7 ms·

I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "fa

I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories. What do you think "farmland" is ? Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal agriculture ? Or some "farmland" can be used for grazing but not for agriculture, maybe ? Same for proteins : all amino acids are not equal, a a pound of soy protein won't have the same effect on your body as a pound of meat proteins. And don't get me started on nutrients and their bio availability (e.g. iron and B12). As far as CO₂ emissions from cattle, where do your think the C comes from ? The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ?

arghwhat 3y ago
Yes, some land is not suitable for agriculture. No, this does mean that having cattle is a neutral usage as each cattle requires agriculture to feed for 3-4 years before they are slaughtered. Yes, cattle emissions are largely from the food. No, this is not just grass that was already there and would decompose anyway - the majority of agricultural production is to feed cattle and would not be necessary without (the efficiency of raising an animal for years to get a few steaks is horrible), and even if fed naturally it significantly increases the rate of plant turnover. Yes, meat protein is a great source of nutrition. No, it is not magically better than equivalent vegetarian nutrition. Both have diets ranging from super healthy to obesity inducing. Being carnivorous or vegetarian is itself not a significant health factor - chips and crisps are often vegan, and Big Macs contain meat.
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  > Yes, meat protein is a great source of nutrition. No, it is not magically better than equivalent vegetarian nutrition. It’s not magic, but the protein from animal sources is just scientifically better than protein from plant sources. If you want to compare the nutritional benefits of different protein sources you need to account for how bioavailable they are. Some plant sources aren’t bad, but none are as good as animal sources, and some of the them aren’t very good at all. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905294/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905294/
  - HelloMcFly 3y ago
    That paper would suggest to me that perhaps eggs are as animal as we need to get. I agree with your specific point here, but it feels like a small thing when considering the overall societal and environmental cost of animal protein (esp. beef, pork, lamb).
    - AmericanChopper 3y ago
      If you tried to get all your calories from eating eggs, your diet would have too much fat and not enough carbs. In reality you need a balanced and varied diet, and the world couldn’t support 7 billion people all deciding to get their protein intake from one specific food item anyway. Animal products are simply better at providing the protein you need. You _can_ get all of it from plant based sources (I’m not sure whether it would be theoretically possible for all humans to adopt such a diet), but it’s more difficult. Meaning if you want to meet your nutritional requirements without having a big calorie excess, you have to plan your diet very carefully, and implement a highly restrictive program. If you want to do that without eating highly processed foods such as soy protein isolate (which is a popular dietary restriction), then you’re going to have an even harder time.
      - pg_1234 3y ago
        "not enough carbs" is the easiest problem to solve (just add wheat/rice/potato etc.) ... in fact the normal problem is too much carbs.
        AmericanChopper 3y ago
        That depends on whether you care about eating too many calories. If your average person got all their protein from eggs, they’d eat too much fat, way too much saturated fat, and have very few calories left to get in all of their other nutritional needs. Incidentally, that’s why it is possible to eat a healthy plant based diet if you’re very active. If you burn 2000 active calories a day, then it matters less if you’re eating nutritionally inefficient food, because you can make up for it in volume.
blacksmith_tb 3y ago
Certainly some cattle are grazed on land that would be too hilly / rocky etc. to farm. And that's not a terrible use of land, but enormous numbers of cattle are raised in feedlots, and fed cereal crops like corn (maize) which have to farmed on the better farmland, which is far less reasonable.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  The non-arable land meme comes from a paper that considered land non-arable if it had 25% crop yield (due to things like bad soil or too rocky or too much of a grade). Yet the things that make land non-arable also reduce their yield for animal ag on that same land.
scns 3y ago
> a pound of soy protein won't have the same effect on your body as a pound of meat proteins. True. Eating meat will raise your inflammation markers by 70%. > nutrients and their bio availability (e.g. iron and B12) Fe3 from animal sources has a better uptake by the body. Fe2 from plants is good enough if you combine it with Vitamin C. Parsley contains both. Animals in conventional agriculture have to be fed B12, for them to stay healthy and their meat to contain any. The B12 producing bacteria in the soil get killed by pesticides. The 83% of farmland which is used to feed and raise animals taken together is the size of Africa. Source: Game Changers, the movie [0]. Highly recommended, stopped cooking wirh organic meat, i take B12 directly instead. If someone else cooks for me, i still eat meat and enjoy it. Knowing full well that it damages my body, like alcohol and sugar. Completly banning fun sounds awful.
- UberFly 3y ago
  "Game Changers" is a terrible place to plant your fact-flag. Like all documentaries of its type, there is no balanced fact-checking, questionable "experts" basing their opinions on small inconclusive studies, etc, etc.
- pvaldes 3y ago
  > Eating meat will raise your inflammation markers by 70%. Big claim. Can you provide a source for this? [Updated, if your source is a movie, is not a real source and is useless. People fly in the movies] In any case to avoid falling in a tunnel vision spot we would need a comparison with the effect of vegetable pesticides on inflammation markers also. We humans, eat meat since... forever in our history. After that idea ancient people should have inflammation markers skyrocketing so could be easy to check it. Have you consider the possibility that the problem could be other than the meat like for example diesel contamination or plastic wrappings?
  - scns 3y ago
    Watch it if you can, it has a lot more on offer. I ate meat before i saw it, since i need B12. Now i rarely do, usually when someone else cooked for me.
- 3y ago
richardw 3y ago
“The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ?” It would decompose (once) and then natural habitat would return because we need less of that land, capturing carbon more permanently because it’s released more slowly. In Brazil, exactly the opposite is happening: deforestation to feed cattle. Are you arguing for that deforestation?
- DuckFeathers 3y ago
  >Are you arguing for that deforestation? Not the same user but I will argue for deforestation any day. Humans are grassland creatures and trees are our enemy. Trees shadow the grass and affect our natural habitat. Even elephants know this and get rid of trees when they see them. [1] In fact, when the wooly mammoths went extinct, Pleistocene Park turned from a grassland to a forest, and now an ecological disaster [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vvC2MHJezF0 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vvC2MHJezF0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXAirenteRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXAirenteRA
  - tfourb 3y ago
    That's just dump. If you really want to over simplify human history, we are Savanna creatures, and Savannas contain plenty of trees and other perennial plants. I also don't get why you are bringing elephants into this, especially because there are whole sub-species of elephants that are adapted to forest-dwelling. As are humans, by the way. Plenty of human civilizations have historically specialized to live in heavily forested biomes, ranging from the rain forests of the tropics to the boreal forests in northern Europe, the North America and Asia. Agroforestry as a practice goes back thousands of years in both the old and the new world.
    - DuckFeathers 3y ago
      >I also don't get why you are bringing elephants into this Because trees are invasive plants and elephants keep them out of the grassland ecosystems. >especially because there are whole sub-species of elephants that are adapted to forest-dwelling. Yes, trees did win that battle... potentially because of sudden drop in elephant population because of disease or famine... but it doesn't have to be the case everywhere. >Savannas contain plenty of trees and other perennial plants. This is a cause for concern and it is a direct result of the drop in African elephant population from several million to around half a million now.
yamtaddle 3y ago
> Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal agriculture ? This is one of those "not even wrong" kind of things. The conditions that led to famine-cycles plaguing the Old World until the arrival of New World crops, and later the Green Revolution, have nothing at all to do with modern farming or land use, not even in the way you're trying to make the connection. This is all just completely irrelevant to the point you're trying to use it to make. "Were pre-contact old-world farmers just too dumb to kill their cows so they could plant more wheat and stop starving every few years?", asked rhetorically to imply that reducing meat farming can't possibly help with any modern problems. I mean... it's just a nonsense question, the context they were operating in, the global population size, and their farming practices are so far removed from what we do now that it doesn't make any sense to frame it this way. No, they weren't too dumb to think of that, and no, it wouldn't have helped if they had tried it, but neither of those things are relevant to the modern situation, at all.
jldugger 3y ago
>I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories "every statistic you will ever encounter online or from coworkers"
ramblenode 3y ago
This is a kind of "wronger than wrong" fallacy [0]. Yes, not all pasture land is suitable for cereal crops. But that doesn't negate the fact that most livestock production does present an inefficient tradeoff when optimizing for nutrition and land/climate impact. This is because a) a large portion of cereal crops are diverted to feed livestock and b) very little livestock comes from natural pasture land. So only a miniscule percent of livestock production represents no land use tradeoff whatsoever. a) 40% of cereal crops go toward animal feed [1] and most modern animal agriculture would be impossible without this. Arable land that could be feeding humans is being used to feed animals which then feed humans. That represents roughly a 90% loss of potential biological productivity [2]. b) Despite the US having some of the largest natural pasture, only 4% of retail beef in the US is grass-fed--meaning only a tiny percent are fed exclusively from pasture [3]. Additionally, most pasture land has been converted from forest. 40% of deforestation overall is due to animal agriculture [4]. This is only a little less than plant-based agriculture which provides sinificantly more food. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-uses?stackMode=relative https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-us... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level [3] https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-grass-fed-beef https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-gr... [4] https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/cop26-agricultural-expansion-drives-almost-90-percent-of-global-deforestation/en https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/cop26-agricultural-expan...
- runsWphotons 3y ago
  "Arable land that could be used to feed humans..." Is there a shortage of food for humans? I dont think there is a supply issue, rather where famines occur it seems political?
  - adrianN 3y ago
    If we needed less land to feed humans we could instead use the land to sequester carbon and provide habitats for wild animals, e.g. by planting forests.
- 3y ago
recycledmatt 3y ago
It’s called a red herring argument - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring
imtringued 3y ago
You don't seem to understand how factory farming works. No, the animals don't get to go outside.
insane_dreamer 3y ago
> As far as CO₂ emissions from cattle, where do your think the C comes from ? The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ? I don't know about other countries, but the percentage of meat in the U.S. that comes from cattle roaming pastures and eating grass is very small (because it costs so much more).

arghwhat 3y ago

Yes, some land is not suitable for agriculture. No, this does mean that having cattle is a neutral usage as each cattle requires agriculture to feed for 3-4 years before they are slaughtered. Yes, cattle emissions are largely from the food. No, this is not just grass that was already there and would decompose anyway - the majority of agricultural production is to feed cattle and would not be necessary without (the efficiency of raising an animal for years to get a few steaks is horrible), and even if fed naturally it significantly increases the rate of plant turnover. Yes, meat protein is a great source of nutrition. No, it is not magically better than equivalent vegetarian nutrition. Both have diets ranging from super healthy to obesity inducing. Being carnivorous or vegetarian is itself not a significant health factor - chips and crisps are often vegan, and Big Macs contain meat.

AmericanChopper 3y ago
> Yes, meat protein is a great source of nutrition. No, it is not magically better than equivalent vegetarian nutrition. It’s not magic, but the protein from animal sources is just scientifically better than protein from plant sources. If you want to compare the nutritional benefits of different protein sources you need to account for how bioavailable they are. Some plant sources aren’t bad, but none are as good as animal sources, and some of the them aren’t very good at all. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905294/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3905294/
- HelloMcFly 3y ago
  That paper would suggest to me that perhaps eggs are as animal as we need to get. I agree with your specific point here, but it feels like a small thing when considering the overall societal and environmental cost of animal protein (esp. beef, pork, lamb).
  - AmericanChopper 3y ago
    If you tried to get all your calories from eating eggs, your diet would have too much fat and not enough carbs. In reality you need a balanced and varied diet, and the world couldn’t support 7 billion people all deciding to get their protein intake from one specific food item anyway. Animal products are simply better at providing the protein you need. You _can_ get all of it from plant based sources (I’m not sure whether it would be theoretically possible for all humans to adopt such a diet), but it’s more difficult. Meaning if you want to meet your nutritional requirements without having a big calorie excess, you have to plan your diet very carefully, and implement a highly restrictive program. If you want to do that without eating highly processed foods such as soy protein isolate (which is a popular dietary restriction), then you’re going to have an even harder time.
    - pg_1234 3y ago
      "not enough carbs" is the easiest problem to solve (just add wheat/rice/potato etc.) ... in fact the normal problem is too much carbs.
      - AmericanChopper 3y ago
        That depends on whether you care about eating too many calories. If your average person got all their protein from eggs, they’d eat too much fat, way too much saturated fat, and have very few calories left to get in all of their other nutritional needs. Incidentally, that’s why it is possible to eat a healthy plant based diet if you’re very active. If you burn 2000 active calories a day, then it matters less if you’re eating nutritionally inefficient food, because you can make up for it in volume.

blacksmith_tb 3y ago

Certainly some cattle are grazed on land that would be too hilly / rocky etc. to farm. And that's not a terrible use of land, but enormous numbers of cattle are raised in feedlots, and fed cereal crops like corn (maize) which have to farmed on the better farmland, which is far less reasonable.

hombre_fatal 3y ago
The non-arable land meme comes from a paper that considered land non-arable if it had 25% crop yield (due to things like bad soil or too rocky or too much of a grade). Yet the things that make land non-arable also reduce their yield for animal ag on that same land.

scns 3y ago

> a pound of soy protein won't have the same effect on your body as a pound of meat proteins. True. Eating meat will raise your inflammation markers by 70%. > nutrients and their bio availability (e.g. iron and B12) Fe3 from animal sources has a better uptake by the body. Fe2 from plants is good enough if you combine it with Vitamin C. Parsley contains both. Animals in conventional agriculture have to be fed B12, for them to stay healthy and their meat to contain any. The B12 producing bacteria in the soil get killed by pesticides. The 83% of farmland which is used to feed and raise animals taken together is the size of Africa. Source: Game Changers, the movie [0]. Highly recommended, stopped cooking wirh organic meat, i take B12 directly instead. If someone else cooks for me, i still eat meat and enjoy it. Knowing full well that it damages my body, like alcohol and sugar. Completly banning fun sounds awful.

UberFly 3y ago
"Game Changers" is a terrible place to plant your fact-flag. Like all documentaries of its type, there is no balanced fact-checking, questionable "experts" basing their opinions on small inconclusive studies, etc, etc.
pvaldes 3y ago
> Eating meat will raise your inflammation markers by 70%. Big claim. Can you provide a source for this? [Updated, if your source is a movie, is not a real source and is useless. People fly in the movies] In any case to avoid falling in a tunnel vision spot we would need a comparison with the effect of vegetable pesticides on inflammation markers also. We humans, eat meat since... forever in our history. After that idea ancient people should have inflammation markers skyrocketing so could be easy to check it. Have you consider the possibility that the problem could be other than the meat like for example diesel contamination or plastic wrappings?
- scns 3y ago
  Watch it if you can, it has a lot more on offer. I ate meat before i saw it, since i need B12. Now i rarely do, usually when someone else cooked for me.
3y ago

richardw 3y ago

“The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ?” It would decompose (once) and then natural habitat would return because we need less of that land, capturing carbon more permanently because it’s released more slowly. In Brazil, exactly the opposite is happening: deforestation to feed cattle. Are you arguing for that deforestation?

DuckFeathers 3y ago
>Are you arguing for that deforestation? Not the same user but I will argue for deforestation any day. Humans are grassland creatures and trees are our enemy. Trees shadow the grass and affect our natural habitat. Even elephants know this and get rid of trees when they see them. [1] In fact, when the wooly mammoths went extinct, Pleistocene Park turned from a grassland to a forest, and now an ecological disaster [2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vvC2MHJezF0 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vvC2MHJezF0 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXAirenteRA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXAirenteRA
- tfourb 3y ago
  That's just dump. If you really want to over simplify human history, we are Savanna creatures, and Savannas contain plenty of trees and other perennial plants. I also don't get why you are bringing elephants into this, especially because there are whole sub-species of elephants that are adapted to forest-dwelling. As are humans, by the way. Plenty of human civilizations have historically specialized to live in heavily forested biomes, ranging from the rain forests of the tropics to the boreal forests in northern Europe, the North America and Asia. Agroforestry as a practice goes back thousands of years in both the old and the new world.
  - DuckFeathers 3y ago
    >I also don't get why you are bringing elephants into this Because trees are invasive plants and elephants keep them out of the grassland ecosystems. >especially because there are whole sub-species of elephants that are adapted to forest-dwelling. Yes, trees did win that battle... potentially because of sudden drop in elephant population because of disease or famine... but it doesn't have to be the case everywhere. >Savannas contain plenty of trees and other perennial plants. This is a cause for concern and it is a direct result of the drop in African elephant population from several million to around half a million now.

yamtaddle 3y ago

> Our ancestors who knew how to raise cattle and farm cereals for millennia were surviving on the verge of starvation : why do you think that was ? Were they so dumb they'd rather die of hunger than convert some of their grazing pastures to cereal agriculture ? This is one of those "not even wrong" kind of things. The conditions that led to famine-cycles plaguing the Old World until the arrival of New World crops, and later the Green Revolution, have nothing at all to do with modern farming or land use, not even in the way you're trying to make the connection. This is all just completely irrelevant to the point you're trying to use it to make. "Were pre-contact old-world farmers just too dumb to kill their cows so they could plant more wheat and stop starving every few years?", asked rhetorically to imply that reducing meat farming can't possibly help with any modern problems. I mean... it's just a nonsense question, the context they were operating in, the global population size, and their farming practices are so far removed from what we do now that it doesn't make any sense to frame it this way. No, they weren't too dumb to think of that, and no, it wouldn't have helped if they had tried it, but neither of those things are relevant to the modern situation, at all.

jldugger 3y ago

>I really wish there was a name (that I knew of) for this logical fallacy of using precise quantities of meaninglessly confused categories "every statistic you will ever encounter online or from coworkers"

ramblenode 3y ago

This is a kind of "wronger than wrong" fallacy [0]. Yes, not all pasture land is suitable for cereal crops. But that doesn't negate the fact that most livestock production does present an inefficient tradeoff when optimizing for nutrition and land/climate impact. This is because a) a large portion of cereal crops are diverted to feed livestock and b) very little livestock comes from natural pasture land. So only a miniscule percent of livestock production represents no land use tradeoff whatsoever. a) 40% of cereal crops go toward animal feed [1] and most modern animal agriculture would be impossible without this. Arable land that could be feeding humans is being used to feed animals which then feed humans. That represents roughly a 90% loss of potential biological productivity [2]. b) Despite the US having some of the largest natural pasture, only 4% of retail beef in the US is grass-fed--meaning only a tiny percent are fed exclusively from pasture [3]. Additionally, most pasture land has been converted from forest. 40% of deforestation overall is due to animal agriculture [4]. This is only a little less than plant-based agriculture which provides sinificantly more food. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wronger_than_wrong [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-uses?stackMode=relative https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-distribution-to-us... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level [3] https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-grass-fed-beef https://extension.sdstate.edu/grass-fed-beef-market-share-gr... [4] https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/cop26-agricultural-expansion-drives-almost-90-percent-of-global-deforestation/en https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/cop26-agricultural-expan...

runsWphotons 3y ago
"Arable land that could be used to feed humans..." Is there a shortage of food for humans? I dont think there is a supply issue, rather where famines occur it seems political?
- adrianN 3y ago
  If we needed less land to feed humans we could instead use the land to sequester carbon and provide habitats for wild animals, e.g. by planting forests.
3y ago

recycledmatt 3y ago

It’s called a red herring argument - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring

imtringued 3y ago

You don't seem to understand how factory farming works. No, the animals don't get to go outside.

insane_dreamer 3y ago

> As far as CO₂ emissions from cattle, where do your think the C comes from ? The grass/food that cattle eat, what would happen to it if let to decompose ? I don't know about other countries, but the percentage of meat in the U.S. that comes from cattle roaming pastures and eating grass is very small (because it costs so much more).