Maybe I should’ve asked you the question I just asked on another post instead: as someone interested in minimizing x-risk, who should I support for President? Or better yet, who has a good compilation of candidates’ records on x-risk-related issues, so I can make my own decision?
Vilfredo's Ghost
I don’t think life evaluation is the right measurement of happiness for this though. I’m pretty egotistical and more income would definitely make me happier, well beyond the threshold here. I make about 100k/year and would definitely be more satisfied with my life if I made 200k. But, that’s purely from a “feeling like a success”/social status standpoint. I have no realistic lifestyle use for 200k. I can’t even figure out how to use 100k on lifestyle because the things people typically buy are really boring. So even though making more money would make me happier, spending more of it on myself wouldn’t. Positive affect is better but may still be affected too much by life evaluation. So negative affect is probably the best measure, since it’s more related to the possibility of suffering due to insufficient money.
Or let them pay for their own college. The rates they’ll get charged will take your income into account, so they’ll have to get a lot of loans. But the loans are pretty manageable and essentially risk-free as long as income-based repayment remains an option. Now, if they are committed EAs and will be earning to give, this doesn’t accomplish as much since this comes out of their future earnings. But even if there’s a 95% probability that they turn out to be earning to give as EAs, that’s still better than the ~100% odds with respect to you. And the interest rates on those loans are lower than average stock market returns, so the smart financial move is always to get the loans and pay them off as slowly as possible rather than pay higher up front costs (assuming they’re reasonably risk tolerant, as young people should be but especially when the goal is to maximize good done rather than maximize their own comfort) (this is a little more complicated to see when we’re talking about earning to give. but you must be assuming a larger discount rate for the value of donations than what you could earn by investing and giving later; otherwise you’d be doing that instead of giving now. So if giving the money away now is worth sacrificing the ~10% annual gains you could make on it, then it’s even more worth sacrificing ~7%/year in interest payments).
Even if your policy views are correct, having friends on the other side of the aisle will do wonders for your predictive abilities, which should influence how you vote in party primaries where electability is at issue. I’m a staunch Democrat currently living in a similarly liberal area but born and raised in a much more conservative area. I was always more bullish on Trump’s odds than my friends here, and every time I hear them say they can’t understand how he got elected or how he’s still popular with the base, I wonder what other easily avoidable mistakes they’re currently making. And there’s no special magic in my improved predictive ability; I just talk to my grandma regularly.
I’d be interested in seeing why they rate malaria so much lower, at least in relative terms, than most of the EA community does. That’s probably a good clue to the differences in methodology, and a shortcut to figuring out whose methods yield more accurate priorities.
P.S. I’m not surprised that measuring the UN development goals is unproductive; a lot of them are obviously distractions. Priorities research only adds value when it’s non-obvious whether something should be a priority. Once it’s clear that the goal is garbage, move on.
agreed
This is awesome and I’ve been wanting something like it but am too lazy to create it myself. So I’m really glad kbog did.
I vote for continuing to include weightings for e.g. candidate health. The interesting question is who is actually likely to do the most good, not who believes the best things. So to model that well you need to capture any personal factors that significantly affect their probability of carrying out their agenda.
I think AI safety and biorisk deserve some weighting here even if candidates aren’t addressing them directly. You could use proxy issues that the candidates are more likely to have records on and that relevant experts have a consensus are helpful or unhelpful (e.g. actions likely to lead to an arms race with China). And then adjust for uncertainty by giving them a somewhat lower weight than you would give a direct vote on something like creating an unfriendly AI.
Delaney’s hitting 2% on Predictit for the first time AFAIK. Did your quasi-endorsement move the markets?
As an EA with political organizing experience I think EA has plenty to say to your friend. Money is useful as a unit of analysis because it’s quantifiable and fungible, but the same analytical framework can easily apply to donations of time, with the caveats that 1) Donating time will vary a lot more in its value depending on the specific service one performs and it becomes a lot more important to pick the right volunteer activity in addition to the right cause, 2) there will be some causes or organizations where it is not possible to donate time effectively, so the highest-value intervention might be different.
Being politically experienced, I would think your friend already has an idea of the highest-value services they would perform for a candidate or organization, although in some cases the highest-value candidates/organizations may have no need for those specific skills, so there could be a tradeoff between doing a more useful activity for a less impactful candidate/org vs. a less useful activity for a higher-impact candidate/org. But if you have a sense of the marginal values of different activities that should be easy to quantify, and then you can assess how high-impact the candidate/org is. For the latter as applied to the Presidential race, see the Candidate Scoring system at https://onedrive.live.com/?authkey=%21AMwfqLPOC5Rim5E&cid=E49A0797F8708ADD&id=E49A0797F8708ADD%217949&parId=E49A0797F8708ADD%217946&o=OneUp. For a better example of the former analysis than most political people seem to have done, I recommend Graber and Green’s Get Out The Vote, with 2 caveats: 1) it focuses only on turnout, and persuasion may be different; 2) the effects that seem to be the strongest are under-studied because political scientists seem to have a fetish for grassroot-y stuff over mass media. https://www.amazon.com/Get-Out-Vote-Increase-Turnout/dp/0815732686. If your friend needs help with the quantitative analysis of these tradeoffs I’m happy to help.
I donated the legal max to Cory Booker and am now donating what I can afford to the DNC, in case you’re wondering where I personally come out on this.
What do prediction markets add that polls don’t? Is there any history of them being more accurate than polling-based models such as 538’s? To the extent they are relevant my intuition is that it would be as to the lesser-known candidates, where the type of person participating in prediction markets has priced in info the average voter doesn’t have. But where average voters do have more complete information, I would rely exclusively or at least more heavily on polls.
I think too many people ignore the “parents” part of singer’s argument. If a parent is willing to kill their child, then either 1. That’s a super f-ed up parent, or 2. it probably is the compassionate thing to do. Anyone who jumps to comparisons to racist euthanasia programs is missing the point entirely, because the kid’s own parents are not going to act the same as some random Old South judge who’s headed to the Klan rally after court gets out.
My sense is that the Warren plan actually reduces the State Department’s ability to get fresh perspectives and fill the (current or expanded) ranks. As unfortunate as it is, donor-Ambassadors are currently the only senior people who haven’t spent their whole careers at State, absorbing its prejudices, its paranoias, etc. There is no other route in from the outside. And while she does propose recruiting more outside of Ivy League colleges, she doesn’t address the more fundamental problem that if you want to be a foreign service officer, your two choices are to either look the part at age 22 or come in at the entry level later in life, so it ends up being a very unattractive career choice for anyone who was undistinguished in college (or uninterested in foreign service at that time) but successful in their career later.
There is something to be said for the civil service. But she picks the wrong military program to emulate. The National Guard would be a better source of inspiration than ROTC, as it allows people to have other careers, but receive the basics of military training and progress appropriately in rank, and then be called into active service when needed.
I am an immigration lawyer and I have trouble taking anyone seriously when they propose “decriminalizing the border”, because it’s so irrelevant to the actual legal issues most immigrants face. People usually don’t get prosecuted for crossing the border illegally, and when they do the consequences are pretty minor. The government does it once in a while to make a point but the really inhumane stuff happens on the civil side of immigration enforcement, where you can still be detained indefinitely and the procedural protections of criminal law don’t apply. If it were a choice, I’d MUCH rather be prosecuted for illegal entry than have a deportation case brought against me.
The other things are fine as far as they go. I’m pro-open borders but since I don’t see it happening anytime soon I’d prefer to see a more serious attempt at reforms that could actually go somewhere.
Re: climate refugees your point about refugee quotas is right, but the standards for asylum are exactly the same as the standards to be a refugee; it’s just about whether you’re in the US or out at the time you apply. And there are no quotas for asylees so revising the eligibility standards there is meaningfully helpful. I would prefer to see a broader “economic refugee/asylee” category but I think accepting climate refugees/asylees is a good practical step in that direction. Someone like me can probably twist the hell out of that in court to basically create a broader “economic asylee” category but I need that crack in the door so I can pry it open.
Incubation period and Chinese government coverup efforts are relevant to this question, but roughly speaking if the actual number of infections is ~35x the reported number, and there’s no uptick in mysterious deaths in hospitals, then the actual mortality rate is ~1/35 the reported number, more in line with normal flu than 1918 Spanish flu.
I think you’d need to structure it somewhat differently. More like a permanent version of what the National Guard was a few years into Iraq and Afghanistan, where everyone knew they would eventually do a rotation, maybe a few, and they happened on reasonably predictable schedules. Less of the all-or-nothing model that you’d have if it’s meant to be used solely as a massive reserve for WWIII.
Considering that military veterans are overrepresented in Congress by a factor of 2 compared to the general adult population, and most of those are not people who have primarily spent their careers in the military, I don’t think the National Guard system does scare off high achievers, at least not public service-oriented ones. The bad reputation that the National Guard earned during and immediately after Vietnam may have had that effect, but I think that’s specific to that era.
FP Gen’s, but the “as far as they go” was a compact method of expressing agreement with you that they leave out a lot of important stuff.
I don’t think WWII presents a case for state planning capacity being all that disconnected from population. Looks like Germany lost roughly 10% of its population and Japan 5%. Big by normal standards but I wouldn’t expect that to be civilizational collapse levels and I think their quick economic recoveries are in line with the timeframe you’d expect for replacing that population. Plague killed more like 30-60%.
As someone with an interest in government and relatively new to the concept of x-risk, I have a semi-urgent question: who should I support for President? I will probably have to get involved with a campaign in some way or another in the next few months to maximize my odds of getting a decent appointment after the election. There’s plenty of interest group ratings, position statements etc. out there on environmental issues but I can’t find much that would be of practical use on the other types, which seem to be more serious at least in aggregate and perhaps individually too. I could try compiling my own ratings but I know far less than a lot of the people in this community, so if someone has already figured out or is in the process of figuring out where the candidates stand on the risks they have expertise in, I would greatly appreciate it. Doesn’t have to be like standard interest group ratings and maybe shouldn’t be. E.g. the fact that someone has a hawkish temperament toward China and that would make them more prone to starting an arms race is probably more important to AI safety than the specifics of any technology-related votes they’ve taken.