I just noticed the article you linked. In the future it’s probably best to put all the arguments here on this forum, where you can add more details and EA-specific information.
Your idea seems to be figuring out a way of assessing individuals’ propensity for violence, and then seeing what changes that. But that’s not how war happens. It happens at the level of societies and nations as a result of more complicated dynamics.
Individuals don’t have a clear, easy-to-study propensity for violence. It’s a complicated thing that depends on the environment. In behavioral economics, we can study consumer choice and come up with descriptive decision theories because everything is about money, which is interchangeable and easy to measure and used for everything. The equivalent of this would be a study of individuals’ propensity to go to college or something like that. We can study such things, but not in the same way and not with the same kind of results.
And only a small proportion of a population will ever become militants. This makes it very hard to study in a statistically rigorous way. If 1% of people will become a militant, then a survey of 1,000 people reaches only ten future militants on average. This creates numerous statistical problems.
In a very general sense, sure you could say X causes people to engage in violence, let’s reduce X, and then violence is reduced in expectation. But that just sounds like normal research that probably already exists.
Finally, it seems to me that interventions which target the people who actually are violent are likely to be more effective. If 1% of people become militants then generic interventions will have to be 50-100x cheaper.
I just noticed the article you linked. In the future it’s probably best to put all the arguments here on this forum, where you can add more details and EA-specific information.
Your idea seems to be figuring out a way of assessing individuals’ propensity for violence, and then seeing what changes that. But that’s not how war happens. It happens at the level of societies and nations as a result of more complicated dynamics.
Individuals don’t have a clear, easy-to-study propensity for violence. It’s a complicated thing that depends on the environment. In behavioral economics, we can study consumer choice and come up with descriptive decision theories because everything is about money, which is interchangeable and easy to measure and used for everything. The equivalent of this would be a study of individuals’ propensity to go to college or something like that. We can study such things, but not in the same way and not with the same kind of results.
And only a small proportion of a population will ever become militants. This makes it very hard to study in a statistically rigorous way. If 1% of people will become a militant, then a survey of 1,000 people reaches only ten future militants on average. This creates numerous statistical problems.
In a very general sense, sure you could say X causes people to engage in violence, let’s reduce X, and then violence is reduced in expectation. But that just sounds like normal research that probably already exists.
Finally, it seems to me that interventions which target the people who actually are violent are likely to be more effective. If 1% of people become militants then generic interventions will have to be 50-100x cheaper.