iamasockpuppet

Karma: 316

iamasockpuppet Jan 31, 2024, 8:43 AM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EV investigation into Owen and Community Health

We’ve also included some detail about the process in an appendix below.

The Google doc isn’t set to be publicly available.

iamasockpuppet Dec 21, 2023, 6:35 PM
5 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
What would it take for EA to become the kind of movement where SBF would’ve lost?
I sorta feel like this is barking up the wrong tree, because: (a) the information that SBF was committing fraud was private and I cannot think of a realistic scenario where it would have become public, and (b) even if widely spread, the public information wouldn’t have been sufficient.
Before FTX’s fall, I’d remarked to several people that EA’s association with crypto (compare e.g. Ben Delo) was almost certainly bad for us, as it’s overrun with scams and fraud. At the time, I’d been thinking non-FTX scams affecting FTX or its customers, not FTX itself being fraudulent; but I do feel like the right way to prevent all this would have been to refuse any association between EA and crypto.
However, this is also starting to sound like a proof that there’s no such thing as a clean judicial system, quality investigative journalism, honest scientific research into commercial products like drugs, etc.
Good point! I’m probably being overly skeptical here, on reflection.

iamasockpuppet Dec 21, 2023, 6:08 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vilfredo's Ghost’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
I’m suspicious that Lightcone has already been deterred.

Even if they haven’t, we should prefer/pursue punishments that don’t involve setting a bunch of money on fire to pay lawyers, with a lawsuit as the last resort; we are not yet at that last resort, and probably won’t ever end up there.

iamasockpuppet Dec 21, 2023, 4:01 PM
9 points
2 ∶ 3
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
I think a war between SBF and EA would have been good for FTX users
To be clear, what I’m saying is that SBF would just flat out win, and really easily too, I wouldn’t expect a war. The people who had criticized him would be driven out of EA on various grounds; I wouldn’t expect EA as a whole to end up fighting SBF; I would expect SBF would probably end up with more control over EA than he had in real life, because he’d be able to purge his critics on various grounds.
Your point about conflict of interest for investigative journalists is a good one. Maybe we should fund them anonymously so they don’t know which side their bread is buttered on.
I don’t think that’s enough; you’d need to not only fund some investigators anonymously, you’d also need to (a) have good control over selecting the investigators, and (b) ban anybody from paying or influencing investigators non-anonymously, which seems unenforceable. (Also, in real life, I think the investigators would eventually have just assumed that they were being paid by SBF or by Dustin Moskovitz.)

iamasockpuppet Dec 21, 2023, 3:28 PM
11 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
Even if you think Lightcone misfired here—If you add FTX in your dataset too, then the “see something? say something!” norm starts looking better overall.
No, I don’t think it does. You also need to assume that a “see something? say something!” rumor mill would have actually had any benefit for the FTX situation. I’m pretty sure that’s false, and I think it’s pretty plausible it would be harmful.
(1) The fraud wouldn’t have become publicly known under this norm, so I don’t think this actually helps.
(2) I don’t think it would be correct for EA to react strongly in response to the rumors about SBF- there are similar rumors or conflicts around a very substantial number of famous people, e.g. Zuckerberg vs. the Winklevoss Twins.
(3) Most importantly, how we get from “see something? say something?” to “the billionaire sending money to everybody, who has a professional PR firm, somehow ends up losing out” is just a gigantic question mark here. To me, the outcome here is that SBF now has a mandate to drive anybody he can dig up or manufacture dirt on out of EA. (I seem to recall that the sources of the rumors about him went to another failed crypto hedge fund that got sued; I can’t find a source, but even if that didn’t actually happen it would be easy him to make that happen to Lantern Ventures.) (I expect that the proposed “EA investigative journalist” would have probably been directly paid by SBF in this scenario.)

iamasockpuppet Dec 21, 2023, 2:49 PM
6 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
whether there should be a justice system within the EA/Rationality community and whether Lightcone can self-appoint into the role of community police
These are two different questions!
EA already has a justice system of sorts- the CEA Community Health Team. Ben chose to do this because he thought it was ineffective. The second question should instead be, whether Lightcone can self-appoint themselves as a replacement for the CHT.
The fact that somebody thought the CHT was ineffective and tried to replace it, then immediately faceplanted, makes me more confident in the actually existing CHT. (In particular, if Alice did indeed lie to Ben, it’s then pretty likely that she said she didn’t trust the CHT/didn’t want info shared with them because they would fact-check her claims.)

iamasockpuppet Dec 21, 2023, 1:03 PM
27 points
4 ∶ 4
in reply to: TracingWoodgrains’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
I believe that Nonlinear would win, and that actually doing so as of now would be mildly wrong.

It’s worth distinguishing between the threat they made and bringing the actual lawsuit; in this comment you talk about the lawsuit, but in your clarification below you talk about the threat of one. Even if I lay aside the obvious justification for the threat and only consider the possible harms, they’re so insignificant that I don’t think they’re worth considering; I feel like the threat was well justified.

iamasockpuppet Dec 21, 2023, 12:47 PM
5 points
4 ∶ 4
in reply to: Vilfredo's Ghost’s comment on: Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong
I disagree that they should necessarily sue if they can win.

NL suing would cause further controversy and damage to their reputation.

Lawsuits should be a weapon of last resort; in this case, it remains plausible that either Lightcone will eventually apologize, or that NL can win over the community. (Arguably they are in the process of doing so?)

A lawsuit is a negative-sum game for the EA community, due to the substantial lawyer fees; depending on the damages, it could be financially negative even for the winner.

In the event of a successful lawsuit, I believe we should think very mildly poorly of NL, and extremely poorly of Lightcone.
What links here?
- iamasockpuppet's comment on Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong by TracingWoodgrains (Dec 21, 2023, 1:03 PM; 27 points)

iamasockpuppet Sep 8, 2023, 4:02 AM
45 points
7 ∶ 1
in reply to: Kelsey Piper’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
I initially upvoted/delta’d/insightful’d this, but on looking into it further I don’t think that this concern can possibly be right. You mention “extraordinary sums of money”, but Puerto Rico only requires $3,000 dollars of liability insurance; the default liability insurance wouldn’t be relevant if “extraordinary sums of money” are involved. It’s possible that Nonlinear had better insurance for their car; but I feel like the concern here should be about them pressuring their employee to break the law, while your comment’s proposed harms would be almost equally bad if everything were legal but Nonlinear didn’t have good supplemental insurance. (In particular, your comment seems to imply that it’s significantly immortal/problematic for anybody to drive in Puerto Rico without additional insurance.)
(Regardless, I think it’s important to note that, even after receiving Nonlinear’s comments, the original post gives driving without a license as an example of something that “could have had severe personal downsides such as jail time in a foreign country”; that’s what they were presumably responding to.)

iamasockpuppet Jan 23, 2023, 2:43 PM
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: [Rumour] Microsoft to invest $10B in OpenAI, will receive 75% of profits until they recoup investment: GPT would be integrated with Office
No details, but something like this appears confirmed: https://openai.com/blog/openai-and-microsoft-extend-partnership/

iamasockpuppet Jul 23, 2022, 3:27 AM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mau’s comment on: EA Probably Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power
Is the idea that there isn’t already opposition to EA stances, so creating it is extra bad?
Bringing into existence new opposition is bad. Not sure to what extent there’s currently no opposition; but there’s no opposition of the sort that EA’s would face. (I’m pretty sure there are no professional oppo researchers targeting EA or individual EA’s right now, for example. Similarly, existing politicians have no reason to dislike EA. Similarly, I’m pretty sure that there’s never been a publicly running advertisement attacking effective altruism.)
(I think it’s pretty likely that there attack ads would be if EA keeps running candidates. Maybe you’re skeptical now, but that’s based on a positive view of EA from the inside; not based on what a motivated opposition researcher who’s being paid to find reasons to criticize an EA would either find or twist to criticize. The term “political hatchet job” exists for a reason.)
obscurity of these cause areas also reduces cause-area-motivated opponents
I’m not really sure what you mean by that?
Is the idea that nobody would oppose EA candidates because of EA ideology? That’s true, they would oppose EA candidates for non-EA ideological reasons, and also because electoral seats are a scarce resource.

iamasockpuppet Jul 22, 2022, 1:47 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Gil’s comment on: EA Probably Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power
Pork is pushed for by legislators, not by interest groups.
I don’t really understand the distinction you’re drawing. Interest groups definitely lobby to receive pork.
These projects have some support from within the district, sure, but it’s really the legislators that want them to happen so they can advertise to their constituents.
Is the claim here that the actual spending itself doesn’t matter, and the reason it occurs is solely that the politician likes to be able to talk about the spending?
That runs counter to my understanding; this paper claims otherwise for Brazil, and this paper suggests otherwise for the US.

iamasockpuppet Jul 22, 2022, 1:14 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Mau’s comment on: EA Probably Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power
Yeah. It’s kinda difficult for me to present a knockdown argument against explicitly EA politicians, when everybody agrees that the benefits would be illegible the public and difficult to predict.
Your analysis of the limited influence of individual elected officials focuses on the House of Representatives. These arguments are grounded in the House’s unique features (e.g., influence of leadership, limits on members’ ability to propose amendments), so it doesn’t make sense to generalize their conclusions to the Senate.
This is true, and I think my essay suffered somewhat from being both an argument specifically about Carrick Flynn and an argument about politics more generally.
I think that the focus on the House, beyond just Flynn, was somewhat reasonable though; I think that EA is just incapable of getting an EA elected to the Senate in the near term, so there’s not much point in considering the benefits. I can elaborate on this if you disagree.
Concluding one of your sections, you write, “they inevitably will end up campaigning on, and dealing with, primarily non-EA topics. This means that most opposition that EA politicians would face isn’t due to their EA stances.” So? I’m not seeing how this is an argument for your main claim.
Two reasons this is bad:
- As I discussed in the next section, creating opposition to EA could be harmful to EA itself.
- It means that most of the EA effort in elections would go, not to arguing for EA causes specifically, but to arguing for and fighting over other issues. For example, in OR-06, significant sums of EA money was spent attacking Andrea Salinas as a drug lobbyist, which is not an EA focus. It also means that EA might lose elections even where nobody really disagrees or opposes the EA cause areas; OR-06 is again an example.

iamasockpuppet Jul 21, 2022, 8:26 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: EA Probably Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power
I agree, I think that GAP is probably very good. I mentioned it as being effective and bipartisan in footnotes 2 and 7.

iamasockpuppet Jul 21, 2022, 8:18 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Peter’s comment on: EA Probably Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power
What goals did the Tea Party fail on?
Repealing Obamacare was arguably its central political goal, and was a total failure.
Secondary failures include failing to reduce government spending and failing to reduce government debt. I also would characterize it as failing to reduce the size of the government and failing to reduce government regulation, although I don’t know how to measure these. These cases are all dependent on what hypothetical you choose- maybe they reduced the rate of increase.

iamasockpuppet Jul 21, 2022, 7:57 PM
12 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Gil’s comment on: EA Probably Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power
Congresspeople deal with a ton of different interest groups all the time trying to have their preferred policies make their way into legislation. We are competing with all of them, which makes our odds of success quite low, especially since politicians generally consult the interest groups they agree with rather than interest groups actually persuading politicians.
...
A more apt comparison in my eyes is pork. Politicians get funding all the time for projects in their districts so they can report back to their constituents. Hundreds of these things get included in many omnibus bills in order to ensure the vote of every single legislator.
I agree that pork is good comparison, since it has highly concentrated support but nonexistent opposition. But the second section I quoted above directly contradicts the first section: pork is an example of how interest groups can be effective at getting their preferred policies into legislation, even if no politician themself benefits from the pork.
It’s very rare for the groups that benefit from pork to try to steer it by themselves holding office.
I don’t think we are really competing with all other interest groups; there’s not a limited amount of legislation. There is a limited-ish budget, but it’s so high that there’s room for many different priorities already (including pork).
But I think you vastly exaggerate how much having more association EA would have with Democrats if there were a couple of Democratic EA-associated legislators in office, especially if they never really talk about EA in public.
Well, maybe. It’s really tough to evaluate hypotheticals like this; but the actually existing political campaign that I’m commenting on lead to multiple articles about EA in the national political press just from the primary, let alone the general or somebody holding office.

iamasockpuppet Jul 21, 2022, 7:39 PM
18 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: jvb’s comment on: EA Probably Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power
I think it’s fair to characterize the Flynn campaign, the actually existing case, as an example of EA as a movement trying to win a political office; it was portrayed that way in the national press. The takeaways I linked on the EA forum also seemed supportive of EA as a movement trying to win political office, and I haven’t seen anybody suggest that this would be harmful.

iamasockpuppet Jul 21, 2022, 1:52 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: atlasunshrugged’s comment on: EA Probably Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power
In which you say that R EA’s would then not be interested in joining EA (or at least engaging in EA politics) but to me that seems off because as you mentioned many of the issues that the average voter and indeed party cares about aren’t things most EA’s would prioritize.
I agree that EA politicians wouldn’t prioritize the issues that they care less about; but they wouldn’t be able to avoid taking a stance on them, most straightforwardly by voting on bills. There are no national single-issue politicians in American politics, every vote is a vote for a coalition, and EA would be a member of such a coalition. EA would be repeatedly advocating for the election of politicians who consistently take one side of the issues, and would therefore correctly be associated with that side.
To me, this means that for the issues that EA’s do really care about (e.g. X-risks mitigation) an EA D or R would be happy to collaborate because they do share the values on those issues even being in different parties which are opposed on other “bread and butter” political issues.
This assumes that the EA’s in question are already committed EA’s with strong alignment on the EA cause areas. There’s at least two important cases where that might not be true:
- EA’s might want to work with somebody who’s not themself an EA; for example, every current member of Congress.
- Nobody is born as an EA; EA needs to recruit people to become EA’s.
I do agree that, while some EA’s with opposing politics might bounce out of EA as a result, the number would be pretty negligible, most would probably remain.
But, given how much the odds go up for an incumbent in their election, I think if he (or anyone else) got in, even if they didn’t have power in that first term, they would be much more likely to be able to stick around for many more and exert power that way.
I agree.

iamasockpuppet Jul 21, 2022, 11:23 AM
14 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Probably Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power
Without necessarily endorsing the EA-as-religion comparison, I don’t think it’s true that politicians don’t face opposition for their religion. Christians do not face much criticism because they are the majority; some specific denominations do face opposition. In particular, Romney did in fact face significant opposition due to his Mormon religion- see this experiment, and this summary on wikipedia. (It wasn’t a significant factor in the higher-profile 2012 general election because the Obama campaign decided to focus their fire on Romney’s venture capital background.)

EA Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power

iamasockpuppetJul 21, 2022, 10:29 AM

156 points

31 comments10 min readEA link

iamasockpuppet

EA Shouldn’t Try to Ex­er­cise Direct Poli­ti­cal Power

EA Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power