Thanks for your response! These are thoughtful points.

I'll need to think more about the marginal impact of being a member of a movement like the vegan one. You raise some good points, and upon reflection, I remember that the vegans in my life have certainly inspired my actions at least a little bit. These are benefits that I am wrong to discount too much. 

I think the step in my money pump argument that bothers me the most is choosing to buy a boba over donating to an effective charity, because it doesn't seem in line with how I make my other decisions. I would really like my preferences to be transitive, as it makes me feel less hypocritical.

2. Veganism doesn't ask people to do anything extra (like pay more for luxury goods). Instead, it asks people to refrain from doing something they otherwise would have done. This makes it feel different in kind than asking people to donate money, although I'll admit that this doesn't seem to make the former any easier unfortunately.

Perhaps the way I think about this is very abstracted away from how real people think about their choices, but I would argue that small charitable donations are less costly to many people than the choice to give up meat. On many restaurant menus, you can find a section that says something along the lines of "add chicken/beef/pork to this for $1.99" or something along those lines. Or maybe a menu will have something like "spaghetti and marinara sauce: $7.99; spaghetti and meatballs: $9.99." The existence of these items at these prices implies that the value of giving up meat in these circumstances is worth at least $2 to some people (they would rather have the meat than have those $2). So, based on people's revealed preferences through pricing, I think veganism is probably more costly to people than explicitly spending small amounts of money. Perhaps there is something to be said about the effort of going out of your way to donate, but in my experience, the process is quite painless.

Quick math: In terms of total expected suffering averted, inviting a group of friends to a barbecue where the main meat is beef is probably more impactful than eating a vegan meal by yourself.

According to Faunalytics' Animal Product Impact Scales, a serving of chicken requires approximately 10 times as many days of animal life to produce as a serving of beef (not adjusted for quality of life or moral weights). Additionally, most seafood is much, much worse than this. If this meal prevents your friends from going and eating those other foods, tricking them into eating beef will likely do more good than eating a vegan meal by yourself. 

Still, this may not be as impactful as saving your money and donating it directly to impactful charities. Saving a single dollar on food and donating it to the SWP will probably do more to reduce suffering than hosting a barbecue. 

Also, you might expose yourself to various forms of value drift by hosting a barbecue, but I could see this happening in a net positive (hosting more barbecues in the future) or a net negative (giving up on veganism entirely/permanently failing to convince any of your friends to give up meat) direction.

I see. Thanks for the response!

EA is something like a brand, and you should be somewhat careful about how you communicate about EA in order to not harm the brand (Thinking like this helped me understand why it was not an universally accepted truth that everybody should tell everybody about EA by all means and immediately. I think a lot of new people in EA go through this “tell everyone” phase, because EA can be super exciting.)

Can you elaborate on this a little bit? What should I not be telling people?