This seems pretty unlikely to me tbh, people are just less productive in the developing world than the developed world, and its much easier to do stuff—including do good—when you have functioning institutions, surrounded by competent people, connections & support structures, etc etc.
That’s not to say sending people to the developed world is bad. Note that you can get lots of the benefits of living in a developed country by simply having the right to live in a developed country, or having your support structure or legal system or credentials based in a developed country.
Of course, its much easier to just allow everyone in a developing country to just move to a developed country, but assuming the hyper rationalist bot exists with an open boarders constraint, it seems incredibly obvious to me that what you say would not happen.
If I can pull this thread...you previously wrote, “Maybe I have more faith in the market here than you do, but I do think that technical & scientific & economic advancement do in fact have a tendency to not only make everywhere better, but permanently so.”
In your opinion, is this an argument in favor of prioritizing pushing both EA money and people into communities like SV that are high-impact in terms of technological advancement?
When you start talking about silicon valley in particular, you start getting confounders like AI, which has a high chance of killing everyone. But if we condition on that going well or assume the relevant people won’t be working on that, then yes that does seem like a useful activity, though note that silicon valley activities are not very neglected, and you can certainly do better than them by pushing EA money (not necessarily people[1]) into the research areas which are more prone to market failures or are otherwise too “weird” for others to believe in.
On the former, vaccine development & distribution or gene drives are obvious ones which comes to mind. Both of which have a commons problem. For the latter, intelligence enhancement.
Why not people? I think EA has a very bad track record of extreme group think, caused by a severe lack of intellectual diversity & humility. This is obviously not very good when you’re trying to increase the productivity of a field or research endeavor.
This seems pretty unlikely to me tbh, people are just less productive in the developing world than the developed world, and its much easier to do stuff—including do good—when you have functioning institutions, surrounded by competent people, connections & support structures, etc etc.
That’s not to say sending people to the developed world is bad. Note that you can get lots of the benefits of living in a developed country by simply having the right to live in a developed country, or having your support structure or legal system or credentials based in a developed country.
Of course, its much easier to just allow everyone in a developing country to just move to a developed country, but assuming the hyper rationalist bot exists with an open boarders constraint, it seems incredibly obvious to me that what you say would not happen.
If I can pull this thread...you previously wrote, “Maybe I have more faith in the market here than you do, but I do think that technical & scientific & economic advancement do in fact have a tendency to not only make everywhere better, but permanently so.”
In your opinion, is this an argument in favor of prioritizing pushing both EA money and people into communities like SV that are high-impact in terms of technological advancement?
When you start talking about silicon valley in particular, you start getting confounders like AI, which has a high chance of killing everyone. But if we condition on that going well or assume the relevant people won’t be working on that, then yes that does seem like a useful activity, though note that silicon valley activities are not very neglected, and you can certainly do better than them by pushing EA money (not necessarily people[1]) into the research areas which are more prone to market failures or are otherwise too “weird” for others to believe in.
On the former, vaccine development & distribution or gene drives are obvious ones which comes to mind. Both of which have a commons problem. For the latter, intelligence enhancement.
Why not people? I think EA has a very bad track record of extreme group think, caused by a severe lack of intellectual diversity & humility. This is obviously not very good when you’re trying to increase the productivity of a field or research endeavor.