Before the revamp of the forum, I was asked to take down job ads, but maybe things have changed since then. I personally don’t think it would be good for the forum to become a jobs board, since the community already has several places to post jobs.
Halstead
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Instructions on potential insomnia cure
Very interesting role, but my understanding was that job posts were not meant to be posted on the forum
Also, to clarify we don’t recommend a donation to MAPS at this time given their funding situation
Do you think it is a conflict of interest if FP recommends something that a donor of ours has funded in the past? This is a genuine question, and would be curious to hear what other people think
Nice post. adding to your point on conservative funders—it would be good for someone to look into how groups like the Kochs have succeeded.
Yeah, the view that utilities aren’t comparable has more legs on preference-satisfactionism than it does on hedonism. On the face it is quite weird to say that the utilities, in the hedonistic sense, are not comparable. Can we compare the utility of a man being tortured with that of a man enjoying watching The Sopranos? DALYs, QALYs and WELLBYs are utility metrics that make utility comparable across people.
I would be interested to see any evidence on whether citizen knowledge has increased or not since social media formed. People often assert this but don’t argue for it and the long-term trend isn’t that clear.
This is a good question. In the absence of other explanations of market failure, this is an update away from the view that direct anti-poverty interventions do have high ROI. While some RCTs of anti-poverty programmes like the Graduation approach might show a big ROI, perhaps the market actors know not to trust these RCTs. Maybe they have an implicit view on the external validity of these studies, which has been demonstrated to be low
This is true, but they do contain low bar elements, such as $1.90 per day poverty. He also clearly thinks they are a bad way to think about development. I think it would be better if economists and EAs focused on an expanded GDP metric that includes income growth as well as other important contributors to wellbeing
2) I don’t think this refutes Johannes point, which is that the headline figures claimed in the write-up on impact lab seem selected to get eye-catching figures. Although they run RCP4.5, they report the effects of RCP8.5 on the website and in the abstract. The mean effect is about a sixth smaller on RCP 4.5.
To put RCP8.5 in context, energy demand nearly quadruples, driven mainly by coal.
I do worry that this sort of work underestimates our ability to adapt. If energy demand does quadruple, there would be a lot more air conditioning to go round, and burning of coal would have driven a lot of income growth
3) From the copy I see, I think you are reporting Figure 7a, not 9a?
The SDGs seem to me to be antithetical to effective altruism. The SDGs :
Are in part ‘kinky’ development goals that place an arbitrary low bar on development goals, such as eradicating $1.90 per day poverty.
Don’t prioritise among competing goals, such as climate change, growth, and education.
EAs should be focused on the question of how governments can most cost-effectively increase social welfare (broadly conceived) in their own countries. If we do this, we will meet all of the arbitrary “low bar” goals anyway. For discussion of national development vs kinky development, see some of Lant Pritchett’s blogs.
I tend to agree. This feels a bit like a “be the change you want to see in the world” thing. Ordinary communication norms would push us towards just using verbal claims like ‘likely’ but for the reasons you mention, I pretty strongly think we should quantify and accept any short-term weirdness hit.
I suppose they’re roughly in line with my previous best guess. On the basis of the Annan and Hargreaves paper, on median BAU scenario the chance of >6K was about 1%. I think this is probably a bit too low because the estimates that ground that were not meant to systematically sample uncertainty about ECS. On the WCRS estimate, the chance of >6K is about 5%. (Annan and Hargreaves are co-authors on WCRS, so they have also updated).
One has to take account of uncertainty about emissions scenarios as well
Thanks for posting this. This does seem to correct a lot of the common stated problems with estimates of S by incorporating all the lines of evidence. It’ll be interesting to see how this is received in AR6.
I have updated the guesstimate model from my How Hot Will it Get piece to reflect the findings here. The scenarios are labelled as the WCRP estimates of climate sensitivity.
Overall, I don’t view this as especially good news.
The 95% confidence interval for S for the baseline case is 2.3K to 4.7K. Depending on the emissions scenario you put in, this implies a 5% chance of >6.3K-7K of warming on pre-industrial.
With robustness checks, the 95% CI for S is 2 to 5.7K. Depending on the emissions scenario, this implies a 5% chance of >7K-10K on pre-industrial.
From what I have read of their assumptions, the Baseline case seems more plausible, e.g. the robustness checks include an assumption of a uniform prior over S, which seems wrong. This suggests that the high chance of extreme warming suggested by Wagner and Weitzman is less likely. Still, the chance of >6K is way too high.
Defining the line of what counts as severe injustice, a high stakes error or a violation of a basic right, is not done precisely in the literature and is in my view impossible to do in a theoretically satisfying way. I think this is true for all nonconsequentialist thresholds. The point of nonconsequentialism is to avoid having to say how good something is, which makes it difficult/impossible to know how to trade-off different nonconsequentialist elements against each other. What do I do if I have to choose between the right to free speech and the economic minimum? If I don’t know how good these things are, I don’t see how I can compare and weigh them. Equally, what do I do if I have a 10% chance of violating someone’s right to free association and a 20% chance of violating someone’s right to an economic minimum? If you don’t know how good these outcomes are, probability weighing them isn’t much use when you’re deciding how to act.
Ultimately, the boundary of what counts as a high stakes error is defined fuzzily and arbitrarily.
Hi, this is a good question. On within-nation rights only, firstly, I think almost all of the democratic theorists think there are at least limited cosmopolitan duties of justice to benefit the very badly off in poor countries at least up to some arbitrary sufficientarian standard. Hardcore nationalism also isn’t that popular in political philosophy, and the moderate intrinsic proceduralists out there don’t believe in it. Secondly, for theorists who endorse an act/omission distinction with respect to national responsibility, there is still the Thomas Pogge point that the global system of institutions in part causes poverty. in that context, aid is a corrective to an injustice.
Thirdly, this raises the question of how we should define the demos. One common view is that decisions that affect all should be decided by all. But then decisions in the US about budgetary spending also affect people in poor countries, animals and future generations, so they should on this standard have a say in the decision or a proxy should have a say for them. This speaks for global enfranchisement rather than US national democracy. Another view is that decisions that coerce others should be decided democratically. But then immigration restrictions coerce prospective immigrants, so again this speaks in favour of global enfranchisement.
On animals, it is very uncommon to hold that animals have no moral status at all, and that abuse of animals could never be classed as a high stakes error. Most philosophers are committed to the moral status of severely disabled humans, dogs and cats, but this clearly implies that chickens and pigs also have moral status.
On Rawls, I’m a bit allergic to Rawls exegesis after years of doing political philosophy, so I’ll leave that one.
Hi Michael, I was also surprised! I think the basic intuition is that people want to avoid sanctioning the tyranny of the majority. Philosophers think it would be unjust for the majority to violate the basic rights of minorities. As I argue in the paper, democracies do this all the time. Lots of philosophers who are at pains to emphasise their democrat credentials are also in favour of the US Supreme Court for this reason—it doesn’t get much more undemocratic than that.
The two main arguments for intrinsic proceduralism are from autonomy and from equal respect/basic equality. It is usually held that people’s rights to act autonomously stop at the rights of others. No-one holds that people have a right grounded in autonomy to pursue the project of killing minorities. On equal respect/basic equality, I have a hard time understanding how it is an argument rather than merely a restatement of the claim that intrinsic proceduralism is true: in spite of basic equality, there are lots of rights and powers we distribute unequally, such as the right to practice medicine or drive.
Ok, the post is still labelled as ‘front page’ in that case, which seems like it should be changed