Talk to me about cost benefit analysis !
Charlie_Guthmann
Karma: 828
Side note—I think you will not get full honesty from many people here (more likely they just won’t comment). Anyone with a public reputation that wants to interact with trump’s admin is not going to want to comment (for good reason), plus this subject can be a bit touchy anyway.
how about 99/1? pretty wild to me that you would say
I have generally found the fears of democracy failing in the US to be hyperbolic and without much good evidence. The claims are also very “vibes-based” and/or partisan rather than at the object level.
and then only offer 90⁄10 odds. Are you saying you think there is a ~1 in 20 chance the next election is not going to be free and fair? I would not consider freaking about about 1⁄100 to be hyperbolic, much less 1⁄20.
Also It would be nice to break this up a little bit more. Here are some things I would probably bet you on, though they need to be clarified and thought out a bit more.
Trump will commit more than x crimes during his presidency.
Trumps secretaries will commit more than x crimes during his presidency
Trump will attempt to run for a third term
The winner of the republican primary in the next two presidential elections will be a MAGA
In the next x years, a future president or (sufficiently) high up politician will not be convicted of any crimes conditional on their party controlling the justice department
How do you feel about EA’s investing in AI companies with their personal portfolio?
Hmm, I hear what you are saying but that could easily be attributed to some mix of
(1) he has really good/convincing ideas
(2) he seems to be a a public representative for the EA/LW community for a journalist on the outside.
And I’m responding to someone saying that we are in “phase 3”—that is to say people in the public are listening to us—so I guess I’m not extremely concerned about him not being able to draw attention or convince people. I’m more just generally worried that people like him are not who we should be promoting to positions of power, even if those are de jure positions.
| and there also isn’t a robust pipeline for promoting virtues and virtuous actors to such places.
this ^
I don’t think I was claiming they have the exact same failure modes—do you want to point out where I did that? Rather they both have failure modes that I would expect to happen as a result of selecting them to be talking heads on the basis of wits and research output. Also I feel like you are implying Leopold is evil or something like that and I don’t agree but maybe I’m misinterpretting.
He seems like a smooth operator in some ways and certainly is quite different than Elizier. That being said I showed my dad (who has become an oddly good litmus test for a lot of this stuff for me as someone who is somewhat sympathethic to our movement but also a pretty normal 60 year old man in a completely different headspace) the Dwarkesh episode and he thought Leopold was very, very, very weird (and not because of his ideas). He kind of reminds me of Peter Thiel. I’ll completely admit I wasn’t especially clear in my points and that mostly reflects my own lack of clarity on the exact point I was trying to getting across.I think I take back like 20% of what I said (basically to the extent I was making a very direct stab at what exactly that failure mode is) but mostly still stand by the original comment, which again I see as being approximately ~ “Selecting people to be the public figureheads of our movement on the basis wits and research output is likely to be bad for us”.
Call me a hater, and believe me, I am, but maybe someone who went to university at 16 and clearly spent most of their time immersed in books is not the most socially developed.
Maybe after they are implicated in a huge scandal that destroyed our movement’s reputation we should gently nudge them to not go on popular podcasts and talk fantastically and almost giddily about how world war 3 is just around the corner. Especially when they are working in a financial capacity in which they would benefit from said war.
Many of the people we have let be in charge of our movement and speak on behalf of it don’t know the first thing about optics or leadership or politics. I don’t think Elizier Yudowsky could win a middle school class president race with a million dollars.
I know your point was specifically tailored toward optics and thinking carefully about what we say when we have a large platform, but I think looking back and forward bad optics and a lack of real politik messaging are pretty obvious failure modes of a movement filled with chronically online young males who worship intelligence and research output above all else. I’m not trying to sh*t on Leopold and I don’t claim I was out here beating a drum about the risks of these specific papers but yea I do think this is one symptom of a larger problem. I can barely think of anyone high up (publicly) in this movement who has risen via organizing.
Charter schools are a real option in many places. In Chicago if you have money and wherewithal you can open a charter school and basically teach what ever you want. The downside here is you will not be able to get the top students in the city to go to your school because there are already a select few incredible public and private schools.
EA tends to be anti-revolution, for a variety of reasons. The recent trump appointments have had me wondering if people here have a “line” in their head. By line I mean something like, I need to drop everything and start protesting or do something fast.
Like I don’t think appointing RFK jr. to health secretary is that line for me, but I also realize I don’t have a clear “line” in my head. If trump appointed a nazi who credibly claimed they were going to commit mass scale war crimes to the sec defense, is that enough for the people here to drop their current work?
I’m definitely generally on the side of engaging in reactionary politics being worthless, and further I don’t feel like the US is about to fall apart or completely go off the rails, but it would be really interesting to see if we could teleport some EAs back in time right before the rise of hitler or pre chinese revolution etc. (while wiping their brains of the knowledge of what would come) and see if they would say stuff like “politics is the mind killer and I need to focus on xyz”
I’m not sure either I don’t mean to sound confident. Read the comment below this one about suffering hours
A lot of the advice for young EA’s is reasonably targeted at folks much more impressive than I am, for good reasons I think
Assuming you have, but still probably worth skimming the earn to give sections of 80k/probably good and looking at their job boards.
Hard to say more without knowing your interests and how “mediocre” you are. You can sign up for career coaching with 80k and/or probably good. Also, it could be useful to reach out to other ea students studying math at other universities and talk to them. can query link below by career stage.https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/people-directory?utm_source=ea_hub&utm_medium=website
Are there estimates for the different per animal unit suffering from animal consumption in different countries (holding animal constant)?
because it’s worse to starve to death
The strongest case for Trump is that the Democrat establishment is systematically deceiving the American people (e.g. via the years-long cover-up of Biden’s mental state, strong partisan bias in mainstream media, and extensive censorship campaigns), engaging in lawfare against political opponents (e.g. against Elon and Trump), and generally growing the power of unaccountable bureaucracies over all aspects of life (including bureaucracies which do a lot of harm, like the FDA, FTC, EPA etc).
Bureaucracy point seems potentially reasonable to me, although hard to say if that exactly equates to less/more democratic or just worse domestic situation.
The cover up of bidens mental state is “highly undemocratic”? that would be not in the top 1000 least democratic things trump/republicans have done in the last 8 years.
Need to work through the entire chain of effects here but I think (granted that a wild animal is a moral patient), crushing it for a near instant death is probably just about the least painful way it can die.
Just to be clear a high percentage of them being eaten alive is an update towards their lives being better, not worse.
very interesting thank you
What do people think about posting urban planning/yimby/ local gov policy thoughts on the forum?
I find that stuff really interesting and admittedly don’t believe it is the most important stuff to work on but is “effective altruism” if you have an extremely local moral circle.
only skimmed your post so not sure if helpful but I wrote this a while ago. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zLi3MbMCTtCv9ttyz/formalizing-extinction-risk-reduction-vs-longtermism
Also you might find this helpful
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.