(I have a comment nephew to this one that argues against âpolitics doesnât belong hereâ, but I also wanted to provide a cautionary suggestion...)
I have found it pretty difficult to think in a balanced way about...any election in the last three cycles...but I want to propose that, on the outside view, âcandidate seems Obviously Badâ and âcandidate would have a negative counterfactual effect on [classical EA cause area]â is nowhere near as correlated as it intuitively feels it should be.
The example that I will keep pointing to, probably forever, is that George W. Bush was almost certainly the best president in the modern era for both Global Health and Welfare[1] and for GCBRs[2], based on programs that were very far from what I (still) think of as his major policy positions.
I think that Bushâs interest in HIV response in Africa was in theory knowable at the time[3], but figuring it out would have required digging into some pretty unlikely topics on a candidate that my would-have-been intellectual circles[4] was pretty strongly convinced was the worse one. (Iâm not sure how knowable his proactive interest in pandemic prep was.)
I donât want to claim that itâs correct to equivocate this cycleâs Republican candidate and W. Bush here, and I donât have any concrete reason to believe that the Republican candidate is good on particular cause areas. I just mean to say, I wouldnât have believed it of W. Bush, either. And in this cycle, Iâm not aware of anyone who has really done the reasearch that would convince me one way or another in terms of the shut-up-and-multiply expected counterfactual utility.
So, while I donât oppose making decisions on other-than-consequentialist and/âor commonsense grounds here (which is likely whatâs going to actually sway my ballot as a citizen), I want to argue for a stance of relatively deep epistemic uncertainty on the consequentialist dimension, until I see more focused argument from someone who really has done the homework.
The National Pharmaceutical Stockpile was founded under Clinton with $51mln of initial funding, but Bush increased the budget tenfold between the Project BioShield Act and PAHPA; expansion of the program since then has been small by comparison. Plus I think that the effect of PEPFAR on the âbiosecurity waterlineâ of the world is under-appreciated.
Wikipedia: âAccording to [Bushâs] 2010 memoir, Decision Points, [George W. and Laura Bush] developed a serious interest in improving the fate of the people of Africa after reading Alex Haleyâs Roots, and visiting The Gambia in 1990. In 1998, while pondering a run for the U.S. presidency, he discussed Africa with Condoleezza Rice, his future secretary of state; she said that, if elected, working more closely with countries on that continent should be a significant part of his foreign policy.â
I was too young to have âintellectual circlesâ during the GWB presidency; Iâm approximating myself by my parents here, though itâs conflated by EA, LessWrong, et al. not existing at the time.
(I have a comment nephew to this one that argues against âpolitics doesnât belong hereâ, but I also wanted to provide a cautionary suggestion...)
I have found it pretty difficult to think in a balanced way about...any election in the last three cycles...but I want to propose that, on the outside view, âcandidate seems Obviously Badâ and âcandidate would have a negative counterfactual effect on [classical EA cause area]â is nowhere near as correlated as it intuitively feels it should be.
The example that I will keep pointing to, probably forever, is that George W. Bush was almost certainly the best president in the modern era for both Global Health and Welfare[1] and for GCBRs[2], based on programs that were very far from what I (still) think of as his major policy positions.
I think that Bushâs interest in HIV response in Africa was in theory knowable at the time[3], but figuring it out would have required digging into some pretty unlikely topics on a candidate that my would-have-been intellectual circles[4] was pretty strongly convinced was the worse one. (Iâm not sure how knowable his proactive interest in pandemic prep was.)
I donât want to claim that itâs correct to equivocate this cycleâs Republican candidate and W. Bush here, and I donât have any concrete reason to believe that the Republican candidate is good on particular cause areas. I just mean to say, I wouldnât have believed it of W. Bush, either. And in this cycle, Iâm not aware of anyone who has really done the reasearch that would convince me one way or another in terms of the shut-up-and-multiply expected counterfactual utility.
So, while I donât oppose making decisions on other-than-consequentialist and/âor commonsense grounds here (which is likely whatâs going to actually sway my ballot as a citizen), I want to argue for a stance of relatively deep epistemic uncertainty on the consequentialist dimension, until I see more focused argument from someone who really has done the homework.
In a word, PEPFAR.
The National Pharmaceutical Stockpile was founded under Clinton with $51mln of initial funding, but Bush increased the budget tenfold between the Project BioShield Act and PAHPA; expansion of the program since then has been small by comparison. Plus I think that the effect of PEPFAR on the âbiosecurity waterlineâ of the world is under-appreciated.
Wikipedia: âAccording to [Bushâs] 2010 memoir, Decision Points, [George W. and Laura Bush] developed a serious interest in improving the fate of the people of Africa after reading Alex Haleyâs Roots, and visiting The Gambia in 1990. In 1998, while pondering a run for the U.S. presidency, he discussed Africa with Condoleezza Rice, his future secretary of state; she said that, if elected, working more closely with countries on that continent should be a significant part of his foreign policy.â
I was too young to have âintellectual circlesâ during the GWB presidency; Iâm approximating myself by my parents here, though itâs conflated by EA, LessWrong, et al. not existing at the time.