One thing to note here is that lots of commonly-used power law distributions have positive support. Political choices can and sometimes do have dramatically negative effects, and many of the catastrophes that EAs are concerned with are plausibly the result of those choices (like nuclear catastrophe, for instance).
So a distribution that describes the outcomes of political choices should probably have support on the whole real line, and you wouldn’t want to model choices with most simple power-law distributions. But you might be on to something—you might think of a hierarchical model in which there’s some probability that decisions are either good or bad, and that the degree to which they are good or bad is governed by a power law distribution. That’s the model I’ve been working with, but it seems incomplete to me.
Worth noting that if some political choices have very large negative outcomes, then choosing political paths that avoid those outcomes would have very positive counterfactual impact, even if no one sees it.
One thing to note here is that lots of commonly-used power law distributions have positive support. Political choices can and sometimes do have dramatically negative effects, and many of the catastrophes that EAs are concerned with are plausibly the result of those choices (like nuclear catastrophe, for instance).
So a distribution that describes the outcomes of political choices should probably have support on the whole real line, and you wouldn’t want to model choices with most simple power-law distributions. But you might be on to something—you might think of a hierarchical model in which there’s some probability that decisions are either good or bad, and that the degree to which they are good or bad is governed by a power law distribution. That’s the model I’ve been working with, but it seems incomplete to me.
Worth noting that if some political choices have very large negative outcomes, then choosing political paths that avoid those outcomes would have very positive counterfactual impact, even if no one sees it.
Good point! I can’t say I have an immediate response, but I’m gonna think a bit more about this.