It takes a lot longer. I reviewed 28 orgs; it would take me a long time to send 28 emails and communicate with potentially 28 people.
This is quite a scalable activity. When I used to do this, I had a spreadsheet to keep track, generated emails from a template, and had very little back and forth—orgs just saw a draft of their section, had a few days to comment, and then I might or might not take their feedback into account.
Here, it seems reasonable to assume that orgs will have made a conscious decision about what general information they want to share with would-be small/medium donors. So there isn’t much reason to expect that an inquiry (along with notice that the author is planning to publish on-Forum) would yield material additional information.[1]
This seems quite false to me. Far from “isn’t much reason”, we already know that such an inquiry would have yielded additional information, because Malo almost definitely would have corrected Michael’s material misunderstanding about MIRI’s work.
Additionally, my experience of writing similar posts is that there are often many material small facts that small orgs haven’t disclosed but would happily explain in an email. Even basic facts like “what publications have you produced this year” would be impossible to determine otherwise. Small orgs just aren’t that strategic about what they disclose!
These seem like poor things to bet on:
Trump will commit more than x crimes during his presidency.
This lacks an objective resolution criteria, and ‘number of crimes’ in the US is often a fairly random number because a single act can give rise to multiple violations. Also, committing crimes is very different from being an autocrat—you could be an autocrat and obey the law, and you can be a democrat and break the law.
Trumps secretaries will commit more than x crimes during his presidency
Similar issues.
Trump will attempt to run for a third term
Not as bad, but seems insufficient. Michael Bloomberg ran for a third term as NYC mayor, even though this required changing the rules just for him, but he was not an autocrat.
The winner of the republican primary in the next two presidential elections will be a MAGA
This is subjective, and also insufficient, as whatever ‘MAGA’ is, it is not the same as an autocrat.
In the next x years, a future president or (sufficiently) high up politician will not be convicted of any crimes conditional on their party controlling the justice department
This also seems insufficient to demonstrate autocracy—for example to my knowledge Obama was never convicted of any crimes when his party controlled the Justice Department, but he was not an autocrat.
I think the best thing to bet on is the probability of winning the next election. Unfortunately this doesn’t work nearly as well as it would have a few weeks ago, but I think think it is the best approach.
Thanks for your response.
I reviewed the source document you linked previously, but I didn’t really find much evidence for the claim (that ‘the “iron-fisted war on crime” is failing’) in it, and reviewed it again just now. Is there a particular section you mean to point towards? I realize the source asserts this claim, but it doesn’t seem to actually argue for it.
I’m also curious as to why you are using such old data? Government statistics are often slow, but your charts are literally almost a decade old. For example, you claim, based on the homicide data up to 2015, that
Even during periods of economic growth and heightened security measures, violence has continued to rise in Latin America.
Conclusion: Past approaches have generally failed to deliver sustainable safety improvements.
But if we consult OWID, we see that there are six more years of data you excluded from your chart, and it shows the opposite pattern: violence has been falling.
If your argument was valid—that rising violence proves past approaches were bad—then this more recent data would suggest we should draw the opposite conclusion, and update in favour of existing approaches. (I don’t think we should infer this, because I think the argument is invalid anyway).
I think omitting this later data makes a pretty big difference, because you made a claim in the present tense—that the iron fist approach is failing—which suggests you should be basing this on evidence about current iron fist approaches. The El Salvador crackdown is the most famous and most iron fist approach around right now (most of these countries don’t even have capital punishment!), so I don’t think you can ignore it.
You also claim that prison spending is unsustainable, based on a forecast for 16bn-24bn of 2024 dollars spend on prisons:
High incarceration rates: There’s been a significant increase in prison populations, leading to substantial government spending and economic losses both for the incarcerated individuals and for society overall.
Conclusion: Simply incarcerating more people is not a sustainable solution.
But Latin American + Caribbean GDP for 2014 was 5.4 trillion, so even at the upper end this is only 0.4%. You’re right that government spending can’t grow as a share of GDP forever, but I don’t see much reason to think this is the limit.
Thanks for sharing this, interesting idea. Could you share some more details about what “strategically weaves educational messages into entertaining formats, like dramas” means in practice? Do you have an example plotline—maybe the radio show features some domestic violence and then the perpetrator gets condemned?
Sure, I’m not saying their org should directly try to incarcerate people, or that their policy mightn’t be good impact/$, but they chose to comment on the prison approach. If their objection was purely cost then surely they would say “the iron-fisted war on crime, while effective at reducing crime, is very expensive”. What they wrote makes it sound like they don’t think it can achieve any significant progress on crime.
Thanks for sharing this, I applaud you for working on the issue of crime, which I think has been under-studied by EAs, despite Sam’s excellent post.
I’m curious about this claim:
The “iron-fisted war on crime” is failing.
I don’t know exactly what counts as “iron-fisted”, especially as few Latin American countries sentence criminals to death, but if anything does it surely covers President Bukele’s crackdown in El Salvador, where they basically just imprisoned everyone with gang tattoos. My impression is that even unsympathetic observers agree it has dramatically reduced the crime rate—see for example the wikipedia section here. When the NYT investigated, they found that even the mothers of guys who were arrested agreed the policy reduced crime:
One of them was Morena Guadalupe de Sandoval’s son, whom she says she has not seen or spoken to since he was arrested on his way home from work in the capital about a year ago. She says the authorities have accused him of being part of a criminal group, something she denies. … Ms. de Sandoval says the crackdown has made things better in her neighborhood, an area called the Italian District that was once dominated by MS-13. She doesn’t see young men smoking marijuana on the corners anymore, she said.
“It’s safer,” she said. “In that way, it’s a good thing.”
In another document you link to this article, but doesn’t really argue that the Bukele’s crackdown has failed… just that other countries, with less extreme policies, have struggled, and that they might have to release the prisoners eventually, and to this one, which simply ignores the incapacitation effect.
The intervention you are investigating could still be worthwhile and productive, I’m just not sure exactly why you are casting aspersions on alternatives.
Very nice work! Both story and production value seems very strong.
That’s a cool idea. Presumably you would need a relatively uncensored chatbot—when I recently tried to get several to produce arguments in favour of Trump policies they all refused.
I think you raise some good points. Two potential countervailing considerations:
19 year olds are legally adults—they can (varying a bit by country) vote, drink, buy firearms, join the army, get married, raise children.
It’s also common for other ideological movements to target much younger people. For example, both environmentalism and feminism are taught in elementary schools.
I think the repeated guilt-by-association posts pointing out that someone in EA associated with someone who has some right wing views are pretty negative.
Thanks for sharing this interesting and (at least to me) novel argument. It strikes me as a way of mitigating Winner’s Curse issues.
Thanks for sharing, very clear writeup.
Notably bargaining between worldviews, if done behind a veil of ignorance, can lead to quite extreme outcomes if some worldviews care a lot more about large worlds.
Maybe worth noting this is by Max Tegmark?
Thanks for sharing both the original and this version of the argument!
I realize this is basically an aside and doesn’t really affect your bottom line, but I don’t think you can draw this inference:
Humanity-caused climate change and land use have contributed to a loss of 69% of wildlife since 1970.
Quoting Our World In Data:
the LPI does not tell us the number of species, populations or individuals lost; the number of extinctions that have occurred; or even the share of species that are declining. It tells us that between 1970 and 2018, on average, there was a 69% decline in population size across the 31,821 studied populations.
This paper also argued the methodology is systematically biased downwards, but I haven’t evaluated it.
The LPI indicates that vertebrate populations have decreased by almost 70% over the last 50 years. This is in striking contrast with current studies based on the same population time series data that show that increasing and decreasing populations are balanced on average. Here, we examine the methodological pipeline of calculating the LPI to search for the source of this discrepancy. We find that the calculation of the LPI is biased by several mathematical issues which impose an imbalance between detected increasing and decreasing trends and overestimate population declines.
I remember removing an org entirely because they complained, though in that case they claimed they didn’t have enough time to engage with me (rather than the opposite). It’s also possible there are other cases I have forgotten. To your point, I have no objections to Michael’s “make me overly concerned about being nice” argument which I do think is true.