kbog

• kbog 31 Mar 2020 2:32 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: brb243's comment on: An Effec­tive Altru­ist “Civic Hand­book” for the USA (draft, call­ing for com­ments and as­sis­tance)

  1. But WHY do you be­lieve that the costs out­weigh benefits? Again—the pa­per look­ing at Ethiopia es­ti­mated that benefits of lower prices out­weighed costs on av­er­age. This seems in­tu­itively sen­si­ble, too—if we sell sub­si­dized low-priced goods, it should in­crease their wealth in the short run at least.

  2. It could be—and there are also many other ways to ad­dress vuln­er­a­bil­ity to spikes in global com­mod­ity prices, as de­scribed in the last pa­per I linked. Of course none of these solu­tions is perfect and sim­ple oth­er­wise the prob­lems would not ex­ist any­more. I think we should look at the likely con­se­quences within cur­rent regimes rather than as­sum­ing that coun­tries/​so­cieties will get much bet­ter at re­spond­ing to prob­lems.

  3. But you see how it’s a trade­off, right? Peo­ple can spe­cial­ize in farm­ing or they can spe­cial­ize in other trades, not both. There can be differ­ent peo­ple do­ing differ­ent jobs, but ev­ery per­son who be­comes a farmer is ne­glect­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of spe­cial­iz­ing in some­thing else. If a coun­try has an in­dus­trial policy it will have to make a tough choice of what in­dus­tries it wants to spe­cial­ize in.

  I am adding these con­sid­er­a­tions to Can­di­date Scor­ing Sys­tem, which is more of an en­cy­clo­pe­dia with all kinds of policy is­sues, but for the Civic Hand­book I think I will leave the mat­ter out as it does not have the kind of clear ar­gu­men­ta­tive sup­port nec­es­sary to build an Effec­tive Altru­ist con­sen­sus.

• kbog 28 Mar 2020 22:22 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: brb243's comment on: An Effec­tive Altru­ist “Civic Hand­book” for the USA (draft, call­ing for com­ments and as­sis­tance)

  Re­gard­ing food aid, you showed a cou­ple pa­pers dis­cussing nega­tive im­pacts from ‘food dump­ing’, sub­si­dized agri­cul­tural ex­ports from wealthy coun­tries to poor ones. A topic that you stud­ied in de­tail.

  https://​​sci-hub.tw/​​10.1017/​​s1742170519000097

  https://​​digi­tal­com­mons.law.seat­tleu.edu/​​cgi/​​view­con­tent.cgi?ar­ti­cle=1089&con­text=sjel

  I did not read all of the text, but they mainly say: the for­eign im­pact is that it dis­places farm­ers. We send cheap ex­ports, which are in fact cheaper than what a free mar­ket would pro­duce, for a com­bi­na­tion of rea­sons but mainly be­cause of our agri­cul­tural sub­sidies. This puts farm­ers in the aid-re­ceiv­ing coun­try out of work be­cause they can­not com­pete.

  My im­me­di­ate ob­jec­tion is, why be­lieve that the costs to farm­ers out­weigh the benefits to con­sumers? If food is lower-priced then that should help many peo­ple. I found this pa­per ar­gu­ing that the con­sumer benefits out­weighed the hit to farm­ing, on av­er­age, for house­holds at all in­come lev­els in Ethiopia. It was not cited by ei­ther of the pa­pers listed above.

  The 1st ar­ti­cle also says that de­pen­dence on food im­ports cre­ates vuln­er­a­bil­ity to price spikes, cit­ing this pa­per. But lo­cal food sources are volatile too, no? Lo­cal weather pat­terns, poli­ti­cal in­sta­bil­ity, plant dis­eases, etc can cre­ate lo­cal price spikes. I imag­ine this would be worse than volatility in global com­mod­ity prices. Now, you can have im­ports step up to cover lo­cal price spikes, but you can also have lo­cal pro­duc­tion step up to cover global price spikes. The former may be eas­ier, but over­all I just don’t see good rea­son to be­lieve that dump­ing in­creases price volatility.

  There is then the long-run ques­tion of whether a coun­try should de­velop its agri­cul­tural sec­tor vs other sec­tors. The 1st pa­per touches on this. I will have to think/​read more on this, or maybe you can bet­ter an­swer it.

• kbog 27 Mar 2020 21:06 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: brb243's comment on: An Effec­tive Altru­ist “Civic Hand­book” for the USA (draft, call­ing for com­ments and as­sis­tance)

  1. OK, I am em­bold­en­ing key sen­tences now. Not en­tirely sure if I like it though.

  2. Thanks, I replied in com­ments within the doc­u­ment.

• kbog 27 Mar 2020 20:54 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler's comment on: An Effec­tive Altru­ist “Civic Hand­book” for the USA (draft, call­ing for com­ments and as­sis­tance)

  Done though I still haven’t iden­ti­fied a proper catchy name. “Effec­tive Altru­ist civic hand­book” was just meant as a place­holder.

• kbog 24 Mar 2020 14:47 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: lucy.ea8's comment on: Why not give 90%?

  You can re­ceive an­swers to these claims by mak­ing a ded­i­cated thread rather than hi­jack­ing the cur­rent one.

• kbog 24 Mar 2020 2:40 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: lucy.ea8's comment on: Why not give 90%?

  To re­spond to the on-topic part of your post (I also down­voted be­cause it’s mostly off-topic), I don’t see how you can shrug off the benefits of donat­ing >10% as if 10% is good enough, while also say­ing that we must in­ter­view and read whole swathes of ad­di­tional pa­pers and peo­ple in the hope that some of it might be use­ful for achiev­ing bet­ter cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion. If you re­ally want Effec­tive Altru­ists to cap­ture the benefits from read­ing non-Western sci­en­tific liter­a­ture, then clearly you don’t think that we can shrug our shoulders and say that we’re good enough, and should rec­og­nize that donat­ing more money is an­other way we can similarly do bet­ter. The two are ac­tu­ally fun­gible, as you can donate money to move­ment growth with ad­ver­tise­ments tar­geted to for­eign coun­tries, or you can donate to cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion efforts with re­searchers hired to sur­vey, re­view and sum­ma­rize the fields of liter­a­ture that you think are valuable.

An Effec­tive Altru­ist “Civic Hand­book” for the USA (draft, call­ing for com­ments and as­sis­tance)

Short guide to ‘prep­ping’ for global catastrophes

• kbog 23 Mar 2020 21:06 UTC

  7 points

  on: Why not give 90%?

  You’re as­sum­ing that the prob­a­bil­ity of giv­ing up each year is con­di­tion­ally in­de­pen­dent. In re­al­ity, if we can figure out how to give a lot for one or two years with­out be­com­ing self­ish, we are more likely to sus­tain that for a longer pe­riod of time. This boosts the case for mak­ing larger dona­tions.

  More­over, I rather doubt that the prob­a­bil­ity of turn­ing self­ish and giv­ing up on Effec­tive Altru­ism can be nearly as high as 50% in a given year. If it were that high, I think we’d have more ev­i­dence of it, in spite of the typ­i­cal wor­ries re­gard­ing how we can hear back from peo­ple who aren’t in­ter­ested any­more.

  Also, this doesn’t break your point, but I think per­centages are the wrong way to think about this. In re­al­ity, dona­tions should be much more de­pen­dent upon lo­cal cost of liv­ing than upon your per­sonal salary. If COL is $40k and you make $50k then donate up to $10k. If COL is $40k and you make $200k then donate up to $160k.

  Peo­ple whose jobs are higher im­pact/​higher-salary (they are cor­re­lated due to dona­tion po­ten­tial if noth­ing else) are likely to face more ex­pen­sive costs of liv­ing and are also likely to ob­tain greater benefits from per­sonal spend­ing (avert­ing a 1% chance of per­sonal burnout is much more im­por­tant if your job is high-im­pact, sav­ing an hour out of your week is much more im­por­tant if your hourly wage is higher, etc). So the ap­pro­pri­ate amount of per­sonal spend­ing does scale some­what with in­come. How­ever this effect is weak enough that I think it makes more sense to usu­ally think about thresh­olds rather than per­centages.

• kbog 23 Mar 2020 20:46 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler's comment on: Vot­ing is to­day (Tues­day March 3) in Cal­ifor­nia and other states—here are recommendations

  New can­di­dates have never served in Congress and there­fore do not have leg­is­la­tive track records on an­i­mal welfare, and it’s such a minor is­sue to most vot­ers that can­di­dates al­most never ex­press their views on it while run­ning for office.

• kbog 4 Mar 2020 5:04 UTC

  −8 points

  on: 80,000 Hours: Anony­mous con­trib­u­tors on flaws of the EA community

  80k ought to frame this as “room for im­prove­ment” or some­thing along those lines in­stead of “flaws.” This is part of be­ing me­dia savvy.

Vot­ing is to­day (Tues­day March 3) in Cal­ifor­nia and other states—here are recommendations

• kbog 3 Mar 2020 9:07 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Wei_Dai's comment on: Can­di­date Scor­ing Sys­tem recom­men­da­tions for the Demo­cratic pres­i­den­tial primaries

  (Sorry for late re­ply)

  First, did you see the truth­ful­ness part? I rated can­di­dates per their av­er­age truth/​lies to the pub­lic, ac­cord­ing to Poli­tiFact. That’s not iden­ti­cal to what you’re ask­ing about, but may be of in­ter­est.

  Bi­den does rel­a­tively poorly. San­ders does well, though (and I haven’t fac­tored this in, maybe I should) he seems to have a more spe­cific and se­ri­ous trend of pre­sent­ing mis­lead­ing nar­ra­tives about the econ­omy. War­ren does well, though I did dock some points for some speci­fi­cally sig­nifi­cant lies. Bloomberg seems to be do­ing quite well, though he has less of a track record so it’s harder to be sure.

  OTOH, it seems like you’re pri­mar­ily con­cerned about epistemics within an ad­minis­tra­tion—that there might be some kinds of poli­ti­cal cor­rect­ness stan­dards. I’ve docked points from Trump be­cause there have been a num­ber of cases of this un­der his watch. Among Democrats, I feel there would be more risk of it with San­ders, be­cause of how many of his ap­point­ments/​staff are likely to come from the pro­gres­sive left. Even though he’s per­ceived as a rather unify­ing figure­head as far as the cul­ture wars are con­cerned, he would likely fare worse from your an­gle. But I feel this is too spec­u­la­tive to in­clude. I can’t think of any is­sues where the ‘red­pill’ story, if true, would be very im­por­tant for the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to know about. And there will not be a lot of differ­ence be­tween can­di­dates here.

  EA fo­rum user Blue­fal­con has pointed out that War­ren’s plan to end poli­ti­cal ap­point­ments to the For­eign Ser­vice may ac­tu­ally in­crease group­think be­cause the stan­dard re­cruit­ment pipeline puts ev­ery­one through very similar paces and doc­trine. Hence, I’ve re­cently given slightly fewer points to War­ren’s for­eign policy than I used to.

• kbog 2 Feb 2020 15:33 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: MichaelStJules's comment on: Can­di­date Scor­ing Sys­tem recom­men­da­tions for the Demo­cratic pres­i­den­tial primaries

  I pre­vi­ously in­cluded wild an­i­mal suffer­ing in the long run weight of an­i­mal welfare. Hav­ing looked at some of these links and re­con­sid­er­ing, I think I was over-weight­ing an­i­mal welfare’s im­pact on wild an­i­mal suffer­ing.

  One ob­jec­tion here is that im­prov­ing so­cioe­co­nomic con­di­tions can also broadly im­prove peo­ple’s val­ues. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, in­creas­ing wealth and se­cu­rity pro­motes self-ex­pres­sion val­ues, which cor­re­spond de­cently well to hav­ing a wide moral cir­cle. So there’s less gen­eral rea­son to sin­gle out moral is­sues like an­i­mal welfare as be­ing a com­par­a­tively higher pri­or­ity.

  How­ever, im­prov­ing so­cioe­co­nomic con­di­tions also ac­cel­er­ates the date at which tech­nolog­i­cal s-risks will pre­sent them­selves. So in some cases, we are look­ing for differ­en­tial moral progress. So this tells me to in­crease the weight of an­i­mal welfare for the long run. (It’s over­all slightly higher now than be­fore.)

  Another ob­jec­tion: a lot of what we per­ceive as pure moral con­cern vs ap­a­thy in gov­er­nance could re­ally be un­der­stood as a differ­ent trade­off of free­dom ver­sus gov­ern­ment con­trol. It’s straight­for­ward in the case of an­i­mal farm­ing or cli­mate change that the peo­ple who be­lieve in a pow­er­ful reg­u­la­tory state are do­ing good whereas the small-gov­ern­ment liber­tar­i­ans are do­ing harm. But I’m not sure that this will ap­ply gen­er­ally in the fu­ture.

  Emerg­ing tech is treated as an x-risk here, so s-risks from tech should be con­sid­ered sep­a­rately. In terms of de­ter­min­ing weights and pri­ori­ties I would sooner lump s-risks into growth and progress than into x-risks.

  I don’t see cli­mate change policy as pro­mot­ing bet­ter moral val­ues. Sure, bet­ter moral val­ues can im­ply bet­ter cli­mate change policy, but that doesn’t mean there’s a link the other way. One of the rea­sons an­i­mal welfare uniquely mat­ters here is that we think there is a spe­cific phe­nomenon where peo­ple care less about an­i­mals in or­der to jus­tify their meat con­sump­tion.

  At the mo­ment I can’t think of other spe­cific changes to make but I will keep it in mind and maybe hit upon some­thing else.

• kbog 2 Feb 2020 13:28 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lucy.ea8's comment on: Re­spond­ing to the Pro­gres­sive Plat­form of “For­eign Policy Gen­er­a­tion”

  Mi­gra­tion and Devel­op­ment: Dis­sect­ing the Anatomy of the Mo­bil­ity Transition

  The Hy­poth­e­sis of the Mo­bil­ity Tran­si­tion by Wilbur Zelin­sky (1971)

  Mex­ico’s GDP per cap­ita and Gini co­effi­cient have been about con­stant for the past decade. I can’t find ev­i­dence on changes in col­lege ed­u­ca­tion at­tain­ment. So it’s not ap­par­ent that they are push­ing for­ward along this tran­si­tion. More­over, Mex­ico only con­sti­tutes ~half of ille­gal im­mi­gra­tion, and many Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries are poorer (in fact they are be­hind the $6k tran­si­tion peak).

  All the data+pa­pers pre­sented be­fore and in this post.

  None of them asked Mex­i­can peo­ple how con­tent they are to stay or im­mi­grate.

  The ob­vi­ous, the num­ber of kids be­ing born in Mex­ico peaked in 1994 at 2.9 mil­lion and has fallen to 2.16 mil­lion births in 2018. If em­i­gra­tion rates re­main same we can ex­pect lower num­ber of Mex­i­cans try­ing to em­i­grate.

  Mex­ico’s pop­u­la­tion is still grow­ing. So if the em­i­gra­tion rate per 1000 peo­ple re­mains con­stant, the num­ber of an­nual emi­gres will grow year over year, just at a lower rate than it would grow if fer­til­ity were higher.

  When fer­til­ity rates fall, the pulls of home coun­try are greater for emi­gres as par­ents age, + par­ents are less en­thu­si­as­tic about kids em­i­grat­ing in the first place.

  Please provide a source. It may be the case that peo­ple with ag­ing fam­i­lies to sup­port de­sire to em­i­grate in or­der to send re­mit­tances.

  Mex­i­can em­i­gra­tion has gone down similar to Ire­land, Ja­pan, UK etc

  It is still a vastly differ­ent coun­try.

  Around 5% of those wish­ing to move to US ac­tu­ally moved.

  And many more tried to move but were ap­pre­hended at the bor­der, or chose not to move be­cause they were afraid of be­ing ap­pre­hended at the bor­der or oth­er­wise po­liced.

  The num­ber of Mex­i­cans at­tempt­ing to cross the bor­der ille­gally has crashed from a high of 1.615 mil­lion in 2000 to 152,257 in 2018

  You’re con­fus­ing ap­pre­hen­sions with cross­ing at­tempts and ne­glect­ing to men­tion the in­crease in ap­pre­hen­sions of non-Mex­i­can mi­grants.

  How­ever nei­ther FPGen or Democrats are ad­vo­cat­ing open bor­ders, I doubt that even un­der the least re­stric­tive pro­pos­als US net im­mi­gra­tion will ex­ceed 1 mil­lion av­er­age over the next 20 years

  Whether or not a coun­try has open bor­ders is not a ques­tion of the quan­tity of im­mi­grants who en­ter the coun­try.

  I just ig­nore them.

  Fine, but don’t then tell me I’m wrong when I’m not.

  Se­cond of all, the Amer­i­can right-wing is cor­rect when they per­ceive that Amer­ica fails to re­li­ably con­trol the south­ern bor­der or po­lice the un­doc­u­mented mi­grant pop­u­la­tion.

  I look for uni­ver­sal defi­ni­tions, open bor­ders means that any­one can come and live in USA

  That’s prob­a­bly what would hap­pen here: as­sum­ing that you make it to the bor­der, then CBP will not have the power to de­tain you, ICE will not ex­ist, you will be “legally pro­tected,” you will not have a crim­i­nal record, and you will have a “path­way to cit­i­zen­ship.”

• kbog 2 Feb 2020 12:18 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: MichaelStJules's comment on: Can­di­date Scor­ing Sys­tem recom­men­da­tions for the Demo­cratic pres­i­den­tial primaries

  Th­ese seem like small im­pacts on the na­tional level. My com­ment on this di­men­sion of wealth tax­a­tion is sim­ply:

  “Wealth taxes would also en­courage more rapid spend­ing on lux­ury con­sump­tion, poli­ti­cal con­tri­bu­tions, and philan­thropy. It’s not clear if this is gen­er­ally good or bad. Of course the tax would also re­duce the amount of money that is ul­ti­mately available for the rich to use on these things, al­though the cap on poli­ti­cal con­tri­bu­tions means that it prob­a­bly wouldn’t make much differ­ence there.”

• kbog 1 Feb 2020 7:53 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MichaelStJules's comment on: Can­di­date Scor­ing Sys­tem recom­men­da­tions for the Demo­cratic pres­i­den­tial primaries

  Good find, adding this too

• kbog 1 Feb 2020 7:49 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: MichaelStJules's comment on: Can­di­date Scor­ing Sys­tem recom­men­da­tions for the Demo­cratic pres­i­den­tial primaries

  Good point. In­creas­ing the weight by 40% un­til I or some­one else does a bet­ter calcu­la­tion.

• kbog 1 Feb 2020 7:43 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: MichaelStJules's comment on: An In­for­mal Re­view of Space Exploration

  OK, I plan to look at some of this in tan­dem with Deud­ney’s book, due to the similar themes.

• kbog 1 Feb 2020 7:32 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MichaelStJules's comment on: Can­di­date Scor­ing Sys­tem recom­men­da­tions for the Demo­cratic pres­i­den­tial primaries

  Hm, I thought that ‘air pol­lu­tion’ would be read­ily in­ter­preted as in­clud­ing cli­mate change.

  I called it air pol­lu­tion rather than cli­mate change be­cause I think it’s per­ceived as a more con­vinc­ing and less par­ti­san term. And it’s more cor­rect, given that we’re also ad­dress­ing other con­se­quences be­sides cli­mate change.

  I don’t call it en­vi­ron­ment be­cause we don’t have eval­u­a­tions re­gard­ing ground and wa­ter pol­lu­tion but I could change it, if more peo­ple feel the same way.