Jason Brennan

Karma: 312

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 2:46 PM
5 points
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
I realized after reading this question that most of the reforms I work on save dollars rather than cost them: Eliminate cash bail, eliminate career prosecutors and instead have prosecutors and public defenders be the same people from the same office, eliminate SWAT teams in most towns and federal distribution of military equipment to the police, open borders, require the FDA to auto-approve any drug approved in certain other countries, etc. Most of these things are free.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 2:44 PM
7 points
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in reply to: Dan Hooley’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
I’d like to try enlightened preference voting in Denmark or New Hampshire.

How it works:
1. Everyone votes for their preferred thing (whatever is being voted on).
2. Everyone somehow registers their demographic data.
3. Everyone takes a 30-question quiz on basic political information.

With 1-3, we then estimate what a demographically identical public would have voted for if it had gotten a perfect score on the quiz. We do that instead of what the majority/plurality actually voted for.
There are lots of details here I’m not getting into, but that’s what I’d want to try. No one’s done it to actually decide policy, but researchers have been doing this in labs for a long time with good results.
What links here?
- Nathan Helm-Burger's comment on Ideal governance (for companies, countries and more) by HoldenKarnofsky (LessWrong; Apr 20, 2022, 9:35 PM; 1 point)

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 2:42 PM
7 points
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
If voting is serious business, we need to treat it as such.

Right before the US 2020 election, Gelman argues that PA voters have a 1 in 8.8 million chance of breaking a tie. TX was 1 in 100 million. DC 1 in 240 trillion.

Showing some votes have high expected utility means showing those same votes can have high expected disutility.

It’s weird that Wilbin and MacAskill will be like, “Hey, careful! Before you donate $50, make sure you are doing good rather than wasting the money or worse, harming people. We are beset by biases that make us donate badly and we need to be careful.” But then when it comes to voting, they often advise people to just vote, or to guesstimate effects, when in fact the empirical work shows that are much more biased and terrible at judging politics than almost anything else.

Most people do not know enough to vote well, and voting well is hard. Believing it is easy is itself evidence of bias—that’s what the political psych shows. (Partisans downplay difficulty and think they are obviously right.) So if some people’s votes matter, rather than advising them to vote, period, we should advise them to be good EAs and be very careful about their votes.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 2:38 PM
5 points
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
I’d say in general political philosophy suffers from the fact that most political philosophers know little about political science, sociology, or economics. They think they can reason about the justice of institutions without knowing how these institutions work or why they exist. In principle, they could, but in practice, this just means that they sneak in mistaken empirical assumptions.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 2:35 PM
9 points
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
Economic growth is vital. Here’s why:

PPP-adjusted GDP/capita is about $16,000 right now. Imagine I waved a magic wand that magically redistributed all of this in the form of consumable income, with equal shares for all. That’d mean everyone on earth lives on $16,000 a year. Better than what we currently have for most people, but, still, a lot worse than what we see in, say, Appalachian USA.

But this is misleading because this isn’t even possible. Lots of that GDP is in the form of government or capital expenditures. We need some money not to be consumed but to be invested in public goods, capital, etc., so we can produce next year. Empirically, maybe only about half of that at most could in principle be consumed as income. So, perfect egalitarianism gets us to maybe $8000 per person right now. Still better than what many experience, but not real security or comfort.

Growth > equality when it comes to welfare for this reason. We need to make more pie so that everyone has enough; right now there is not enough pie for everyone to have a good slice, even if we gave everyone an equal slice.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 1:30 PM
8 points
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in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
Many EAs are smart neoliberals, but they don’t pay sufficient attention to government failure. They imagine running a bureaucracy the way they want, as if it were staffed by EAs, rather than staffed by regular people with regular foibles.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 1:29 PM
9 points
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in reply to: mhendric🔸’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
Consequentialist arguments favor liberalism because in practice, it works and other things don’t. Most of my arguments for institutions are consequentialist. Economic justifications are consequentialists.

I think consequentialists get stuck thinking liberalism fails because, sitting in an armchair, they can imagine giving unilateral power to someone to break by liberal rules and then imagine this results in more good. But in practice, that power rarely works as intended, and it gets captured by people who use it for bad ends or use it incompetently. So, I think consequentialism + robust political economy → liberalism.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 1:27 PM
11 points
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in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
EAs are bad at marketing to non-EAs.

Illustrative anecdote: A few years ago, I was in charge of our first year seminars at Georgetown. Every year, we pick a non-profit partner who gives the students a real problem that non-profit needs to have fixed. The students act as consultants to offer solutions in a case competition. The winners usually intern with the organization afterward to implement their ideas. I picked a major EA charity. They said, “We need to figure out how to raise money from more diverse sources other than EA people. Almost all of our money comes from EA utilitarians and libertarians. How can we appeal to more people without diluting our message or using non-evidence-based forms of marketing?” During their presentation, I asked them, “Look, if you are evidence-based, what about the strong evidence that evidence-based marketing doesn’t appeal to the majority of donors? If EA is about taking effective means to one’s ends, doesn’t that mean sometimes using non-EA arguments and forms of persuasion?”

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 1:23 PM
24 points
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
The public reason field seems to have all the makings of a degenerate research project. It’s a bunch of people debating fine points of definition and who clearly don’t believe in what they say. Take, for instance, Gerald Gaus. He theorized about diversity of thought because he hated it; he didn’t respect anyone other than those that agreed with him and did his philosophy his way. He wanted disciples. He was willing to sabotage his own department to make sure he got his way in hiring acolytes. Yet, oddly, public reason theorists who say they care about public justification never bother to learn what the public thinks or try to justify institutions and policies to them. In my view, Peter Singer cares much more about public justification than Rawls, Freeman, Gaus, Weithman, Benn, Quong, or Vallier. Singer provides public reasons to advocate his ideas; they don’t.

In general, political philosophy still seems to reward people for working on very abstract topics that don’t really matter. I’m not sure why. PPE-style philosophy and non-ideal theory is much harder and more cognitively demanding than definition-spinning and ideal theory, because you have to know more and have to deal with all the problems of human nature. Yet philosophy rewards the easier to do work over the harder stuff.

I wouldn’t worry about fixing philosophy. Just do good work and don’t worry about it. However, in general, I think there is way too much public investment in philosophy. Philosophy classes do not deliver the promised goods, so the money should be used elsewhere. If the field were cut in half and the money went to reducing the cost of college, that’d be a good start.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 1:17 PM
7 points
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
I work on stuff I think would be high impact if leaders acted on it: immigration liberalization, criminal justice reform, kidney and organ markets.

Jones is probably right but he’s not calling for much reform. He’s trying to get readers to not go more radically democratic than they already are.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 1:16 PM
25 points
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in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
It depends on the EA. I don’t know if there is a universal trend or generalized flaws. EAs seem so diverse that it’s hard to generalize.

Still, if I generalize based on what I’ve read and whom I’ve talked to, here’s what I see:

1. EAs sometimes forget political economy issues. When they offer a political policy that would work, they forget that it will likely be captured by others who don’t share their values, or that the people running it will possibly be incompetent. In general, for politics, I recommend imagining that your preferred policies will cost 3 times what you expect and deliver 1/3rd the goods. Look at how incompetent the US government is and then remember institutions like this will be in charge.

2. EAs sometimes forget that most other people are not rationalists and do not base their opinions on evidence. The EA message doesn’t sell not because their arguments are bad—their arguments are sound!--but but because good arguments do not persuade people.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 1:13 PM
9 points
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in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
These are great questions. I’ll need to look into this more and come back to you.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 1:12 PM
6 points
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
I don’t find arguments for common world ownership very persuasive. It’d take too long to go through all the arguments to explain why here, so I’ll just leave my general worry: Common world ownership means we all have a say on everyone else, and it tends to make the world somewhat zero sum. Every new person is an incursion on my ownership rights and dilutes my claims. I prefer institutional mechanisms that create positive sum games. I really Weyl agrees and thinks his proposal gets around this.

As for self-ownership, I think of course we own ourselves, but this doesn’t do much work philosophically. Here’s an excerpt from a paper I wrote with Bas van der Vossen:

Self-Ownership: Almost Uncontroversial
We own different things in different ways. The bundle of rights that constitutes ownership varies from thing owned to thing owned. The strength of these rights also varies. We can own a cat and a car, but our ownership of the cat—which is real ownership—doesn’t allow us to do as much with it as with our ownership of a car. The way we own cats is different from how we own cars, which is different from how we own a guitar, which is different from how we own a plot of land, and so on.
Morally-speaking, not just legally speaking, the kinds of rights we have over these various things varies. But we really can own each of them. If you prefer to say that ownership is “more extensive” when we have the full bundle of rights with no moral constraints on use, that’s fine. But even if there is more or less extensive ownership, it’s still ownership. Your cat is your cat. You are not allowed to torture it, neglect it, or have sex with it, but that’s not because the cat is partially society’s or anyone else’s. Nor is it because you don’t really own it.
Different kinds of moral arguments—such as Kantian deontological principles, or claims about what it takes to realize certain moral powers, or arguments from a privileged “original position”, or reflections on Strawsonian reactive attitudes, or sophisticated Millian consequentialism, or whatnot—lead us to believe that people have certain rights of exclusion and use over themselves, and possibly as well as some other rights over themselves. And once you see how these rights shape up, you notice that people’s rights over themselves amount to the bundle of rights—to exclude, to use, to modify, etc.—that just so happens to look like what we call “property rights”. It is in this sense, then, that we call people self-owners.
More precisely, we can think of self-ownership as being made up of two variables. On the one hand, self-ownership offers protections (in the form of Hohfeldian claim-rights) against unwanted incursions on one’s person. On the other hand, self-ownership offers the freedom (in the form of Hohfeldian liberties) to use one’s person. Since liberties logically entail the absence of duties (including duties correlating to claim-rights), it follows that the two variables (internal to the idea of self-ownership) can be traded off against each other.
The real question, then, is what mix of the two variables internal to the idea of self-ownership (the claim to exclude and the freedom to use) is morally most desirable. This should be obvious, of course. Bas is a self-owner with the freedom to use his person, but this does not license him in punching Jason in the face. Self-ownership is not best understood by completely maximizing on the freedom-variable, to the complete denial of the exclusion-variable. And, again pace Sobel, self-ownership is also not best understood by maximizing on the exclusion-variable, to the complete denial of the freedom-variable.^[i]
Every liberal thinks we each have strong rights to freely use our persons, and exclude others from them. Every liberal thinks that a woman has the right to say no to a demand for sex, on the grounds that it’s her body. In this sense, then, all liberals accept some version of a self-ownership thesis, though many of them would not describe their beliefs as such. (On this point, note that G. A. Cohen thought the self-ownership thesis was the essence of liberalism, not libertarian liberalism specifically (Cohen 2000, p. 252).)
However, in this kind of story, the concept of self-ownership can do almost no work in resolving disputes among liberals. What liberals—both left-liberals and libertarians—disagree about is how people own themselves, not that they own themselves. Our disputes about how to best trade off the two variables internal to that very idea. Criticizing someone’s preferred conception of self-ownership, in other words, is like denying their conclusion. It’s a way of registering disagreement, but not an actual argument against their view.
For instance, consider a variation of Peter Singer’s famous thought experiment (Singer 1972). Imagine you see a toddler drowning in a puddle. Suppose you had bad legs and can’t save the child. Suppose also there is a healthy bystander nearby who could save the child, but who says, “I can’t be bothered. I don’t want my shoes to get muddy.” Now, finally, suppose you have a weapon, and so can force the bystander to save the toddler. May you do so? (Are you justified, or at least excused, in doing so?^[ii])
Perhaps you think the answer is yes. Does this somehow invalidate or make trouble for the self-ownership thesis? Consider a somewhat related thought experiment. Suppose a car is barreling towards your child, and the only way to rescue him is to push him out of the way onto someone’s lawn. Or suppose your child is injured, and the only way to get him to the hospital and prevent her death is to hotwire a car. Or suppose you’re stuck in the woods when an unexpected, freak blizzard hits in May, and the only way to survive is to break into someone’s cabin. May you do any of these things? (Are you justified, or at least excused, in doing so?)
These are interesting questions, and virtually everyone agrees that the answer to these questions should be some kind of yes. (They disagree on what precise form that yes takes.) But we’ve never met anyone who, upon saying that because, in cases like this, you may be excused or justified in temporarily overriding others’ property rights (with the stipulation that you might owe them compensation in some cases), that property is an inherently problematic concept and that private property doesn’t exist. On the contrary, there are hundreds of years’ worth of common-law cases dealing with such issues, which are meant to show just what property amounts to, not that property doesn’t exist.
Again, something strange is going on with the critics of the self-ownership thesis. In order to show the thesis is incoherent or problematic, they have to make the position out to be something that no one would sensibly defend, and must use arguments that no one would find compelling against other forms of property. The compliment they pay to libertarians is that they straw man the position in order to critique it.
^[i] For good discussion of this point, see Mack (2015)
^[ii] The difference between justification and excuse is as follows: When a person is justified in doing X, the action is right. When a person is excused, the action is wrong, but her blameworthiness is reduced as a result of duress. So, for instance, killing a murderous intruder in self-defense is a justified, while killing another person because a gunman coerced you into doing it on pain of your own death may be excusable.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 1:07 PM
8 points
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in reply to: SammyDMartin’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
I think it has in some ways strengthened my overall philosophy. I’ve been pushing public choice ideas for a while, and the FDA and CDC seemed to band together this year to make that look right.

Epistocracy should not be confused with technocracy. In a technocracy, a small band of experts get lots of power to manipulate people, nudge them, or engage in social engineering. Many democrats are technocrats—indeed, the people I argue with, like Christiano, Estlund, and so on, are pretty hardcore technocrats who have been in favor of letting alphabet agencies have lots of dictatorial power during this crisis.

Instead, epistocracy is about weighing votes during elections to try to produce better electoral or referendum results. For instance, I favor a system of enlightened preference voting where we let everyone vote but we then calculate what the public would have supported had it been fully informed. And there is decent evidence that if we used it, one thing that would happen is that the resulting voting public would be more aware of the limitations of technocrats and would be more in favor of civil liberties.
What links here?
- Sammy Martin's comment on Ideal governance (for companies, countries and more) by HoldenKarnofsky (LessWrong; Apr 5, 2022, 7:56 PM; 5 points)

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 1:03 PM
9 points
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in reply to: harsimony’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
I am tempted to say the stuff on open borders and immigration, because the welfare effects of increased immigration are much higher than anything else I’ve worked on. But realistically, it’s difficult to change people’s minds even when you give them overwhelming evidence.

The work I did with Peter Jaworski on taboo markets seems persuasive to most people who encounter it. If people followed our advice, we’d save tens of thousands of lives per year in the US. But then the issue is that even if you agree with us, it’s not like you can personally legalize kidney markets or other needed markets.

That’s kind of the problem with much of my work. It’s about politics, institutions, and policy. Even when there’s good advice, it’s not like readers have the power to act on it, and the people in power have little incentive to do what’s right.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 12:59 PM
12 points
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
People tomorrow matter. We cannot simply imposes costs upon them. As Feinberg argued long ago, if I left a time bomb underground that would explode in 200 years, when it kills people, I am a murderer.

Still, we have good reason to think overall that people in the future will be much better off than we are. That doesn’t license us to hurt them for our benefit, but we can take steps that impose costs upon them IFF doing so is part of a reasonable risk-sharing scheme from which they benefit more than they lose.

Jason Brennan Aug 20, 2021, 12:57 PM
10 points
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in reply to: John G. Halstead’s comment on: AMA: Jason Brennan, author of “Against Democracy” and creator of a Georgetown course on EA
I am a bit split on the data from polling younger people. Quite a bit of that data shows that they prefer the word/label “socialism” to “capitalism”. If you ask them whether socialism is better than capitalism, they say yes. But if you give them more specific things, such as asking whether the government should own all productive property or whether we should have markets, they tend to reject socialism in favor of capitalism, though not by a huge amount. Also, you see the memes going around where people use “socialism” to refer not to socialism, but to government-funded public goods and welfare policies.

Still, if people are confused, then demagogues can take advantage of them or they might end up voting for the wrong things.

I think the case for capitalism must be made not merely because some form of it works better than the alternatives, but because the empirics on immigration show that open borders with global market economies is the best and most effective solution to world poverty. Immigration beats both intra- and international redistribution in terms of its distributional and welfare effects.

However, socialism and open borders don’t mix well, because once you turn a society into a giant workers’ co-op, adding new members always comes at the expense of the current members.