Vote power should scale with karma
jackva
Karma: 3,953
I was mostly objecting to your statement of “seeing no sign of authoritarian takeover”, I do agree and mentioned in my comment that Siebe’s statement was possibly too definite.
But I don’t think it is hyperbolic to say that there are many signs of Trump’s authoritarianism and signs consistent with an attempted authoritarian takeover and that this is qualitatively different than what we have seen from any other President in recent history, one has to go back to at least Nixon to get things in the same ballpark (and Nixon was arguably a lot more constrained by his own party than Trump is right now).
The examples you are citing “Presidents doing things that should be done through Congress” are not examples of authoritarian behavior and pretending that what Trump is doing is part of the regular testing of executive authority is also quite misleading.
Which other recent Administration was headed by someone denying a legitimate election result? Which other recent Administration had a VP flirting with the idea of not honoring Supreme Court rulings? Which other recent Administration was systematically invested in fighting against civil society institutions and law firms? Which other Administration has had so many people warning about authoritarian tendencies, both from their own party and from key senior staff from their own first administration?
The forum likes to catastrophize Trump but I need to point out a few things for the sake of accuracy since this is very misleading and highly upvoted.
The current administration has done many things that I find horrible, but I don’t see any evidence of an authoritarian takeover. Being hyperbolic isn’t helpful.
I think this statement is highly misleading. First, I think compared to most other fora and groups, this Forum is decidedly not catastrophizing Trump.
Second, if you don’t see “any evidence of an authoritarian takeover” then you are clearly not paying very much attention.
I think there is a fair debate to be had about how seriously to take various signs of authoritarianism on the part of the Administration, but “seeing no evidence of it” is not really consistent with the signals one does readily find when paying attention, such as:
- an attack on the independence of the judiciary and law firms, complaining about the fact that courts exercise their legitimate powers
- flirting with the idea of being in defiance of court orders
- talking about a third term
- praising Putin, Orban, and other authoritarians
- undermining due process
Interesting framing, but essentially the banks are just saying what has been clear for many years now—the thing that has changed is that the political context now makes it easy and advantageous to say it while this was different before.
This seems right.
What happens right now is Silicon Valley becoming extremely polarizing, with those voices in the Democratic coalition having the most reach campaigning strongly on an anti-Musk platform.
report link is wrong
This is a brave thing to publish in the current political climate and I am grateful you did!
I think we are misunderstanding each other a bit.
I am in no way trying to imply that you shouldn’t be mad about environmentalism’s failings—in fact, I am mad about them on a daily basis. I think if being mad about environmentalism’s failing is the main point than what Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are currently doing with Abundance is a good example of communicating many of your criticisms in a way optimized to land with those that need to hear it.
My point was merely that by framing the example in such extreme terms it will lose a lot of people despite being only very tangentially related to the main points you are trying to make. Maybe that’s okay, but it didn’t seem like your goal overall to make a point about environmentalism, so losing people on an example that is stated in such an extreme fashion did not seem worth it to me.
I find it pretty difficult to see how to get broad engagement on this when being so obviously polemical / unbalanced in the examples.
As someone who is publicly quite critical of mainstream environmentalism, I still find the description here so extreme that it is hard to take seriously as more than a deeply partisan talking point.
The “Environmental Protection Act” doesn’t exist, do you mean the “National Environmental Policy Act” (NEPA)?
Neither is it true that environmentalists are single-handedly responsible for nuclear declining and clearly modern environmentalism has done a huge amount of good by reducing water and air pollution.
I think your basic point—that environmentalism had a lot more negative effects than commonly realized and that we should expect similar degrees of unintended negative effects for other issues—is probably true (I certainly believe it).
But this point can be made with nuance and attention to detail that makes it something that people with different ideological priors can read and engage with constructively. I think the current framing comes across as “owning the libs” or “owning the enviros” in a way that makes it very difficult for those arguments to get uptake anywhere that is not quite right-coded.
It would be great if there was a better prediction market version of this question, unfortunately others I found are even worse.
Yet, I don’t think it’s worth dismissing entirely.
If criteria are stricter now, this should mean that an increase in the probability between November and today is underestimated by this question.
Thanks for clarifying this!
I think ultimately we seem to have quite different intuitions on the trade-offs, but that seems unresolvable. Most of my intuitions there come from advising non-EA HNWs (and from spending time around advisors specialized in advising these), so this is quite different from mostly advising EAs.
Have Wikipedia policies changed recently, though? The key thing here is the time trend so unless Wikipedia policies have changed, it seems reasonable to interpret the change over time as reflecting the underlying substantive interest.
Clearly one needs some media source to define resolution criteria for a question like this.
[Linkpost] Will the US experience a constitutional crisis before 2030?
Thanks for laying out your view in such detail, Patrick!
I find it hard to grasp how the EA Forum can be so narrow—given there are no Fora / equivalents for the other brands you mention.
E.g. I still expect the EA Forum is widely perceived as the main place where community discussion happens beyond the narrow mandate you outline so which attentional priorities will be set here will be seen as a broader reflection of the movement than what I think you intend.
I think that’s fine—we just have different views on what a desirable size of the potential size of the movement would be.
To clarify—my point is not so much that this discussion is outside the Overton Window, but that it is deeply inside-looking / insular. It was good to be early on AI risk and shrimp welfare and all of the other things we have been early on as a community, but I do think these issues have a higher tractability in mobilizing larger movements / having an impact outside our community than this debate week has.
This comment really makes me appreciate the nuanced way to give feedback with disagree and karma—I think it is quite useful to incentivize critical feedback that the two can be, and are, distinguished.
Thanks for engaging and for giving me the chance to outline more clearly and with more nuance what my take is.
I covered some of this in my reply to Ollie, but basically (a) I do think that Forum weeks are significant attentional devices signaling what we see as priorities, (b) the Forum has appeared in detail in many EA-critical pieces and (c) there are many Forum weeks we could be running right now that would be much better both from a point of action guiding and perception in the wider world.
I take as given—I am not the right person to evaluate this—that there are some interventions that some EA funders might decide along those considerations.
But I am pretty confident it won’t matter to the wider philanthropic world, almost no one is thinking about philanthropic interventions saying “does this make a world better where we survive v does this mostly affect probability of extinction?”
If EA were ascendant and we’d be a significant share of philanthropy maybe that’d be a good question to ask.
But in a world where our key longtermist priorities are not well funded and where most of the things we can be doing to broadly reduce risks are not clearly alignable to either side of the crux here, I think making this a key attentional priority seems to have, at least, significant opportunity cost.
EDIT: I am mostly trying to give a consistent and clearly articulated perspective here, I am surely overlooking things and you have information on this that I do not have. I hope this is useful to you, but I don’t want to imply I am able to have an all-things-considered view.
This is not what I am saying, my point is about attentional highlighting.
I am all for discussing everything on the Forum, but I do think when we set attentional priorities—as those weeks do—we could reflect whether we are targeting things that are high value to be discussed and how they land with and how they affect the broader world could be a consideration here.
I think messaging to the broader world that we focus our attention on a question that will only have effects for the small set of funders that are hardcore EA-aligned makes ourselves small.
By crude analogy it’s like having a whole Forum week on welfare weights at the opportunity cost of a week focused on how to improve animal funding generally.
We could have discussion weeks right now on key EA priorities in the news, from the future of effective development aid, to great power war and nuclear risk, to how to manage AI risk under new political realities, that all would seem to affect a much larger set of resourcing and, crucially, also signal to the wider world that we are a community engaging on some of the most salient issues of the day.
I think setting a debate week on a topic that has essentially no chance of affecting non-EA funders is a lost opportunity and I don’t think it would come out on top as a topic in a prioritization of debate weeks topic in the spirit of “how can we do the most good?”
On a more personal level, but I think this is useful to report here, because I don’t think I am the only one with this reaction: I’ve been part of this community for a decade and have built my professional life around it—and I do find it quite alienating that, at a time where we are close to a constitutional crisis in the US, where USAID is in shambles and where the post WW2-order is in question, we aee not highlighting how to take better action in those circumstances but instead discussing a cause prioritization question that seems very unlikely to affect major funding. It feeds the critique of EA that I’ve previously seen as bad faith—that we are too much armchair philosophers.
It could easily happen that based on this video several millions are raised, just based on increasing salience and the framing being largely positive and this resonating with a couple of donors with significant capital.