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: −19
No Room for Political Philosophy
I repeat here my previous post supporting Bostrom, and his apology:
He is a simply one of the best philosophers of our time, and the main founder or longtermism. The comment in the original mail list was a modest misstep by a person without special responsibilities at the time, and his apology in 2023 has been entirely appropriate.
The racial IQ gap is an observational fact, and he is not an expert on its determinants, so he shall not take a position on a scientific issue that lays beyond his academic authority.
99% of meat comes from factory farms? A good percent of cows (and sheep, that in Europe, AU and NZ still have some relevance) are pasture fed, as anybody driving a car can easily check by herself.
https://extension.psu.edu/grass-fed-beef-production
“Rather than debate advantages and disadvantages of the grain versus grass-fed systems, the take-home here is that all beef cattle, whether farmers choose to raise them as grass-fed or grain-fed animals, spend at least two-thirds of their lifetime in a pasture setting. Therefore, all beef may be considered “grass-fed” for the majority of its life. Thus, beef production in the United States has been, and continues to be, a forage-based industry. The differentiation in what makes cattle grass-fed then, generally occurs towards the end of life and will be discussed in more detail.”
I was not aware of the enormous weigth of aquaculture on final fish production. I was thinking it was around 10%, but it is close to one half.
https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-aquaculture
Onmizoid is rigth, and I have retracted my comment.
When I began writing in the EA forum I was often told that I was unclear, but this is because there is “rationalistic style” that in my view is not conductive to understanding, but to the signaling of community belonging.
Well, I am surprised of the amount of downvoting and the lack of comments. I would have been glad of engaging with opposite arguments.
Artificial Intelligence as exit strategy from the age of acute existential risk
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.
In my view you underestimate the degree of intentionality and coordination of the offensive against EA.
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?
Time consistency for the EA community: Projects that bridge the gap between near-term bootstrapping and long-term targets
While I don’t have a very good opinion on AI risk research, this is the last necessary thing.
There is radical uncertainty about the technological paths opened by AI, wheather those paths end in AGI, and what kind of preferences would AGI have at the beguining and how they would evolve. Any mathematical modelling at this stage would be pure “pretense of knowledge”. An exercise even more sterile than the numbers war about if there is 1%, a 10% or a 99% probability of AI doom.
It is time to explore the technology, and to make researchers sensitive to risks. In fact, I think that AI safety still does not exist as an independent knowledge field, and mathematization of (almost) nothing is even worse than nothing.
Storable Votes with a Pay as you win mechanism: a contribution for institutional design
World and Mind in Artificial Intelligence: arguments against the AI pause
I have written two recent posts describing my position. In the first I argued that nuclear war plus our primitive social systems, imply we live in an age of acute existential risk, and the substitution of our flawed governance by AI based government is our chance of survival.
In the second one, I argue that given the kind of specialized AI we are training so far, existential risk from AI is still negligible, and regulation would be premature.
You can comment on the posts themselves, or you can comment both posts here.
Do you have any suggestion for non lethal aid to Ukraine? For example, organizations providing electrical generators, heaters, anything that can help the non military resistance of Ukraine’s population?
To some extent this is more or less a description of the brigthest side of the American Dream. It would be interesting to know what projects are you interested in.
It increases large migrations, political unstability, drought… and that create geopolitical unstability, and the probability of conventional war, revolution, etc and those events can easily trigger a nucelar as long a nuclear power is involved. Do the math: around 1⁄3 of people lives in nuclear armed nations.
Nuclear war turn historical risk into something that can have geological time consequences. I don’t believe there is really any other existential risk (on the timescale of decades) other than nuclear war. There is only one “precipice” but many ways to fall there.
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
If I understand properly EA is to some extent a platform where many different perspectives can coexist. I find Shrimp welfare or deep longtermism totally pointless, but cause choice is a main principle of the movement.
Your effort and money can be directed to those issues that you really care about. Democracy is good, choice is even better!