A tool for arguing with yourself · vegan-grants.internal

The Equivalence Engine

Every act of animal advocacy is being silently compared to every other one. This tool makes those comparisons explicit, numeric, and editable. Each assumption below is a slider. Move it and the math moves with it.

The headline claim Em keeps making, made literal:

A balance weighing 1,000 generic leaflets against the equivalent number of specific ones 1000 100
1,000 generic leaflets
handed to whoever walks by
100 specific ones
“dairy takes babies from their mothers,” at a maternity fair

at the current setting, a specific message is worth 10× a generic one

10×

● To-do — Em to review

This whole tool is a draft of my own reasoning, externalised so it can be argued with. Nothing here is settled. Where the evidence is thin, I’ve said so under “Evidence & caveats.”

These are assumptions, not facts.

Behind every grant sits a chain of guesses: that a vegan is “worth more” than a reducer, that a young person is more reachable than a middle-aged one, that a conversation beats a billboard. Usually those guesses stay hidden inside a gut feeling. Here they’re written down as numbers you can change.

The point isn’t that these numbers are right. It’s that the conclusion is only ever as good as the assumption that produced it — so if you disagree, move the slider and watch what it does to the answer. Your edits are saved in this browser; Reset restores my defaults.

Working definition · not a slider

What “vegan” means here

Throughout, “vegan” means aspirationally vegan: someone who agrees the world should move this way, wants to be part of it, and is genuinely trying. It’s closer to how Buddhism treats the path than to a purity test — the pursuit counts, not a perfect record. A person eating plant-based 90% of the time and pulling others along may matter more than a flawless eater who tells no one.

That choice is upstream of everything below: it’s why retention and spread can outweigh raw dietary perfection.

The dials · 14 assumptions

One person, weighed fourteen ways

Each card states an equivalence, shows it as a live ratio, and lets you tune the multiplier behind it. The worked example and the bars update as you drag. Open “Evidence & caveats” for sources that support — or undercut — the claim.

evidence leans for evidence leans against context / mixed
The impact engine · compounding

Build a campaign, watch the assumptions multiply

Pick a profile and the tool chains your sliders into one number: impact-equivalent units, where 1 unit ≈ one generic, passive message landing on one general-audience person in a baseline setting. It’s a deliberately crude model — its job is to show how small assumptions compound, not to be exact.

Impact-equivalent units
baseline = one generic, passive message on one general-audience person

The multiplication chain — every “×” is a slider

    Evidence · the honest part

    Sources & caveats, in full

    A consolidated list of everything cited above. Many of these findings are contested, small, or drawn from outside animal advocacy and stretched to fit. Read them as provocations to the assumptions, not proof of them.