David Mathers🔸

Karma: 5,201

David Mathers🔸Jan 31, 2025, 12:09 PM
16 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Introducing the Effektiv Spenden “Defending Democracy” fund
German has always had laws allowing this, for the extremely obvious reason that Germany once fairly elected a fascist government that ended democracy, created a totalitarian dictatorship, started the most destructive war in history*, and committed genocide. Understandably, the designers of (West) Germany’s post-war constitution wanted to stop this happening again. These laws have been used to ban neo-Nazi parties at least 4 times since 1945, so even the idea of actually using them is not a new panic response to the AfD’s popularity. If the laws make Germany a flawed democracy now, then arguably it always has been. Incidentally hardcore communist elements in Die Linke have also been surveilled by the German security services for suspected opposition to the democratic constitution, so it’s not true that only right-wing extremism is restricted in Germany. (Die Linke were cleared because it was decided the Stalinists were only a small % of the party with little influence.)
In fact of course, it is at the very least not clear the laws are bad even from a purely democracy-centric perspective and ignoring the substantive badness of Nazism. It is true I think that an election where you can vote for anti-democratic fascists is more democratic in itself. But it is of course also true that “fair elections except fascists are banned” is more democratic than “fascists dictatorship”. If the risk of the later is high in a completely free election, them a mildly restricted election that bans the fascists can easily be the democracy-maximizing move in the medium term. I think it is fair to say that in early 50s West Germany, a country where a decently-sized % of voters had been enthusiastic Nazis, the risk of fascist takeover at the ballot box was more than theoretical. (Though admittedly the result would probably have been an American military takeover of Germany, not a revived Nazi dictatorship, but that would also have been a very bad outcome.)
Now, maybe what you think is outrageous isn’t that banning parties is allowed (or isn’t just that), but that the accusation that the AfD are anti-democratic extremists is obviously false and pretextual. Two points about that.
Firstly, they haven’t been banned yet! (And personally I suspect they won’t be, and I’m fairly strongly inclined to think they shouldn’t be, though I’d change my mind on that if Hocke or his faction captured the leadership.**) German law doesn’t allow the government to just decide a party is extremist and ban them. They have to provide evidence in a court of law that they really do count as dangerously extreme by specific standards. Now maybe that process will in fact be a total farce with terrible standards of evidence, but since it hasn’t happened yet, I don’t see any strong reason to think it will be right now. Of course, it is possible that the legal definitions of anti-democratic extremism are badly drafted and could be used to ban a non-fascist party in a procedurally fair way. Maybe that is true, I am not an expert on the laws. (But frankly I have some doubt that you know whether this true either.)
Now you might say it is anti-democratic for the government to threatening the AfD with a ban if they are clearly not a fascist threat to democracy, even if there is little chance of the ban getting through court. And yeah, I agree with the conditional claim here: that would be a very bad violation of liberal and democratic norms. But I don’t think it is clear that the antecedent is true. Bjorn Hocke the AfD’s leader in Thuringia seems to have been a neo-Nazi in a very literal sense 10 or 15 years ago, and I’ve never seen any evidence that his views have changed. In particular, he was filmed chanting at a neo-Nazi rally in Dresden in 2010: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/29/the-trial-of-bjorn-hocke-the-real-boss-of-germany-far-right I think this sufficient evidence to show that Hocke was very probably a real Nazi in 2010, and that Nazis generally want to abolish democracy. (If you doubt The Guardian’s word that it really was a Nazi rally, note that Hocke’s supporters don’t themselves seem to deny this. The defence of him quoted in the article is that he only went to the rally “to observe”, not that it wasn’t a Nazi rally.) On the other hand, Hocke doesn’t currently lead the AfD, Alice Weidel does, and I think she has tried to kick Hocke out before. I haven’t seen any evidence that she is anything more than a very conservative but democratic politcian. So I think it might not currently be correct to class them as Nazis as a whole, and for that reason, I think a ban is probably wrong. But I think the presence of a significant Nazi faction downgrades suggesting they should be banned from outrageous to merely not correct.
*Technically you could argue the Japanese actually started it when they invaded China, I suppose.
**If you care about track records, I am a Good Judgement superforecaster, and I gave Trump a higher chance if winning the popular vote than most of the other supers did.

David Mathers🔸Jan 31, 2025, 8:36 AM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Capitalism and the Very Long Term
https://mattbruenig.com/2017/07/28/nordic-socialism-is-realer-than-you-think/
At least 8 years ago though, Finland and Norway had relatively high levels of state ownership of enterprises, much higher than the US. If that’s not a much higher level of real socialism, it’s hard to say what is. That suggests to me that whatever the Economic Freedom Index measures it’s not how little socialism there is in a country. Nonetheless, it could be the freedom not the socialism that’s responsible for Finland and Norway doing well, of course.
Norway is a petro state so arguably it doesn’t really count, but Finland isn’t.

David Mathers🔸Jan 30, 2025, 8:18 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Matthew_Barnett’s comment on: Capitalism and the Very Long Term
“anticapitalists often think that we should have very heavy taxation or outright wealth confiscation from rich people, even if this would come at the expense of aggregate utilitarian welfare”

What’s the evidence for this? I think even if it is true, it is probably misleading, in that most leftists also just reject the claims mainstream economists make about when taxing the rich will reduce aggregate welfare (not that there is one single mainstream economist view on that anyway in all likelihood.) This sounds to me more like an American centre-right caricature of how socialists think, than something socialists themselves would recognize.

David Mathers🔸Jan 22, 2025, 9:19 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Hammerle’s comment on: Why aren’t relocated births accounted for in cost-effectiveness analyses of family planning charities?
I’m not sure I subscribe to any form of utilitarianism, and I’m not sure what my view in population ethics is. But I am confident that the mere fact that a life would be below average well-being does not make adding it to the world a bad thing.

David Mathers🔸Jan 21, 2025, 2:38 PM
10 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Maximising expected utility follows from self-evident premises?
Thanks.

A partly underlying issue here is that it’s not clear that the consequentialist/non-consequentialist division is actually all that deep or meaningful if you really think about it. The facts about “utility” in a consequentialist theory, are plausibly ultimately just a kind of short-hand for facts about preferability between outcomes that could be stated without any mention of numbers/utility/maximizing (at least if we allow infinitely long statements). But for non-consequentialist theories, you can also derive a preferability relation on outcomes (where what you do is part of the outcome, not just the results of your action), based on what the theory says you should do in a forced choice. For at least some such theories that look “deontic”, in the sense of having rights that you shouldn’t violate, even if it leads to higher net well-being, the resulting preferability ranking might happen to obey the 4 axioms and be VNM-rational. For such a deontic theory you could then express the theory as maximizing a relevant notion of utility if you really wanted to (at least if you can cardinalize the resulting ordering of actions by prefertability, via looking at preferences between chance-y prospects I don’t know enough to know if meeting the axioms guarantees you can do this.) So any consequentialist theory is sort of really a number/utility-free theory about preferability in disguise, and at least some very deontic feeling theories are in some sense equivalent to consequentialist theories phrased in terms of utility.

Or so it seems to me anyway, I’m certainly not a real expert on this stuff.

David Mathers🔸Jan 21, 2025, 12:59 PM
12 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: NobodyInteresting’s comment on: NobodyInteresting’s Quick takes
People don’t like angry political comments here, they prefer a dispassionate tone. They also generally don’t like stuff that sounds like “left-wing activist”, even though most people here don’t identify as “right-wing” but as left/centre-left/centre/libertarian. Not to mention that whilst most people here are not pro-Trump, probably a small minority are, and they can strong downvote if they want to, and if you get no upvotes, that means low Karma even if most people aren’t bothered by what you said. Also, I think the Musk Nazi salute thing reads as “silly media bullshit” even to a lot of people who don’t like Trump, because they don’t think Musk is a “real fascist”*. Musk probably tends to get (too much of) the benefit of the doubt round here, because he shares a lot of preoccupations with the futurist, existential risk wing of EA, and because he is idolized in Silicon Valley as a great man (something that predates his public turn to the far-right.)

*(I think Musk is a real fascist, but I still kind of feel like that, because I don’t think he was actually signaling that he secretly loves Hitler, he was just trying to offend for shits and giggles. Very obnoxious, but not necessarily a sign that he is secretly working towards some sort of Nazi-style regime behind the scenes.)

David Mathers🔸Jan 21, 2025, 12:47 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: GiveWell raised less than its 10th percentile forecast in 2023
FTX was late in 2022, but nonetheless 2022 already shows most of the drop in new donors.

David Mathers🔸Jan 20, 2025, 7:59 PM
10 points
1 ∶ 1
on: Maximising expected utility follows from self-evident premises?
Is there any pattern of behaviour that couldn’t be interpreted as maximizing utility for some utility function? If not, even if vNM is self-evident it’s not actually much of a constraint.

David Mathers🔸Jan 20, 2025, 11:09 AM
5 points
3 ∶ 0
in reply to: David Hammerle’s comment on: Why aren’t relocated births accounted for in cost-effectiveness analyses of family planning charities?
Maximize average welfare is a bad policy goal: https://utilitarianism.net/population-ethics/#:~:text=The%20average%20view%2C%20variable%20value,lives%20with%20positive%20well%2Dbeing.

David Mathers🔸Jan 17, 2025, 4:16 PM
17 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Joseph’s comment on: Should we try harder to appeal to conservatives?
I think other than the meat one, your along the lines of how some people are thinking, albeit described in a very polemical and pejorative way, that probably isn’t particularly fair. But also, a lot of these people see any obviously and transparently “elite” group* as dodgy, not to mention that EAs tend to think like economists and don’t want to abolish capitalism which to makes them “neoliberal” to a lot of leftists (not unfairly I don’t think, though whether “neoliberalism” in this weak sense is obviously bad and evil is another matter). And as Titotal as already mentioned there are people kicking around the general EA scene with views on race that are to the right of what is acceptable even in some mainstream conservative contexts.

More generally, if you see the left/right division as about whether we want to keep or get rid of current hierarchies, EAs are associated with things the top of current hierarchies-like big tech firms and Oxford University-and don’t seem very ashamed about it. And then when we actually think about improving the world “how do we get rid of current hierarchies” isn’t usually our starting question. Also, for the sort of leftists who try and explain disagreement with leftism in terms of false consciousness, there seems to be a constant temptation to see anything that isn’t explicitly about getting rid of current unjust hierarchies as a ploy to distract people from current unjust hierarchies, especially if it has billionaire backing. (Of course, many things other than EA receive money from >3 billionaires, but are not perceived as “billionaire” backed to the same degree.)

*that isn’t humanities profs, but I would argue they aren’t really “elite” in the same way as some EA leaders-Holden Karnofsky is married to the President of Anthropic after all, which is a hell of a lot more elite than “went to a fancy grad school, but now teaches history at mid-ranking state uni

David Mathers🔸Jan 17, 2025, 11:19 AM
8 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Should we try harder to appeal to conservatives?
My guess (I have no hard data) is that many people on the left (or at least many of the minority of people on the left who have heard of EA at all) already (mostly wrongly) perceive EA as “conservative” or at least (much more fairly) “neoliberal”. It could be that engaging with conservatives more increases that impression, and leads to reduce recruitment amongst left-wingers, without drawing in enough more conservative people to compensate. I’m not saying don’t engage with conservatives, just that there might be unintended consequences.

David Mathers🔸Jan 4, 2025, 10:34 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Quick takes
I haven’t read the paper, but a simple objection is that you’re never going to be certain your actions only have finite effects, because you should only assign credence 0 to contradictions. (I don’t actually know the argument for the latter, but some philosophers believe it.) So you have to deal with the very, very small but not literally 0 chance that your actions will have an infinitely good/bad outcome because your current theories of how the universe works are wrong. However, anything with a chance of bringing about an infinitely good or bad outcome has an infinite expected value or an undefined one. So unless all expected values are undefined (which brings it own problems) you have to deal with infinite expected values, which is enough to cause trouble.

David Mathers🔸Jan 1, 2025, 4:34 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
Yeah, I think this is probably right. My point isn’t that there is nothing troubling or potentially dangerous about Vasco’s reasoning-that’s clearly not true-but just that people should be careful in how they describe it, and not claim it rests on more controversial starting premises than it actually does. (I.e. in particular that it doesn’t have hedonism or consequentialism as a starting premise; obviously it does make some controversial assumptions.)

David Mathers🔸Dec 31, 2024, 3:17 PM
4 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
Not giving to global health charities.

David Mathers🔸Dec 30, 2024, 12:24 PM
5 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
In any case though, I think what I mostly object to isn’t the claim that if you endorse Vasco’s reasoning because you are a utilitarian that counts as “naive”, but rather the use of the “naive utilitarian” label to imply that his reasoning:

a) is distinctively utilitarian rather than being compatible with a variety of moral views

b) commits you to being prepared to use violence/deception.

David Mathers🔸Dec 30, 2024, 12:16 PM
6 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
I’d distinguish here between actions and reasons for action. The action is not conventionally immoral, but the reason for action is. I think this is probably a significant distinction, though how it is significant doesn’t feel very clear to me.

David Mathers🔸Dec 28, 2024, 7:30 PM
56 points
12 ∶ 1
on: GiveWell may have made 1 billion dollars of harmful grants, and Ambitious Impact incubated 8 harmful organisations via increasing factory-farming?
I think Vasco’s personal strong endorsement of hedonistic utilitarianism has maybe caused confusion about the degree to which the meat eating problem can be avoided just by abandoning utilitarianism for standard reasons. And I also worry some of the criticism of Vasco is stretching the term “naive utilitarian” beyond its standard meaning.
On the first point, an overall ethical view could imply that global health donations are bad for the reasons Vasco gives, even if it was quite distant from hedonistic utilitarianism in a number of ways:

-Firstly, this doesn’t really seem to be a question of preference versus hedonistic utilitarianism. Presumably there is some sense in which preference utilitarianism counts animal suffering as frustrated preference and still bad. So the frustration of animal preferences caused by meat eating could still outweigh the value in terms of satisfied preference from saving human lives. It’s unclear to me which of preference or hedonistic utilitarianism is more likely to deliver this result, but I don’t see an obvious reason why hedonistic utilitarianism is more likely to.

-Secondly, and more importantly, just valuing other things apart from pleasure and suffering won’t necessarily reverse Vasco’s conclusion that meat consumption patterns mean saving human lives does more harm than good, though you’d need to re-do the analysis. On any sane pluralist view where things other than pleasure and suffering matter (and as it happens, I fairly strongly reject pure hedonism), suffering is still bad. So it could still be the case that the badness of suffering caused by the average human through meat consumption outweighs the value of the hedonic and non-hedonic goods that the typical beneficiary of life-saving global health charities will experience in a lifetime. It is likely true that bringing in non-hedonic goods makes it more likely that the goods experience in a human lifetime come out as outweighing the suffering caused by meat consumption, but more likely doesn’t mean “guaranteed” or even “probability above 50%”, it’s purely relative.

-Thirdly, nothing about Vasco’s reasoning here implies the controversial consequentialist claim that you should murder people or otherwise violate human rights, or break standard commonsense moral rules whenever that produces the best consequences. It’s perfectly coherent to think that a human life continuing is net harmful because of meat consumption, but also you shouldn’t murder that person, or try and bring about their death through conventionally immoral means like lying, law-breaking etc., because consequentialism is false, and the ends don’t justify the means. It’s true that Vasco is (effectively) recommending one particular action that would bring about deaths in response to the harms humans would cause, namely, not donating to global health charities. But this is not a conventionally immoral or obviously rights-violating action. Common sense morality says that you are allowed not to give to global health charities for any number of reasons: you want to spend the money on your own children, you want to give to research into the rare cancer that killed your Dad etc. So common sense morality is consistent with the recipients of global health charities not having a right to our help, and with it being morally permissible to withhold that help even if it leads to their deaths*.

The meat eater/eating problem is an issue for anyone who

A) Donates to global health

B) Thinks that animal suffering can in principle be compared to, and sometimes outweigh large benefits to humans

C) Thinks we shouldn’t make donations that are net harmful.

That is surely a far wider group than “hedonistic utilitarians”, not just in principle, but in practice. I say this not to defend Vasco’s personal honor-I find total commitment to hedonistic utilitarianism a bit scary as it happens, but because I don’t think other people should avoid thinking about the potential inconsistency in their views here. Even if, like Karthik, you are 100% certain that the correct reaction to any inconsistency can’t possibly be deciding that it is net good when the average child dies, it is probably still good to think about which of your other commitments you want to give up to avoid inconsistency.

As for “naive utilitarianism”, as I understood this term it doesn’t mean “embracing any conclusion that conflicts with common sense, because you are a utilitarian and believe it is correct from a utilitarian point of view.” Rather, as I understood it a “naive utilitarian” was a utilitarian who:

A) Tries to make moral decisions on the basis of explicit utility calculations
and
B) Is prepared to perform conventionally highly immoral and norm-breaking actions like stealing and murder, if an explicit utility calculation implies they are optimal.

And part of the point of calling this “naive” was that such a decision procedure was not only contrary to common sense, but also unlikely to actually maximize utility.

Vasco’s post isn’t a clear example of naive utilitarianism in this sense because he isn’t recommending any action that is clearly highly conventionally immoral and norm-breaking. The only action he is recommending, if any, is not donating to global health charities. His reasons for thinking this are definitely extremely inconsistent with common sense, but that’s not enough to make it “naive utilitarianism” as I understand the term, because I understand it, naive utilitarianism is distinctively about pursuing utilitarian ends through ruthless/violent/deceptive means.

*(I’m not denying there might be some less common sense non-consequentialist moral views on which aid recipients do have a right to our help.)

David Mathers🔸Dec 17, 2024, 12:12 PM
16 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: justsaying’s comment on: Blog update: Reflective altruism
“I think your posting about him undermines your credibility elsewhere.” This seems worryingly like epistemic closure to me (though it depends a bit what “elsewhere” refers to.) A lot of Thorstad’s work is philosophical criticism of longtermist arguments, and not super-technical criticism either. You can surely just assess that for yourself rather than discounting it because of what he said about an unrelated topic, unless he was outright lying. I mostly agree with Thorstad’s conclusions about Scott’s views on HBD, but whilst that makes me distrust Scott’s political judgement, it doesn’t effect my (positive) view of the good stuff Scott has written about largely unrelated topics like whether antidepressants work, or the replication crisis.

I’d also say that the significance of Scott sometimes pushing back against HBD stuff is very dependent on why he pushes back. Does he push back because he thinks people are spreading harmful ideas? Or does he push back because he thinks if the blog becomes too associated with taboo claims it will lose influence, or bring him grief personally? The former would perhaps indicate unfairness in Thorstad’s portrayal of him, but the latter certainly would not. In the leaked email (which I think is likely genuine, or he’d say it wasn’t, but of course we can’t be 100% sure) he does talk about stratigising to maintain his influence with liberals on this topic. My guess, as a long-time reader is that it’s a bit of both. I don’t think Scott is sympathetic to people genuinely wanting to hurt Black people, and I’m sure there are Reactionary claims about race that he thinks are just wrong. But he’s also very PR conscious on this topic in my view. And it’s hard to see why he’s had so many HBD-associated folk on his blogroll if he doesn’t want to quietly spread some of the ideas.

David Mathers🔸Dec 3, 2024, 10:33 AM
23 points
20 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: lukeprog’s Quick takes
It’s easy for both to be true at the same time right? That is skeptics tone it down within EA, and believers tone it down when dealing with people *outside* EA.

David Mathers🔸Dec 2, 2024, 8:04 AM
9 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: The Mariel Boatlift
As the article in The Critic itself points out, it is hardly surprising that a group that is disproportionately made up of young, single men are more criminal than the general population, since young men are overwhelmingly more criminal than anyone else, and single men are likely plausibly worse. It’s not clear what this tells us about immigrants even from Syria or Afghanistan, let alone anywhere else, if we control for that. My guess for what it’s worth is that they will still have higher crime rates even if you control if they are Syrians (don’t know about Afghans, suspect more positive selection there), but you’d need to actually look.