Scriptwriter for RationalAnimations! Interested in lots of EA topics, but especially ideas for new institutions like prediction markets, charter cities, georgism, etc. Also a big fan of EA / rationalist fiction!
Jackson Wagner
Karma: 3,771
With your FTX thought experiment, the population being defrauded (mostly rich-world investors) is different from the population being helped (people in poor countries), so defrauding the investors might be worthwhile in a utilitarian sense (the poor people are helped more than the investors are harmed), but it certainly isn’t in the investors’ collective interest to be defrauded!! (Unless you think the investors would ultimately profit more by being defrauded and seeing higher third-world economic growth, than by not being defrauded. But this seems very unlikely & also not what you intended.)
I might be in favor of this thought experiment if the group of people being stolen from was much larger—eg, the entire US tax base, having their money taken through taxes and redistributed overseas through USAID to programs like PEPFAR… or ideally the entire rich world including europe, japan, middle-eastern petro-states, etc. The point being that it seems more ethical to me to justify coercion using a more natural grouping like the entire world population, such that the argument goes “it’s in the collective benefit of the average human, for richer people to have some of their money transferred to poorer people”. Verus something about “it’s in the collective benefit of all the world’s poor people plus a couple of FTX investors, to take everything the FTX investors own and distribute it among the poor people” seems like a messier standard that’s much more ripe for abuse (since you could always justify taking away anything from practically anyone, by putting them as the sole relatively-well-off member of a gerrymandered group of mostly extremely needy people).
It also seems important that taxes for international aid are taken in a transparent way (according to preexisting laws, passed by a democratic government, that anyone can read) that people at least have some vague ability to give democratic feedback on (ie by voting), rather than being done randomly by FTX’s CEO without even being announced publicly (that he was taking their money) until it was a fait accompli.
Versus I’m saying that various forms of conscription / nationalization / preventing-people-and-capital-from-fleeing (ideally better forms rather than worse forms) seems morally justified for a relatively-natural group (ie all the people living in a country that is being invaded) to enforce, when it is in the selfish collective interest of the people in that group.
huw said “Conscription in particular seems really bad… if it’s a defensive war then defending your country should be self-evidently valuable to enough people that you wouldn’t need it.”
I’m saying that huw is underrating the coordination problem / bank-run effect. Rather than just let individuals freely choose whether to support the war effort (which might lead the country to quickly collapse even if most people would prefer that the country stand and fight), I think that in an ideal situation:
1. people should have freedom of speech to argue for and against different courses of action—some people saying we should surrender because the costs of fighting would be too high and occupation won’t be so bad, others arguing the opposite. (This often doesn’t happen in practice—places like Ukraine will ban russia-friendly media, governments like the USA in WW2 will run pro-war support-the-trooops propaganda and ban opposing messages, etc. I think this is where a lot of the badness of even defensive war comes from—people are too quick to assume that invaders will be infinitely terrible, that surrender is unthinkable, etc.)
2. then people should basically get to occasionally vote on whether to keep fighting the war or not, what liberties to infringe upon versus not, etc (you don’t necessarily need to vote right at the start of the war, since in democracy there’s a preexisting social contract including stuff like “if there’s a war, some of you guys are getting drafted, here’s how it works, by living here as a citizen you accept these terms and conditions”)
IMO, under those conditions (and as long as the burdens / infringements-of-liberty of the war are reasonably equitably shared throughout society, not like people voting “let’s send all the ethnic-minority people to fight while we stay home”), it is ethically justifiable to do quite a lot of temporarily curtailing individual liberties in the name of collective defense.Back to finance analogy: sometimes non-fraudulent banks and investment funds do temporarily restrict withdrawals, to prevent bank-runs during a crisis. Similarly, stock exchanges implement “circuit-breakers” that suspend trading, effectively freezing everyone’s money and preventing them from selling their stock, when markets crash very quickly. These methods are certainly coercive, and they don’t always even work well in practice, but I think the reason they’re used is because many people recognize that they do a better-than-the-alternative job of looking out for investors’ collective interests.
This isn’t part of your thought experiment, but in the real world, even if FTX had spent a much higher % of their ill-gotten treasure on altruistic endeavors, the whole thing probably backfired in the end due to reputational damage (ie, the reputational damage to the growth of the EA movement hurt the world much more than the FTX money donated in 2020 − 2022 helped).
And in general this is true of unethical / illegal / coercive actions—it might seem like a great idea to earn some extra cash on the side is beating up kids for their lunch money, but actually the direct effect of stealing the money will be overriden by the second-order effect of your getting arrested, fined, thrown in jail, etc.
But my impression is that most defensive wars don’t backfire in this way?? Ukraine or Taiwan might be making an ethical or political mistake if they decide to put up more of a fight by fighting back against an invader, but it’s not like conscripting more people to send to the front is going to paradoxically result in LESS of a fight being put up! Nations siezing resources & conscripting people in order to fight harder, generally DOES translate straightforwardly into fighting harder. (Except on the very rare occasion when people get sufficiently fed up that they revolt in favor of a more surrender-minded government, like Russia in 1918 or Paris in 1871.)
To be clear, I am not saying that conscription is always justified or that “it’s solving a coordination problem” is a knockdown argument in all cases. (If I believed this, then I would probably be in favor of some kind of extreme communist-style expropriation and redistribution of economic resources, like declaring that the entire nation is switching to 100% Georgist land value taxes right now, with no phase-in period and no compensating people for their fallen property values. IRL I think this would be wrong, even though I’m a huge fan of more moderate forms of Georgism.) But I think it’s an important argument that might tip the balance in many cases.
Finally, to be clear, I totally agree with you that conscription is a very intense infringement on individual human liberty! I’m just saying that sometimes, if a society is stuck between a rock and a hard place, infringements on liberty can be ethically justifiable IMO. (Ideally IMO I’d like it if countries, even under dire circumstances, should try to pay their soldiers at least something reasonably close to the “free-market wage”, ie the salary that would get them to willingly volunteer. If this requires extremely high taxes on the rest of the populace, so be it! If the citizens hate taxes so much, then they can go fight in the war and get paid instead of paying the taxes! And thereby a fair equilibrium can be determined, whereby the burden of warfighting is being shared equally between citizens & soldiers. But my guess is that most ordinary people in a real-world scenario would probably vote for traditional conscription, rather than embracing my libertarian burden-sharing scheme, and I think their democratic choice is also worthy of respect even if it’s not morally optimal in my view.)
Also agreed that societies in general seem a little too rearing-to-go to get into fights, likely make irrational decisions on this basis, etc. It would be great if everyone in the world could chill out on their hawkishness by like 50% or more… unfortunately there are probably weird adversarial dynamics where you have to act freakishly tough & hawkish in order to create credible deterrence, so it’s not obvious that individual countries should “unilaterally disarm” by doving-out (although over the long arc of history, democracies have generally sort of done this, seemingly to their great benefit). But to the extent anybody can come up with some way to make the whole world marginally less belligerent, that would obviously be a huge win IMO.
But there’s clearly a coordination problem around defense that conscription is a (brute) solution to.
Suppose my country is attacked by a tyrranical warmonger, and to hold off the invaders we need 10% the population to go fight (and some of them will die!) in miserable trench warfare conditions. The rest need to work on the homefront, keeping the economy running, making munitions etc. Personally I’d rather work on the homefront (or just flee the country, perhaps)! But if everyone does that, nobody will head to the trenches, the country will quickly fold, and the warmonger invader will just roll right on to the next country (which will similarly fold)!
It seems almost like a “run on the bank” dynamic—it might be in everyone’s collective interests to put up a fight, but it’s in everyone’s individual interests to simply flee. So, absent some more elegant galaxy-brained solution (assurance contracts, prediction markets, etc??) maybe the government should defend the collective interests of society by stepping in to prevent people from “running on the bank” by fleeing the country / dodging the draft.
(If the country being invaded is democratic and holds elections during wartime, this decision would even have collective approval from citizens, since they’d regularly vote on whether to continue their defensive war or change to a government more willing to surrender to the invaders.)
Of course there are better and worse forms of conscription: paying soldiers enough that you don’t need conscription is better than paying them only a little (although in practice high pay might strain the finances of an invaded country), which is better than not paying them at all.
The OP seems to be viewing things entirely from the perspective of individual rights and liberties, but not proposing how else we might solve the coordination problem of providing for collective defense.
Eg, by his own logic, OP should surely agree that taxes are theft, any governments funded by such flagrant immoral confiscation are completely illegitimate, and anarcho-capitalism is the only ethically acceptable form of human social relations. Yet I suspect the OP does not believe this, even though the analogy to conscription seems reasonably strong (albeit not exact).
Wow, sounds like a really format to have different philosophers all come and pitch their philosophy as the best approach to life! I’d love to take a class like that.
Reposting here a recent comment of mine listing socialist-adjacent ideas that at least I personally am a lot more excited about than socialism itself.
* * *FYI, if you have not yet heard of “Georgism” (see this series of blog posts on Astral Codex Ten), you might be in for a really fun time! It’s a fascinating idea that aims to reform capitalism by reducing the amount of rent-seeking in the economy, thus making society fairer and more meritocratic (because we are doing a better job of rewarding real work, not just rewarding people who happen to be squatting on valuable assets) while also boosting economic dynamism (by directing investment towards building things and putting land to its most productive use, rather than just bidding up the price of land).
A few other weird optimal-governance schemes that have socialist-like egalitarian aims but are actually (or at least partially) validated by our modern understanding of economics:using prediction markets to inform institutional decision-making (see this entertaining video explainer), and the wider field of wondering if there are any good ways to improve institutions’ decisions
using quadratic funding to optimally* fund public goods without relying on governments or central planning. (*in theory, given certain assumptions, real life is more complicated, etc etc)
pigouvian taxes (like taxes on cigarrettes or carbon emissions). Like georgist land-value taxes, these attempt to raise funds (for providing public goods either through government services or perhaps quadratic funding) in a way that actually helps the economy (by properly pricing negative externalities) rather than disincentivizing work or investment.
various methods of trying to improve democratic mechanisms to allow people to give more useful, considered input to government processes—approval voting, sortition / citizen’s assemblies, etc
conversation-mapping / consensus-building algorithms like pol.is & community notes
not exactly optimal governance, but this animated video explainer lays out GiveDirectly’s RCT-backed vision of how it’s actually pretty plausible that we could solve extreme poverty by just sending a ton of money to the poorest countries for a few years, which would probably actually work because 1. it turns out that most poor countries have a ton of “slack” in their economy (as if they’re in an economic depression all the time), so flooding them with stimulus-style cash mostly boosts employment and activity rather than just causing inflation, and 2. after just a few years, you’ll get enough “capital accumulation” (farmers buying tractors, etc) that we can taper off the payments and the countries won’t fall back into extreme poverty + economic depression
the dream (perhaps best articulated by Dario Amodei in sections 2, 3, and 4 of his essay “machines of loving grace”, but also frequently touched on by Carl Schulman) of future AI assistants that improve the world by actually making people saner and wiser, thereby making societies better able to coordinate and make win-win deals between different groups.
the concern (articulated in its negative form at https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/, and in its positive form at Sam Altman’s essay Moore’s Law for Everything), that some socialist-style ideas (like redistributing control of capital and providing UBI) might have to come back in style in a big way, if AI radically alters humanity’s economic situation such that the process of normal capitalism starts becoming increasingly unaligned from human flourishing.
Reposting here a recent comment of mine listing socialist-adjacent ideas that at least I personally am a lot more excited about than socialism itself.
* * *FYI, if you have not yet heard of “Georgism” (see this series of blog posts on Astral Codex Ten), you might be in for a really fun time! It’s a fascinating idea that aims to reform capitalism by reducing the amount of rent-seeking in the economy, thus making society fairer and more meritocratic (because we are doing a better job of rewarding real work, not just rewarding people who happen to be squatting on valuable assets) while also boosting economic dynamism (by directing investment towards building things and putting land to its most productive use, rather than just bidding up the price of land). Check it out; it might scratch an itch for “something like socialism, but that might actually work”.
A few other weird optimal-governance schemes that have socialist-like egalitarian aims but are actually (or at least partially) validated by our modern understanding of economics:using prediction markets to inform institutional decision-making (see this entertaining video explainer), and the wider field of wondering if there are any good ways to improve institutions’ decisions
using quadratic funding to optimally* fund public goods without relying on governments or central planning. (*in theory, given certain assumptions, real life is more complicated, etc etc)
pigouvian taxes (like taxes on cigarrettes or carbon emissions). Like georgist land-value taxes, these attempt to raise funds (for providing public goods either through government services or perhaps quadratic funding) in a way that actually helps the economy (by properly pricing negative externalities) rather than disincentivizing work or investment.
various methods of trying to improve democratic mechanisms to allow people to give more useful, considered input to government processes—approval voting, sortition / citizen’s assemblies, etc
conversation-mapping / consensus-building algorithms like pol.is & community notes
not exactly optimal governance, but this animated video explainer lays out GiveDirectly’s RCT-backed vision of how it’s actually pretty plausible that we could solve extreme poverty by just sending a ton of money to the poorest countries for a few years, which would probably actually work because 1. it turns out that most poor countries have a ton of “slack” in their economy (as if they’re in an economic depression all the time), so flooding them with stimulus-style cash mostly boosts employment and activity rather than just causing inflation, and 2. after just a few years, you’ll get enough “capital accumulation” (farmers buying tractors, etc) that we can taper off the payments and the countries won’t fall back into extreme poverty + economic depression
the dream (perhaps best articulated by Dario Amodei in sections 2, 3, and 4 of his essay “machines of loving grace”, but also frequently touched on by Carl Schulman) of future AI assistants that improve the world by actually making people saner and wiser, thereby making societies better able to coordinate and make win-win deals between different groups.
the concern (articulated in its negative form at https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/, and in its positive form at Sam Altman’s essay Moore’s Law for Everything), that some socialist-style ideas (like redistributing control of capital and providing UBI) might have to come back in style in a big way, if AI radically alters humanity’s economic situation such that the process of normal capitalism starts becoming increasingly unaligned from human flourishing.
Reposting a comment of mine from another user’s similar post about “I used to be socialist, but now have seen the light”!
* * *FYI, if you have not yet heard of “Georgism” (see this series of blog posts on Astral Codex Ten), you might be in for a really fun time! It’s a fascinating idea that aims to reform capitalism by reducing the amount of rent-seeking in the economy, thus making society fairer and more meritocratic (because we are doing a better job of rewarding real work, not just rewarding people who happen to be squatting on valuable assets) while also boosting economic dynamism (by directing investment towards building things and putting land to its most productive use, rather than just bidding up the price of land). Check it out; it might scratch an itch for “something like socialism, but that might actually work”.
A few other weird optimal-governance schemes that have socialist-like egalitarian aims but are actually (or at least partially) validated by our modern understanding of economics:using prediction markets to inform institutional decision-making (see this entertaining video explainer), and the wider field of wondering if there are any good ways to improve institutions’ decisions
using quadratic funding to optimally* fund public goods without relying on governments or central planning. (*in theory, given certain assumptions, real life is more complicated, etc etc)
pigouvian taxes (like taxes on cigarrettes or carbon emissions). Like georgist land-value taxes, these attempt to raise funds (for providing public goods either through government services or perhaps quadratic funding) in a way that actually helps the economy (by properly pricing negative externalities) rather than disincentivizing work or investment.
various methods of trying to improve democratic mechanisms to allow people to give more useful, considered input to government processes—approval voting, sortition / citizen’s assemblies, etc
conversation-mapping / consensus-building algorithms like pol.is & community notes
not exactly optimal governance, but this animated video explainer lays out GiveDirectly’s RCT-backed vision of how it’s actually pretty plausible that we could solve extreme poverty by just sending a ton of money to the poorest countries for a few years, which would probably actually work because 1. it turns out that most poor countries have a ton of “slack” in their economy (as if they’re in an economic depression all the time), so flooding them with stimulus-style cash mostly boosts employment and activity rather than just causing inflation, and 2. after just a few years, you’ll get enough “capital accumulation” (farmers buying tractors, etc) that we can taper off the payments and the countries won’t fall back into extreme poverty + economic depression
the dream (perhaps best articulated by Dario Amodei in sections 2, 3, and 4 of his essay “machines of loving grace”, but also frequently touched on by Carl Schulman) of future AI assistants that improve the world by actually making people saner and wiser, thereby making societies better able to coordinate and make win-win deals between different groups.
the concern (articulated in its negative form at https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/, and in its positive form at Sam Altman’s essay Moore’s Law for Everything), that some socialist-style ideas (like redistributing control of capital and providing UBI) might have to come back in style in a big way, if AI radically alters humanity’s economic situation such that the process of normal capitalism starts becoming increasingly unaligned from human flourishing.
Left-libertarian EA here—I’ll always upvote posts along the lines of “I used to be socialist, but now have seen the light”!
FYI, if you have not yet heard of “Georgism” (see this series of blog posts on Astral Codex Ten), you might be in for a really fun time! It’s a fascinating idea that aims to reform capitalism by reducing the amount of rent-seeking in the economy, thus making society fairer and more meritocratic (because we are doing a better job of rewarding real work, not just rewarding people who happen to be squatting on valuable assets) while also boosting economic dynamism (by directing investment towards building things and putting land to its most productive use, rather than just bidding up the price of land). Check it out; it might scratch an itch for “something like socialism, but that might actually work”.
A few other weird optimal-governance schemes that have socialist-like egalitarian aims but are actually (or at least partially) validated by our modern understanding of economics:using prediction markets to inform institutional decision-making (see this entertaining video explainer), and the wider field of wondering if there are any good ways to improve institutions’ decisions
using quadratic funding to optimally* fund public goods without relying on governments or central planning. (*in theory, given certain assumptions, real life is more complicated, etc etc)
pigouvian taxes (like taxes on cigarrettes or carbon emissions). Like georgist land-value taxes, these attempt to raise funds (for providing public goods either through government services or perhaps quadratic funding) in a way that actually helps the economy (by properly pricing negative externalities) rather than disincentivizing work or investment.
various methods of trying to improve democratic mechanisms to allow people to give more useful, considered input to government processes—approval voting, sortition / citizen’s assemblies, etc
conversation-mapping / consensus-building algorithms like pol.is & community notes
not exactly optimal governance, but this animated video explainer lays out GiveDirectly’s RCT-backed vision of how it’s actually pretty plausible that we could solve extreme poverty by just sending a ton of money to the poorest countries for a few years, which would probably actually work because 1. it turns out that most poor countries have a ton of “slack” in their economy (as if they’re in an economic depression all the time), so flooding them with stimulus-style cash mostly boosts employment and activity rather than just causing inflation, and 2. after just a few years, you’ll get enough “capital accumulation” (farmers buying tractors, etc) that we can taper off the payments and the countries won’t fall back into extreme poverty + economic depression
the dream (perhaps best articulated by Dario Amodei in sections 2, 3, and 4 of his essay “machines of loving grace”, but also frequently touched on by Carl Schulman) of future AI assistants that improve the world by actually making people saner and wiser, thereby making societies better able to coordinate and make win-win deals between different groups.
the concern (articulated in its negative form at https://gradual-disempowerment.ai/, and in its positive form at Sam Altman’s essay Moore’s Law for Everything), that some socialist-style ideas (like redistributing control of capital and providing UBI) might have to come back in style in a big way, if AI radically alters humanity’s economic situation such that the process of normal capitalism starts becoming increasingly unaligned from human flourishing.
Agreed that it’s a weird mood, but perhaps inevitable.
In terms of the inequality between running PR campaigns but “not interesting cooprating with other people’s altruistic PR campaigns”: insofar as attention is ultimately a fixed resource, it’s an intrinsically adversarial situation between different attempts to capture peoples’ attention. (Although there are senses in which this is not true—many causes are often bundled together in a political alliance. And there could even be a broader cultural shift towards people caring more about behaving ethically, which would perhaps “lift all boats” in the do-gooder PR-campaign space!) Nevertheless, given the mostly fixed supply of attention, it certainly seems fine to steal eyeballs for thoughtful, highly-effective causes that would otherwise be watching Tiktok, and it seems similarly fine to steal eyeballs for good causes that would otherwise have gone to dumb, counterproductive causes (like the great paper-straw crusade). After that, it seems increasingly lamentable to steal eyeballs from increasingly reasonably-worthy causes, until you get to the level of counterproductive infighting among people who are all trying hard to make the world a better place. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that everyone naturally thinks their own cause is worthier than others. Nevertheless, I think some causes are worthier than others, and fighting to direct attention towards the worthiest causes is a virtuous thing to do—perhaps even doing one’s civic duty as a participant in the “marketplace of ideas”.
In terms of the inequality between organizers (who are being high-impact only because others are low impact) vs consumers whose behavior is affected:This is omnipresent everywhere in EA, right? Mitigating x-risks is only high-impact because the rest of the world is neglecting it so badly!
Are we cruelly “stealing their impact”? I mean, maybe?? But this doesn’t seem so bad, because other people don’t care as much about impact. Conversely, some causes are much better than EA at going viral and raising lots of shallow mass awareness—but this isn’t so terrible from EA’s perspective, because EA doesn’t care as much about going viral.
But talk of “stealing impact” is weird and inverted… Imagine if everyone turned EA and tried to do the most high-impact thing. In this world, it might harder to have very high impact, but this would hardly be cause for despair, because the actual world would be immensely better off! It seems perverse to care about imagined “impact-stealing” rather than the actual state of the world.
It also seems like a fair deal insofar as the organizers have thought carefully and worked hard (a big effort), while it’s not like the consumers are being coerced into doing menial low-impact gruntwork for long hours and low pay; they’re instead making a tiny, nearly unconscious choice between two very similar options. In a way, the consumers are doing marginal charity, so their impact is higher than it seems. But asking people to go beyond marginal charity and make costlier sacrifices (ie, join a formal boycott, or consciously keep track of long lists of which companies are good versus bad) seems like more of an imposition.
Re: Nestle in particular, I get the spirit of what you’re saying, although see my recent long comment where I try to think through the chocolate issue in more detail. As far as I can tell, the labor-exploitation problems are common to the entire industry, so switching from Nestle to another brand wouldn’t do anything to help?? (If anything, possibly you should be switching TOWARDS nestle, and away from companies like Hershey’s that get a much higher % of their total revenue from chocolate?)
I think this spot-check about Nestle vs cocoa child labor (and about Nestle vs drought, and so forth) illustrates my point that there are a lot of seemingly-altruistic PR campaigns that actually don’t do much good. Perhaps those PR campaigns should feel bad for recruiting so much attention only to waste it on a poorly-thought-out theory of impact!
Hi; thanks for this thoughtful reply!
I agree that with chocolate and exploited labor, the situation is similar to veganism insofar as if you buy some chocolate, then (via the mechanisms of supply and demand) that means more chocolate is gonna be harvested (although not necessarily by harvested by that particular company, right? so I think the argument works best only if the entire field of chocolate production is shot through with exploited labor?). Although, as Toby Chrisford points out in his comment, not all boycott campaigns are like this.Thoughts on chocolate in particular
Reading the wikipedia page for chocolate & child labor, I agree that this seems like a more legit cause than “water privatization” or some of the other things I picked on. But if you are aiming for a veganism-style impact through supply and demand, it makes more sense to boycott chocolate in general, not a specific company that happens to make chocolate. (Perplexity says that Nestle controls only a single-digit percentage of the world’s chocolate market, “while the vast majority is produced by other companies such as Mars, Mondelez, Ferrero, and Hershey”—nor is Nestle even properly described as a chocolate company, since only about 15% of their revenue comes from chocolate! More comes from coffee, other beverages, and random other foods.)
In general I just get the feeling that you are choosing what to focus on based on which companies have encountered “major controversies” (ie charismatic news stories), rather than making an attempt to be scope-sensitive or thinks strategically.
“With something like slave labor in the chocolate supply chain, the impact of an individual purchase is very hard to quantify.”
Challenge accepted!!! Here are some random fermi calculations that I did to help me get a sense of scale on various things:
Google says that the average american consumes 100 lbs of chicken a year, and broiler chickens produce about 4 lbs of meat, so that’s 25 broiler chickens per year. Broiler chickens only live for around 8 weeks, so 25 chickens = at any given time, about four broiler chickens are living in misery in a factory farm, per year, per american. Toss in 1 egg-laying hen to produce about 1 egg per day, that’s five chickens per american.
How bad is chicken suffering? Idk, not that bad IMO, chickens are pretty simple. But I’m not a consciousness scientist (and sadly, nor is anybody else), so who knows!
Meanwhile with chocolate, the average american apparently consumes about 15 pounds of chocolate per year. (Wow, that’s a lot, but apparently europeans eat even more??) The total worldwide market for chocolate is 16 billion pounds per year. Wikipedia says that around 2 million children are involved in child-labor for harvesting cocoa in West Africa, while Perplexity (citing this article) estimates that “Including farmers’ families, workers in transport, trading, processing, manufacturing, marketing, and retail, roughly 40–50 million people worldwide are estimated to depend on the cocoa and chocolate supply chain for their income or employment.”
So the average American’s share of global consumption (15 / 16 billion, or about 1 billionth) is supporting the child labor of 2 million / 1 billion = 0.002 West African children. Or, another way of thinking about this is that (assuming child laborers work 12-hour days every day of the year, which is probably wrong but idk), the average American’s yearly chocolate consumption supports about 9 hours of child labor, plus about 180 hours of labor from all the adults involved in “transport, trading processing, manufacturing, marketing, and retail”, who are hopefully mostly all legitly-employed.
Sometimes for a snack, I make myself a little bowl of mixed nuts + dark chocolate chips + blueberries. I buy these little 0.6-pound bags of dark chocolate chips for $4.29 at the grocery store (which is about as cheap as it’s possible to buy chocolate); each one will typically last me a couple months. It’s REALLY dark chocolate, 72% cacao, so maybe in terms of child-labor-intensity, that’s equivalent to 4x as much normal milk chocolate, so child-labor-equivalent to like 2.5 lbs of milk chocolate? So each of these bags of dark chocolate involves about 1.5 hours of child labor.
The bags cost $4.29, but there is significant consumer surplus involved (otherwise I wouldn’t buy them!) Indeed, I’d probably buy them even if they cost twice as much! So let’s say that the cost of my significantly ycutting back my chocolate consumption is about $9 per bag.
So if I wanted to reduce child labor, I can buy 1 hour of a child’s freedom at a rate of about $9 per bag / 1.5 hours per bag = $6 per hour. (Obviously I can only buy a couple hours this way, because then my chocolate consumption would hit zero and I can’t reduce any more.)
That’s kind of expensive, actually! I only value my own time at around $20 - $30 per hour!
And it looks doubly expensive when you consider that givewell top charities can save an african child’s LIFE for about $5000 in donations—assuming 50 years life expectancy and 16 hours awake a day, that’s almost 300,000 hours of being alive versus dead. Meanwhile, if me and a bunch of my friends all decided to take the hit to our lifestyle in the form of foregone chocolate consumption instead of antimalarial bednet donations, that would only free up something like 833 hours of an african child doing leisure versus labor (which IMO seems less dramatic than being alive versus dead).
One could imagine taking a somewhat absurd “offsetting” approach, by continuing to enjoy my chocolate but donating 3 cents to Against Malaria Foundation for each bag of chocolate I buy—therefore creating 1.8 hours of untimely death --> life in expectation, for every 1.5 hours of child labor I incur.
Sorry to be “that guy”, but is child labor even bad in this context? Is it bad enough to offset the fact that trading with poor nations is generally good?
Obviously it’s bad for children (or for that matter, anyone), who ought to be enjoying their lives and working to fulfill their human potential, to be stuck doing tedious, dangerous work. But, it’s also bad to be poor!
Most child labor doesn’t seem to be slavery—the same wikipedia page that cites 2 million child laborers says there are estimated to be only 15,000 child slaves. (And that number includes not just cocoa, but also cotton and coffee.) So, most of it is more normal, compensated labor. (Albeit incredibly poorly compensated by rich-world standards—but that’s everything in rural west africa!)
By analogy with classic arguments like “sweatshops are good actually, because they are an important first step on the ladder of economic development, and they are often a better option for poor people than their realistic alternatives, like low-productivity agricultural work”, or the infamous Larry Summers controversy (no, not that one, the other one. no, the OTHER other one. no, not that one either...) about an IMF memo speculating about how it would be a win-win situation for developed countries to “export more pollution” to poorer nations, doing the economic transaction whereby I buy chocolate and it supports economic activity in west africa (an industry employing 40 million people, only 2 million of whom are child laborers) seems like it might be better than not doing it. So, the case for a personal boycott of chocolate seems weaker than a personal boycott of factory-farmed meat (where many of the workers are in the USA, which has much higher wages and much tighter / hotter labor markets).
“I am genuinely curious about what you consider to fall within the realm of morally permissible personal actions.”
This probably won’t be a very helpful response, but for what it’s worth:
I don’t think the language of moral obligations and permissibility and rules (what people call “deontology”) is a very good way to think about these issues of diffuse, collective, indirect harms like factory farming or labor exploitation.
As you are experiencing, deontology doesn’t offer much guidance on where to draw the line when it comes to increasingly minor, indirect, or incidental harms.
It’s also not clear what to do when there are conflicting effects at play—if an action is good for some reasons but also bad for other reasons.
Deontology doesn’t feel very scope-sensitive—it just says something like “don’t eat chocolate if child labor is involved!!” and nevermind if the industry is 100% child labor or 0.01% child labor. This kind of thinking seems to have a tendency to do the “copenhagen theory of ethics” thing where you just pile on more and more rules in an attempt to avoid being entangled with bad things, when instead it should be more concerned with identifying the most important bad things and figuring out how to spend extra energy addressing those, even while letting some more minor goals slide.
I think utilitarianism / consequentialism is a better way to think about diffuse, indirect harms, because it’s more scope-sensitive and it seems to allow for more grey areas and nuance. (Deontology just says that you must do some things and mustn’t do other forbidden things, and is neutral on everything else. But consequentialism rates actions on a spectrum from super-great to super-evil, with lots of medium shades in-between.) It’s also better at balancing conflicting effects—just add them all up!
Of course, trying to live ordinary daily life according to 100% utilitarian thinking and ethics feels just as crazy as trying to live life according to 100% deontological thinking. Virtue ethics often seems like a better guide to the majority of normal daily-life decisionmaking: try to behave honorably, try to be be caring and prudent and et cetera, doing your best to cultivate and apply whatever virtues seem most relevant to the situation at hand.
Personally, although I philosophically identify as a pretty consequentialist EA, in real life I (and, I think, many people) rely on kind of a mushy combination of ethical frameworks, trying to apply each framework to the area where it’s strongest.
As I see it, that’s virtue ethics for most of ordinary life—my social interactions, how I try to motivate myself to work and stay healthy, what kind of person I aim to be.
And I try to use consequentialist / utilitarian thinking to figure out “what are some of the MOST impactful things I could be doing, to do the MOST good in the world”. I don’t devote 100% of my efforts to doing this stuff (I am pretty selfish and lazy, like to have plenty of time to play videogames, etc), but I figure if I spend even a smallish fraction of my time (like 20%) aimed at doing whatever I think is the most morally-good thing I could possibly do, then I will accomplish a lot of good while sacrificing only a little. (In practice, the main way this has played out in my actual life is that I left my career in aerospace engineering in favor of nowadays doing a bunch of part-time contracting to help various EA organizations with writing projects, recruiting, and other random stuff. I work a lot less hard in EA than I did as an aerospace engineer—like I said, I’m pretty lazy, plus I now have a toddler to take care of.)
I view deontological thinking as most powerful as a coordination mechanism for society to enforce standards of moral behavior. So instead of constantly dreaming up new personal moral rules for myself (although like everybody I have a few idiosyncratic personal rules that I try to stick to), I try to uphold the standards of moral behavior that are broadly shared by my society. This means stuff like not breaking the law (except for weird situations where the law is clearly unjust), but also more unspoken-moral-obligation stuff like supporting family members, plus a bunch of kantian-logic stuff like respecting norms, not littering, etc (ie, if it would be bad if everyone did X, then I shouldn’t do X).
But when it comes to pushing for new moral norms (like many of the proposed boycott ideas) rather than respecting existing moral norms, I’m less enthusiastic. I do often try to be helpful towards these efforts on the margin, since “marginal charity” is cheap. (At least I do this when the new norm seems actually-good, and isn’t crazy virtue-signaling spirals like for example the paper-straws thing, or counterproductive in other ways like just sapping attention from more important endeavors or distracting from the real cause of a problem.) But it usually doesn’t seem “morally obligatory” (ie, in my view of how to use deontology, “very important for preserving the moral fabric of society and societal trust”) to go to great lengths to push super-hard for the proposed new norms. Nor does it usually seem like the most important thing I could be doing. So beyond a token, marginal level of support for new norms that seem nice, I usually choose to focus my “deliberately trying to be a good person” effort on trying to do whatever is the most important thing I could be doing!
Thoughts on Longtermism
I think your final paragraph is mixing up two things that are actually separate:
1. “I’m not denying [that x-risks are important] but these seem like issues far beyond the influence of any individual person. They are mainly the domain of governments, policymakers… [not] individual actions.”
2. “By contrast, donating to save kids from malaria or starvation has clear, measurable, immediate effects on saving lives.”
I agree with your second point that sadly, longtermism lacks clear, measurable, immediate effects. Even if you worked very hard and got very lucky and accomplished something that /seems/ like it should be obviously great from a longtermist perspective (like, say, establishing stronger “red phone”-style nuclear hotline links between the US and Chinese governments), there’s still a lot of uncertainty about whether this thing you did (which maybe is great “in expectation”) will actually end up being useful (maybe the US and China never get close to fighting a nuclear war, nobody ever uses the hotline, so all the effort was for naught)! Even in situations where we can say in retrospect that various actions were clearly very helpful, it’s hard to say exactly HOW helpful. Everything feels much more mushy and inexact.
Longtermists do have some attempted comebacks to this philosophical objection, mostly along the lines of “well, your near-term charity, and indeed all your actions, also affect the far future in unpredictable ways, and the far future seems really important, so you can’t really escape thinking about it”. But also, on a much more practical level, I’m very sympathetic to your concern that it’s much harder to figure out where to actually donate money to make AI safety go well than to improve the lives of people living in poor countries or help animals or whatever else—the hoped-for paths to impact in AI are so much more abstract and complicated, one would have to do a lot more work to understand them well, and even after doing all that work you might STILL not feel very confident that you’ve made a good decision. This very situation is probably the reason why I myself (even though I know a ton about some of these areas!!) haven’t made more donations to longtermist cause areas.
But I disagree with your first point, that it’s beyond the power of individuals to influence x-risks or do other things to make the long-term future go well, rather it’s up to governments. And I’m not just talking about individual crazy stories like that one time when Stanislav Petrov might possibly have saved the world from nuclear war. I think ordinary people can contribute in a variety of reasonably accessible ways:
I think it’s useful just to talk more widely about some of the neglected, weird areas that EA works on—stuff like the risk of power concentration from AI, the idea of “gradual disempowerment” over time, topics like wild animal suffering, the potential for stuff like prediction markets and reforms like approval voting to improve the decisionmaking of our political institutions, et cetera. I personally think this stuff is interesting and cool, but I also think it’s societally beneficial to spread the word about it. Bentham’s Bulldog is, I think, an inspiring recent example of somebody just posting on the internet as a path to having a big impact, by effectively raising awareness of a ton of weird EA ideas.
If you’re just like “man, this x-risk stuff is so fricking confusing and disorienting, but it does seem like in general the EA community has been making an outsized positive contribution to the world’s preparedness for x-risks”, then there are ways to support the EA community broadly (or other similar groups that you think are doing good) -- either through donations, or potentially through, like, hosting a local EA meetups, or (as I do) trying to make a career out of helping random EA orgs with work they need to get done.
Some potential EA cause areas are niche enough that it’s possible to contribute real intellectual progress by, again, just kinda learning more about a topic where you maybe bring some special expertise or unique perspective to an area, and posting your own thoughts / research on a topic. Your own post (even though I disagree with it) is a good example of this, as are so many of the posts on the Forum! Another example that I know well is the “EcoResilience Initiative”, a little volunteer part-time research project / hobby run by my wife @Tandena Wagner—she’s just out there trying to figure out what it means to apply EA-style principles (like prioritizing causes by importance, neglectedness, and tractability) to traditional environmental-conservation goals like avoiding species extinctions. Almost nobody else is doing this, so she has been able to produce some unique, reasonably interesting analysis just by sort of… sitting down and trying to think things through!
Now, you might reasonably object: “Sure, those things sound like they could be helpful as opposed to harmful, but what happened to the focus on helping the MOST you possibly can! If you are so eager to criticize the idea of giving up chocolate in favor of the hugely more-effective tactic of just donating some money to givewell top charities, then why don’t you also give up this speculative longtermist blogging and instead try to earn more money to donate to GiveWell?!” This is totally fair and sympathetic. In response I would say:
Personally I am indeed convinced by the (admittedly weird and somewhat “fanatical”) argument that humanity’s long-term future is potentially very, very important, so even a small uncertain effect on high-leverage longtermist topics might be worth a lot more than it seems.
I also have some personal confidence that some of the random, very-indirect-path-to-impact stuff that I get up to, is indeed having some positive effects on people and isn’t just disappearing into the void. But it’s hard to communicate what gives me that confidence, because the positive effects are kind of illegible and diffuse rather than easily objectively measurable.
I also happen to be in a life situation where I have a pretty good personal fit for engaging a lot with longtermism—I happen to find the ideas really fascinating, have enough flexibility that I can afford to do weird part-time remote work for EA organizations instead of remaining in a normal job like my former aerospace career, et cetera. I certainly would not advise any random person on the street to quit their job and try to start an AI Safety substack or something!!
I do think it’s good (at least for my own sanity) to stay at least a little grounded and make some donations to more straightforward neartermist stuff, rather than just spending all my time and effort on abstract longtermist ideas, even if I think the longtermist stuff is probably way better.
Overall, rather than the strong and precise claim that “you should definitely do longtermism, it’s 10,000x more important than anything else”, I’d rather make the weaker, broader claims that “you shouldn’t just dismiss longtermism out of hand; there is plausibly some very good stuff here” and that “regardless of what you think of longermism, I think you should definitely try to adopt more of an EA-style mindset in terms of being scope-sensitive and seeking out what problems seem most important/tractable/neglected, rather than seeing things too much through a framework of moral obligations and personal sacrifice, or being unduly influenced by whatever controversies or moral outrages are popular / getting the most news coverage / etc.”
That’s an interesting way to think about it! Unfortunately this is where the limits of my knowledge about the animal-welfare side of EA kick in, but you could probably find more info about these progest campaigns by searching some animal-welfare-related tags here on the Forum, or going to the sites of groups like Animal Ask or Hive that do ongoing work coordinating the field of animal activists, or by finding articles / podcast interviews with Lewis Bollard, who is the head grantmaker for this stuff at Open Philanthropy / Coefficient Giving, and has been thinking about the strategy of cage-free campaigns and related efforts for a very long time.
I’m not an expert about this, but my impression (from articles like this: https://coefficientgiving.org/research/why-are-the-us-corporate-cage-free-campaigns-succeeding/ , and websites like Animal Ask) is that the standard EA-style corporate campaign involves:
a relatively small number of organized activists (maybe, like, 10 − 100, not tens of thousands)...
...asking a corporation to commit to some relatively cheap, achievable set of reforms (like switching their chickens to larger cages or going cage-free, not like “you should all quit killing chickens and start a new company devoted to ecological restoration”)
...while also credibly threatening to launch a campaign of protests if the corporation refuses
Then rinse & repeat for additional corporations / additional incremental reforms (while also keeping an eye out to make sure that earlier promises actually get implemented).
My impression is that this works because the corporations decide that it’s less costly for them to implement the specific, limited, welfare-enhancing “ask” than to endure the reputational damage caused by a big public protest campaign. The efficacy doesn’t depend at all on a threat of boycott by the activists themselves. (After all, the activists are probably already 100% vegan, lol...)
You might reasonably say “okay, makes sense, but isn’t this just a clever way for a small group of activists to LEVERAGE the power of boycotts? the only reason the corporation is afraid of the threatened protest campaign is because they’re worried consumers will stop buying their products, right? so ultimately the activists’ power is deriving from the power of the mass public to make individual personal-consumption decisions”.
This might be sorta true, but I think there are some nuances:
i don’t think the theory of change is that activists would protest and this would kick off a large formal boycott—most people don’t ever participate in boycotts, etc. instead, I think the idea is that protests will create a vague haze of bad vibes and negative associations with a product (ie the protests will essentially be “negative advertisements”), which might push people away from buying even if they’re not self-consciously boycotting. (imagine you usually go to chipotle, but yesterday you saw a news story about protestors holding pictures of gross sad caged farmed chickens used by chipotle—yuck! this might tilt you towards going to a nearby mcdonalds or panda express instead that day, even though ethically it might make no sense if those companies use equally low-welfare factory-farmed chicken)
corporations apparently often seem much more afraid of negative PR than it seems they rationally ought to be based on how much their sales would realistically decline (ie, not much) as a result of some small protests. this suggests that much of the power of protests is flowing through additional channels that aren’t just the immediate impact on product sales
even if in a certain sense the cage-free activists’ strategy relies on something like a consumer boycott (but less formal than a literal boycott, more like “negative advertising”), that still indicates that it’s wise to pursue the leveraged activist strategy rather than the weaker strategy of just trying to be a good individual consumer and doing a ton of personal boycotts
in particular, a key part of the activists’ power comes from their ability to single out a random corporation and focus their energies on it for a limited period of time until the company agrees to the ask. this is the opposite of the OP’s diffuse strategy of boycotting everything a little bit (they’re just one individual) all the time
it’s also powerful that the activists can threaten big action versus no-action over one specific decision the corporation can make, thus creating maximum pressure on that decision. Contrast OP—if Nestle cleaned up their act in one or two areas, OP would probably still be boycotting them until they also cleaned up their act in some unspecified additional number of areas.
We’ve been talking about animal welfare, which, as some other commenters have notes, has a particularly direct connection to personal consumption, so the idea of something like a boycott at least kinda makes sense, and maybe activists’ power is ultimately in part derived from boycott-like mechanisms. But there are many political issues where the connection to consumer behavior is much more tenuous and indirect. Suppose you wanted to reduce healthcare costs in the USA—would it make sense to try and get people to boycott certain medical procedures (but people mostly get surgeries when they need them, not just on a whim) or insurers (but for most people this comes as a fixed part of their job’s benefits package)?? Similarly, if you’re a YIMBY trying to get more homes built, who do you boycott? The problem is really a policy issue of overly-restrictive zoning rules and laws like NEPA, not something you could hope to target by changing your individual consumption patterns. This YIMBY example might seem like a joke, but OP was seriously suggesting boycotting Nestle over the issue of California water shortages, which, like NIMBYism, is really mostly a policy failure caused by weird farm-bill subsidies and messed-up water-rights laws that incentivize water waste—how is pressure on Nestle, a european company, supposed to fix California’s busted agricultural laws?? Similarly, they mention boycotting coca-cola soda because coca-cola does business in israel. How is reduced sales for the coca-cola company supposed to change the decisions of Bibi Netanyahu and his ministers?? One might as well refuse to buy Lenovo laptops or Huawei phones in an attempt to pressure Xi Jinping to stop China’s ongoing nuclear-weapons buildup… surely there are more direct paths to impact here!
I’ll admit to a perhaps overly mean-spirited or exasperated tone in that section, but I think the content itself is good actually(tm)?
I agree with you that LLM tech might not scale to AGI, and thus AGI might not arrive as soon as many hope/fear. But this doesn’t really change the underlying concern?? It seems pretty plausible that, if not in five years, we might get something like AGI within our lifetime via some improved, post-LLM paradigm. (Consider the literal trillions of dollars, and thousands of brilliant researchers, now devoting their utmost efforts towards this goal!) If this happens, it does not take some kind of galaxy-brained rube-goldberg argument to make an observation like “if we invent a technology that can replace a lot of human labor, that might lead to extreme power concentration of whoever controls the technology / disempowerment of many people who currently work for a living”, either via “stable-totalitarianism” style takeovers (people with power use powerful AI to maintain and grow this power very effectively) or via “gradual disempowerment” style concerns (once society no longer depends on a broad base of productive, laboring citizens, there is less incentive to respect those citizens’ rights and interests).
Misalignment / AI takeover scenarios are indeed more complicated and rube-goldberg-y IMO. But the situation here is very different from what it was ten years ago—instead of just doing Yudkowsky-style theorycrafting based on abstract philosophical principles, we can do experiments to study and demonstrate the types of misalignment we’re worried about (see papers by Anthropic and others about sleeper agents, alignment faking, chain-of-thought unfaithfulness, emergent misalignment, and more). IMO the detailed science being done here is more grounded than the impression you’d get by just reading people slinging takes on twitter (or, indeed, by reading comments like mine here!). Of course if real AGI turns out to be in a totally new post-LLM paradigm, that might invalidate many of the most concrete safety techniques we’ve developed so far—but IMO that makes the situation worse, not better!
In general, the whole concept of dealing with existential risks is that the stakes are so high that we should start thinking ahead and preparing to fight them, even if it’s not yet certain they’ll occur. I agree it’s not certain that LLMs will scale to AGI, or that humanity will ever invent AGI. But it certainly seems plausible! (Many experts do believe this, even if they are in the minority on that survey. Plus, like the entire US stock market these days is basically obsessed with figuring out whether AI will turn out to be a huge deal or a nothingburger or something in-between, so the market doesn’t consider it an obvious guaranteed-nothingburger. And of course all the labs are racing to get as close to AGI as fast as possible, since the closer you get to AGI, the more money you can make by automating more and more types of labor!) So we should probably start worrying now, just like we worry about nuclear war even though it seems hopefully unlikely to me that Putin or Xi Jinping or the USA would really decide to launch a major nuclear attack even in an extreme situation like an invasion of Taiwan. New technologies sometimes have risks; AI might (not certain, but definitely might) become and EXTREMELY powerful new technology, so the risks might be large!
EA is about more than just “a commitment to measurable impact”—it’s also about trying to find the most /effective/ ways to help others, which means investigating (and often doing back-of-the-envelope “importance, neglectedness, tractability” estimates) to prioritize the most important causes.
Take your Nestle example: although they make a convenient big corporate villain, so they often get brought up in debates about drought in California and elsewhere, they aren’t actually a big contributor to the problem of drought since their water consumption is such a miniscule fraction of the state’s total water use. Rather than getting everyone to pressure Nestle, it would be much more effective for individuals to spend their time lobbying for slightly changing the rules around how states like California regulate and price water, or lobbying for the federal government to remove wasteful farm subsidies that encourage water waste on a much larger scale.
See here for more on this issue: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/
Some EAs might also add that the overall problem of water scarcity in California, or the problem of misleading baby formula ads (note the science is actually not clear on whether breastmilk is any better than formula; they seems about the same for babies’ health! https://parentdata.org/what-the-data-actually-says-about-breastfeeding/ ) , or the problem that Coca Cola does business in Israel (doesn’t it do business basically everywhere??), are simply less severe than the problem of animal suffering. Although of course this depends on one’s values.
Some other considerations about boycotts:
Many already consider veganism to be a pretty extreme constraint on one’s diet that makes it harder to maintain a diet of tasty, affordable, easy-to-cook, nutritious food. Add in “also no avocados, and nothing made by Nestle or Coca Cola, and nothing from this other long list of BDS companies, and also...”, and this no longer sounds like an easy, costless way to make things a little better! (Indeed, it starts to look more like a costly signal of ideological purity.) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Wiz4eKi5fsomRsMbx/change-my-mind-veganism-entails-trade-offs-and-health-is-one
Within the field of animal welfare, EA has actually pioneered the strategy of DOWNPLAYING the importance of veganism and other personal choices, in favor of a stronger emphasis on corporate pressure campaigns to get companies to adopt incrementally better standards for their animals. This has turned out to be an extremely successful tactic (billions of chickens’ lives improved over just a few years, meanwhile after decades of vegan activism the percentage of vegans/vegetarians in the USA remains about the same low number it’s always been). This lesson would seem to indicate that pushing for mass personal change (eg, to reduce climate emissions by boycotting flights) is perhaps generally less effective than other approaches (like funding scientific research into greener jet fuel, or lobbying for greater public investment in high-speed rail infrastructure).
TBH, the way a lot of advocates talk about consumer boycotts makes me think they believe in the (satirical) “copenhagen interpretation of ethics”, the theory that if you get involved in anything bad in any way, however tangiential (like drinking a soda made by the same company who also sells sodas to israelis, who live in a country that is oppressing the people of the west bank and gaza), that means you’re “entangled” with the bad thing so it’s kinda now your fault, so it’s important to stay pure and unentangled so nobody can blame you. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QXpxioWSQcNuNnNTy/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics I admit that following the Copenhagen Interpretation of ethics is a great way to avoid anyone ever blaming you for being complicit in something bad. But EA is about more than just avoiding blame—it’s about trying to help others the most with the resources we have available. That often means taking big actions to create goodness in the world, rather than having the “life goals of dead people” and simply trying to minimize our entanglement with bad things: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/the-life-goals-of-dead-people
The EA community is pretty small. Even if all 10,000 of us stopped eating Nestle products, that wouldn’t be a very large impact, and it would draw attention away from worthier pursuits, like trying to incubate charities directly serving people in the poorest nations, instead of worrying that maybe a few cents of the five dollars I paid for avocado toast at a restaurant might work its way into the hands of a mexican cartel.
Fun fact: it’s actually this same focus on finding causes that are important (potentially large in scale), neglected (not many other people are focused on them) and tractable, that has also led EA to take some “sci-fi doomsday scenarios” like wars between nuclear powers, pandemics, and AI risk, seriously. Consider looking into it sometime—you might be surprised how plausible and deeply-researched these wacky, laughable, uncool, cringe, “obviously sci-fi” worries really are! (Like that countries might sometimes go to war with each other, or that it might be dangerous to have university labs experimenting with creating deadlier versions of common viruses, or that powerful new technologies might sometimes have risks.)
I suspect that part of the theory of impact here might not run through any individual grant item (ie, liberalized zoning laws leading to economic growth through increased housing construction in some particular city), but rather through a variety of bigger-picture considerations that look something like:
The overall state / quality of US politics is extremely important, because the US is the most powerful country in the world, etc. Improving the state of US politics even a little (ie by making it more likely that smart, thoughtful people will be in power, make good decisions, implement successful reforms, etc) seems like an important point of leverage for many very important causes (consider USAID cuts, AI chip export controls to China, and foreign policy especially concerning great power relations, nuclear nonproliferation, preserving democracy and broad human influence over the future, continued global economic growth, etc).
Of course “fighting for influence over US politics” is gonna seem less appealing once you take into account the fact that it is in a certain sense the least-neglected possible cause, has all sorts of deranging / polarizing / etc side-effects, and so forth. But maybe, even considering all these things, influencing US politics still seems very worthwhile. (This seems plausible to me.)
Promoting the abundance movement seems like a decent idea for both improving the US Democratic party (in terms of focusing it on smarter, more impactful ideas) and perhaps making the Democrats more likely to win elections (which is great if you think Dems are better than the current Republican party), and maybe even improve the Republican party too (if the abundance agenda proves to be a political winner and the right is forced to compete by adopting similar policies). And, as a plus, promoting this pro-growth, liberal/libertarian agenda seems a little less polarizing that most other conceivable ways of engaging with US politics.
People have wondered for a long time if, in addition to direct work on x-risks, one should consider intermediate “existential risk-factors” like great power war. It seems plausible to me that “trying to make the United States more sane” is a pretty big factor in many valuable goals—global health & development, existential risk mitigation, flourishing long-term futures, and so forth.
Hating a big corporation is so much goddamn fun.
England chopped up Africa and trapped it in a cycle of conflict.
...companies like Amazon have sparked a global wave of consumerismEAs get a little obsessed with alignment when hiring.
Maybe we’re so big on hiring value-aligned media people because we don’t want our movement to get melded back into the morass of ordinary leftist activism!
I agree with some of your points on style / communication—hedging can really mess up the process of trying to write compelling content, and EA should probably be more willing to be controversial and combative and identify villains of various sorts. But I think the subtext that we should specifically do this by leaning more in a standard-left-wing-activism direction risks worsening the crisis of lameness, rather than fixing it.
As other commenters have mentioned, I’d be worried about losing some of the things that make EA special (for example, suffering the same kind of epistemic decay that plagues a lot of activist movements).
But I’m also a little skeptical that, even if EA was fine with (or could somehow avoid) taking the epistemic hit of building a mass movement in this way, the aesthetics of billionaire-bashing and protest-attending and etc are really as intrinsically “sexy” to smart, ambitious young people as you make them out to be. I’d worry we’d create a vibe that ends up artificially self-limiting the audience we can reach. (I’m thinking about how a lot of left wing activism—abolish the police, extinction rebellion climate stuff, gaza protests, etc—often tends to create counterproductive levels of polarization, seemingly for polarization’s own sake, in a way that seems to just keep re-activating the same left-leaning folks, but not accomplishing nearly as much broad societal persuasion as would seem to be possible.)
(re: “EA should probably be more willing to be controversial and combative and identify villains”, my preferred take is that EA should be willing to be more weird in public, to talk seriously about things that seem sci-fi (like takeover by superintelligence) or morally bizarre (like shrimp welfare) or both (like possible utopian / transhumanist futures for humanity), thus attracting attention by further distinguishing itself from both left-wing and right-wing framings, thus offering something new and strange but also authentic and evidence-backed to people who have a truth-seeking mindset and who are tired of mainstream ideological culture-wars. Politically, I expect this would feel kind of like a “radical-centrist” vibe, or maybe like a kind of fresh alternate style of left-liberalism more like the historical Progressive Era, or something. Anyways, of course it takes plenty of media skill to talk about super-weird stuff well! And this vision of mine also has lots of drawbacks—who knows, maybe I have rose-tinted glasses and it would actually crash and burn even harder than a more standard lefty-activism angle. But it’s what I would try.)
Linking my own thoughts as part of previous discussion “How confident are you that it’s preferable for America to develop AGI before China does?”. I generally agree with your take.
This is a nice story, but it doesn’t feel realistic to treat the city of the future as such an all-or-nothing affair. Wouldn’t there be many individual components (like the merchant’s initial medical tonic) that could be stand-alone technologies, diffusing throughout the world and smoothly raising standards of living in the usual way? In this sense, even your “optimistic” story seems too pessimistic about the wide-ranging, large-scale impact of the scholar’s advice.
The world of the story would still develop quite differently than in real history, since they’re:
getting technologies much faster than in real history
getting technologies without understanding as much of the theory behind them. (although is this really true? I feel like, if we had access to such a scholar, it might be easiest for the scholar to tell us about fundamental theories of nature, rather than laboriously transcribing the design for each and every inscrutable device. so it’s possible that an oracle would actually differentially advance our theoretical understanding—consider how useful an oracle would be in the field of modern pharma development, where we have many effective drugs whose exact mechanisms of action are still unknown!)
This and other effects (like the obvious power-concentration aspect of whoever controls access to the oracle’s insights) would probably produce a very lopsided-seeming world compared to actual modernity. But I don’t think it would end up looking like either of the two endings to your story.
(Of course, your more poetic endings fit the form of a traditional fable much better. “And then the city kicked off an accelerating techno-industrial singularity” doesn’t really fit the classic repertoire of tragedy, comedy, etc!)
100km across would be a pretty large comet; how much warning would humanity likely get that the comet is incoming?
Sorry about that! I think I just intended to link to the same place I did for my earlier use of the phrase “AI-enabled coups”, namely this Forethought report by Tom Davidson and pals, subtitled “How a Small Group Could Use AI to Seize Power”: https://www.forethought.org/research/ai-enabled-coups-how-a-small-group-could-use-ai-to-seize-power
But also relevant to the subject is this Astral Codex Ten post about who should control an LLM’s “spec”: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/deliberative-alignment-and-the-spec
The “AI 2027″ scenario is pretty aggressive on timelines, but also features a lot of detailed reasoning about potential power-struggles over control of transformative AI which feels relevant to thinking about coup scenarios. (Or classic AI takeover scenarios, for that matter. Or broader, coup-adjacent / non-coup-authoritarianism scenarios of the sort Thiel seems to be worried about, where instead of getting taken over unexpectedly by China, Trump, or etc, today’s dominant western liberal institutions themselves slowly become more rigid and controlling.)
For some of the shenanigans that real-world AI companies are pulling today, see the 80,000 Hours podcast on OpenAI’s clever ploys to do away with its non-profit structure, or Zvi Mowshowitz on xAI’s embarrassingly blunt, totally not-thought-through attempts to manipulate Grok’s behavior on various political issues (or a similar, earlier incident at Google).
People also talked about “astronomical waste” (per the nick bostrom paper) -- the idea that we should race to colonize the galaxy as quickly as possible because we’re losing literally a couple galaxies every second we delay. (But everyone seemed to agree that this wasn’t practical, racing to colonize the galaxy soonest would have all kinds of bad consequences that would cause the whole thing to backfire, etc)
People since long before EA existed have been concerned about environmentalist causes like preventing species extinctions, based on a kind of emotional proto-longtermist feeling that “extinction is forever” and it isn’t right that humanity, for its short-term benefit, should cause irreversible losses to the natural world. (Similar “extinction is forever” thinking applies to the way that genocide—essentially seeking the extinction of a cultural / religious / racial / etc group, is considered a uniquely terrible horror, worse than just killing an equal number of randomly-selected people.)
A lot of “improving institutional decisionmaking” style interventions make more and more sense as timelines get longer (since the improved institutions and better decisions have more time to snowball into better outcomes).