Here is CSS6: https://1drv.ms/b/s!At2KcPiXB5rkvg3MH6izzguUYpuR
kbog
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In the long run it seems like the meat eater problem will drop off quite a bit. First because of improving welfare standards, second because of pressures to switch to more efficient plant-based calories, and third because people stop eating more meat or even eat less meat beyond a certain income. So making the US wealthier for instance is most likely good for farm animals in the long run.
For global development in the short run, we can see that $1000 in Africa cuts animal welfare by −800 (best estimate) to −4000 (high estimate) points. And I conservatively estimated that $1 to an ACE charity improves animal welfare by 10,000 points. So $1,100 donated to GiveDirectly (=~$1,000 received) should require between $0.08 and $0.40 if you want to offset to an effective animal charity. But it’s rather arbitrary depending on just how conservative you want to be. I sort of assumed that the real effectiveness of ACE charities is 5x lower than their estimate.
Note that I don’t think that offsetting as a practice actually makes sense, it doesn’t make sense under utilitarianism, it’s more of a methodological tool to put the impacts of different things in perspective with one another.
Consequences of animal product consumption (combined model)
I made a significant mistake in this. I calculated the sensitivity analysis for Buttigieg’s electability incorrectly and this underestimated the amount by which his position in the nomination scoring can climb. With recent boosts in his popularity and prediction market expectations since CSS5 was published, Buttigieg could be a viable recommendation. I will review this stuff and put out CSS6 fairly quickly.
As stated in the report, the academic establishment is not universally pro-capitalist now nor was it universally pro-capitalist in the past. Academia is broadly left wing compared to the rest of America. Another thing to note is how consistently climate scientists have investigated global warming despite the presence of fossil fuel interests. So the idea that everything is being controlled is just implausible on its face.
There is a lot of money to be made in defending free markets.
Humans seek prestige as much as money, and can get both of these things from attacking free markets as well.
Note how many reviews authors get for writing about the economy of Cuba, compared to how many reviews authors get for writing about billionaires funding the radical right. Who’s the one making money now?
See Dark Money by Jane Mayer for a detailed investigation into how a handful of billionaires built alternative ideological infrastructure that became mainstream and established,
I just ctrl-F’d for every mention of “university” and find that most of the time the author is citing the views of university faculty or talking about times when they contradicted what the Koch brothers or Republican Party wanted. Haven’t yet seen anything about a conspiracy to control their ideological infrastructure.
For a quick example of the Cato Institute misrepresenting data in its writing see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/never-trust-the-cato-institute
Robinson says that the studies are only talking about getting pay of some kind rather than full leave, but that’s apparent to anyone reading Calder’s report. Straightforward and correct citation.
Robinson objects that Calder only cites the part of a study that pertains to wages, but that section of her paper was about wages. It would have just been out of place to talk about the other effects in that section of her paper.
Robinson objects that another study doesn’t contemplate eliminating paid leave, but that’s a normative question separate from what was really studied; there’s no reason to be shackled to interests of the authors of the paper.
Robinson objects that there are exceptions to the general trend of OECD countries, but this is silly—of course the overall trend matters most. You can find counterexamples to the trend, but then you can also find super-examples which emphasize the trend even more starkly. (Note: just three days ago Robinson took National Review to task because they were using individual examples of government failures and ignoring the general trends.)
The one strong takeaway is that Calder didn’t include a fair amount of evidence that presented mandatory paid leave in a better light. Not misrepresentation, more like being one-sided. And that’s all that Robinson could find wrong with this >20 page document. There are 52 footnotes, and Robinson finds that countervailing evidence was excluded from 2-3 of them, and finds 3-4 more good sources that should have been included, after saying he spent “a long time” on it. It’s not very jarring. Calder’s report does seem flawed, but this falls short of the standard required to “never trust” the author (let alone CATO).
In any case, the CATO institute does not produce the economic freedom rankings.
And finally there is a big difference between a report that was released by a person at a think tank, and a dataset that was released by the think tank that has now been used in hundreds of papers of published academic research.
Not trusting the establishment creates a lot of problems,
Yes, the main one being that it doesn’t lead anywhere.
Everything you’ve said about problems with universities or think tanks applies equally well to the microcosm of leftist bloggers and philosophers and journalists. Much more so, honestly. Of course there is less billionaire money, but lots of other crap instead. I’ve previously found reasons to “never trust” Nathan Robinson, flaws that are worse than those in Calder’s report. So we need to be very clear that the conclusion of this sort of narrative, no matter how sound it is, is not that socialism is better. The conclusion, if this narrative is true, is just that everything is super vulnerable to bias or deceit and there is no useful expert guidance.
Now you could preserve the idea of expert consensus, but redefine ‘experts’ to mean the associated collection of freethinkers and heterodox bloggers and crackpots with no institutional ties. If you do this, then you’re still not going to get a consensus for socialism either. You’ll get a fair number of capitalists/libertarians, plus an assortment of anarchists (both right-wing and left-wing), socialists/communists and then a few people with really weird ideas like monarchism or fascism or whatever. Also lots of conspiracy theories. And many people (like me) will say that the idea of relying on such an ecosystem to create a kind of expert consensus is rather bonkers in the first place.
Then our only way to come to any substantial conclusion is to just read through the sources and arguments in detail to see who is actually right about socialism. But insofar as we’ve seen no good arguments that leftists are actually right about this, you can see that it’s rather pointless to keep talking about The Establishment. Instead of trying to argue that it’s just turtles all the way down, it would be a lot more productive to present arguments that leftists are actually right in the first place, and then investigate them, and in the process of investigating them some truths about the reliability of ‘the establishment’ can be uncovered.
To put simple numbers on the whole thing, let’s say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.1 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.5 if the establishment is corrupt. If we currently think the establishment is 90% likely to be good, then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.14. If we see some strong evidence and arguments against the establishment then maybe we’ll change our trust in it down to 70%. Then P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.22. Well that’s not a very big change.
OTOH, if we saw a good argument that socialism is actually good, then we would now say that P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.2 if the establishment is good and P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.7 if the establishment is corrupt, and then we’d also change our trust in the establishment from 90% to 80% because we’ve presumably caught something that they weren’t able to answer. Now P(socialism>capitalism) = 0.30. Well that’s still a low probability, but you’ve gone further.
So I went and looked deeper.
Re: Chomsky, there’s nothing but quotes from back then? I was expecting a chapter with arguments. These quotes from back then are nothing new. As stated in the OP the Soviet Union did indeed industrialize rapidly in the 1930s/1940s period (Allen says that things went bad in the 1970s, though others talk about the Khrushchev era; I didn’t bother citing Red Plenty) and also there was this kind of exaggeration from Westerners during the Cold War who didn’t know much about the USSR. Partially due to ignorance and exaggeration/fear, but partially due to misleading or false Soviet data. I’ve heard that the same thing is going on again with China today—Westerners think the Chinese government is efficient compared to democracy but really it isn’t. I find nothing here to add to the report.
Re: Cuba. So I mostly read the book, skimmed some of it.
One of the authors was a child in Cuba, went to America, got a BS in econ, did investment banking and private equity, as well as some political activism about Cuba. But the other is a prolific published economist. Parts of the book didn’t have many citations, I wasn’t sure where they were getting the info from. However the book was pretty strongly focused on economics, as well as going back to the island’s colonial roots. It only barely mentioned things like political repression, no mention of gay persecution, and so on, which reassured me that they are writing to answer the economic question rather than making political propaganda. Generally it seemed informed and serious as far as I could tell.
I checked one part for misleading info. The authors use Cuba’s GDP per capita in 1950 and 1957 to emphasize their wealth pre-Castro. So I checked if they cherrypicked the years for this. I looked at 1946-1949 and found that Cuba was similarly wealthy at that time. Then I checked 1955-1958 and found that Cuba’s economy did peak in 1957, but the whole world’s economy was rising in 1955-1957 as well, and Cuba faced some revolutionary violence and US embargoes in 1957-1958, so it seems alright. I also checked for non-economic indicators of quality of life but found that I was getting ahead of myself and the authors were looking at the exact same statistics in the next chapter anyway.
The authors didn’t go over the embargo in detail but they point out some issues which are not affected by it. First, inefficient farming and food shortages arose quickly after the revolution, before the main embargo came into effect. Tobacco export quantity and quality to the US also fell before it was embargoed. The efficiency of the food and sugar farms themselves was poor. Meanwhile the USSR gave large amounts of aid and trade subsidies to Cuba. When this ended circa 1990, Cuba’s economy collapsed, which shows that the USSR support was very important (possibly more important than the US embargo). Additionally, what trade and finance Cuba did have in the 1990s/2000s suffered major retractions caused by government actions, so we know they could be doing noticeably better even with the US embargo. And Cuba gets a very big amount of remittance money, $5 billion per year. The remittances and USSR aid together might easily outweigh the impacts of the US embargo. And the problems for Cuba just seem too great to be explained by any embargo: in some ways Cuba’s standard of living is actually worse than it was before the revolution!
Authors also point out that the non-economic quality of life indicators for Cuba are really not impressive, and the official statistics (like their GDP) are inflated. Not just their opinion: the UN agrees that there is a lack of reliable information about Cuba’s economy and development. Plus, the idea that Cuba would post false/misleading statistics is expected by the research on autocracies that I included in the OP.
Overall, I’m reasonably satisfied by the book, it’s not a slam dunk but it makes a good argument. I think it would be good to spend more time on the standards of living in 1989 before the loss of Soviet support—it still seems like Cuba made a poor showing over 1960-1989, but maybe it wasn’t as bad as it has been since then.
But I also found other studies on the topic. Three of them take a general look at Cuba’s economy/development and find that the revolution hurt it:
https://economics.ca//2013/papers/SG0030-1.pdf
https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/twec.12609
I also found this article which looks at Cuba’s famous healthcare and finds that it’s overrated. Also it further underscores the idea of Cuban government statistics not being reliable.
https://academic.oup.com/heapol/article/33/6/755/5035051
Finally, I think if the embargo were really so severe as to be mainly responsible for Cuba’s problems, Cuba would do more to try to undo it. I don’t know the details of the diplomacy here and of course there limits to how well Cuba can reform without risking a coup or revolution, but it still seems like there are small ways they could have tried to improve relations with the US—token liberalization, apologize for shooting down planes in 1996, offer compensation for frozen/confiscated US property, or other things. If there really were so many billions of dollars at stake then I would think they’d have taken some earlier, bigger steps forward. Low confidence on this.
But in summary: it seems well substantiated that Cuba’s economic model has failed. I will add these new studies into the report.
I don’t suspect it is very true for modern socialist parties/ govt’s.
It’s at the forefront of socialists in the USA who are categorically opposed to ‘sweatshop labor’. Take it from Chomsky whose criticism of Mondragon is “it’s in a market system and they still exploit workers in South America.”
Something like Yanis Varoufakis’s Diem25 project for example.
Socialist? It looks like they are just a political movement. Reform the EU to be more democratic. That’s not socialism. Granted I am not familiar with this.
I will also point out that restricting trade to poor nations is not unique to socialists. Under Trump, the US has reinstated sanctions on Cuba on pretty dubious grounds. It does also preferentially trades with countries with govt’s in line with US’s broader national ambitions (for e.g. Saudi Arabia because they listed aramco)
Some of that is political moves which happen under any kind of government and are not about anyone being rich or poor. USSR put an embargo on West Berlin. Cuba used to refuse to buy food from the US because they didn’t want to legitimize the embargo.
Otherwise, capitalist countries also engage in protectionism per se. That hits wealthier countries too. Notice how Trump’s main focus is China which is a middle income country. And there have been trade scuffles with the EU recently. I’m not sure because I haven’t seen anyone really investigate this, but I don’t think it hits the poorest countries very hard, because most industries in these countries are not competitors to US industries.
The anti-globalization thing is an additional phenomenon on top of these things.
This sort of socialism with international aims was abandoned quite early on in the Russian Revolution with Stalin in favour of socialism in one country, marking a significant break with orthodox socialist thought. I say that as a sort of defence against comparisons of international socialist movement to individual socialist states past and present. But it is also a scathing criticism of the international socialist movement that one section of it in Russia (the most successful section) did go the way of nationalism—and inspired a whole swathe of countries like China and Cuba to adopt its nationalistic model.
In this context, it looks like ‘international socialism’ means spreading socialism throughout the entire world. Which is very different from openness to trade.
Socialist states have traded with each other. E.g. the Soviets bought lots of sugar from Cuba and exported energy. They’re not going to think it’s exploitation if the other country is socialist. But if the other state is capitalist then it’s not going to happen. It all depends on the context. Here I’m mainly talking about the US or UK going socialist while the developing world presumably doesn’t change very much.
Co-ordination within a socialist system will be difficult in having to accommodate different perspectives and interests in much the way it is difficult under the current system. But… by definition an international socialist movement is about minimising and compromising on conflicting national/ individual/religious interests/perspectives to a act in the international interest, so I think it would be better at co-ordination. But the point I make is semantics.
It’s one thing to talk about theoretical comparisons but a key issue for the short and medium term (and possibly long term) future is the existence of stable, credible institutions. Liberal capitalist states have a decent framework for international trade and monetary agreements, we have G7 and G20 and so on. If you sweep these norms and institutions aside to build something better, you can face a lot of new problems from the power vacuum. It would take time and work to build things up again.
Yes I’ve heard a number of people say it. I think it came from here: https://reducing-suffering.org/will-space-colonization-multiply-wild-animal-suffering/
A vision for anthropocentrism to supplant wild animal suffering
^ This, will clear up the language for the next version.
Candidate Scoring System, Fifth Release
Probably people just don’t like the idea of combating the democratic government. It’s one of those norms that lots of people think is important.
3. What if certain wars are utilitarian? Officially many interventions have humanitarian justifications. Is this true? And how would we know?
Yes, here is a survey of me and 6 other EAs on the consequences of recent US military engagements: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BbVEMsaGx0nXTY8Gg6vGoqIBi3wqnPkg5z54a3bg5SU/viewanalytics
If you want to get into the relevant rationales and data that is another story. But until someone can show that they are really harmful, we don’t have a good enough reason to justify trying to weaken the government.
For example, the book you cite on Cuba makes no mention of the US embargo on Cuba in the summary, and very little reference to it in the index. One of the authors worked at Goldman Sachs and KKR.
Alright, I will try to see if there is more published literature on Cuba, and look harder for reviews. I did this before, but only on a shallow level. There actually don’t seem to be many publications about Cuba. If I can’t find a more trustworthy answer then I’ll have to go down to the level of blogs, social media comments, personal evaluations, etc.
A UN study estimated that the embargo has cost Cuba $130B (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-economy-un/us-trade-embargo-has-cost-cuba-130-billion-un-says-idUSKBN1IA00T). Cuba’s GDP per capita in PPP terms is $22.2K, more than the neighboring Dominican Republic ($19.3k) and Haiti ($1.8K) (taken from each country’s wiki page). I’m far from an expert on this and don’t know what Cuba’s GDP per capita “should” be, but based on this list, Cuba would be the 8th wealthiest country in Latin America and the Caribbean by GDP PPP per capita (out of 32).
So, it looks like the UN person is straight-up quoting the estimate from the Cuban report. I don’t see any report from the UN on it. Cuba’s reporting has potential bias—not that I would dismiss it out of hand, of course. But I searched around a bit, and apparently they’ve also claimed that it cost $750B total which is >$10B/year (!) and alternately that it costs them merely $685M per year. I didn’t see the original sources so I don’t know what the differences are with underlying methodology, if these reports are even sourced correctly, etc.
Cuba’s annual GDP (in US$) is $87B, so going naively off the numbers it doesn’t seem like this would make a big difference, unless the $750B figure is accurate but that seems very unlikely.
I think this is what you want to look at for Cuba’s overall performance (the revolution was in the 1950s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GDP-Caribbean.png They went from 1st place to 2nd place among those 6 countries. Which yes doesn’t look very bad, especially given their performance on some non-economic measures, but of course this is not a very robust way of evaluating them.
The author of the book on Soviet agriculture, D Gale Johnson, chaired the U Chicago Econ dept, which has been the hub of libertarian Austrian economics.
U Chicago wasn’t Austrian, it was the center of Freshwater Economics which was mainstream, neoclassical economics.
From his wiki “Among other notable contributions to economics, Johnson concluded that the strength of an industry depends on how the market works and not so much on government actions.”
Well, yes. But that’s… what he contributed! It’s their job to research this stuff and report whatever the results are. Would you doubt climate scientists just because they made contributions showing that global warming is a big problem?
What would trigger alarms in my head is if they said things like “it’s a violation of our rights when the government intervenes in the economy”, because then they have a non-economic motivation that may interfere with their conduct of economics.
For an alternative perspective of the economic productivity of the USSR, see chapter 5, footnote 8 of Understanding Power: the Indispensable Chomsky (http://www.understandingpower.com/files/AllChaps.pdf): “In June 1956, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that “the economic danger from the Soviet Union was perhaps greater than the military danger.” The U.S.S.R. was “transforming itself rapidly . . . into a modern and efficient industrial state,” while Western Europe was still stagnating.” (this happened in spite of the USSR’s utter destruction during WWII).
OK, I will look into this soon when I have proper time, and come back here with details. If it turns out to seem really correct on the object level and economists don’t seem able to address it, then we’ll have no conclusion on the matter (our investigation says one thing, the experts mostly say another). If the argument looks plausible but unclear on the object level, then we’ll accept the economists’ view but with a higher degree of uncertainty. If the case looks unlikely on the object level then we’ll drop it. If I had more time and education I might be willing to do a super-deep personal review capable of directly uncovering the whole story, but I don’t.
You could do this too btw if you want, and it could be integrated into the CSS. I just need the results of comparing things against other sources, comprehensive debates with other people, etc to make it reliable. Some kind of meta-review or double crux. I could trust that.
The Economic Freedom of the World Index is published by the Cato Institute, among other libertarian/pro-market think tanks and institutes.
I’ve revised the paragraph in the CSS draft (partially stuff I did soon after making the OP, but partially just now after reading your post) and this is what it says now:
One aspect of many socialist plans is greater government control of the economy. But Hall and Lawson (2014) looked at 198 relevant empirical studies published in highly selective social science journals, and we can add a more recent study by Jackson (2017). The result is that economic freedom corresponds with good outcomes in 68% of studies and bad outcomes in just 4% of studies. Hall and Lawson find that this result might be weakened by publication bias but find no evidence to indicate that it would be overturned. In a more recent, narrower and simpler literature review, Horpedahl et al (2019) argue that economic freedom generally helps achieve the aims of social justice (which is good for social welfare, ceteris paribus). The think tanks which produce the rankings of economic freedom – mainly the Fraser Institute, but also the Heritage Foundation – are conservative, but highly ranked (see reports here) and the rankings are commonly accepted in the academic literature. Now it’s worth noting that other aspects of socialism could temper the downsides of free markets and thereby reduce the necessary level of economic regulations, but it’s not clear whether a socialist government would be inclined to take advantage of this opportunity.
Due to uncertainties, I now say that greater government control of the economy seems bad (as opposed to the OP here where I wrote that it would be bad).
There are various ways to look for bias in studies and metanalyses, so if there is not published evidence for strong bias then it seems rather unlikely.
I should note that none of this is an apology for human rights abuses carried out by Castro and the USSR.
I wouldn’t think of it that way, no need to worry. We’re all EAs here
Then you sure aren’t obligated to do accurate marketing, or anything else. That kind of nihilism just blows everything up. It’s a bit like saying “I’m just a Boltzmann brain, therefore drowning kids don’t exist.”
Maybe, but I didn’t say that I’d expect to see lots of projects trying to fix these issues, just that I’d expect to see more research into them, which is obviously the first step to determine correct interventions.
But you were talking about supposed deficiencies in EA modeling. Now you’re talking about the decision of which things to research and model in the first place. You’re shifting goalposts.
Voting mechanisms can be systemic if they’re approached that way. For instance, working backwards from a two party system in the US, figuring out what causes this to happen, and recommending mechanisms that fix that.
That’s no more systemic than any other way to decide how to improve how to improve voting. Changing voting mechanisms is basically working backwards from the problem of suboptimal politicians in the US, figuring out what system causes this to happen, and recommending mechanisms that fix that. Whether “figuring out” is more guided by empirical observations or by social choice theory doesn’t change the matter.
What would count as useful speculation if you think that EAs cause prioritization mechanisms are biased?
Well you can point out arguments that people are ignoring or rejecting for bad reasons, but that requires more concrete ideas instead of speculation. Maybe the lesson here is to dabble less in “speculation” and spend more time trying to make concrete progress. Show us! What’s a good cause we’ve missed?
This is another great example of EA bucking the trend, but I don’t see it as a mainstream EA cause.
Yes, because right now the only good way to approach it is to pretty much “get better at biology”—there is not enough fundamental knowledge on cognition to make dedicated progress on this specific topic. So EAs’ decisions are rational.
By the way, no other groups of “systems thinkers” are picking up on paradise engineering either.
These are certainly examples of root cause thinking, but to be truly systems thinking they have to take the next step to ask how can we shift the current system to these new foundations.
Like, uh, building institutions and advocacy for responsible AI design, and keeping them closely networked with the EA community, and spreading the idea of functional decision theory as a component of desirable AI design, with papers about FDT cooperation being published by multiple EA groups that focus on AI (MIRI and FRI)?
Consider for instance how hard it is to incorporate a feedback loop into a guesstimate model, not to mention flowthrough effects
Lol. I included “feedback loops” in arithmetic in a Word document. I had governance listed as 5% equal to the sum of other long-run policy issues, but due to the feedback loop of better governance begetting better governance, I decided to increase it to 10%. Done.
Non-systemic solution: Seeing that people are irrational, then creating an organization that teaches people to be rational.
Systemic solution: Seeing that people are irrational, asking what about the system creates irrational people, and then creating an organization that looks to change that.
Right. Let’s build kibbutzim where children are conditioned to make rational decisions. Sounds super tractable to me! Those silly EAs have been missing this low-hanging fruit the entire time.
Also, it’s not even clear how this definition of systems fits with your earlier claims that systems solutions are incorrectly less amenable to EA methodology than non-systems solutions. The concrete thing you’ve said is that EA models are worse at flow-through effects and feedback loops, which even if true (dubious) seems to apply equally well to non-systemic solutions.
I’m including systems thinking as part of my definition. This often leads to “big” interventions, but oftentimes the interventions can be small, but targeted to cause large feedback loops and flowthrough effects.
Except apparently you aren’t including poverty relief, which has large feedback loops and flowthrough effects; and apparently you aren’t including for animal advocacy, which has the same; and apparently you aren’t including EA movement growth, which has the same; and apparently you aren’t including promoting the construction of safe AGI, which has the same; and so on for everything else that EA does.
This looks very no-true-Scotsman-like.
They “have to” do that? Why?
Because they only have a hundred million dollars or so, and uh they don’t have the ability to coerce the general population? Come on.
“Hopefully” getting it to catch on elsewhere also seems silly. Perhaps they could try to look into ways to model the network effects, influence and power structures, etc, and use systems thinking to maximize their chances of getting it to catch on elsewhere
This is pedantry. Saying “hopefully” doesn’t imply that they’re not going to select the option with the highest cause for hopes. It merely implies that they don’t have control over how these things actually play out.
My takeaway is that the EA forum’s voting is better than LessWrong’s.
More than that, I’m saying we’re simply obligated to save lives for $100k each. Assuming that we are first-worlders with spare money, of course.
For all EA’s globalist ambitious, there is this assumption that people who are actually in a low-middle income country aren’t a part of the conversation
Come on, the assumption of the writers is “people looking to us for philanthropy advice are predominantly living in the First World,” and that assumption is correct. (And it’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy, either).
The problem isn’t the phrasing, of course, it’s what the phrasing indicates about the writer.
OK, then how do you know that it doesn’t merely indicate that the writer is good at writing and marketing?
You can’t just assume that your solidarity group is the most effective way to do things. Someone still has to do an impact evaluation on your social movement and the flow of talent and resources through that movement, including the particular activities of any particular organization enacting that movement.
More evaluations and analyses are always nice (and some EA orgs have done that kind of thing, I believe). But their value can be dubious and it may just be a fruitless meta trap. You may think that an EA organization is under-allocating time and money for meta evaluations, but other people are going to disagree, and the reasons for such disagreement need to be properly addressed before this kind of thing can be used as a general criticism.
No one has a monopoly on critiquing people merely for having unexamined assumptions. If you start it, it turns into a game of whataboutism and petty status-seeking where no actually useful progress is made to help with important efforts in the real world. Drop the methodology wars and focus on making actual progress.
Sorry I have little time and I’m just going to respond to the logic of offsetting right now. In utilitarianism ordinarily we maximize expected utility, so there’s no need to hedge. If two actions have the same expected utility but one has a higher % chance of having a negative outcome, they’re still equally good. Companies and investors need to protect certain interests so $2 million is less than twice as good as $1 million, but in utility terms 2 million utils is exactly twice as good as 1 million utils.
Of course you could deny expected utility maximization and be morally loss averse/risk averse, and then this would be a conversation to have. There are good arguments against doing that, however, it’s a minority view