No-one in this thread is the target audience for the campaign. And you are clearly attacking another group's effort right here!

Because the author's objective is to promote animal welfare. They are jettisoning that which is unnecessary, but you need the payload.

There doesn't seem to be anything gained by being negative about veganism though, and not doing that would seem robustly better.

Being seen as honest about the problems with veganism raises their credibility with their other recommendations. "Oh yes, we're not like those annoying people you've already rejected, we have a different view".

This feels like a very negative take on a lighthearted campaign that is trying to get across an important point. It's important to do outreach to people who disagree with you - even people who think vegans are annoying.

If donors thought the other thing was more valuable than GiveWell, they should donate there instead, and that other group could then pay higher salaries and attract the talent.

Thanks for finding! If it was new to Toby and Ryan in that thread this was probably the earliest EAs had come across it.

This was named the Meat-Eater Problem in this article in the Journal Of Controversial Ideas by @MichaelPlant.

The name is much older than this, though it has generally been refered to as 'The Poor Meat-Eater Problem' which I think is a better name; I remember discussing it in 2012 and I don't think it was new then. On the forum with a quick search I found this from over 9 years ago.

David D Friedman wrote a very interesting blog post on this topic which significantly influenced my thinking, arguing that if you reject the validity of human shields, then you should also accept the possible acceptability (in sufficiently dire circumstances) of conscription:

The bad guy grabs a convenient bystander, pulls out a gun, points it at you, and starts shooting with the bystander held in front of him. If you shoot back you might kill the innocent shield. Are you entitled to do it?

...

If your response to the human shield problem is that killing an innocent shield violates the victim’s rights so you should never do it, you are at the mercy of any opponent willing to follow the Hamas strategy or any serious nuclear power.

...

The alternative is that you have a right to defend yourself. If the only way of defending yourself violates the rights of other people, you are still entitled to do it; your violation of their rights is the fault of the attacker you are defending against. That seems the obvious position, short of pacifism, for a libertarian to take.

But …

Arguably, defending against aggressive neighbors requires taxes. Collecting taxes violates the rights of the taxpayers but if you are entitled to kill innocent Palestinians or Russians when doing so is necessary to defend your rights, surely you are also entitled to violate the rights of Americans to some of their money.

There are good arguments against a military draft under most circumstances but imagine a war so dangerous that no wage would be high enough to recruit enough volunteers to keep the enemy from conquering you. You wouldn't want to violate the rights of people by drafting them, but if it is the only way of defending your rights … 

Similarly, you argue that (according to normal ethics) killing people is forbidden normally, but encouraged during war. But neither seems true to me: killing is permitted to normal people if necessary in self defense or the defense of others, and killing in war is only permitted if the war is just - ie a war of national defense or the defense of others.

Something can be a promising X intervention even if its something that had been thought of before in connection with another purpose.

For example, GLP-1 blockers are promising obesity interventions. When we discovered they were very effective at weight loss, this was an important intellectual contribution to the world. It gave fat people a new reason to take the drugs. This is true even though GPL-1s were already an approved medical intervention for a different purpose (diabetes).

Even beyond this, I think Nick's Astronomical Waste argument is Longtermist. So in that sense it is a novel Longtermist idea, even if it predates the term 'Longtermism'.

I distinctly remember telling my parents to wear a mask in the airport, based on rationalist sources, and having to argue that actually anonymous people on the internet were more reliable sources than the government, who did not recommend this.