Talk to me about cost benefit analysis !
Charlie_Guthmann
Karma: 825
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.
Despite the ongoing debate among researchers, Australia are going full steam ahead and recently announced a ban on social media for all under-16s.
Do you disagree with this? I guess in my opinion it seems responsible to gather enough data to feel confident in the health effects of something before we let the entire population start doing it.
Just skimmed so far but does this mean there hasn’t been a single RCT on any of this stuff? Are governments blocking this from happening?
Ty!
[Question] What are the best available studies on the effects of smartphone/instagram/facebook/tiktok/etc use on humans, specifically children?
Can you try to paint me a picture of how you specifically would benefit?
One last thing—if the reason you want to join a totalizing community is to gain structure, you don’t need to join an EA cult to do this!
- Join more groups unrelated to EA. Make sure to maintain a connection to this physical world and remember how beautiful it is. Friendship, community and love are extremely motivating.- I say this as a non-spiritual lifelong atheist: You may also consider adding some faith practice like hinduism or buddhism. I find a lot of hindu texts and songs to be extremely beautiful and although I don’t believe in any of the magic stuff the idea of reincarnation and karma and the accompanying art / rituals can be motivating to me to do the best I can for this world.
Feel free to dm me if you want
I agree for the most part with Michael’s answers to your questions on LW so I’ll just go over some slight differences.
1- This movement should not be centralized at all IMO. EA should be a library. Also It’s pretty gross that it’s centralized but there is no political system sans a token donation election. I’m pretty sure nick beckstead and Will MacAskill etc etc would have been fired into the moon after ftx if there was a democratic voting process for leaders.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8wWYmHsnqPvQEnapu/?commentId=6JduGBwGxbpCMXymd
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MjTB4MvtedbLjgyja/?commentId=iKGHCrYTvyLrFit2W
3- Agree with why the team is the way it is but they do have more of an obligation to correct this (conditional on the demographics of the team actually being an important dimension of success. It’s believable but not a no-brainer) than your average HR dep. My experience working in a corporate job is that HR works for the man—don’t trust them at all. CEAs community team is actually trying to solve problems to help all members of the community, not just the top dogs (well, at least you would hope)
5- Agree w/michael that they are. However, you’re picking up on a real thread of arrogance, and often a smug unwillingness to engage with non top 5 cause areas despite the flow-through effects possibly getting more money to the causes they want. I think local EA groups should focus more on fixing the issues in their cities. Not because it is as important but because I think they would gain a lot of recognition and they could leverage that to fundraise more for their causes down the line. Likewise, orgs should be more willing to compromise their work if that means getting way more money. A few years ago my parents asked me to help them research which homeless shelters in Chicago to donate to and I told them they should give the money to (insert ea FOTM charity). They got super triggered and I think if I just answered their question I would have more sway over other donations they made.
8. I found this post, though I’ll say I find the concept of an EA club not having ea in their name bizarre. I dislike the name effective altruism but that is the name of the movement so yea I would say they overcooked here.
Isn’t the more important point about having a conflict of interest with pauseAI efforts?
I’ll start by saying I absolutely think it’s a terrible idea to try to destroy humanity. I am 100% not saying we should do that. Ok, now that we have that out of the way. If you decide to commit your life to x-risk reduction because there are “trillions of units of potential value in the future”, you are in a bit of sticky situation if someone credibly argues that the expected value of the future is lower if humans become grabby than if they don’t. And that’s ok! It’s still probably one of the highest EV things you can do.
And I’ll say it again years later, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KDjEogAqWNTdddF9g/long-termism-vs-existential-risk
this ^ post is not great. The entire thing basically presupposes that human society is positive, that aliens will not exist, that animals will not re-evolve if we die. I wouldn’t bring this up if not for it being one most upvoted posts on the forum ever (top 5 if you don’t include posts about ea drama).
So we get to use cold hard rationality to tell most people that the stuff they are doing is relatively worthless compared to x-risk reduction, but when that same rationality argues that x-risk reduction is actually incredibly high variance and may very well be harming trillions of the people in the future we get to be humanists ?
It actually goes more giga brain than this—since aliens are in the picture, or even maybe life can re- evolve on our planet to interstellar intelligence. You might be interested to talk to @Arepo , he’s a crucial considerer. I’d especially recommend his post “A proposed hierarchy of longtermist concepts”.
shameless self plugs that also might lead you to some related readings (i’m narcissistic enough to somehow remember almost all my comments on the subject)
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zDJpYMtewowKXkHyG/alien-counterfactuals
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zLi3MbMCTtCv9ttyz/formalizing-extinction-risk-reduction-vs-longtermism
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zuQeTaqrjveSiSMYo/?commentId=7s2vrDuxonBqoGrou
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Pnhjveit55DoqBSAF/?commentId=wTkFestNWNorB5mG4
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YnBwoNNqe6knBJH8p/?commentId=HPsgdWEbdEZH3WN6j
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WebLP36BYDbMAKoa5/?commentId=cJdqyAAzwrL74x2mG
Either way, don’t be down on yourself. I know exactly how you feel. There is way too much stuff to know. The fact that you are writing this and reflecting means you are one of the best humans alive right now, regardless of if x-risk is important or not. Keep up the good work.
I guess in thinking about this I realize it’s so hard to even know if someone is a “PR disaster” that I probably have just been confirming my biases. What makes you say that he hasn’t been?
It has very little to do with the forum. I don’t think most people here that think they might be interacting with the executive branch would post anything super negative on the internet if they are thinking clearly.
Read a history book?
edit: this was super rude but yea my point is there is lots of literature you can comb through to think about if my graph is accurate.
edit 2: What exactly are you saying is not falsifiable?
If I’m willing to bet, I need to take “edge”.
This is pretty patronizing. You don’t know me but do you really think the average person on the EA forum needs that explained?
hence why I wrote 1⁄20 (95-5). If you believe the chance is <1/100 you are 10x. Given the asymmetry of my/other users knowledge of your internal probability, I understand offering the best possible odds for yourself that you still think the other side would take, but it’s a bit of an icky norm to come on here and play poker when people might assume you would be happy to take a 2x-5x bet. More importantly the bet you offered proves nothing in my mind since anywhere between a 1-5% chance of the next election being rigged would still be really really bad and worth hyperventilating about.
If you want, read my comment to lark. I don’t think my resolution criteria are good. It’s rather that I don’t personally expect the next election to be rigged ( I would be on the same side of the 90⁄10 bet as you) but I do expect trump to continue to denigrate the checks and balances that we have in this country, whether it be official laws or unofficial norms, hence why I am trying to pose intermediate questions. I’ll try to improve the original questions though.
1⁄2 - just specify a specific crime that we think most presidents don’t commit and would obviously be worth prosecuting.3 - really? You think this wouldn’t be a clear step towards autocracy?
4 - The general position of MAGA’s is that the 2020 election was stolen.
5- Admittedly a Pretty awful market, just ignore this one
Again I don’t think even these modified versions are good, but I think we can still do better.
Completely agree—I think all of my markets are bad. However the direction I’m trying to move in by proposing these questions is to operationalize steps along the way towards autocracy. You could semi replicate this but saying ok well will one of the next 5 elections going to be rigged (if you believe you can operationalize this), but even if you could set up a futures market for it I don’t think you will get all that much market efficiency from it.
Betting on the prob of next election is going to paint a very incomplete picture. There is a world in which we are 99% the next election is not going to get rigged but acts during this admin would credibly increase the chance of future riggings by a lot. For instance lets assume trump himself as no interest in being an autocrat. Then he wouldn’t rig the election purposely right? And yet the fact that we now have a precedent that you won’t be prosecuted for essentially anything if you win the presidency surely changes the incentives of future politicians who are considering meddling.
This is literally my position. I think the next election is >90% to be “relatively fair”, but I also think trump is going to do a ton of stuff that paves the way for a future election to not be fair. Picture below to help explain thesis.
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.