jackva

• jackva 9 Jul 2025 6:52 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: aderonke’s comment on: Flood­ing in La­gos: Cli­mate Change or Gover­nance Failure?

  Thanks for writing this! Have you considered sharing this with non-EA audiences?

• jackva 28 Jun 2025 10:33 UTC

  16 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Should EAs pay more at­ten­tion to Cli­mate Tip­ping Points? AMOC Col­lapse as a Case Study

  Thanks for this, would be happy to have a call about it!

  One question: how did you source materials for this? E.g. I notice that this does not include probably the most prominent paper skeptical of tipping point risks, so I am a bit worried that this is selecting on the studies that show most concern, rather than a balanced assessment of risk.

  In that sense, the tipping point literature to me appears like the nuclear winter literature—huge uncertainties, huge disagreements, and a big resultant risk from over- or understating the risk when wanting to make a case for either high or low risk.

• jackva 26 Jun 2025 17:46 UTC

  7 points

  1 ∶ 1

  on: Sum­mary of John Halstead’s Book-Length Re­port on Ex­is­ten­tial Risks From Cli­mate Change

  There’s obvious blaming to be done for some Democrats exaggerating the science of climate change rhetorically, but the intro here still strikes me as quite uncharitable.

  In common discourse “existential” is often used in a very loose fashion and hyperbole is par for the course in political rhetoric.

• jackva 26 Jun 2025 17:41 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Buy and Re­tire Pol­luters’ Rights to Emit CO2

  I don’t think you are discounting here for the cap not being effectively binding (in the RGGI example) and also, last time I looked into this in depth (I used to work on RGGI at ICAP, which you cite), it was not true that additionality would always be 1.

• jackva 19 May 2025 16:23 UTC

  7 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Tristan Katz’s comment on: The Daily Show did a seg­ment on EA and Shrimp Welfare Project

  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.

• jackva 28 Apr 2025 20:03 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Poll: Should peo­ple with more fo­rum karma have more pow­er­ful votes?

  Vote power should scale with karma

  What links here?

  • Will Aldred's comment on Will Al­dred’s Quick takes by Will Aldred (29 Apr 2025 6:40 UTC; 7 points)

• jackva 8 Apr 2025 20:03 UTC

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: Sie­beRozen­dal’s Shortform

  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?

• jackva 6 Apr 2025 10:34 UTC

  38 points

  16 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: Sie­beRozen­dal’s Shortform

  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.

  1. 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
  

• jackva 2 Apr 2025 20:22 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Big Banks Quietly Pre­pare for Catas­trophic Warming

  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.

• jackva 30 Mar 2025 13:03 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Matrice Jacobine’s comment on: Third-wave AI safety needs so­ciopoli­ti­cal thinking

  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.

• jackva 28 Mar 2025 23:08 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: US For­eign Aid Fund­ing Pause: A Frame­work for Giv­ing in Uncer­tain Times

  report link is wrong

• jackva 28 Mar 2025 19:09 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 3

  on: What’s the an­ti­dote to hy­per­na­tion­al­ism?

  This is a brave thing to publish in the current political climate and I am grateful you did!

• jackva 27 Mar 2025 18:51 UTC

  6 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: richard_ngo’s comment on: Third-wave AI safety needs so­ciopoli­ti­cal thinking

  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.

• jackva 27 Mar 2025 12:33 UTC

  25 points

  11 ∶ 1

  on: Third-wave AI safety needs so­ciopoli­ti­cal thinking

  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.

• jackva 23 Mar 2025 18:36 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Larks’s comment on: [Linkpost] Will the US ex­pe­rience a con­sti­tu­tional crisis be­fore 2030?

  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.

• jackva 23 Mar 2025 18:01 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: jackva’s Quick takes

  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.

• jackva 23 Mar 2025 14:31 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: [Linkpost] Will the US ex­pe­rience a con­sti­tu­tional crisis be­fore 2030?

  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?

• jackva 20 Mar 2025 9:49 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Patrick Gruban 🔸’s comment on: jackva’s Quick takes

  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.

• jackva 20 Mar 2025 9:21 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: OllieBase’s comment on: jackva’s Quick takes

  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.