I am an Economist working at the Financial Risk Department of 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 ).
Arturo Macias
Karma: −21
Dear Yellow,
Thank you very much for your comment. I try to answer your objections:
Elites are an inevitable fact of civilized life. Like other silenced topics (tradionally sex), the more you hide it, the worse it becomes. Moreover, I agree with the Ash and the rest of the Palladium crowd: an overworked and overspecialized elite is quite dangerous.
Lately I have heard a good deal of LibriVox audiobooks on history (Hume’s History of England, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Guizot’s History of France, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America) and literary works (Don Quijote, Eneid, Iliad and Odissey), and other material that was part of the classical western education. I understand how that education was able to create a cohesive and somewhat high minded elite (also brutal and endogrupally oriented of course, of course). We have lost important capabilities with the replacement of the West traditional elites.
Regarding the sustainability-effectiveness relation, I can create counterexamples of non sustainable and effective interventions, but for the majority of practical cases, sustainability is a necessary condition for effectiveness (and a detailed discussion on the topic would be tiring).
“. I think it’s important that as many people as possible are empowered to participate in what could be humanity’s most important century. ”
Dear Stephan, it is not only that they can participate. Poor countries are less stable and can desestabilize others. Their population grows unsustainably and their demographic excedents can be destabilizing.
Growth is a moral imperative and part of the political stabilization that is necessary to avoid big power conflict and even nuclear war.
A Global Middle Class is a necessary condition for the reduction of geopolitical / nuclear risk. So growth is a long term target too. Of course, direct giving and charitable organizations are relatively impotent to create growth: research, technological transfers and political work to put development as a main global target is what can work here.
Latin American and African groups are extremely important for EA, so congratulations for the initiative!.
In a previous post (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/4viLtxnwzMawqdPum/time-consistency-for-the-ea-community-projects-that-bridge) I have argued that the development of non-propietary technologies to improve productivity (and specially agricultural productivity) in Africa shall be considered a main EA priority.
There have been some movements like the African makers (http://africanmakersmedia.com/) or open source ecology (https://www.opensourceecology.org/) that have tried to build an alternative technological open source techno ecology. Do you know about this kind of networks, and kind of assistance can be offered to them?
I completely support Bostrom too. He is not only corageous, but also politically skilfull. Some conflicts are inevitable.
I have witten this post supporting Bostrom. This is a critical issue:
Here is my post supporting Bostrom and specifically his agnostic position on the black white IQ gap:
I Really Think Bostrom does not care at all about race. He has a modestly racist Bayesian prior, and probably he is able to update beliefs when confronted with relevant individual information.
Really, his neurotype is too un emotional for racism or even moderate nationalistic chovinism.
Well, I am surprised of the amount of downvoting and the lack of comments. I would have been glad of engaging with opposite arguments.
But true racists are essentialists! They do not update beliefs. Bostrom lives for one thing over all others: to be factually right, all the time about everything. Perhaps human survival o suffering is important for him, but it is obvious that goes in second place.
I don’t know which are his real present prior on the black white IQ gap, but I have no reason to think that he consider it to be wide (because it is not), nor I have any reason to think that he does not update beliefs on personal IQ when information arrives.
In fact given how epistemologically uncompromising he has proven to be, I am more confident than ever in he being even handedly Bayesian on race and everything else.
I have written a post that probably answer some of those concerns:
Across large racial groups, however, the observed differences are statistically significant but modest (as they are for other anthropometric characters), and given the social and cultural disparities across racial groups and the social plasticity of IQ the share of biological causality on the observed racial IQ gap is a difficult and controversial research problem. Bostrom has not scientific legitimacy to give an opinion in such a technical and disputed issue.
Regarding feelings and human sympathy, the big question is: whose feelings? How can a modest difference in the mean of the IQ distribution offend a black man with an IQ of 130? And if you are a white person with an IQ of 85, how useful is for you the white black IQ gap for which you make a negative contribution? IQ is a personal characteristic, and means are completely irrelevant for every single person.
If we believe that IQ is important for some application, we can measure it directly at the individual level instead of looking at skin color. Anti-racist arguments do not depend on the distribution of psychometric variables. They depend on treating each person as an individual, ignoring skin color, and exclusively considering the abilities and limitations relevant to the case considered of the person under scrutiny. Any “anti-racism” in excess of this, is, in fact, racism
Thanks, I agree with that. It was written fast, and fastidious peer reviewers did not help to keep the text focused. The result is grandiose European historicism.
I have written this post on EA governance and democratization. I hope it is on interest:
I have written this post on the Effective Altruism governance and democratization.
I hope it helps to frame the issue.
I have produce this answer to this post here:
Kind regards,
Arturo
I find this work fascinating. Is there any project about agricultural mechanization based on open source standards. I only know about of this:
https://www.opensourceecology.org/
But I think that Research and Developement for low tech innovation adapted to severely underdeveloped coutries looks a possible kind of potentially ultra leveraged aid.
Hello to all,
Have you contacted the Integrated Information Theory group about this project? In my (dualistic naturalist) viewpoint their work is the most advanced in the area of consciece detection.
https://www.amazon.com/Sizing-Up-Consciousness-Objective-Experience/dp/0198728441
Of course, conscience is absolutely noumenal and the best part of their work is focused in the case where self reported conscience experience is possible [humans], but they tried to extrapolate into mathematical models of application to any material system.
I completely agree with this position, but my take is different: Nuclear war risk is high all the time, and all geopolitical and climate risks can increase it. It is perhaps not existential for the species, but certainly it is for cilivization. Given this, for me it is the top risk, and to some extent, all efforts for progress, political stabilization, climate risk mitigation are modestly important in themselves, and massively important to affect nuclear war risk.
Now, the problem with AI risk is that our understanding of why and how IA works is limited. If my understaing is correct, we have constructed Alpha Zero mainly by growing it, not by designing it. We really dont understand “how it works”. The “black box risk” is huge, and until we have a better theoretical understanding of AI , all efforts will be mainly useless. The “information bottleneck principle” tried it, but interest on it faded. I think other generalizing principles have not been proposed, but I am a user, not a developer, so I could be wrong.
Regarding the neurological part (the conscience detector based in brain information) that is described in “Sizin Up consciuosness” I think they are mostly rigth. The IIT mathematical model is beyond my understanding, and the Aronsson criticism also. But given my naturalistic dualist vision of conscience, unfortunately only an axiomatic and extrapolative way to consciousness measurement is possible.
“Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism”
Is this a test of attention? Or there is something I miss?
Dear all,
My name is Arturo Macias. I am a 45 years old economist working at Banco de España, the Spanish Central Bank. I have recently finished my Ph.D (see my ORCID account for my published papers: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1623-0957) and consequently I have recovered a substantial amount of free time.
While I have a great deal of simpathy to the whole Effective Altruism movement my main interest is related to intitutional desing and economic estabilization. In my view among the main existential risk bottlenecks for this Dangerous Century, a critical one is institutional stagnation. E.O Wilson famously said: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology”. Regarding the Paleolithic emotions, I can not advance any solution (this is for geneticists), and regarding the godlike tecnologhy, after Aug 6th 1945 nobody can.
Regarding the medieval institutions I think I can make some modest contributions and thats is why I am here.
Kind Regards,
Arturo