The cost of a tonne of CO2 is almost definitely less $100, and probably less than $25.. So the difference between New York City 7.9 and the US Overall Average of 23.6 is below $1500/year. That’s probably not enough to swing many people’s decisions, but it is significantly more than I expected. Using a more reasonable figure of $25/tonne, we get just under $400/year.
Larks
Excellent idea! The rest of this comment is going to be negative, but my balance of opinion is not reflected in the balance of words.
One potential downside is that dangerous research would move to other countries. However, this effect would be reduced by the dominance of the anglosphere in many areas of research. Additionally, some research with the potential to cause local but not global disasters represents a national but not international externality, in which case other countries are also appropriately incentivised to adopt sensible precautions. So on net this does not seem to be a very big concern.
Another is the lack of any appreciation for public choice in this argument. Yes, I agree this policy would be good if implemented exactly as described. But policies that are actually implemented rarely bare much resemblance to the policies originally advocated by economists. Witness the huge gulf between the sort of financial reform that anyone actually advocates and Dodd-Frank, which as far as I’m aware satisfied basically no-one who was familiar with it. The relevant literature is the public choice literature. So here are some ways this could be misimplimented:
Politically unpopular research is crushed by being deemed dangerous. Obvious targets include research into nuclear power, racial differences, or GMOs.
Regulatory capture means that incumbants are allowed to get away with under-insuring, while new entrants are stifled. (In much the same way that financial regulation has benefited large banks at the expense of small ones).
The regulations are applied by risk-averse regulators who under-approve, resulting in too much deterrent to risky work, like with the FDA.
The regulators are not clever enough to work out what is actually risky, in the same way that financial regulators have proved themselves incapable of identifying systematic risks ahead of time, and central banks incapable of spotting asset bubbles. As such, the relationship between the level of liability researchers had to insure against and the true level of liability would be poor.
Why require insurance rather than just impose liability? Shouldn’t this be a decision for the individuals?
Some work may be sufficiently risky that the actors cannot afford to self-insure. In such circumstances it makes sense to require insurance (just as we require car insurance for drivers).
Drivers are generally individuals, whereas research is generally done by institutions. It seems plausible to me that creditworthy institutions/individuals should not have to take out car insurance. If Oxford faced a potential liability in the billions, I’m sure it would insure. I guess the main threat comes from small, limited liability institutions whose only purpose is to do this one kind of research, and are thus unconcerned with the downside. Or large institutions with poor internal governance.
I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand your point. There’s a huge difference between investment risk, for which you are paid the equity risk premium, and the sorts of things people insure against.
I agree.
Yup, I agree again. Though there is still the risk that the political system might manufacture externalities to accuse the researchers of.
This is why the reinsurance market exists.
Excellent news.
A promising idea in macroeconomics is that of NGDP level targetting. Instead of targetting the inflation rate, the central bank would try to maintain a trend rate of total spending in the economy. Here’s Scott Sumner’s excelent paper making the case for NGDP level targetting. As economic policy suggestions go, it’s extremely popular among rationalists—I recall Eliezer endorsing it a while back.
At the moment we have real-time market-implied forecasts for a variety of things; commodity prices, interest rates and inflation. These inflation expectations acted as an early warning sign of the great recession. Unfortunately, at present there does not exist a market in NGDP futures, so it’s hard to get real-time information on how the economy as a whole is doing.
Fortunately, Scott Sumner is setting up a prediction market for NGDP targetting in New Zealand. A variety of work, including some by Robin Hanson, suggests that even quite small prediction markets can create much more accurate predictions than teams of experts. The market is in the early stages of creation, but if anyone was interested in supply technical skills or financial assistance*, this could potentially have a huge payoff. Even if you don’t want to contribute to the project, you could participate in the market when it launches, which would help improve liquidity and aid the quality of predictions.
A few EA types have already donated, and Scott quickly raised his initial target of $30k within a day or so, but it’s plausible that costs might be higher than expected.
Improved practical knowledge and demand to make nutrition-complete affordable vegan food
Could you explain the causal mechanism you have in mind? It seems that such a charity would increase overall demand for vegan food, because it is buying some, but reduce demand from everyone else, because some people who would otherwise have eaten vegan food will instead just take from this charity.
Also I think it would be good if you could outline some thoughts about possible disadvantages of such a charity.
it seems arbitrary to consider the division “animal/non-animal” as especially nutritionally salient.
I don’t think this is actually arbitrary. Humans are animals, not plants. As such, it seems prima facie plausible that animals would contain the nutrients we need, as they are presumably largely the same nutrients the animals need. Humans did not evolve to only eat plants though, so it’s plausible that there are some nutrients that we need that are both absent in plants and that we are unable to metabolize from plants.
Also, “caring about lesser minds” is a good meme to promote, especially considering FAI, CEV etc.
The point about CEV is that it is extrapolated—if you have a good argument for vegetarianism, CEV would take that argument into account, whether or not you actually made the argument to anyone. So there’s no need to evangelize now.
Facebook group recently passed 4,000 members
Many of those are spam accounts. A very large number of ‘members’ have profile set in either Africa, Arabic countries or Pakistan, and most of them seem to be fake accounts.
They typically have no or few interests in common with flesh-and-blood EAs
Their profiles will show little activity, except for frequent changes of profile picture.
Their profile pictures will frequently not depict the same person.
If they post statuses, they will be extremely generic, feel-good statuses with little personalisation.
They will be a member of many many facebook groups.
Often their profile contains no english language content.
They never comment in the group, except to occasionally try to sell sunglasses.
They have 0 mutual friends, and 0 friends in the group.
This is an argument that I’ve previously made, but I can’t recall ever seeing anyone else ever make it. I wish you hadn’t deleted your account so I could see who you were!
we should have added skepticism for arguments against veg*nism due to the high self-serving bias we have to continue our current diets.
And we should have added skepticism for health-based arguments for vegetarianism that are made by people who are vegetarians for non-health reasons, as it would be extremely convenient if making a massive dietary change for non-health reasons turned out to have no major health issues.
Net present value—even some EAs do not understand this idea.
Statistics concepts—especially regression to the mean.
Inside view vs Outside view.
Do you have a rough sense of how many of them are spam accounts?
Unfortunately I don’t know of any tool that would allow us to easily judge this; FB doesn’t make it easy to look at the properties of your group’s members. I would guess over half. Most of them are not active—if one posts spam, and I’m on my laptop, I’ll block them from the group—unfortunately this option is not available on my phone. Similarly, maybe 50% of all posts to the group are spam of some kind.
Is frequent spam the reason we’ve switched to requiring FB posts to go through pre-moderation before appearing?
Yes
Mainly product adverts—tends to be sunglasses rather than viagra though.
More young people attend protests but more older people participate in lobbying, fund political parties, and provide most funding for charities.
Many young people I know basically treat protests as a recreational event.
Hey Ben, welcome to the forum! What’s your company do?
Do we allow links in the open thread? If so, here’s a nice one by Bryan Caplan.
Great idea! I know some couples who mutually disarm on election day, knowing they’d vote for opposite candidates.
Hey,
I recently reading mathematics and philosophy at Oxford, and now work in Finance. I’ve been interested since before it had a name, and am mainly interested in Existential Risks. I mainly donate to MIRI. I use the same username on LW.