A few thoughts on the democracy criticism. Don’t a lot of the criticisms here apply to the IPCC? “A homogenous group of experts attempting to directly influence powerful decision-makers is not a fair or safe way of traversing the precipice.” IPCC contributors are disproportionately white very well-educated males in the West who are much more environmentalist than the global median voter, i.e. “unrepresentative of humanity at large and variably homogenous in respect to income, class, ideology, age, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, and professional background.” So, would you propose replacing the IPCC with something like a citizen’s assembly of people with no expertise in climate science or climate economics, that is representative wrt some of the demographic features you mention?
You say that decisions about which risks to take should be made democratically. The implication of this seems to be that everyone, and not just EAs, who is aiming to do good with their resources should donate only to their own government. Their govt could then decide how to spend the money democratically. Is that implication embraced? This would eg include all climate philanthropy, which is now at $5-9bn per year.
You seem to assume that we should be especially suspicious of a view if it is not held by a majority of the global population. Over history, the views of the global majority seem to me to have been an extremely poor guide to accurate moral beliefs. For example, a few hundred years ago, most people had abhorrent views about animals, women and people of other races. By the arguments here, do you think that people like Benjamin Lay, Bentham and Mill should not have advocated for change in these areas, including advocating for changes in policy?
As I said in a different but related context earlier this week, “If a small, non-representative group disagrees with the majority of humans, we should wonder why, and given base rates and the outside view, worry about failure modes that have affected similar small groups in the past.”
I do think we should worry about failure modes and being wrong. But I think the main reason to do that is that people are often wrong, they are bad at reasoning, and subject to a host of biases. The fact that we are in a minority of the global population is an extremely weak indicator of being wrong. The majority has been gravely wrong on many moral and empirical questions in the past and today. It’s not at all clear that the base rate of being wrong for ‘minority view’ vs ‘majority view’ is higher or not, and that question is extremely difficult to answer because there are lots of ways of slicing up the minority you are referring to.
I feel like there’s just a crazy number of minority views (in the limit a bunch of psychoses held by just one individual), most of which must be wrong. We’re more likely to hear about minority views which later turn out to be correct, but it seems very implausible that the base rate of correctness is higher for minority views than majority views.
On the other hand I think there’s some distinction to be drawn between “minority view disagrees with strongly held majority view” and “minority view concerns something that majority mostly ignores / doesn’t have a view on”.
that is a fair point. departures from global majority opinion still seems like a pretty weak ‘fire alarm’ for being wrong. Taking a position that is eg contrary to most experts on a topic would be a much greater warning sign.
I see how this could be misread. I’ll reformulate the statement; “If our small, non-representative group comes to a conclusion, we should wonder, given base rates about correctness in general and the outside view, about which failure modes have affected similar small groups in the past, and consider if they apply, and how we might be wrong or misguided.”
So yes, errors are common to all groups, and being a minority isn’t a indicator of truth, which I mistakenly implied. But the way in which groups are wrong is influenced by group-level reasoning fallacies and biases, which are a product of both individual fallacies and characteristics of the group. That’s why I think that investigating how previous similar groups failed seems like a particularly useful way to identify relevant failure modes.
I think it’s simplistic to reduce the critique to “minority opinion bad”. At the very least, you need to reduce it to “minority opinion which happens to reinforce existing power relations and is mainly advocated by billionaires and those funded by it bad”. Bentham argued for diminishing his own privilege over others, to give other people MORE choice, irrespective of their power and wealth and with no benefit to him. There is a difference imo
My argument here is about whether we should be more suspicious of a view if it is held by the majority or the minority. Whether that is true seems to me to be mainly dependent on the object-level quality of the belief and not whether it is held by the majority or not—that is a very weak indicator, as the examples of slavery, women, racism, homosexuality etc illustrate.
I don’t think your piece argues that TUA reinforces existing power relations. The main things that proponents of TUA have diverted resources to are: engineered pandemics, AI alignment, nuclear war and to a lesser extent climate change. How does any of this entrench existing power relations?
nitpick, but it is also not true that the view you criticise is mainly advocated for by billionaires. Obviously, a tiny minority of billionaires are longtermists and a tiny minority of longtermists are billionaires.
The main things that proponents of TUA have diverted resources to are: engineered pandemics, AI alignment, nuclear war and to a lesser extent climate change. How does any of this entrench existing power relations?
This is moving money to mostly wealthy, Western organisations and researchers, that would’ve otherwise gone to the global poor. So the counterfactual impact is of entrenching wealth disparity.
I think it is very unclear whether it is true that diverting money to these organisations would entrench wealth disparity. Examining the demographics of the organisations funded is a faulty way to assess the overall effect on global wealth inequality—the main effect these organisations will have is via the actions they take rather than the take home pay of their staff.
Consider pandemic risk. Open Phil has been the main funder in this space for several years and if they had their way, the world would have been much better prepared for covid. Covid has been a complete disaster for low and middle-income countries, and has driven millions into extreme poverty. I don’t think the net effect of pandemic preparedness funding is bad for the global poor. Similarly, with AI safety, if you actually believe that transformative AI will arrive in 20 years, then ensuring the development of transformative AI goes well is extremely consequential for people in low and middle-income countries.
I did not mean the demographic composition of organisations to be the main contributor to their impact. Rather, what I’m saying is that that is the only impact we can be completely sure of. Any further impact depends on your beliefs regarding the value of the kind of work done.
I personally will probably go to the EA Long Term Future Fund for funding in the not so distant future. My preferred career is in beneficial AI. So obviously I believe the work in the area has value that makes it worth putting money into.
But looking at it as an outsider, it’s obvious that I (Guy) have an incentive to evaluate that work as important, seeing as I may personally profit from that view. Rather, if you think AI risk—or even existential risk as a whole—is some orders of magnitude less important than it’s laid out to be in EA—then the only straightforward impact of supporting X-risk research is in who gets the money and who does not. If you think any AI research is actually harmful, then the expected value of funding this is even worse.
I had the same reaction as this, in that the dominant worldview today views extreme levels of animal suffering as acceptable but most of us would agree it’s not, and believe we should do our utmost to change it.
I think the difference between the examples you’ve mentioned and the parallel to existential risk is with the qualifier Luke and Carla provided in the text (emphasis mine):
Tying the study of a topic that fundamentally affects the whole of humanity to a niche belief system championed mainly by an unrepresentative, powerful minority of the world is undemocratic and philosophically tenuous
Where the key difference is that the study of existential risk is tied to the fate of humanity in ways that animal welfare, misogyny and racism aren’t (arguably the latter two examples might influence the direction of humanity significantly but probably not whether humanity ceases to exist).
I’m not necessarily convinced that existential risk studies is so different to the examples you’ve mentioned that we need to approach it in a much more democratic way but I do think the qualifiers given by the authors mean the analogies you’ve drawn aren’t that water-tight.
Most whites had abhorent views on race at certain points in the past (probably not before 1500 though, unless Medieval antisemitism counts) but that is weak evidence that most people did, since whites were always a minority. I’m not sure many of us know what if any racial views people held in Nigeria, Iran, China or India in 1780.
I seem to remember learning about rampant racism in China helping to cause the Taiping rebellion? And there are enormous amounts of racism and sectarianism today outside Western countries—look at the Rohingya genocide, the Rwanda genocide, the Nigerian civil war, the current Ethiopian civil war, and the Lebanese political crisis for a few examples.
Every one of these examples should be taken with skepticism as this is far outside my area of expertise. But while I agree with the sentiment that we often conflate the history of the world with the history of white people, I’m not sure it’s true in this specific case.
i’d be pretty surprised if almost everyone didn’t have strongly racist views in 1780. Anti-black views are very prevalent in India and China today, as I understand it. eg Gandhi had pretty racist attitudes.
minor point but I don’t think you’ve described citizen’s assemblies in the most charitable way. Yes, it is a representative sortition of the public so they don’t necessarily have expertise in any particular field but there is generally a lot of focus on experts from various fields who inform the assembly. So in reality, a citizen’s assembly on climate would be a random selection of representative citizens who would be informed/educated by IPCC (or similar) scientists, who would then deliberate amongst themselves to reach their conclusions.These conclusions one would hope would be similar to what the scientists would recommend themselves as it based on information largely provided by them.
For people that might be interested, here is the report of the Climate Assembly (a citizen’s assembly on climate commissioned by the UK government) that in my opinion, had some fairly reasonable policy suggestions. You can also watch a documentary about it by the BBC here.
The paper never spoke about getting rid of experts or replacing experts with citzens. So no.
Many countries now run citizen assemblies on climate change, which I’m sure you’re aware of. They do not aim to replace the role of IPCC.
EA or the field of existential risk cannot be equated with the IPCC.
To your second point, no this does not follow at all. Democracy as a procedure is not to be equated (and thus limited) to governments that grant you a vote every so often. You will find references to the relevant literature on democratic experimentation in the last section which focusses on democracy in the paper.
It would help for clarity if I understood your stance on central bank independence. This seems to produce better outcomes but also seems undemocratic. Do you think this would be legitimate?
It still seems like, if I were Gates, donating my money to the US govt would be more democratic than eg spending it on climate advocacy? Is the vision for Open phil that they set up a citizen’s assembly that is representative of the global population and have that decide how to spend the money, by majority vote?
As in the discussion above, I think you’re being disingenuous by claiming government is “more democratic.”
And if you were Gates, I’d argue that it would be even more democratic to allow the IPCC, which is more globally representative and less dominated by special interests that the US government, to guide where you spend your money than it would to allow the US government to do so. And given how much the Gates foundation engages with international orgs and allows them to guide his giving, I think that “hand it to the US government” would plausibly be a less democratic alternative than the current approach, which seems to be to allow GAVI, the WHO, and the IPCC to suggest where the money can best be spent.
And having Open Phil convene a consensus driven international body on longtermism actually seems somewhat similar to what the CTLR futureproof report co-written by Toby Ord suggests when it says the UK should lead by, “creating and then leading a global extreme risks network,” and push for “a Treaty on the Risks to the Future of Humanity.” Perhaps you don’t think that’s a good idea, but I’m unclear why you would treat it as a reductio, except in the most straw-man form.
Hi David, I wasn’t being disingenuous. Here, you say “I think you’re being disingenuous by claiming government is “more democratic.” In your comment above you say “One way to make things more democratic is to have government handle it, but it’s clearly not the only way.” Doesn’t this grant that having the government decide is more democratic? These statements seem inconsistent.
So, to clarify before we discuss the idea, is your view that all global climate philanthropy should be donated to the IPCC?
I think there is a difference between having a citizen’s assembly decide what to do with all global philanthropic money (which as I understand it, is the implication of the article), and having a citizen’s assembly whose express goal is protecting the long-term (which is not the implication of the article). If all longtermist funding was allocated on the first mechanism, then I think it highly likely that funding for AI safety, engineered pandemics and nuclear war would fall dramatically.
The treaty in the CTLR report seems like a good idea but seems quite different to the idea of democratic control proposed in the article.
Comparing how democratic government is to different things yield different results, because democratic isn’t binary. Yes, unitary action by a single actor is less democratic than having government handle things, and no, having the US government handle things is not clearly more democratic than deferring to the IPCC. But, as I’m sure you know, the IPCC isn’t a funding body, nor does it itself fight climate change. So no, obviously climate philanthropy shouldn’t all go to them.
I think there is a difference between having a citizen’s assembly decide what to do with all global philanthropic money (which as I understand it, is the implication of the article),
No, and clearly you need to go re-read the paper. You also might want to look into the citations Zoe suggested that you read above, about what “democratic” means, since you keep interpreting in the same simplistic and usually incorrect way, as equivalent to having everyone vote about what to do.
The treaty in the CTLR report seems like a good idea but seems quite different to the idea of democratic control proposed in the article.
This goes back to the weird misunderstanding that democratic is binary, and that it always refers to control. First, global engagement and the treaty are two different things they advise the UK government. Second, I’m sure that the authors can say for themselves whether they see international deliberations and treaties as a way to more democratic input, but I’d assume that they would say that it’s absolutely a step in the direction they are pointing towards.
Hi David. We were initially discussing whether giving the money to govts would be more democratic. You suggested this was a patently mad idea but then seemed to agree with it.
Here is how the authors define democracy: “We understand democracy here in accordance with Landemore as the rule of the cognitively diverse many who are entitled to equal decision-making power and partake in a democratic procedure that includes both a deliberative element and one of preference aggregation (such as majority voting)”
You say: “You also might want to look into the citations Zoe suggested that you read above, about what “democratic” means, since you keep interpreting in the same simplistic and usually incorrect way, as equivalent to having everyone vote about what to do.”
equal political power and preference aggregation entails majority rule or lottery voting or sortition. Your own view that equal votes aren’t a necessary condition of democracy seems to be in tension with the authors of the article.
A lot of the results showing the wisdom of democratic procedures depend on certain assumptions especially about voters not being systematically biased. In the real world, this isn’t true so sometimes undemocratic procedures can do better. Independent central banks are one example, as is effective philanthropy.
For context, I have read a lot of this literature on democracy and did my doctoral thesis on the topic. I argued here that few democratic theorists actually endorse these criticisms of philanthropy.
You’re using a word differently than they explicitly say they are using the same word. I agree that it’s confusing, but will again note that consensus decision making is democratic in thes sense they use, and yet is none of the options you mention. (And again, the IPCC is a great example of a democratic deliberative body which seems to fulfill the criteria you’ve laid out, and it’s the one they cite explicitly.)
On the validity and usefulness of democracy as a method of state governance, you’ve made a very reasonable case that it would be ineffective for charity, but in the more general sense that Landemore uses it, which includes how institutions other than governments can account for democratic preferences, I’m not sure that the same argument applies.
That said, I strongly disagree with Cremer and Kemp about the usefulness of this approach on very different grounds. I think that both consensus and other democratic methods, if used for funding, rather than for governance, would make hits based giving and policy entrepreneurship impossible, not to mention being fundamentally incompatible with finding neglected causes.
I think your Open Phil example could be an interesting experiment. Do you think that if Open Phil commissions a citizen’s assembly to allocate their existential risk spending and the input is given by their researchers / program officers, it would be wildly different to what they would do themselves?
In any scenario, I think it would be quite interesting as surely if our worldviews and reasoning are strong enough to claim big unusual things (e.g. strong longtermism) we should be able to convince a random group of people that they hold? and if not, is that a problem with the people selected, our communication skills or the thinking itself? I personally don’t think it would be a problem with the people (see past successes of citizen’s assemblies)* so shouldn’t we be testing our theories to see if they make sense under different worldviews and demographic backgrounds? and if they don’t seem robust to other people, we should probably try integrate the reasons why (within reason of course).
*there’s probably some arguments to be made here that we don’t necessarily expect the allocation from this representative group, even when informed perfectly by experts, to be the optimal allocation of resources so we’re not maximising utility / doing the most good. This is probably true but I guess the balance of this with moral uncertainty is the trade-off we have to live with? Quite unsure on this though, seems fuzzy
Hi James, I do think it would be interesting to see what a true global citizen’s assembly with complete free rein would decide. I would prefer that the experiment were not done with Open Phil’s money as the opportunity cost would be very high. A citizen’s assembly with longtermist aims would also be interesting, but would be different to what is proposed in the article. Pre-setting the aims of such an assembly seems undemocratic.
I would be pretty pessimistic about convincing lots of people of something like longtermism in a citizen’s assembly—at least I think funding for things like AI, engineered viruses and nuclear war would fall a fair amount. The median global citizen is someone who is strongly religious, probably has strong nationalist and socialist beliefs (per the literature on voter preferences in rich countries, which is probably true in poorer countries), unwilling to pay high carbon taxes, homophobic etc.
For what it’s worth, I wasn’t genuinely saying we should hold a citizen’s assembly to decide what we do with all of Open Phil’s money, I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment. I’m not sure I agree that the pre-setting of the aims of an assembly is undemocratic, however, as surely all citizen’s assemblies need an initial question to start from? That seems to have been the case for previous assemblies (climate, abortion, etc.).
To play devil’s advocate, I’m not sure your points about the average global citizen being homophobic, religious, socialist, etc., actually matter that much when it comes to people deciding where they should allocate funding for existential risk. I can’t see any relationship between beliefs in which existential risks are the most severe and queer people, religion or their willingness to pay carbon taxes (assuming the pot of funding they allocate is fixed and doesn’t affect their taxes).
Also, I don’t think you’ve given much convincing evidence that a citizen’s assemblies would lead to funding for key issues falling a fair amount vs decisions by OP program officers, besides your intuition. I can’t say I have much evidence myself except for the studies (1, 2, 3 to a degree) provided in the report, would suggest the exact opposite, in that a diverse group of actors performs better than an higher-ability solo actor. In addition, if we base the success of the citizen’s assembly on how well they match our current decisions (e.g. the same amount of biorisk, nuclear and AI funding), I think we’re missing the point a bit. This assumes we’ve got it all perfectly allocated currently which I think is a central challenge of the paper above, in that it’s probably allocated perfectly according to a select few people but this by no means leads to it actually being true.
I’m not sure your points about the average global citizen being homophobic, religious, socialist, etc., actually matter that much when it comes to people deciding where they should allocate funding for existential risk
I vaguely remember reading something about religious people worrying less about extinction, but I don’t remember whether that was just intuition or an actual study. They may also be predisposed to care less about certain kinds of risk, e.g. not worrying about AI as they perceive it to be impossible.
I think you’re unaware of the diversity and approach of the IPCC. It is incredibly interdisciplinary, consensus driven, and represents stakeholders around the world faithfully. You should look into what they do and their process more carefully before citing them as an example.
Then, you conflated “democratically” with “via governments, through those government’s processes” which is either a bizarre misunderstanding, or a strange rhetorical game you’re playing with terminology.
As mentioned, the vast majority of the authors are from a similar demographic background to EAs. The IPCC also produces lots of policy-relevant material on eg the social costs of climate change and the best paths to mitigation, which are mainly determined by white males.
Here is a description of climate philanthropy as practiced today in the United States. Lots of unelected rich people who disproportionately care about climate change spend hundreds of millions of pounds advocating for actions and policies that they prefer. It would be a democratic improvement to have that decision made by the US government, because at least politicians are subject to competitive elections. So, having the decision made by the US government would be more democratic. Which part of this do you disagree with?
It seems a bit weird to class this as a ‘bizarre misunderstanding’ since many of the people who make the democracy criticism of philanthropy, such as Rob Reich, do in fact argue that the money should be spent by the government.
“the vast majority of the authors are from a similar demographic background to EAs… mainly determined by white males”
A key difference is having both representation of those with other perspectives and interests, and a process which is consensus driven and inclusive.
”It would be a democratic improvement to have that decision made by the US government, because at least politicians are subject to competitive elections. So, having the decision made by the US government would be more democratic. Which part of this do you disagree with?”
One way to make things more democratic is to have government handle it, but it’s clearly not the only way. Another way to be more democratic would, again, by being more broadly representative and consensus driven. (And the switch from “IPCC” to “climate philanthropy as practiced today in the United States” was definitely a good rhetorical trick, but it wasn’t germane to either the paper’s discussion of the IPCC, or your original point, so I’m not going to engage in discussing it.)
in the second bit, I wasn’t talking about the IPCC, I was talking about your second point “you conflated “democratically” with “via governments, through those government’s processes”″. The reason I mentioned climate philanthropy was because that is what I mentioned in my original comment you responded to: if you think philanthropy is undemocratic, then that also applies to climate philanthropy, which Luke Kemp is strongly in favour of, so this is an interesting test case for their argument.
First, are you backing away from your initial claims about the IPCC, since it in fact is consensus based with stakeholders rather than being either a direct democracy, or a unilateralist decision.
Second, I’m not interested in debating what you say Luke Kemp thinks about climate philanthropy, nor do I know anything about his opinions, nor it is germane to this discussion. But in your claims that you say are about his views, you keep claiming and assuming that the only democratic alternatives to whatever we’re discussing are a direct democracy or control by a citizens’ assembly (without expertise) or handing things to governments. Regardless of Luke’s views elsewhere, that’s certainly not what they meant in this paper. Perhaps this quote will be helpful;
We understand democracy here in accordance with Landemore as the rule of the cognitively diverse many who are entitled to equal decision-making power and partake in a democratic procedure that includes both a deliberative element and one of preference aggregation (such as majority voting)
As Landemore, who the paper cites several times, explains, institutions work better when the technocratic advice is within the context of a inclusive decision procedure, rather than either having technocrats in charge, or having a direct democracy.
Hello, Yes i think it would be fair to back away a bit from the claims about the IPCC. it remains true that most climate scientists and economists are white men and they have a disproportionate influence on the content of the IPCC reports. nonetheless, the case was not as clear cut as I initially suggested.
I find the second point a bit strange. Isn’t it highly relevant to understand whether the views of the author of the piece we are discussing are consistent or not?
It’s also useful to know what the implication of the ideas are expressed actually are. They explicitly give a citizen’s assembly as an example of a democratic procedure. Even if it is some other deliberative mechanism followed by a majority vote, I would still like to know what they think about stopping all climate philanthropy and handing decisions over all money over to such a body. It’s pretty hard to square a central role for expertise with a normative idea of political equality.
Isn’t it highly relevant to understand whether the views of the author of the piece we are discussing are consistent or not?
No, it really, really isn’t useful to discuss whether people are wrong generally to evaluate the piece.
They explicitly give a citizen’s assembly as an example of a democratic procedure. Even if it is some other deliberative mechanism followed by a majority vote...
They don’t suggest that the citizen’s assemblies use majority voting, and in fact say that they would make recommendations and suggestions, not vote on what to do. So again, stop conflating democratic with first-past- the-post voting.
It’s pretty hard to square a central role for expertise with a normative idea of political equality.
You keep trying to push this reducto-ad-absurdum as their actual position. First, Zoe explicitly said, responding to you, “The paper never spoke about getting rid of experts or replacing experts with citzens.”
Also, are you actually saying that political equality is fundamentally incompatible with expertise? Because that’s a bold and disturbing claim coming from someone who did a doctoral thesis on democracy—maybe you can cite some sources or explain?
I do think it is germane to the discussion, because it helps to clarify what the authors are claiming and whether they are applying their claims consistently.
I was discussing this paper, which doesn’t discuss climate philanthropy, not everything they have ever stated. I don’t know what else they’ve claimed, and I’m not interested in a discussion of it.
You say that decisions about which risks to take should be made democratically. The implication of this seems to be that everyone, and not just EAs, who is aiming to do good with their resources should donate only to their own government. Their govt could then decide how to spend the money democratically.
I’m not fully sure that deciding which risks to take seriously in a democratic fashion logically leads to donating all of your money to the government. Some reasons I think this:
That implies that we all think our governments are well-functioning democracies but I (amongst many others) don’t believe that to be true. I think it’s fairly common sentiment and knowledge that political myopia by politicians, vested interests and other influences mean that governments don’t implement policies that are best for their populations.
As I mentioned in another comment, I think the authors are saying that as existential risks affect the entirety of humanity in a unique way, this is one particular area where we should be deciding things more democratically. This isn’t necessarily the case for spending on education, healthcare, animal welfare, etc, so there it would make sense you donate to institutions that you believe are more effective and the bar for democratic input is lower. The quote from the paper that makes me think this is:
Tying the study of a topic that fundamentally affects the whole of humanity to a niche belief system championed mainly by an unrepresentative, powerful minority of the world is undemocratic and philosophically tenuous.
Thirdly, I think this point is weaker but most political parties aren’t elected by the majority of the population in the country. One cherry picked example is that only 45% of UK voters voted for the Conservative party and we only had a 67% election turnout, meaning that most of the country didn’t actually vote for the winning party. It then seems odd that if you think the outcome would have been different given a higher voter turnout (closer to “true democracy”), you would give all your donations to the winning party.
Note—I don’t necessarily agree with the premise we should prioritise risks democratically but I also don’t think what you’ve said re donating all of our money to the government is the logical conclusion from that statement.
(...) provides regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation.
, and is not a political thinktank (even though climate risk deniers and minizers might like to claim it is), is funded at least by 65% by nation states and the UN (44% USA in 2018, 25% by the next inheriting their democratic legitimacy w.r.t to funding any money) and fundamentally deals with something much more narrowly defined, empirically verifiable and graspable than the TUA main causes. It suffers from a lot of the same problems w.r.t representation and democracy as all of science and society does, but it’s not nearly as donor-alignment-driven as the targets of the article
The IPCC reports have hundreds of authors from all over the world: https://www.ipcc.ch/authors/. It is misleading to say the IPCC is homogeneous and that the authors are “disproportionately white very well-educated males in the West”. Every country and a large variety of civil institutions are represented at the conference of parties, and they use a consensus process.
The implication of this seems to be that everyone, and not just EAs, who is aiming to do good with their resources should donate only to their own government. Their govt could then decide how to spend the money democratically. Is that implication embraced? This would eg include all climate philanthropy, which is now at $5-9bn per year.
As always, I don’t think this implication is necessarily bad. Individual philanthropy is not sustainable, undemocratic, and indeed might do more harm than good in that, in public perception, it takes the weight off the government’s shoulder while in practice putting into it a fraction of the effort.
I don’t think this is the only side of the story, of course. I donate myself to organisations who I believe do important work but aren’t in the consensus. I think governments are good for making some democratic decisions, but are very undemocratic on others, e.g. by only representing the country’s population and not the entire world’s, or by neglecting to represent animals or future generations. And I think organisations that operate independently of the government are good for putting checks and balances on it and preventing consolidation of power.
A few thoughts on the democracy criticism. Don’t a lot of the criticisms here apply to the IPCC? “A homogenous group of experts attempting to directly influence powerful decision-makers is not a fair or safe way of traversing the precipice.” IPCC contributors are disproportionately white very well-educated males in the West who are much more environmentalist than the global median voter, i.e. “unrepresentative of humanity at large and variably homogenous in respect to income, class, ideology, age, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, and professional background.” So, would you propose replacing the IPCC with something like a citizen’s assembly of people with no expertise in climate science or climate economics, that is representative wrt some of the demographic features you mention?
You say that decisions about which risks to take should be made democratically. The implication of this seems to be that everyone, and not just EAs, who is aiming to do good with their resources should donate only to their own government. Their govt could then decide how to spend the money democratically. Is that implication embraced? This would eg include all climate philanthropy, which is now at $5-9bn per year.
You seem to assume that we should be especially suspicious of a view if it is not held by a majority of the global population. Over history, the views of the global majority seem to me to have been an extremely poor guide to accurate moral beliefs. For example, a few hundred years ago, most people had abhorrent views about animals, women and people of other races. By the arguments here, do you think that people like Benjamin Lay, Bentham and Mill should not have advocated for change in these areas, including advocating for changes in policy?
As I said in a different but related context earlier this week, “If a small, non-representative group disagrees with the majority of humans, we should wonder why, and given base rates and the outside view, worry about failure modes that have affected similar small groups in the past.”
I do think we should worry about failure modes and being wrong. But I think the main reason to do that is that people are often wrong, they are bad at reasoning, and subject to a host of biases. The fact that we are in a minority of the global population is an extremely weak indicator of being wrong. The majority has been gravely wrong on many moral and empirical questions in the past and today. It’s not at all clear that the base rate of being wrong for ‘minority view’ vs ‘majority view’ is higher or not, and that question is extremely difficult to answer because there are lots of ways of slicing up the minority you are referring to.
I feel like there’s just a crazy number of minority views (in the limit a bunch of psychoses held by just one individual), most of which must be wrong. We’re more likely to hear about minority views which later turn out to be correct, but it seems very implausible that the base rate of correctness is higher for minority views than majority views.
On the other hand I think there’s some distinction to be drawn between “minority view disagrees with strongly held majority view” and “minority view concerns something that majority mostly ignores / doesn’t have a view on”.
that is a fair point. departures from global majority opinion still seems like a pretty weak ‘fire alarm’ for being wrong. Taking a position that is eg contrary to most experts on a topic would be a much greater warning sign.
I see how this could be misread. I’ll reformulate the statement;
“If our small, non-representative group comes to a conclusion, we should wonder, given base rates about correctness in general and the outside view, about which failure modes have affected similar small groups in the past, and consider if they apply, and how we might be wrong or misguided.”
So yes, errors are common to all groups, and being a minority isn’t a indicator of truth, which I mistakenly implied. But the way in which groups are wrong is influenced by group-level reasoning fallacies and biases, which are a product of both individual fallacies and characteristics of the group. That’s why I think that investigating how previous similar groups failed seems like a particularly useful way to identify relevant failure modes.
yes I agree with that.
I think it’s simplistic to reduce the critique to “minority opinion bad”. At the very least, you need to reduce it to “minority opinion which happens to reinforce existing power relations and is mainly advocated by billionaires and those funded by it bad”. Bentham argued for diminishing his own privilege over others, to give other people MORE choice, irrespective of their power and wealth and with no benefit to him. There is a difference imo
My argument here is about whether we should be more suspicious of a view if it is held by the majority or the minority. Whether that is true seems to me to be mainly dependent on the object-level quality of the belief and not whether it is held by the majority or not—that is a very weak indicator, as the examples of slavery, women, racism, homosexuality etc illustrate.
I don’t think your piece argues that TUA reinforces existing power relations. The main things that proponents of TUA have diverted resources to are: engineered pandemics, AI alignment, nuclear war and to a lesser extent climate change. How does any of this entrench existing power relations?
nitpick, but it is also not true that the view you criticise is mainly advocated for by billionaires. Obviously, a tiny minority of billionaires are longtermists and a tiny minority of longtermists are billionaires.
This is moving money to mostly wealthy, Western organisations and researchers, that would’ve otherwise gone to the global poor. So the counterfactual impact is of entrenching wealth disparity.
I think it is very unclear whether it is true that diverting money to these organisations would entrench wealth disparity. Examining the demographics of the organisations funded is a faulty way to assess the overall effect on global wealth inequality—the main effect these organisations will have is via the actions they take rather than the take home pay of their staff.
Consider pandemic risk. Open Phil has been the main funder in this space for several years and if they had their way, the world would have been much better prepared for covid. Covid has been a complete disaster for low and middle-income countries, and has driven millions into extreme poverty. I don’t think the net effect of pandemic preparedness funding is bad for the global poor. Similarly, with AI safety, if you actually believe that transformative AI will arrive in 20 years, then ensuring the development of transformative AI goes well is extremely consequential for people in low and middle-income countries.
I did not mean the demographic composition of organisations to be the main contributor to their impact. Rather, what I’m saying is that that is the only impact we can be completely sure of. Any further impact depends on your beliefs regarding the value of the kind of work done.
I personally will probably go to the EA Long Term Future Fund for funding in the not so distant future. My preferred career is in beneficial AI. So obviously I believe the work in the area has value that makes it worth putting money into.
But looking at it as an outsider, it’s obvious that I (Guy) have an incentive to evaluate that work as important, seeing as I may personally profit from that view. Rather, if you think AI risk—or even existential risk as a whole—is some orders of magnitude less important than it’s laid out to be in EA—then the only straightforward impact of supporting X-risk research is in who gets the money and who does not. If you think any AI research is actually harmful, then the expected value of funding this is even worse.
Do you mean that most people advocating for techno-positive longtermist concern for x-risk are billionaires, or that most billionaires so advocate?I don’t think either claim is true (or even close to true).It’s also not the claim being made:
You’re right, my mistake.
I had the same reaction as this, in that the dominant worldview today views extreme levels of animal suffering as acceptable but most of us would agree it’s not, and believe we should do our utmost to change it.
I think the difference between the examples you’ve mentioned and the parallel to existential risk is with the qualifier Luke and Carla provided in the text (emphasis mine):
Where the key difference is that the study of existential risk is tied to the fate of humanity in ways that animal welfare, misogyny and racism aren’t (arguably the latter two examples might influence the direction of humanity significantly but probably not whether humanity ceases to exist).
I’m not necessarily convinced that existential risk studies is so different to the examples you’ve mentioned that we need to approach it in a much more democratic way but I do think the qualifiers given by the authors mean the analogies you’ve drawn aren’t that water-tight.
Most whites had abhorent views on race at certain points in the past (probably not before 1500 though, unless Medieval antisemitism counts) but that is weak evidence that most people did, since whites were always a minority. I’m not sure many of us know what if any racial views people held in Nigeria, Iran, China or India in 1780.
I seem to remember learning about rampant racism in China helping to cause the Taiping rebellion? And there are enormous amounts of racism and sectarianism today outside Western countries—look at the Rohingya genocide, the Rwanda genocide, the Nigerian civil war, the current Ethiopian civil war, and the Lebanese political crisis for a few examples.
Every one of these examples should be taken with skepticism as this is far outside my area of expertise. But while I agree with the sentiment that we often conflate the history of the world with the history of white people, I’m not sure it’s true in this specific case.
Yeah, you’re probably right. It’s just I got a strong “history=Western history” vibe from the comment I was responding to, but maybe that was unfair!
i’d be pretty surprised if almost everyone didn’t have strongly racist views in 1780. Anti-black views are very prevalent in India and China today, as I understand it. eg Gandhi had pretty racist attitudes.
I think there is a “not” missing: “view if it is held by a majority of the global population.”
sorry, yeah corrected
minor point but I don’t think you’ve described citizen’s assemblies in the most charitable way. Yes, it is a representative sortition of the public so they don’t necessarily have expertise in any particular field but there is generally a lot of focus on experts from various fields who inform the assembly. So in reality, a citizen’s assembly on climate would be a random selection of representative citizens who would be informed/educated by IPCC (or similar) scientists, who would then deliberate amongst themselves to reach their conclusions.These conclusions one would hope would be similar to what the scientists would recommend themselves as it based on information largely provided by them.
For people that might be interested, here is the report of the Climate Assembly (a citizen’s assembly on climate commissioned by the UK government) that in my opinion, had some fairly reasonable policy suggestions. You can also watch a documentary about it by the BBC here.
The paper never spoke about getting rid of experts or replacing experts with citzens. So no.
Many countries now run citizen assemblies on climate change, which I’m sure you’re aware of. They do not aim to replace the role of IPCC.
EA or the field of existential risk cannot be equated with the IPCC.
To your second point, no this does not follow at all. Democracy as a procedure is not to be equated (and thus limited) to governments that grant you a vote every so often. You will find references to the relevant literature on democratic experimentation in the last section which focusses on democracy in the paper.
It would help for clarity if I understood your stance on central bank independence. This seems to produce better outcomes but also seems undemocratic. Do you think this would be legitimate?
It still seems like, if I were Gates, donating my money to the US govt would be more democratic than eg spending it on climate advocacy? Is the vision for Open phil that they set up a citizen’s assembly that is representative of the global population and have that decide how to spend the money, by majority vote?
As in the discussion above, I think you’re being disingenuous by claiming government is “more democratic.”
And if you were Gates, I’d argue that it would be even more democratic to allow the IPCC, which is more globally representative and less dominated by special interests that the US government, to guide where you spend your money than it would to allow the US government to do so. And given how much the Gates foundation engages with international orgs and allows them to guide his giving, I think that “hand it to the US government” would plausibly be a less democratic alternative than the current approach, which seems to be to allow GAVI, the WHO, and the IPCC to suggest where the money can best be spent.
And having Open Phil convene a consensus driven international body on longtermism actually seems somewhat similar to what the CTLR futureproof report co-written by Toby Ord suggests when it says the UK should lead by, “creating and then leading a global extreme risks network,” and push for “a Treaty on the Risks to the Future of Humanity.” Perhaps you don’t think that’s a good idea, but I’m unclear why you would treat it as a reductio, except in the most straw-man form.
Hi David, I wasn’t being disingenuous. Here, you say “I think you’re being disingenuous by claiming government is “more democratic.” In your comment above you say “One way to make things more democratic is to have government handle it, but it’s clearly not the only way.” Doesn’t this grant that having the government decide is more democratic? These statements seem inconsistent.
So, to clarify before we discuss the idea, is your view that all global climate philanthropy should be donated to the IPCC?
I think there is a difference between having a citizen’s assembly decide what to do with all global philanthropic money (which as I understand it, is the implication of the article), and having a citizen’s assembly whose express goal is protecting the long-term (which is not the implication of the article). If all longtermist funding was allocated on the first mechanism, then I think it highly likely that funding for AI safety, engineered pandemics and nuclear war would fall dramatically.
The treaty in the CTLR report seems like a good idea but seems quite different to the idea of democratic control proposed in the article.
Comparing how democratic government is to different things yield different results, because democratic isn’t binary. Yes, unitary action by a single actor is less democratic than having government handle things, and no, having the US government handle things is not clearly more democratic than deferring to the IPCC. But, as I’m sure you know, the IPCC isn’t a funding body, nor does it itself fight climate change. So no, obviously climate philanthropy shouldn’t all go to them.
No, and clearly you need to go re-read the paper. You also might want to look into the citations Zoe suggested that you read above, about what “democratic” means, since you keep interpreting in the same simplistic and usually incorrect way, as equivalent to having everyone vote about what to do.
This goes back to the weird misunderstanding that democratic is binary, and that it always refers to control. First, global engagement and the treaty are two different things they advise the UK government. Second, I’m sure that the authors can say for themselves whether they see international deliberations and treaties as a way to more democratic input, but I’d assume that they would say that it’s absolutely a step in the direction they are pointing towards.
Hi David. We were initially discussing whether giving the money to govts would be more democratic. You suggested this was a patently mad idea but then seemed to agree with it.
Here is how the authors define democracy: “We understand democracy here in accordance with Landemore as the rule of the cognitively diverse many who are entitled to equal decision-making power and partake in a democratic procedure that includes both a deliberative element and one of preference aggregation (such as majority voting)”
You say: “You also might want to look into the citations Zoe suggested that you read above, about what “democratic” means, since you keep interpreting in the same simplistic and usually incorrect way, as equivalent to having everyone vote about what to do.”
equal political power and preference aggregation entails majority rule or lottery voting or sortition. Your own view that equal votes aren’t a necessary condition of democracy seems to be in tension with the authors of the article.
A lot of the results showing the wisdom of democratic procedures depend on certain assumptions especially about voters not being systematically biased. In the real world, this isn’t true so sometimes undemocratic procedures can do better. Independent central banks are one example, as is effective philanthropy.
For context, I have read a lot of this literature on democracy and did my doctoral thesis on the topic. I argued here that few democratic theorists actually endorse these criticisms of philanthropy.
You’re using a word differently than they explicitly say they are using the same word. I agree that it’s confusing, but will again note that consensus decision making is democratic in thes sense they use, and yet is none of the options you mention. (And again, the IPCC is a great example of a democratic deliberative body which seems to fulfill the criteria you’ve laid out, and it’s the one they cite explicitly.)
On the validity and usefulness of democracy as a method of state governance, you’ve made a very reasonable case that it would be ineffective for charity, but in the more general sense that Landemore uses it, which includes how institutions other than governments can account for democratic preferences, I’m not sure that the same argument applies.
That said, I strongly disagree with Cremer and Kemp about the usefulness of this approach on very different grounds. I think that both consensus and other democratic methods, if used for funding, rather than for governance, would make hits based giving and policy entrepreneurship impossible, not to mention being fundamentally incompatible with finding neglected causes.
I really appreciate your effort defending a paper containing parts you strongly disagree with from (what you consider) bad arguments!
I think your Open Phil example could be an interesting experiment. Do you think that if Open Phil commissions a citizen’s assembly to allocate their existential risk spending and the input is given by their researchers / program officers, it would be wildly different to what they would do themselves?
In any scenario, I think it would be quite interesting as surely if our worldviews and reasoning are strong enough to claim big unusual things (e.g. strong longtermism) we should be able to convince a random group of people that they hold? and if not, is that a problem with the people selected, our communication skills or the thinking itself? I personally don’t think it would be a problem with the people (see past successes of citizen’s assemblies)* so shouldn’t we be testing our theories to see if they make sense under different worldviews and demographic backgrounds? and if they don’t seem robust to other people, we should probably try integrate the reasons why (within reason of course).
*there’s probably some arguments to be made here that we don’t necessarily expect the allocation from this representative group, even when informed perfectly by experts, to be the optimal allocation of resources so we’re not maximising utility / doing the most good. This is probably true but I guess the balance of this with moral uncertainty is the trade-off we have to live with? Quite unsure on this though, seems fuzzy
Hi James, I do think it would be interesting to see what a true global citizen’s assembly with complete free rein would decide. I would prefer that the experiment were not done with Open Phil’s money as the opportunity cost would be very high. A citizen’s assembly with longtermist aims would also be interesting, but would be different to what is proposed in the article. Pre-setting the aims of such an assembly seems undemocratic.
I would be pretty pessimistic about convincing lots of people of something like longtermism in a citizen’s assembly—at least I think funding for things like AI, engineered viruses and nuclear war would fall a fair amount. The median global citizen is someone who is strongly religious, probably has strong nationalist and socialist beliefs (per the literature on voter preferences in rich countries, which is probably true in poorer countries), unwilling to pay high carbon taxes, homophobic etc.
For what it’s worth, I wasn’t genuinely saying we should hold a citizen’s assembly to decide what we do with all of Open Phil’s money, I just thought it was an interesting thought experiment. I’m not sure I agree that the pre-setting of the aims of an assembly is undemocratic, however, as surely all citizen’s assemblies need an initial question to start from? That seems to have been the case for previous assemblies (climate, abortion, etc.).
To play devil’s advocate, I’m not sure your points about the average global citizen being homophobic, religious, socialist, etc., actually matter that much when it comes to people deciding where they should allocate funding for existential risk. I can’t see any relationship between beliefs in which existential risks are the most severe and queer people, religion or their willingness to pay carbon taxes (assuming the pot of funding they allocate is fixed and doesn’t affect their taxes).
Also, I don’t think you’ve given much convincing evidence that a citizen’s assemblies would lead to funding for key issues falling a fair amount vs decisions by OP program officers, besides your intuition. I can’t say I have much evidence myself except for the studies (1, 2, 3 to a degree) provided in the report, would suggest the exact opposite, in that a diverse group of actors performs better than an higher-ability solo actor. In addition, if we base the success of the citizen’s assembly on how well they match our current decisions (e.g. the same amount of biorisk, nuclear and AI funding), I think we’re missing the point a bit. This assumes we’ve got it all perfectly allocated currently which I think is a central challenge of the paper above, in that it’s probably allocated perfectly according to a select few people but this by no means leads to it actually being true.
I vaguely remember reading something about religious people worrying less about extinction, but I don’t remember whether that was just intuition or an actual study. They may also be predisposed to care less about certain kinds of risk, e.g. not worrying about AI as they perceive it to be impossible.
(these are pretty minor points though)
I think you’re unaware of the diversity and approach of the IPCC. It is incredibly interdisciplinary, consensus driven, and represents stakeholders around the world faithfully. You should look into what they do and their process more carefully before citing them as an example.
Then, you conflated “democratically” with “via governments, through those government’s processes” which is either a bizarre misunderstanding, or a strange rhetorical game you’re playing with terminology.
As mentioned, the vast majority of the authors are from a similar demographic background to EAs. The IPCC also produces lots of policy-relevant material on eg the social costs of climate change and the best paths to mitigation, which are mainly determined by white males.
Here is a description of climate philanthropy as practiced today in the United States. Lots of unelected rich people who disproportionately care about climate change spend hundreds of millions of pounds advocating for actions and policies that they prefer. It would be a democratic improvement to have that decision made by the US government, because at least politicians are subject to competitive elections. So, having the decision made by the US government would be more democratic. Which part of this do you disagree with?
It seems a bit weird to class this as a ‘bizarre misunderstanding’ since many of the people who make the democracy criticism of philanthropy, such as Rob Reich, do in fact argue that the money should be spent by the government.
“the vast majority of the authors are from a similar demographic background to EAs… mainly determined by white males”
A key difference is having both representation of those with other perspectives and interests, and a process which is consensus driven and inclusive.
”It would be a democratic improvement to have that decision made by the US government, because at least politicians are subject to competitive elections. So, having the decision made by the US government would be more democratic. Which part of this do you disagree with?”
One way to make things more democratic is to have government handle it, but it’s clearly not the only way. Another way to be more democratic would, again, by being more broadly representative and consensus driven. (And the switch from “IPCC” to “climate philanthropy as practiced today in the United States” was definitely a good rhetorical trick, but it wasn’t germane to either the paper’s discussion of the IPCC, or your original point, so I’m not going to engage in discussing it.)
in the second bit, I wasn’t talking about the IPCC, I was talking about your second point “you conflated “democratically” with “via governments, through those government’s processes”″. The reason I mentioned climate philanthropy was because that is what I mentioned in my original comment you responded to: if you think philanthropy is undemocratic, then that also applies to climate philanthropy, which Luke Kemp is strongly in favour of, so this is an interesting test case for their argument.
First, are you backing away from your initial claims about the IPCC, since it in fact is consensus based with stakeholders rather than being either a direct democracy, or a unilateralist decision.
Second, I’m not interested in debating what you say Luke Kemp thinks about climate philanthropy, nor do I know anything about his opinions, nor it is germane to this discussion.
But in your claims that you say are about his views, you keep claiming and assuming that the only democratic alternatives to whatever we’re discussing are a direct democracy or control by a citizens’ assembly (without expertise) or handing things to governments. Regardless of Luke’s views elsewhere, that’s certainly not what they meant in this paper. Perhaps this quote will be helpful;
As Landemore, who the paper cites several times, explains, institutions work better when the technocratic advice is within the context of a inclusive decision procedure, rather than either having technocrats in charge, or having a direct democracy.
Hello, Yes i think it would be fair to back away a bit from the claims about the IPCC. it remains true that most climate scientists and economists are white men and they have a disproportionate influence on the content of the IPCC reports. nonetheless, the case was not as clear cut as I initially suggested.
I find the second point a bit strange. Isn’t it highly relevant to understand whether the views of the author of the piece we are discussing are consistent or not?
It’s also useful to know what the implication of the ideas are expressed actually are. They explicitly give a citizen’s assembly as an example of a democratic procedure. Even if it is some other deliberative mechanism followed by a majority vote, I would still like to know what they think about stopping all climate philanthropy and handing decisions over all money over to such a body. It’s pretty hard to square a central role for expertise with a normative idea of political equality.
No, it really, really isn’t useful to discuss whether people are wrong generally to evaluate the piece.
They don’t suggest that the citizen’s assemblies use majority voting, and in fact say that they would make recommendations and suggestions, not vote on what to do. So again, stop conflating democratic with first-past- the-post voting.
You keep trying to push this reducto-ad-absurdum as their actual position. First, Zoe explicitly said, responding to you, “The paper never spoke about getting rid of experts or replacing experts with citzens.”
Also, are you actually saying that political equality is fundamentally incompatible with expertise? Because that’s a bold and disturbing claim coming from someone who did a doctoral thesis on democracy—maybe you can cite some sources or explain?
I do think it is germane to the discussion, because it helps to clarify what the authors are claiming and whether they are applying their claims consistently.
I was discussing this paper, which doesn’t discuss climate philanthropy, not everything they have ever stated. I don’t know what else they’ve claimed, and I’m not interested in a discussion of it.
I’m not fully sure that deciding which risks to take seriously in a democratic fashion logically leads to donating all of your money to the government. Some reasons I think this:
That implies that we all think our governments are well-functioning democracies but I (amongst many others) don’t believe that to be true. I think it’s fairly common sentiment and knowledge that political myopia by politicians, vested interests and other influences mean that governments don’t implement policies that are best for their populations.
As I mentioned in another comment, I think the authors are saying that as existential risks affect the entirety of humanity in a unique way, this is one particular area where we should be deciding things more democratically. This isn’t necessarily the case for spending on education, healthcare, animal welfare, etc, so there it would make sense you donate to institutions that you believe are more effective and the bar for democratic input is lower. The quote from the paper that makes me think this is:
Thirdly, I think this point is weaker but most political parties aren’t elected by the majority of the population in the country. One cherry picked example is that only 45% of UK voters voted for the Conservative party and we only had a 67% election turnout, meaning that most of the country didn’t actually vote for the winning party. It then seems odd that if you think the outcome would have been different given a higher voter turnout (closer to “true democracy”), you would give all your donations to the winning party.
Note—I don’t necessarily agree with the premise we should prioritise risks democratically but I also don’t think what you’ve said re donating all of our money to the government is the logical conclusion from that statement.
Not really. The IPCC
, and is not a political thinktank (even though climate risk deniers and minizers might like to claim it is), is funded at least by 65% by nation states and the UN (44% USA in 2018, 25% by the next inheriting their democratic legitimacy w.r.t to funding any money) and fundamentally deals with something much more narrowly defined, empirically verifiable and graspable than the TUA main causes. It suffers from a lot of the same problems w.r.t representation and democracy as all of science and society does, but it’s not nearly as donor-alignment-driven as the targets of the article
The IPCC reports have hundreds of authors from all over the world: https://www.ipcc.ch/authors/. It is misleading to say the IPCC is homogeneous and that the authors are “disproportionately white very well-educated males in the West”. Every country and a large variety of civil institutions are represented at the conference of parties, and they use a consensus process.
As always, I don’t think this implication is necessarily bad. Individual philanthropy is not sustainable, undemocratic, and indeed might do more harm than good in that, in public perception, it takes the weight off the government’s shoulder while in practice putting into it a fraction of the effort.
I don’t think this is the only side of the story, of course. I donate myself to organisations who I believe do important work but aren’t in the consensus. I think governments are good for making some democratic decisions, but are very undemocratic on others, e.g. by only representing the country’s population and not the entire world’s, or by neglecting to represent animals or future generations. And I think organisations that operate independently of the government are good for putting checks and balances on it and preventing consolidation of power.