Note: Diana Fleischman is the wife of Geoffrey Miller, another far-right effective altruist with a (much more prolific) account on this forum.
Matrice Jacobine
Karma: 81
Anthropic teams up with Palantir and AWS to sell AI to defense customers
Okay, so why is the faction of EA with ostensibly the most funds the one with “near-zero relevant political influence” while one of the animalist faction’s top projects is creating an animalist movement in East Asia from scratch, and the longtermist faction has the president of RAND? That seems like a choice to divide influence that way in the first place.
GH&D also has a clearly successful baseline with near-infinite room for more funding, and so more speculative projects need to clear that baseline before they become viable.
Again, that is exactly what I am calling “constantly retreading the streetlight-illuminated ground”. I do not think most institutional development economists would endorse the idea that LDCs can escape the poverty trap through short-term health interventions alone.
The concept was coined by Singer, who is an EA, but he coined it in 1981 and it has been a term of mainstream moral philosophy for a while.
I don’t know how to make it clearer. Longtermist nonprofits get to research world problems and their possible solutions without having to immediately show a randomized controlled trial following the ITN framework on policies that don’t exist yet. Why is the same thing seemingly impossible for dealing with global poverty?
Why are the animalist and longtermist wings of EA the only wings that consider policy change an intervention?
That’s what I mean by “constantly retreading the streetlight-illuminated ground”. And lack of established charities hasn’t stopped the longtermist wing (and to a certain extent the animalist wing) of EA before?
Institutional reforms to help LDCs escape the poverty trap.
My experience is that many global-poverty-focused EA likes to refer to their field as “global health and development” but the existing literature in institutional development economics has been mostly ignored in favor of constantly retreading the same old streetlight-illuminated ground of bednets and deworming. This may in part because it might be problematic for EA Political Orthodoxy. @Ben Kuhn has made this point cogently here and here.
Not only longtermism predate progress studies, but the two have actively conflicting theoretical underpinnings and policy goals. See this article by @Garrison:
Crawford and Cowen, the two leading intellectual figures of the progress community, come from the objectivist and libertarian traditions, respectively. On a panel at AynRandCon, Crawford described progress studies as adjacent to objectivism, the philosophical system outlined in 20th Century philosopher Ayn Rand’s fiction. Objectivism posits that pursuing one’s own happiness is the proper moral purpose of life and advocates for laissez-faire capitalism, among other things. Crawford also hopes progress studies will lead to “political debates framed in terms of progress and growth, rather than primarily or exclusively in terms of redistribution”.
While longtermism can be traced to Bostrom and Hughes’ founding of the Institute for Ethics in Emerging Technologies with the express purpose of steering the world transhumanist movement away from Silicon Valley libertarianism and into a social-democratic direction, by focusing on ethical and social concerns about emerging technologies instead of defending the development of emerging technologies as an unalloyed natural right.
“Okay, all the examples I used were strawmen, but it doesn’t really matter”
?????
I would advise using normal capitalization for your titles. Not that big of a deal if you just read the article but the table of contents on the left side of the site just makes it looks like you’re SCREAMING.