Garrison

Karma: 1,237

Garrison 22 Apr 2019 19:37 UTC
25 points
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in reply to: GeorgeBridgwater’s comment on: Reasons to eat meat
I started out in EA as an omnivore who cared primarily about global poverty/health. Over time, indirect exposure to more vegans/vegetarians and the good arguments in favor of helping animals. I became pescatarian in Jan 2018 and vegetarian about a year later. But if people had been in my face about it/made me feel unwelcome for being an omnivore at the beginning, it’s possible I wouldn’t have stuck around and gone veggie. It’s for this reason that I’m very careful about talking about the issue. It’s not that I don’t think we have a moral obligation to not consumer animal products, I’ve found that focusing on the “how” of going veg and only being candid about the moral considerations when pushed is most effective.

Garrison 30 Apr 2019 20:41 UTC
13 points
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on: Psychedelics Normalization
I wrote a long piece on psychedelics for Current Affairs magazine diving into the history, economics, and potential political impact: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/04/make-america-trip-again. I don’t spend too much time on the research on psychedelic therapies (these are well covered elsewhere, particularly Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind). I also don’t take an explicitly EA approach to the piece, although I do identify with EA.
I do think that psychedelics are a massively under-explored EA topic for reasons that have been mentioned. Their ability to increase psychological openness would probably prime them for EA in addition to all the mental health benefits.

Garrison 3 Jun 2019 20:14 UTC
1 point
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on: Overview of Capitalism and Socialism for Effective Altruism
Late to the party, but after seeing a few of your posts on politics (which I find informative, especially for the papers you link), I’ve noticed that you tend to uncritically cite sources who have clear ideological commitments to market capitalism/right wing politics that are obvious from a cursory google search. For example, the book you cite on Cuba makes no mention of the US embargo on Cuba in the summary, and very little reference to it in the index. One of the authors worked at Goldman Sachs and KKR. A UN study estimated that the embargo has cost Cuba $130B (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-economy-un/us-trade-embargo-has-cost-cuba-130-billion-un-says-idUSKBN1IA00T). Cuba’s GDP per capita in PPP terms is $22.2K, more than the neighboring Dominican Republic ($19.3k) and Haiti ($1.8K) (taken from each country’s wiki page). I’m far from an expert on this and don’t know what Cuba’s GDP per capita “should” be, but based on this list, Cuba would be the 8th wealthiest country in Latin America and the Caribbean by GDP PPP per capita (out of 32).
The author of the book on Soviet agriculture, D Gale Johnson, chaired the U Chicago Econ dept, which has been the hub of libertarian Austrian economics. From his wiki “Among other notable contributions to economics, Johnson concluded that the strength of an industry depends on how the market works and not so much on government actions.”
For an alternative perspective of the economic productivity of the USSR, see chapter 5, footnote 8 of Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky (http://www.understandingpower.com/files/AllChaps.pdf): “In June 1956, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that “the economic danger from the Soviet Union was perhaps greater than the military danger.” The U.S.S.R. was “transforming itself rapidly . . . into a modern and efficient industrial state,” while Western Europe was still stagnating.” (this happened in spite of the USSR’s utter destruction during WWII).
The Economic Freedom of the World Index is published by the Cato Institute, among other libertarian/pro-market think tanks and institutes. There has been an enormous amount of propaganda produced around these questions (how well did communist governments perform economically, what economic system should we prefer). Your posts don’t appear to take this into account.
I should note that none of this is an apology for human rights abuses carried out by Castro and the USSR.

Garrison 8 Jun 2019 19:49 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: Overview of Capitalism and Socialism for Effective Altruism
Thanks for taking these things into account. I also won’t have the time to go too much deeper on this stuff. I would say a general response to relying on things like rankings of think tanks or other establishment measures of institutional credibility won’t be very persuasive to a lot of people on the left. The world is dominated by capitalist countries, companies, and institutions that support/defend them. There is a lot of money to be made in defending free markets. See Dark Money by Jane Mayer for a detailed investigation into how a handful of billionaires built alternative ideological infrastructure that became mainstream and established, despite having a self-interested, market fundamentalist ideology. The ranking you linked appears to based on surveys of other people in the establishment. If you’re broadly critical of the establishment, you don’t find their rankings to be credible. For a quick example of the Cato Institute misrepresenting data in its writing see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/never-trust-the-cato-institute
For another example of ostensibly opposed think tanks working together (because they both serve the interests of capitalists) see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/12/why-is-the-center-for-american-progress-betraying-the-left
Not trusting the establishment creates a lot of problems, which is why a lot of leftists (more prevalent in the past I think) believe some crackpottery and align with some cranks. The establishment may be right about a lot of things, but in some cases it’s collectively wrong and there won’t be many establishment sources you can cite to say so.

Garrison 24 Jul 2019 15:33 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: EA-aligned podcast with Spencer Greenberg
Good point. I think the biggest way he’s changed my mind is by helping me understand the ways in which other people’s perspectives and default modes of thinking may differ. I have a tendency to see the exchange of ideas as an argument to win (partly a product of my personality, partly a product of my years doing competitive debate). Spencer’s approach in conversation, writing, and tools on Clearer Thinking emphasize the mode of discovering how other people think about the world. His work has also pushed me to examine my own bias, particularly on political issues.

Garrison 14 Aug 2019 18:50 UTC
2 points
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on: Ask Me Anything!
What are your thoughts on the rise of left-wing politics in the US (e.g. the Sanders campaign, the election of AOC and the rest of the squad, the victories and near-victories at the local levels)? Related: how do you think EAs should think about the 2020 US presidential race?

Garrison 18 Aug 2019 22:48 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: HenryStanley’s comment on: EA-aligned podcast with Lewis Bollard
Thanks! That’s a really good idea. I definitely think there is an appetite for more EA-aligned podcasts and the barrier to entry is pretty low. I’ll work on this in the next few weeks.

Garrison 19 Aug 2019 0:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: mic’s comment on: EA-aligned podcast with Lewis Bollard
The endorsement episode was released before the election and the mini-analysis was released the day after the election, when it appeared that Caban had won. I was personally involved with the campaign and thought it would be helpful to direct anyone who was inspired by the conversation with Chloe to take a concrete action. I could redact, but agree it might be odd.
Thanks! I was doing one per week at first, but have found that to be unsustainable.

Garrison 19 Aug 2019 19:34 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: William_MacAskill’s comment on: Ask Me Anything!
I participated in a civil disobedience direct action protesting an ICE-affiliated private detention center in Elizabeth, NJ. I was one of 36 people arrested for blocking traffic in and out of the facility (and nothing else). We spent hours traveling there, prepping for the action, blocking the road, being arrested and detained. All in, it was a full day of work for everyone involved, plus over 100 others who showed up. We raised money for a lawyer and travel expenses for people traveling for court. From an EA standpoint, this is really hard to justify. We shut down vehicle traffic from one facility for a few hours and got some press.
But, that was the first action of now nearly 40 across the country in the past 7 weeks. People have shut down the ICE HQ for hours, disrupted companies working with ICE, and got a bunch of press coverage on the horrible treatment of immigrants. It sill remains to be seen what the final result will be, but it does seem like the Trump admin has responded to popular protests in the past (the airport protests in particular). Even if this ultimately fails, a ton of young people are getting trained in activism and organizing. One of the organizers cut her teeth organizing the Women’s March. The downstream effects of getting young people involved in effective political organizing are hard to measure, but can change the course of history. Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential campaign, but the young people who worked on his campaign went on to take over the Republican Party (see Rick Perlstein’s book Before the Storm if you’re interested in the story). While the org is definitely not EA, I found the organizing to be very well-thought through and effective, especially compared to other actions I’ve participated in.
For anyone curious, the group that organized this is called Never Again Action (https://www.neveragainaction.com/).

Garrison 20 Aug 2019 18:48 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: William_MacAskill’s comment on: Ask Me Anything!
I wouldn’t consider Dave Rubin’s show intellectual, but he does have reach.

Garrison 21 Aug 2019 17:58 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: WilliamKiely’s comment on: EA-aligned podcast with Lewis Bollard
Wonderful feedback, thanks! It’s tricky because it’s not just an EA podcast, so I have to assume many of my listeners aren’t familiar with EA. I could cover the EA side of things at the beginning of the show when it’s relevant, then tell people who are EA veterans when to skip to. Rob does this and I find it pretty helpful. I always find it interesting to hear about the personal experience of people who “stare into the abyss” for the careers (see my episode with asylum attorney Brianna Rennix). For future posts will use your title advice.

Garrison 18 Feb 2020 22:50 UTC
1 point
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on: [Review and notes] How Democracy Ends—David Runciman
Good writeup, thank you!
It strikes me that the populist claim (”...that democracy has been stolen by elites, and that the people need to claim it back”) is plainly true in the US. I guess my quibble would be that there has never really been true democracy in the US; for most of our history, large groups have been excluded from democratic processes. While almost everyone can vote now, there are still large barriers to voting (e.g. it’s not a national holiday, you often have to register in advance, non-citizens can’t vote, etc.). Voting also has a lot less impact than campaign contributions and other political spending, which are obviously a factor of wealth. There was a Princeton paper that found the wealthy are many times more likely to achieve their desired policy goals (https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746). Michael Bloomberg is now trying to openly buy the presidency and might succeed.
Does the author engage substantively with this point? I’ve seen establishment academics poopoo populism, lumping together the right and left-wing versions of it.

Garrison 17 Mar 2021 0:15 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Alex HT’s comment on: Response to Phil Torres’ ‘The Case Against Longtermism’
The main issue I have with this quote is that it’s so divorced from the reality of how cost effective it is to save lives in rich countries vs. poor countries (something that most EAs probably know already). I understand that this objection is addressed by the caveat ‘other things being equal’, but it seems important to note that it costs orders of magnitude more to save lives in rich countries, so unless Beckstead thinks the knock-on effects of saving lives in rich countries are sufficient to offset the cost differences, it would still follow that we should focus our money on saving lives in poor countries.

Garrison 18 Mar 2021 14:33 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Jordan_Warner’s comment on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
The thing that dem socs in the us want, a socialist economy and government, hasn’t really happened in a rich country. The closest example would be Sweden in the 70s. I don’t think there’s much value in comparing the results of left wing revolutions in extremely poor and war ravaged countries with what might happen if dem socs like bernie sanders were to be able to enact their agendas in rich countries. The most economically left wing governments and societies in the rich world, i.e. Scandinavia, are some of the best places to live based on a whole host of metrics.

Garrison 18 Mar 2021 15:04 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: Vilfredo's Ghost’s comment on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
Arguments like this certainly don’t help win over leftists to EA.

A self described democratic socialist nearly won the democratic nomination for president. The Democratic socialists of America (dsa) helped get dozens of candidates elected to national, state, and city offices over the last 4 years. Polling shows millennials being more sympathetic to socialism than capitalism.

The Warren example would also quickly get your political analysis dismissed by almost anyone on the left. Warren’s lifetime voting record is slightly more left than bernies according to this site (https://progressivepunch.org/scores.htm?house=senate) but she took office in 2012, while bernie became a senator in 2006 after serving 16 years in the house. The democratic party has moved to the left over the last 30 years so more recently elected officials will have a more left record, all else equal. Bernie also received far more support from left wing organizations than Warren. The last point that Warren is trying to get actual legislation done while bernie and other socialists aren’t is just wrong. Bernie played a huge role in shaping the recently passed American rescue plan, which is estimated to halve child poverty (https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2021/03/16/bernie-sanders-joe-manchin-492117).

This argument is hugely dismissive of a significant strain of American politics based on flawed analysis and unsupported assertions.

Garrison 19 Mar 2021 18:11 UTC
17 points
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in reply to: Vilfredo's Ghost’s comment on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
I’m a self-described socialist. I also work at an EA-aligned nonprofit and co-organize one of the largest EA groups in the world. I know plenty of other EAs who do great work and identify as socialists or leftists.
But maybe EA would be better off without us because our political contributions are objectively wrong according to your analysis.
Your analysis assumes that the goal of anyone with left of center politics is to flip seats from red to blue, but this is not the goal of the DSA. Obviously, winning majorities is essential to enacting legislation, but the composition of those majorities will change what legislation looks like. In the example I linked above, Bernie was able to significantly influence the American Rescue Plan to get more unconditional cash to people who need it, among other things. In New York State, Dems hold super majorities in the Assembly and Senate. All 5 of DSA’s endorsed candidates won their primaries (the actually competitive election). One of them was the lead sponsor on the HALT Solitary Confinement Act, which significantly restricts the usage of solitary confinement (i.e. torture) in New York’s corrections facilities and just passed the Assembly and Senate with veto-proof majorities yesterday.
Eliot Engels:
- supported the Iraq War
- opposed the Iran deal
- supported Saudi’s war on Yemen
Source. (The author of this article also wrote a defense of EA 5 years ago)
The nature of presidential primaries is that there is typically a clear front-runner by some point who captures the lions share of the remaining delegates. Even so, in 2016, the results were far closer, with Hillary receiving 55% of the popular vote to Bernie’s 43%.
Honestly, you sound ideologically opposed to socialism, which is fine. What’s frustrating is that you’re writing about politics with a certitude that doesn’t seem to match your understanding of it. You’re picking a few random data points and then asserting that this proves some very broad claim, like that socialists participating in politics is bad for progressives or that Engel is better than Bowman.

Garrison 19 Mar 2021 18:15 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jordan_Warner’s comment on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
Many EAs support open borders, which to me is in the same general ballpark of “abolish the police”. Both are radical breaks from how the world currently is. Both slogans are open to many different interpretations. And both have a lot of literature and research behind them. But one slogan is popular among EAs, and one isn’t.

Garrison 20 Mar 2021 0:55 UTC
−1 points
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in reply to: Vilfredo's Ghost’s comment on: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard
Thinking that you can be opposed to a broad ideology on empirical grounds is simply mistaken. You can say something like ” the countries that adopted self-described Marxist governments fared worse than they would have otherwise”. But even that claim requires a lot of evidence to defend! Marxist revolutions didn’t happen in already wealthy countries with stable institutions. I don’t even consider myself a Marxist—I’m just trying to make the point that this stuff is too complicated to make a claim that an ideology is empirically right or wrong.
Ideology is like bad breath, you can’t smell your own. You have an ideology, whether you’d like to admit it or not!
I share your wish that American politics weren’t so focused on Americans and wish that Bernie were more of an internationalist. However, his platform on immigration in 2020 was better than any other candidate’s from an EA perspective IMO, even if his record may not have been great on it.

Garrison 21 Apr 2021 14:47 UTC
−7 points
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: If Bill Gates believes all lives are equal, why is he impeding vaccine distribution?
It’s not too surprising that the top comment is a rehashing of market fundamentalism. Going through point by point.
Unfortunately, this agreement has had major downsides. By preventing AstraZeneca from making a profit, it has undermined their ability to invest in capacity, and is one of the causes of the numerous production setbacks we have seen. I think it would have been much better if AstraZeneca was allowed to charge higher prices to incentivise them to produce more! If there is a shortage, that suggests that prices are too low, not too high.
If Oxford had required that their partner sell the vaccines for say 10% over the cost of production and distribution for the lifecycle of the patent, there would be no incentive to slow-roll production until the pandemic is deemed to be “over” so they can really start cashing in. The problem here is the cliff, not the price cap. Generic drugs are widely available even though the companies that make them don’t have a legal monopoly. Better yet, a public sector pharma sector could just pursue research and production that has the highest social impact, with no concern for whether it’s profitable (cures and vaccines will be less profitable than treatments and drugs that require indefinite prescriptions).
Given you highlight Moderna, why did you not mention that they have in fact agreed not to enforce their vaccine IP rights during the pandemic?
The paragraph after my quote from the NYT op-ed addresses this directly:
“Moderna has pledged not to enforce its “Covid-19 related patents against those making vaccines intended to combat the pandemic.” But as Doctors Without Borders has pointed out, that offer is less generous than it seems since other types of intellectual property, such as know-how or trade secrets, typically are needed to develop and produce vaccines.”
As it happens, I doubt this will be that important a move. Manufacturing mRNA vaccines is a very advanced business that requires a lot of expertise; these are not small molecule drugs! Even with the IP waiver I suspect most others would struggle to do what Moderna and Pfizer have achieved. There just is not a huge amount of currently idle capacity in this supply chain. For more detail on the manufacturing details, I recommend reading this article.
I agree that some of the rhetoric around how easy it would be to spin up new manufacturing capacity, especially that which is related to novel tech, is probably inaccurate. But these problems were foreseen a year ago. Licensing and coordinating new production takes time, deals have to be negotiated and struck. If the IP were public, every company and govt with the capacity to manufacture vaccines could be working on it (or have begun retrofitting plants to build that capacity) . The fact that no companies contributed to knowledge sharing efforts is mentioned in many of the articles I linked.
The article you linked also doesn’t say that other plants couldn’t make the vaccines on a timeline that could impact the course of the pandemic, it just says that it’s a myth that dozens of facilities stand ready to make more vaccine right now (which may actually be true of vaccines that aren’t using mRNA approaches).
I also think you have misunderstood how accounting works. Net Income is after R&D expense. The more a company spends on R&D, the lower Net Income will be. The fact that Net Income is low compared to cash return doesn’t mean that the company isn’t doing R&D.
No, I understand this. Net income could be reinvested in R&D if a company chose to do so. The point is that vaccine development isn’t as profitable as other, less socially useful drugs (like things to treat male pattern baldness). This article goes into a lot of detail on how market forces have diminished our research and production capacities over time:
“The AIDS pandemic focused attention on America’s own disappearing base of vaccine R&D, even as Washington accelerated the trend worldwide. In 1985, the nonprofit Institute of Medicine warned that America’s “reliance on market incentives to ensure vaccine availability may lead to a failure to meet public health needs [and] may not result in optimal levels of vaccine innovation.” Douglas MacMaster, the president of Merck, delivered a similar message before Congress a year later, warning that his company, one of the last to maintain a vaccine research program, might not be able to fund it much longer, given the “profitability of such products.” 
Merck ended up keeping its vaccine department. But despite claims by the industry, U.S. drug companies have not produced a “renaissance” of infectious disease research on par with the achievements of the last century. Hoyt made a study of pharma’s post-1970 vaccine record and published her findings in her 2012 book, Long Shot: Vaccines for National Defense, revealing that vaccine innovation had in fact been in a decades-long slide—one tracking precisely to the rise of monopoly science and the related financialization of the drug business. ”
I actually think that it is a major problem how low the prices for the vaccines have been. These drug companies have provided us with a way out of the pandemic that many people thought was impossible—and very few expected as quickly as this. For this they should have been richly rewarded—we want to incentivise companies to work on the world’s biggest problems for the future! Unfortunately, if you look at the share prices of Pfizer or AstraZeneca and compare them to the broader market, you can see this was not the case. Given the amount these companies have been attacked by politicians, I think it is plausible that AstraZeneca leadership might regard this entire endeavour as a mistake.
If you think this is true, how do you expect the world to get vaccinated? It’s already cost prohibitive for poor countries to secure enough vaccine for their citizens. Almost no one in the global South has been vaccinated and COVAX is underfunded and only promises to vaccinated 20% of the population of the countries it covers. How would these companies making even more money off of the vaccines improve this situation?

Garrison 21 Apr 2021 14:52 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: If Bill Gates believes all lives are equal, why is he impeding vaccine distribution?
Then we should massively invest in alternative models for developing and producing vaccines. The reality is that monopoly prices and IP protections are making vaccines inaccessible to the majority of the world. If you just remove IP protections but don’t put something else in place, I could see that leading to bad outcomes, but that’s not what advocates are calling for. Decades of market fundamentalism has thoroughly limited our ideas of what is possible. Public sector drug development was the norm for many countries around the world, until the pharma industry captured rich country govts.