See http://bit.ly/ea-css , specifically sections “Capitalism and Socialism”, “taxation and budget” (wealth and corporate tax), “Trade”, “Housing Policy” (rent control), “Healthcare” (drug price controls), and “Education Policy”.
kbog
Karma: 2,302
Concrete Foreign Policy Recommendations for America
In making this claim you completely overlook the fundamental quantitative reasoning you need to make to tackle the question of impact.
Those issues are addressed in different sections. Scope just refers to what % of the future people are affected.
Ending malaria and “solving” love will give everyone a better life for at best 80 years, solving aging for… 1000 years as a lower bound.
This is reasoning from the lifetime utility of a given individual. I think that’s incorrect. Assume population size remains the same; if there are 10 people living 100 years, that’s comparable to one person living 1000 years, save for the unfortunate experiences surrounding death. OTOH, if we imagine 10 people living 1000 years, the principal advantage is not to be understood as improved quality of life, but rather as an increase in population size over time. So I give credit to anti-aging both for making mortality/morbidity very rare, and for increasing the population size.
I’ve only skimmed your part 1 LEV post so I may be missing something. But the way I see it, if you assign full QALYs for the 1000 years, you are doing one of two things: 1) assuming that the fertility rate (births per person per year) will not decline as a result of the greater population, or 2) not worried about the foregone births. I presume the population will grow as a result of solving aging, but not to the extent that is naively implied by assuming that fertility remains constant.
I implicitly assumed that both of these interventions are going to happen at some point anyway, and early research can just shift them forwards.
Dating apps and matching are not neglected, but for some reason this more deliberate experimental approach seems largely ignored.
As an aside, if we are getting many novel ideas but there are not enough people to fund/implement them, that’s good evidence that we should be worrying more about movement growth (& less about cultivating a small cadre of uber-rational people).
Responding to the Progressive Platform of “Foreign Policy Generation”
I don’t see what your disagreement is. Reaching LEV means we end greatly reduce or end natural deaths, which is what I discussed above.
I don’t think there’s a huge benefit of going from, say, 1000 year lifespans to infinite lifespans.
No idea, it’s just something that I’ve heard EAs say when they’re talking about having kids
I’m not going to get into this, but if you think this is the answer to big questions of how to increase economic growth, it would be better to properly define the dataset and show an analysis which demonstrates causation rather than mere correlation.
Are you talking about the general conversations about whether EAs should have kids, or are you talking about the point I’m making right here?
Either way, I’m confident we are all perfectly capable of discussing right and wrong action on such issues while steering clear of moralistic judging, just as we have generally done on other issues such as diet and donations.
I’m the one who upvoted that comment that you made, and broadly agree with it. As I tried to make clear in the post: the main reason we talk broadly about socialism is that there is a broad socialist movement which cannot be reduced to a specific policy platform, and it can be useful to know whether we should encourage, discourage or ignore this broad movement.
It is perfectly consistent to say that the socialist movement mostly points in a bad policy direction, while also believing that real policy evaluation should be done in more specific terms, that boundaries between socialism and capitalism are fuzzy, and that there have been successes and failures from both approaches.
A small observation about the value of having kids
OK, I don’t think he means that social welfare policies like public education and healthcare (as done in the context of a capitalist economy) are generally bad, but rather that properly socialist countries are bad. After all he did say that there are successes and failures from both approaches.
Love seems like a high priority
The reason to make that assumption is that EA is just a very small component of the global budget and we are typically dealing with large problems, so our funding usually does little to change marginal returns.
In some cases, like AI risk, the problem is “small” (i.e. our small amount of extra funding can meet the main practical requirements for the time being). However, for big economic issues, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
We have also ranked American political policies and candidates in terms of how much impact they will have on growth (and other issues), giving quantitative weighting to different issues.
https://1drv.ms/b/s!At2KcPiXB5rkyABaEsATaMrRDxwj?e=VvVnl2
It is very rough and tentative but suggests that housing and immigration liberalization are the most important areas for U.S. domestic policy to improve economic growth. Different Fed policy and child allowance might be very good too.
Rather than being wild speculation, I think this is clearly correct. And needs to be mentioned anytime someone criticizes EA for having too much focus on proven interventions instead of things like economic growth.
However there are other causes which can be good under such a moderate epistemic view: growing Effective Altruism, curing aging, fighting climate change, partisan politics, improving foreign policy, etc. All of these have been recognized by some Effective Altruists as important and will compete with economic growth for attention.
Do you have a better analysis of this? Lots of things happened before economic growth and could have plausibly contributed to it. Remember not to select on the dependent variable: perhaps countries which didn’t produce huge welfare gains also implemented widespread K-12 education.
This is the reason I don’t like labels of left/right/socialist/communist/capitalist/fascist etc.. It is much better to discuss policy.
That’s exactly one of the main problems with the leftist reaction that jonathanpaulson mentioned. I’m not sure what you are disagreeing about.
Read both and still don’t see anything to contradict my post, unless you are assuming “person-affecting” ethics.