I wanted to write a summary comment to close this out and clarify a bit more what I am trying to (not) get at I (still hope to be able to address all detailed comments, probably on the weekend, as I am doing this in personal capacity):
1. With re-examining work on systemic attributes I don’t mean “systems change, not climate change” style work, but rather something small-c conservative—protecting/strengthening the basic liberal norms and institutions such as rule of law, checks and balances, etc. at home and the rule-based international post WW2-order and a basic commitment/ norm to a positive sum view of the world globally.
2. My basic contention is that—when many of those institutions are under much more threat and are much more fluid than before—working on them is relatively more important, both because greater volatility and more downside risk but also because more surgical interventions are affected by this.
Somewhat crudely, all work that flows through influencing Congress to spend more money on priority X, requires a continued respect for Congress’s “power of the purse” (no impoundment). Similarly, the promisingness of much GCR work also seems heavily affected by macro-level variables on the international scale.
3. It would be good to examine this more thoroughly and see whether there are things we can do that are highly effective on the margin and doing so would require a serious analytical and research effort, not relying on cached priors on system level v surgical interventions debates of days past.
To be clear, I am fairly agnostic to whether this would lead to an actual reprioritizing or whether the conclusion would be that engaging on system-level factors is not promising. I do not know.
Insofar as I am criticizing, I am criticizing the lack of serious engagement with these questions as a community, a de facto conclusion on this question—do > 95% work surgical work—that rests on little serious analysis and a lack of grappling with a changing situation that, at the very least, should affect the balance of considerations.
4. In terms of taking action, I would be surprised if the conclusion from this would be—if more action is warranted—to simply increase the effort of existing EA(-adjacent) effortson those topics such as around advocating for electoral reforms. It is obviously important to advocate for changes to electoral systems and other institutional incentive structures, in particular if those have properties that would address some of the existing problems.
However, it seems clear to me that this cannot be everything EAs would consider doing on this. By crude analogy, much of these discussions feel like spirited discussions about which colors to paint the walls in the kitchen while there is an unattended fire in the living room. In the same way that our primary strategies on engaging on AI risk are not 30-year strategies to change how technology is governed, seriously engaging on preserving desirable system level attributes / institutions cannot only be about very long-run plays in a time where prediction markets predict a 3⁄4 chance of a constitutional crisis in the US over the next couple of years and the international situation is similarly fluid.
5. I also do have “this is not neglected” and “this is intractable” in my head as the primary reasons why we should not do this. However, I (and I think many others), have also become a lot more skeptical of using these considerations lazily and heuristically to discredit looking into entire fields of action that are important.
It is certainly true that the average intervention on vaguely improving institutions in a way that is salient with the public already will have a low impact. But it would not shock me at all if a serious research effort found many interventions that are surprisingly neglected and quite plausibly tractable.
I think the analytically vibrant community we’d ideally like to be would dive deeper into those issues at this point in time.
Very grateful for the amount of discussion here.
I wanted to write a summary comment to close this out and clarify a bit more what I am trying to (not) get at I (still hope to be able to address all detailed comments, probably on the weekend, as I am doing this in personal capacity):
1. With re-examining work on systemic attributes I don’t mean “systems change, not climate change” style work, but rather something small-c conservative—protecting/strengthening the basic liberal norms and institutions such as rule of law, checks and balances, etc. at home and the rule-based international post WW2-order and a basic commitment/ norm to a positive sum view of the world globally.
2. My basic contention is that—when many of those institutions are under much more threat and are much more fluid than before—working on them is relatively more important, both because greater volatility and more downside risk but also because more surgical interventions are affected by this.
Somewhat crudely, all work that flows through influencing Congress to spend more money on priority X, requires a continued respect for Congress’s “power of the purse” (no impoundment). Similarly, the promisingness of much GCR work also seems heavily affected by macro-level variables on the international scale.
3. It would be good to examine this more thoroughly and see whether there are things we can do that are highly effective on the margin and doing so would require a serious analytical and research effort, not relying on cached priors on system level v surgical interventions debates of days past.
To be clear, I am fairly agnostic to whether this would lead to an actual reprioritizing or whether the conclusion would be that engaging on system-level factors is not promising. I do not know.
Insofar as I am criticizing, I am criticizing the lack of serious engagement with these questions as a community, a de facto conclusion on this question—do > 95% work surgical work—that rests on little serious analysis and a lack of grappling with a changing situation that, at the very least, should affect the balance of considerations.
4. In terms of taking action, I would be surprised if the conclusion from this would be—if more action is warranted—to simply increase the effort of existing EA(-adjacent) efforts on those topics such as around advocating for electoral reforms. It is obviously important to advocate for changes to electoral systems and other institutional incentive structures, in particular if those have properties that would address some of the existing problems.
However, it seems clear to me that this cannot be everything EAs would consider doing on this. By crude analogy, much of these discussions feel like spirited discussions about which colors to paint the walls in the kitchen while there is an unattended fire in the living room. In the same way that our primary strategies on engaging on AI risk are not 30-year strategies to change how technology is governed, seriously engaging on preserving desirable system level attributes / institutions cannot only be about very long-run plays in a time where prediction markets predict a 3⁄4 chance of a constitutional crisis in the US over the next couple of years and the international situation is similarly fluid.
5. I also do have “this is not neglected” and “this is intractable” in my head as the primary reasons why we should not do this. However, I (and I think many others), have also become a lot more skeptical of using these considerations lazily and heuristically to discredit looking into entire fields of action that are important.
It is certainly true that the average intervention on vaguely improving institutions in a way that is salient with the public already will have a low impact. But it would not shock me at all if a serious research effort found many interventions that are surprisingly neglected and quite plausibly tractable.
I think the analytically vibrant community we’d ideally like to be would dive deeper into those issues at this point in time.