Meat-eating (without offsetting) seems to me like an obvious rationality failure. Extremely few people actually take the position that torturing animals is fine; that it would be acceptable to do to a pet or even a stray. Yet people are happy to pay others to do it for them, as long as it occurs where they can't see it happening.

Attempts to point this out to them are usually met with deflection or anger, or among more level-headed people, with elaborate rationalizations that collapse under minimal scrutiny. ("Farming creates more animals, so as long as their lives are net positive, farming is net positive" relies on the extremely questionable assumption that their lives are net positive, and these people would never accept the same argument in favor of forcible breeding of humans. "Animals aren't sentient" relies on untested and very speculative ideas about consciousness, akin to the just-so stories that have plagued psychology. There's no way someone could justifiably be >95% confident of such a thing, and I highly doubt these people would accept a 5% chance of torturing a human in return for tastier food.)

So with the exception of hardcore moral relativists who reject any need to care about any other beings at all, I find it hard to take seriously any "rationalist" who continues to eat meat. It seems to me that they've adopted "rationalism" in the "beliefs as attire" sense, as they fail to follow through on even the most straightforward implications of their purported belief system as soon as those implications do not personally benefit them.

Change my mind?