Talk to me about cost benefit analysis !
Charlie_Guthmann
Karma: 821
Are you sure the technology is there yet? I don’t know if I have actually seen an extremely convincing deepfake.
Today was a pretty bad day for American democracy IMO. The guy below me got downvoted and yea his comment wasn’t the greatest but I directionally agree with him.
Pardons are out of control: Biden starts the day pardoning people he thinks might be caught in the political crossfire (Fauci, Milley, others) and more of his family members. Then Trump follows it up by pardoning close to all the Jan 6 defendants. The ship has sailed on whatever “constraints” pardons supposedly had, although you could argue Trump already made that true 4 years ago.
Ever More Executive Orders: Trump signed ~25 executive orders (and even more “executive actions”—don’t worry about the difference unless you like betting markets). This included withdrawing from WHO and ending birthright citizenship, though the latter is unlikely to stick since it’s probably unconstitutional. I haven’t had time to wade through all the EOs but like the pardons, this seems to be a cancerous growth of executive encroachment on the other branches with no clear end in sight.
Pre$idential $hitcoins: To be fair, the $TRUMP coin happened a few days ago, with $MELANIA following more recently. I’m not sure if people remember this, but it was a genuine scandal when Trump didn’t release his tax returns in 2016. Now, 8 years later, he is at best using his office to scam American citizens. Less charitably he has created a streamlined bribery pipeline. It was a blip in the news cycle.
Multiple reasons.
1. Your style of writing doesn’t meet the standards of this forum. It’s vague and memey. I’m inclined not to be that bothered but it definitely is outside of the expected decorum of the forum.
2. You aren’t adding much to the conversation here, this is a pretty liberal forum and we already know Trump acts like a buffon and Elon is an anti-woke troll who has recently supported the AfD (I generally think people here are too quick to downvote things that feel low-effort, it’s probably directionally better if people spew a bit more garbage if that would generate more discussion and cause people to second-guess commenting less—and second I don’t think it’s so irrelevant that he did this although their are lots of other reasons to be concerned that are more concrete).
3. People here are on net not super involved in politics and might feel offended that you imply it is important since it hurts their ego, and since you write in a style that is not within the accepted standards it’s easy for them to express their discontent with your writing style even if the impetus to downvote is partially that they think you are being reactionary and disagreeing with their priors.
But yea I’d recommend writing something like ~ “The trump inauguration festivities have caused me to update towards thinking American politics is a more important cause area because x”. It still probably won’t be received particularly well here without being more quantitative/fleshing it out more but you won’t get 26 downvotes.
To rank interventions or causes as a whole (so not just making comparisons of outputs apples to apples), you need to have a moral framework. Unless you (1) believe there is an objectively correct moral framework and (2) trust that EA is both good at cost-benefit analysis and moral philosophy, I think you may be hoping for too much.
I’m pretty sure the personal benefits of getting the flu vaccine for a male in their 20-30s is not much higher than the costs. Agree on the bike helmet thing though.
I don’t know unfortunately, basically just going off trusting the leadership to be cost effective plus they are in a really good position to influence policy/executive orders.
I haven’t quite finished donating because waiting on a final input on whether rand actually needs funding but I expect my final donations to look more or less like below. I don’t really believe in spreading this amount of funding on the object level but it’s more fun and allows me to tell my friends that I think these issues are all important. I gave about 10% of my income.
RAND- earmarked for emerging risks
Chicago growth project (YIMBY/good governance PAC)
ARI
Horizon
rethink
ACE
Givewell unrestricted
I probably won’t be donating again for at least a year or two because I left my trading job to start a startup—happy new year.
Yea I have no idea if they actually need money but if they still want to hire more people to the AI team wouldn’t it be better to give the money to RAND to hire those policymakers rather than like the Americans for Responsible Innovation—which open phil currently recommends but is much less prestigious and I’m not sure if they are working side by side with legislators. The fact that open phil gave grants but doesn’t currently recommend for individual donors makes me think you are right that they don’t need money atm but it would be nice to be sure.
Haven’t seen anyone mention RAND as a possible best charity for AI stuff and I guess I’d like to throw their hat in the ring or at least invite people to tell me why I’m wrong. My core claims are approximately:
Influencing the US (federal) government is probably one of the most scalable cost-effective routes for AI safety.
Think tanks are one of the most cost-effective ways to influence the US government.
The prestige of the think tank matters for getting into the room/influencing change.
Rand is among the most prestigious think tank doing AI safety work.
It’s also probably the most value-aligned, given Jason Matheny is in charge.
You can earmark donations to the catastrophic risks/emerging risks departments
I’ll add I have no idea if they need/have asked for marginal funding.
The get-out-of-RSP-free card
If I’m reading this correctly it seems quite vaguely written, so expecting them to pull this out literally whenever they want but maybe I’m overly skeptical. Bush invading Iraq vibes.
do you feel confident about your moral philosophy?
adding on that wholefoods https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/quality-standards/statement-on-broiler-chicken-welfare
has made some commitments to switching breeds, we discussed this briefly at a Chicago EA meeting. I didn’t get much info but they said that going and protesting/spreading the word to whole foods managers to switch breeds showed some success.
No I don’t but effective altruism should not be a small movement. I think about 1⁄3 of all people could get on board. Applied utilitarianism should be a small movement, and probably not democratic. I’ll just write up a more coherent version of my vision and make a quick take or post though. I would agree democracy is not great for a small movement though I’m not expert.
It was such a token effort though. I’m literally giving that much away myself. How about every single person at an ea org steps down and we have an election for the new boards, or they can drop the ea name? (I’m only half joking)
Yea I think I can feel better about giving to manifund so that’s a good shout. Functionally giving money to them still feels like I’m contributing to the larger ea political oligopoly though. I want to enrich a version of ea with real de jure democratic republic institutions
Nope I think the grants you are doing seem good, I don’t mean it like that.
I mean the idea of giving these semi central ea orgs/ funds money doesn’t make sense to me. EA is supposed to be a cause agnostic decentralized movement. If it was called the utilitarian fund this would probably be about 70% of the way towards me being willing to donate. When my dad asks why you guys did x and I have to respond by saying ea isn’t a monolith and then he asks me where the Chicago donation fund is and then I have to say well dad that’s not effective because (insert large moral circle utilitarian calculus) and then he asks me “oh so is ea a utilitarian movement” … maybe you see where I am going with this? It’s a bit of a meta point and perhaps now is not the right time to bring it up.
I mean political representation like if there is an organization with ea in its name then I should be able to vote for the board as a member of ea.
My two cents on why I am not giving to any effective altruism funds: I have no political representation in this movement.
In a vague long term sense I’m inclined to agree. However it’s not inevitable, especially locally and in the short run. If tulip farming is still in expectation the best wages the migrant will make what incentive do they have to produce something else?
I find the whole discourse around this to be very similar to the housing supply price question. Economists will study if random housing shocks affect price. Like… of course it does. Can building more housing induce demand? Absolutely. But this is a local property.
Imagine you have a lonely house out in the woods in the middle of nowhere. I try to sell it to you for 1 mil and you laugh at me and say no. Now imagine I told you that house was in the middle of a city the density and size of New York. All the sudden this looks like a steal.
People like density and total city size. Of course we all have unique density wtp curves, but probably almost all of us can agree that we want to live near like 50 people.
In cities that have a fixed area, adding supply increases density (and always increases total city size). So we don’t get to travel in the 2-d land of supply and price but rather are forced along a specific curve on the surface of this multi dimensional surface. I think the way these economic studies are structured, they inherently miss the forrest for the trees. Each cities multi dimensional surface probably looks sufficiently different and they are on a different enough part of it that I don’t know how much we can really glean (and this isn’t even getting into the imperfections of the studies themselves).
Coming back to the boat lift, we need to know a few things.
If you were to look at the graph of all human output in x city, are we on average in economics or diseconomies of scale?
Which industries/types of labor are in economies or diseconomies of scale?
What is the distribution of the industries/types of labor of the migrants?
How does global demand shift by moving a person from their old city to their new city?
How does the demand for the basket of industries in x city change by moving someone from their old city to their new one? Which industries lose demand? Which gain demand?
What is the labor market share of the companies in the city (monopsonies gonna monopsony) ?
etc.
My point being the surface that describes Miami might be quite different than the surface that describes Dayton, Tennessee. Not only that but I don’t have a strong reason to believe that taking a local chunk of the surface describing wages in Miami would be highly representative of the entire surface, at least to the extent that a 10% increase or decrease in wages locally would be construed as “bumpy”. And the vector we append to our current location on the surface is quite different from one migration event to the next.
This is all one long drawn out way to say that these studies are underpowered, and I don’t update much on them. I say this as someone who is politically very pro immigration. The Mariel boat lift is a fascinating historical event though.
“. But most likely, immigrants do not drive down the wages of native workers.”
This is a broad statement.
Imagine a city that just farms tulips, but does not itself consume tulips. No other output is produced. All consumption goods are shipped in from Amazon. Imagine constant returns to scale of tulip production and at least some elasticity for tulip demand. It’s inevitable tulip farmer wages will go down if we airdrop an additional tulip farmer.
ok if we are talking about that level of deepfake I feel like that does already existed and has even existed before AI tools. “Fake News” is not an AI specific phenomena, though it makes it easier. Photo shop and captioning photos with lies do exist and go viral all the time. Boomers on facebook are fed a diet of bullshit. It’s possible op doesn’t use FB type sites and/or the sites have identified they don’t like bs so that isn’t what the algo feeds them.