I am an Economist working as a risk manager at Banco de España (Spanish Central Bank). I was born in 1977 and I have recently finished my PhD Thesis (See ORCID webpage: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1623-0957 ). All opinions published here are purely personal.
Arturo Macias
Karma: 75
The anti-AIDS program PEPFAR: the European Union must replace the United States (if necessary)
The Dictator’s Handbook [book by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith]
Thank you, some time ago I wrote this piece, thinking that nobody in the field was working in credible certifications. If farmers become used to welfare certifications, soon they can discover that it is in their collective economic interest to support it (as electric utilities have done with climate change).
Your article is extremely useful! Thx.
Oh, it is not an objection! I mean, you have given some arguments that go against the use of citizen juries for general policy issues. Still you think juries are good for that use case.
But for expert panels, there are not substantial arguments against choice by sortision!. Still the US President (and often european parliaments) chose supreme justices. I am quite pessimistic because this mechanism is not used even when its superiority is almost impossible to dispute.
Sortision is not used even for expert panels (including high courts), where objections are truly inexistent.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PyqPr4z76Z8xGZL22/sortition
Naturalistic dualism
Social Science in its epistemological context
I have read both the RP and the post against neuron counts, and I find them unconvincing. Let’s take this: “There are studies that show increased volume of brain regions correlated with valanced experience, such as a study showing that cortical thickness in a particular region increased along with pain sensitivity”.
There is no way to know what is related to “pain sensitivity”, because all we know about consciousness comes from extrapolation. The only valanced experience you can observe is your own. Even if you find that a given part of the brain is related to pain, what matters most is not the size of that part of the brain but if there is a self to feel the pain.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3nLDxEhJwqBEtgwJc/arthropod-non-sentience
There are not “royal paths” to understand consciousness. There is a “pretty hard problem of consciousness” between you and any exercise of consciousness attribution and no checklist nor neural similarity will easily bridge that gap.
I think that the real divide is CAFO (Concentrated Animal Farming Operation) species vs non-CAFO. Runminants (sheep and beef) are at least partially fed on pastures, so they do not live in permanently overcrowded farms, with high agression and stress.
Between the two main CAFO species (chicken and pork) I have not strong opinions: given neuron counts and brain weigth, I think pigs are more morally valuable than chicken, while chicken live worse lives: hard to decide.
While I find vegetarianism utopic, in my view, CAFOs can be overcame (see here).
I think this is the main priority (max [Expected loss reduction/euro]) in catastrophic risks. This could make even a nuclear terrorist attack (or nuclear tactical war) into a massive event. In fact the passivity of military planners regarding this threat is suprising.
The Shrimp is not very complex either: not enough nodes in the network.
Because the counterexample is based on the intuition of complexity. Also because the experiments about sleep of Massimmi and Tononi (cited) suggest that some IIT version is true; regarding the letter, you have Hoel answer in the text.
Arthropod (non) sentience
Yes, there are some measures, but beware of Goodhart Law: if you over-incentive consensus, you get herd behaviour. Many “consensus building” mechanisms end producing the same kind of problems as “peer review”: conformity, statu quo bias, and above all, guild mentality. In Law, external measures of goodness (that counterbalance statu quo bias) are even more difficult to create than in academy...
https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/08/02/the-academic-culture-of-fraud/
I disagree. Blindness is the main attribute of Justice. Rawls and the Romans were right. Meritocracy is nice at the gates of the career, but how do you measure merit among the chief justices? Any mechanism different from the lottery will become a battlefield.
Moreover, I don’t believe in merit among the experienced Justices. Law is not like chess or Physics. It is about consensus, and intuitiveness. There is not a real object to be discovered by the jurisconsult, but a mix of system, continuity, social agreement, and a bit of game theoretical intuitions. Who is the “best” at that?
Regarding the views of the population, I am for judicial review by the legislature, but not in the late stages of the career, because the closer to the high court is the political intervention, the higher becomes the risk of capture.
I find that ending “factory farming” in the western world is possible in less than 40 years. The real problem here is veganism: people need animal proteins, and by pushing veganism, the animal welfare activist look like crazy bolsheviks.
What is the animal welfare equivalent of socialdemocracy? In my view, expanding the rumninants husbandry (becuase the true horror is farmed hens and pork), killing fishes by electrical stunning instead of suffocation, and above all, join with western farmers for total protectionism, because farmers are for efficiency (and cruelty) mostly for fear of foreing competition.
At the end, electrical utilities are the main lobby for climate change mitigation. Western farmers can be the same for animal welfare.
But even if you think that more can be done, what do you think as its use to create “expert panels” including the Supreme Court?
It looks so natural that it is increíble that Sortition (among professional justices) for High Courts is not universal.
I would use it for expert panels (above all, the Supreme Court), never for the executive or the Legislative.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/PyqPr4z76Z8xGZL22/sortition
I entirely support your cause, while is there any similar regulation to avoid the importation of Frankenchicken meat? In animal welfare, for me the most important policy is to support protectionism in the meat/dairy/eggs markets. Animal welfare activist and farmers have a common enemy: imports.
This is a marvelous question, that is partially adressed in the book: “Finally, after facing the abyss of the nature of power and those who wield it, the authors describe the social checks and balances that make the sustainability of pluralistic political regimes possible”[...]”Democratic competition turns the natural brutality and cynicism of political actors into a virtuous competition to provide the public with maximum material prosperity.”
Regarding cultural change and evolution I wrote a long essay whose cover note you can read here (and if interested, the link to the essay is there):
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aCEuvHrqzmBroNQPT/the-evolution-towards-the-blank-slate
There you can see how I see the relation between Gintian “strong reciprocity” and cultural evolution. “But it turns out that existing hominids are more like water molecules (attracted by the powerful van der Waals forces of strong reciprocity) than the quasi-ideal gas helium atoms of abstract philosophy. The moralization of human existence has occurred through the creation of incentive schemes generating social surplus and distributing it in such a way that the social organization itself was reinforced in the process.”