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I appreciate the steelman, sincerely.
I think from my perspective, it's more a Pascal's Mugging like: "Every contact between humans and animals carries the potential for a zoonotic disease transmission event. So far these have just been very lethal, but sooner or later, if we continue to farm animals, one of these events will cause human extinction. Therefore we must cease all farming of animals and go full vegan, at least until such a time as it is possible to farm animals without any human ever inhaling viral particles from an animal."
That scenario is possible. The space of possible causes for human extinction includes a mass-disease event from factory farming.
On the one hand, my personal intuition says that it's not hugely likely, that diseases don't really work that way, that transmissability and lethality trade off against each other in such a way that species-destroying viruses are pretty unlikely, that our vaccine technologies are pretty good.
On the other hand, I can't prove mathematically that this could never happen, that
p(doom)is below 1% (and 1% is still really bad!). I probably can't beat a trained virologist in a four-hour debate.Buuut, back to the first hand, I really honestly don't think it's very likely, and I really like meat. I really doubt we're ever going to be able to farm in a way that genuinely eliminates the possibility of human/animal transmission, it would never be economical to do so even if it were possible, so what looks like a compromise to be careful until we're sure it's safe is actually just a demand for the rest of humanity's future to be vegan.
Ultimately the best I can do is carry on advocating for farming, keep an eye out for indications that the disease situation might be worse than I think it is, suggest mitigations, and try hard to keep the vegans from getting any power or authority. It looks tremendously irresponsible or even evil to the people who have different priors from me.
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