I find the Gaetz and Hegeseth picks to be a bit worrying. I struggle to find a reason that the Gabbard is bad at all. In fact, I think she is probably good? She’s a former congresswoman, city councillor, hawaii house rep and member of the national guard, etc. She seems like a good pick who is concerned about the US tendency to intervene in foreign countries.

Now, to be clear, I find the Gaetz and Hegeseth picks to be bad but I thought Trump would do these types of things and I think there is a whole universe of things that Trump could have done and so he did some mildly-moderately bad ones.

So, he did some bad things but it was around expectation and nothing yet in the tails and thus I shouldn’t update in the direction of totalitarianism.

I’m still not finding anything to really be alarmed about other than people I know being alarmed.

I take the perspective that the United States is just tending towards the more typical behavior of presidential electoral systems. America will start acting more and more like Latin American presidential regimes, because the of the deadlock that presidential systems create. The checks and balances aren’t protecting us. Instead, the checks and balances are what drive the public to elect “strongmen” who can “get things done”—often through illegal and unconstitutional measures.

Trump for example is celebrated for “getting things done”—things that are often illegal and unconstitutional. That’s the selling point. Therefore I’m not the only one who has suggested that presidential regimes are unstable. Yet as we look across the world, parliamentary systems also have their own problems with authoritarian takeovers.

I write about what I think the solution is here.

In short, I think we can create a smarter democracy using a system called “sortition”. Please take a read of the article I linked for more information.

...

Even if sortition might be an interesting policy to you, it’s not particularly clear if implementation is politically feasible. The inertia of the US political system is so vast it’s hard for any money to budge it. Any financial investment will yield highly nonlinear results. Policy might not change for years, or decades, until suddenly one day policy changes. Yet just because the response to investment is extremely nonlinear doesn’t therefore mean it’s unwise to invest. (There’s also the question if America is the wisest place to invest in. Pro-sortition movements also exist in Europe. Could pro-sortition movements be launched more easily in African and South America?)

In terms of what you can impact in terms of an idea such as sortition, your investment can be used to drive “public awareness” and “lobbying”. Money can be used to persuade local governments to adopt pro-sortition policies. Or money could be spent raising public awareness of sortition—public awareness that might lead to movement growth.

I also think many EAs are still allergic to direct political advocacy, and that this tendency is stronger in more rationalist-ish cause areas such as AI. We shouldn’t forget Yudkowsky’s “politics is the mind-killer”!

Cool, I might just be remembering that one instance.

On that framing, I agree that that’s something that happens and that we should be able to anticipate will happen.

I remember removing an org entirely because they complained, though in that case they claimed they didn’t have enough time to engage with me (rather than the opposite). It’s also possible there are other cases I have forgotten. To your point, I have no objections to Michael’s “make me overly concerned about being nice” argument which I do think is true.

Maybe instead of “where people actually listen to us” it’s more like “EA in a world where people filter the most memetically fit of our ideas through their preconceived notions into something that only vaguely resembles what the median EA cares about but is importantly different from the world in which EA didn’t exist.”

IIRC didn’t you somewhat frequently remove sections if the org objected because you didn’t have enough time to engage with them? (which I think was reasonably costly)

As we discussed at EAG B, the material change between the 1st term and 2nd term is that there were many “adults in the room” who kept the former president from fulfilling his worst instincts. Whereas now there has been a 4-year effort to cultivate a pipeline of loyalists to staff the government. Ezra’s episode on Trump and his disinhibition is a good piece on the topic.

The nominations for the national security apparatus are the strongest signal that he wants power consolidated and will test GOP Senators out the gate if they will be a check on his power.

I think Ezra’s start to the podcast that Michael linked was apt. If someone two months ago said that Gaetz, Gabbard, and Hegeseth were going to be nominated for DoJ, DNI, DoD, it would have been framed as hyperbolic doomer Liberal talk. However that is the universe we are in.

Have the nominations and the proposal to purge military generals updated your priors at all since EAG B?

I’ve seen Dan Dennett (in effect) argue for it as follows: if a human adult subject reports NOT experiencing something in a lab experiment and we’re sure they’re sincere, and that they were paying attention to what they were experiencing, that is immediately pretty much 100% proof that they are not having a conscious experience of that thing, no matter what is going on in the purely perceptual (functional) regions of their brains and how much it resembles typical cases of a conscious experience of that thing. The best explanation for this is that its just part of our concept of “conscious” that a conscious experience is one that you’re (at least potentially) introspectively aware that you’re having. Indeed (my point not Dennett’s), this is how we found out that there is such a thing as “unconscious perception”, we found out that information about external things can get into the brain through the eye, without the person being aware that that information is there. If we don’t think that conscious experiences are ones you’re (at least potentially) introspectively aware of having, it’s not clear why this would be evidence for the existence of unconscious perception. But almost all consciousness scientists and philosophers of mind accept that unconscious perception can happen.

Here’s Dennett (from a paper co-authored with someone else) in his own words on this, critiquing a particular neuroscientific theory of consciousness:

“It is easy to imagine what a conversation would sound like between F&L and a patient (P) whose access to the locally recurrent activity for color was somehow surgically removed. F&L: ‘You are conscious of the redness of the apple.’ P: ‘I am? I don’t see any color. It just looks grey. Why do you think I’m consciously experiencing red?’ F&L: ‘Because we can detect recurrent processing in color areas in your visual cortex.’ P: ‘But I really don’t see any color. I see the apple, but nothing colored. Yet you still insist that I am conscious of the color red?’ F&L: ‘Yes, because local recurrency correlates with conscious awareness.’ P: ’Doesn’t it mean something that I am telling you I’m not experiencing red at all? Doesn’t that suggest local recurrency itself isn’t sufficient for conscious awareness?”

I don’t personally endorse Dennett’s view on this, I give to animal causes, and I think it is a big mistake to be so sure of it that you ignore the risk of animal suffering entirely, plus I don’t think we can just assume that animals can’t be introspectively aware of their own experiences. But I don’t think the view itself is crazy or inexplicable, and I have moderate credence (25% maybe?) that it is correct.

A post/​submission I wrote to OP two years ago has some thoughts on this:

https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​kmx3rKh2K4ANwMqpW/​​destabilization-of-the-united-states-the-top-x-factor-ea

It has some recommended readings and outlines potential interventions.

I’m still distilling what I would add to it in the present day.

The top thing on my mind is the proposed board to purge generals. (Note: presidents already have the authority to dismiss generals, however the implication of this proposal is that they want to purge so many generals that they need a systematic vehicle to do it.) As I wrote in my piece, our biggest bulwark against an authoritarian power grab is that the United States Military is very strong, professional, competent, and apolitical. Any changes away from that status quo should raise alarm bells.

The nominations to the military/​national security apparatus are clearly about total loyalty over competence. These are the military and intelligence services that when captured in other countries by authoritarians have cemented regimes.

Interventions in the immediate term targeted at disrupting the consolidation of power (in the aforementioned moves) could be very high leverage.

For a longer-term intervention that focuses more on the upstream drivers of our political dysfunction which enables authoritarians, I still back the idea of doing local/​state ballot initiatives to reform the political system. A gap I see in the space is that political system reform via initiatives is pursued piecemeal instead of comprehensively. Also, anti-establishment sentiments poll very high amongst Americans including the Left and Right, yet that bi-populist agreement is not being effectively tapped. Not only could mobilizing it help get initiatives over the line, but it would create depolarizing interactions between regular citizens.

Just the stuff I already said about the success he seems to have had. It is also true that many people hate him and think he’s ridiculous, but I think that makes him polarizing rather than disastrous. I suppose you could phrase it as “he was a disaster in some ways but a success in others” if you want to.

I don’t think people are saying putting time and or money to charities that address the poor in rich countries is not helping people, but merely that you could help more poor people in poor countries with the same resources. Thus, if we are saying that we are considering the interests of the unfortunate in poor and rich countries equally, we would want to commit our limited resources to the developing world.

I think a lot of times EAs are assuming a given set of resources that they have to commit to doing good. With that assumption, the counterfactual to the food pantry is the most cost effective charity. The “warm fuzzy/​utilon” dichotomy that you deride here actually supports your notion that the food pantry could compete with the door’s luxury consumption instead. This is because warm fuzzies (the donor’s psychic benefit derived from giving) could potentially be a substitute for the consumption of luxury goods (going out to eat, etc.).

So, the concept of the fuzzies (albeit maybe with language you find offensive) actually supports your notion that, within individual donation decisions, helping locally does not always compete with effective giving.

Pasted from LW:

Hey Seth, appreciate the detailed engagement. I don’t think the 2017 report is the best way to understand what China’s intentions are WRT to AI, but there was nothing in the report to support Helberg’s claim to Reuters. I also cite multiple other sources discussing more recent developments (with the caveat in the piece that they should be taken with a grain of salt). I think the fact that this commission was not able to find evidence for the “China is racing to AGI” claim is actually pretty convincing evidence in itself. I’m very interested in better understanding China’s intentions here and plan to deep dive into it over the next few months, but I didn’t want to wait until I could exhaustively search for the evidence that the report should have offered while an extremely dangerous and unsupported narrative takes off.

I also really don’t get the error pushback. These really were less technical errors than basic factual errors and incoherent statements. They speak to a sloppiness that should affect how seriously the report should be taken. I’m not one to gatekeep ai expertise, but idt it’s too much to expect a congressional commission with a top recommendation to commence in a militaristic AI arms race to have SOMEONE read a draft who knows that chatgpt-3 isn’t a thing.

Thanks for the comment! Disagreeing with my proposed donations is the most productive sort of disagreement. I also appreciate hearing your beliefs about a variety of orgs.

A few weeks ago, I read your back-and-forth with Holly Elmore about the “working with the Pentagon” issue. This is what I thought at the time (IIRC):

• I agree that it’s not good to put misleading messages in your protests.

• I think this particular instance of misleadingness isn’t that egregious, it does decrease my expectation of the value of PauseAI US’s future protests but not by a huge margin. If this was a recurring pattern, I’d be more concerned.

• Upon my first reading, it was unclear to me what your actual objection was, so I’m not surprised that Holly also (apparently) misunderstood it. I had to read through twice to understand.

• Being intentionally deceptive is close to a dealbreaker for me, but it doesn’t look to me like Holly was being intentionally deceptive.

• I thought you both could’ve handled the exchange better. Holly included misleading messaging in the protest and didn’t seem to understand the problem, and you did not communicate clearly and then continued to believe that you had communicated well in spite of contrary evidence. Reading the exchange weakly decreased my evaluation of both your work and PauseAI US’s, but not by enough to change my org ranking. You both made the sorts of mistakes that I don’t think anyone can avoid 100% of the time. (I have certainly made similar mistakes.) Making a mistake once is evidence that you’ll make it more, but not very strong evidence.

I re-read your post and its comments just now and I didn’t have any new thoughts. I feel like I still don’t have great clarity on the implications of the situation, which troubles me, but by my reading, it’s just not as big a deal as you think it is.

General comments:

• I think PauseAI US is less competent than some hypothetical alternative protest org that wouldn’t have made this mistake, but I also think it’s more competent than most protest orgs that could exist (or protest orgs in other cause areas).

• I reviewed PauseAI’s other materials, although not deeply or comprehensively, and they seemed good to me. I listened to a podcast with Holly and my impression was that she had an unusually clear picture of the concerns around misaligned AI.

Thank you, Chris. We’ve looked for a duplicate, in case one was inadvertently posted, but are only seeing this one. In any event, we hope that the information contained in the post is helpful and would encourage all interested to apply to the program.

I guess in thinking about this I realize it’s so hard to even know if someone is a “PR disaster” that I probably have just been confirming my biases. What makes you say that he hasn’t been?

Thank you for the friendly flag. HIP welcomes all applicants to the Impact Accelerator Program regardless of hemisphere, country, or timezone.

GWWC website in 2010:
For a person earning £15,000 per year, this would mean saving 5 lives every year

£300/​$450 (~£450/​$650 inflation-adjusted) per life then.. unfathomably low

https://​​old.reddit.com/​​r/​​EffectiveAltruism/​​comments/​​1gmtdrm/​​has_average_cost_to_save_a_life_increased_or/​​

I hate Trump as much as anyone but it seems unlikely EA can make much difference here, given how many other well-resourced, powerful actors there are trying to shape outcomes in US politics.