If there’s barely any cattle sales it’s probably a case of needing better access to markets.
I don’t think I stated or drew this conclusion. You might be confusing it with the bit about crop sales.
Benquo
Karma: 25
Oppression and production are competing explanations for wealth inequality.
My understanding of the term “privatization” is that it generally refers to the voluntary sale of state assets, by the state. That doesn’t seem like quite the same thing as the state expropriating and possibly selling assets that were previously understood to be owned and administered by some smaller community within the state. Am I missing some important detail here?
The applicability to animal welfare is relatively complex, because it has to do with biases in how we project our agency onto animals when trying to sympathize with them. The applicability to global development is relatively straightforward, as frequently success is defined in terms that at least partially include acceptance of acculturation (schooling & white-collar careers) that causes people to endorse the global development efforts.
You haven’t addressed my question about how this post differs from other abstract theoretical work in EA. It’s a bit odd that you’re reiterating your original criticism without engaging with a direct challenge to its premises.The push for immediate concrete examples or solutions can actually get in the way of properly understanding problems. When we demand actionable takeaways too early, we risk optimizing for superficial fixes rather than engaging with root causes—which is particularly relevant when discussing preference falsification itself. I think it’s best to separate arguments into independently evaluable modular units when feasible.
I’d still like to hear your thoughts on what distinguishes this kind of theoretical investigation from other abstract work that’s considered EA-relevant.
Parkinson’s Law and the Ideology of Statistics
I’d like to better understand your criteria for relevance. Are you suggesting that EA relevance requires either explicit action items or direct factual support for current EA initiatives? If so, what makes this post different from abstract theoretical posts like this one on infinite ethics in terms of EA relevance?
The relevance to EA is that we have this problem where we try to help people by looking at what they say they want (or even what they demonstrate they want), but sometimes those preferences are artifacts of threat models rather than actual desires. Like how in the post’s primate example, low-status males aren’t actually uninterested in mating—they’re performing disinterest to avoid punishment. This matters because a lot of EA work involves studying revealed preferences in contexts with strong power dynamics (development economics, animal welfare, etc). If we miss these dynamics, we risk optimizing for the same coercive equilibria we’re trying to fix.
Preference Inversion
Ben_Todd, it seems to me like you’re saying both these things:
GWWC is very busy and can’t reasonably be expected to write up all or most of the important considerations around things like whether or not to take the GWWC Pledge.
Considerations around the pledge are in GWWC’s domain, & sensitive, so people should check in with GWWC privately before discussing them publicly, and failing to do so is harmful in expectation.
I’m having a hard time reconciling these. In particular, it seems like if you make both these claims, you’re basically saying that EAs shouldn’t publicly criticize the pledge without GWWC’s permission because that undercuts GWWC’s goals. That seems very surprising to me. Am I misunderstanding you?
This is awesome! I’m going to try this out next time I get to explain effective altruism to someone.
(I originally wrote “have to explain,” but in the spirit of this article I rewrote it as “get to” before posting.)
Enclosure acts seem like the correct analogy. And I’d say the enclosure acts and 20th century Soviet modernization were along some relevant dimensions more similar to each other than either is to a decentralization of economic decisionmaking.
The distinction I’m trying to draw attention to in this post is one between unironically believing microeconomics and modern academic finance as descriptive theories that help one interpret the environment in which one lives and has real embedded experience of—treating them as stage 1 simulacra—and, on the other hand, treating those theories as stage 3 simulacra, a bad-faith substitute for interpreting one’s environment that serves to entitle one’s identity to false credit and the concomitant extraction of resources from less entitled groups. The former attitude would reason from evidence of inefficiency, to predictions about profitable deals one could strike with the locals. The latter would lead to the sort of thing that actually happened. This us approximately the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism.