fish, not right now. So I applaud anybody who would actually take that step, over writing a few bullet points as to how we should tackle the problem.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    I think we just need to accept that a portion of the population will not follow these rules, and that this portion alone is enough not to reach the critical mass required to reach that solution "inflexion point". Even if I'm wrong saying that... how long will it take to reach critical mass? How much destruction will be caused attempting to reach it? Individual-centered solutions can't work efficiently enough for these things to change without personal incentives. We need incentives, replacements, regulations. Look at the difference between those two worlds: World 1: "Don't use those free plastic bags! Buy a reusable bag instead for more money! It's the responsible thing to do!" World 2: "Plastic bags cost $0.06 each." Which one has less plastic floating in the sea?
quicklime 8y ago
> And then we'll have depressing articles about poor fishermen who found themselves unemployed and unemployable. But think of all the uplifting articles we'll have about new jobs on farms!
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. Or to put it another way: try not to contribute to creating a world you don't want to live in.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Sure. My point is that just "being the change you wish to see in the world" is nowhere near enough for actual change to happen.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      And too often ends with it.

Arnt 8y ago

WTF? I'm also upset by the large percentage of slaughtered animals that isn't eaten. Do you have an easy solution for me, just stop eating those species of animals? I'm also upset by the large percentage of vegetables that's thrown away by the shops. Do you have an easy solution for me, just stop eating vegetables?

vfc1 8y ago

Exactly, it makes sense. Why contribute to an industry where there is so much human slavery involved, still in 2018 (source - https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/23/thai-seafood-industry-report-trafficking-rights-abuses https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jan/23/t...)?

belorn 8y ago

If you want to make the situation better, start eating eating fish from invasive species or fish from overpopulated lakes caused by eutrophication. Here in Sweden it seems more the rule than the exception that fresh water lakes are overpopulated, and yet the prescriptive method is to eat less fish and more farmed vegetarian options which means more fertilizers and more runoff creating even more eutrophication in lakes. There is no easy solution to sustained ecological balance. Only by actively counteract the imbalance by positive action can a balance be maintained.

mac01021 8y ago

You also have to stop all the other people who aren't upset from eating fish. So... not so easy.

JTbane 8y ago

Or eat farmed fish.

koboll 8y ago

That couldn't be farther from a solution. Boycotts do next to nothing in the face of collective action problems.