Interested in AI safety talent search and development.
Peter
Karma: 541
I would love to help out with these, especially reading!
As you mention, increases in efficiency tend to be followed by equal increases in consumption in society absent other incentives and policies. So it’s understandable that some people might think we need some limits on resource extraction. And that some think we might be better off continuing innovation within those sustainable limits, instead of hoping we will always be able to invent technology that allows us to ignore those resource limits and failing to plan for possible limits.
It does seem intuitively satisfying to just throw my hands up at the political system and hope technology solves everything, but I wonder if that’s more a result of laziness and despair than well reasoned understanding and moral correctness. The 40 hour work week was once unthinkable. So were child labor laws. So was a ban on CFCs. What if people had just given up? What if we had just hoped someone would invent a better alternative to CFCs that caught on in time, and we allowed the ozone to be destroyed? Instead, we got rid of CFCs and invested in new technology. Technology does not develop in a political vacuum. We would not have seen over 90% cost reductions in technologies like solar during the past 10 years without major investments and support from the Obama administration.
Reducing carbon emissions is an example of “degrowth” in one sector of the economy. The wealthiest 10% of the world are responsible for over half of emissions in 2015. That’s not exactly a decoupling of wealth/consumption/pollution, in my opinion. And we know that happiness barely increases above $75,000 a year, so is rising GDP really benefiting most people when it mainly goes to the top 10%? It makes sense that some restrictions on the 10%’s huge resource use could potentially be helpful in making sure there is enough for everyone to thrive (and may even be good for the overwealthy too). For example, banning all new fossil fuel extraction and creating a carbon tax that is used to fund clean energy jobs will improve the health of millions and save thousands of lives by reducing air pollution. Most people would consider this good overall, even if it limits growth compared to allowing fossil fuel extraction to expand alongside renewables. And there’s a good case to be made that in the long run, damage from fossil fuels would cause even greater degrowth from massive, sudden, and sustained shocks to the economy rather than more gradual, palatable, and planned transitions in production and innovation.
Most people would prefer to work less so that they can spend more time with friends, family, and passion projects. And 9 out of 10 people would even give up $23 out of every $100 they would ever make for a guarantee of more meaningful work. So it’s not clear to me that more consumption is always the best way to increase well-being for people compared to other options or that we should solely pursue a strategy of ignoring resource limits and hoping for the best with technology investments.
To summarize, I don’t feel particularly attached to one perspective or the other. Here are three questions I have.
1. Why shouldn’t we set sustainable limits on resource extraction and continue to invest in technology? Why is ignoring the possibility of running out of resources and betting everything on innovating our way out of all of those limits within a few decades better than a more careful approach? There are plenty of people who chop down an entire forest today for a quick buck rather than harvest sustainably in perpetuity, even if the latter would generate more wealth in the long run.2. A lot of people would rather have more time and meaningful work than money. Why should we ignore their preferences instead of taking a more flexible approach that allows people greater freedom over what they do (maybe through policies like offering shorter work weeks, building more affordable housing, and even some sort of basic income perhaps—all funded by taxing wealth and/or sharing assets) rather than trying to maximize GDP growth at their expense—or at least without prioritizing them as much—like we have often done over the past few decades?
3. It’s not clear to me that all increases in growth and consumption necessarily mean greater happiness, creativity, and innovation forever. Why not reduce certain kinds of consumption and use those resources to increase investments in innovation? Why should we be opposed to potentially reducing consumption overall even when it ends up boosting happiness overall? I think there’s sometimes truth to the saying “less is more.” There’s diminishing marginal utility to much consumption. Some people overeat while others barely have enough; some people are stressed because they work so much, while others are stressed because they don’t have enough work to be sure they can afford to live; and so on.
I’ve never heard of anyone proposing 85% wealth reduction so I don’t think it’s relevant here. But you could absolutely take that wealth and use it to create good standards of living across the board within sustainable limits. That’s what everyone wants at the end of the day, right?
I don’t know anything about degrowth people saying we cannot use new technologies even if they don’t cause damage to the environment. That sounds more like straight up primitivism, which is a really obscure ideology. I think you’re better off responding to the strongest possible arguments rather than the weakest ones. That seems like the most effective way to come to the best proposals using insights from both sides.
It seems like you don’t accept the possibility to have innovation within an economy and rising standards of living without increasing total resource extraction every year. Maybe people figure out asteroid mining and all kinds of innovations so we never have to worry about any resources but it seems possible that such technology could take a long time or never be invented. Instead you turn to “Well this seems politically hard not easy and effective” and again if we end up in a world where it’s what we needed to do, then we should have done it and tried to do it no matter how hard it was. CFCs were an example of banning harmful technology instead of an innovation only approach. You say it was easier because growth continued but you don’t have a counterfactual to judge it against. Maybe it’s more palatable to not change any tax rates and investment policies and just keep raising more revenue as the economy grows, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to invest in beneficial technologies.
People cut down a whole forest for profit today because they are shortsighted and don’t care or they don’t have other alternatives. For some people, interest rates will never change that unless you paid them more than what they could chop the whole forest down for today. They are that shortsighted and selfish. And if you’re doing that to save the Amazon, well that also seems like a big policy change very different than just invest, grow, and hope for the best. I don’t see any reason why we can’t have growth in parts of the world that need it while reducing overconsumption in other parts.
Thanks! Sometimes I wonder if it’s even worth thinking about topics like this since it seems so hard to see how it would even have an impact (and even if it did I could be wrong) so I’m glad you did.
Meditating is definitely one of the best ways I’ve found to be happier, kinder, and calmer. Even when I feel like I don’t have time, I can tell there’s a difference from doing just 30 seconds or a minute a day.
Wow this sounds awesome!
I think many progressives and others on the left value mutual aid because they see it as more sustainable and genuine and with fewer negative strings attached. I think they are generally fine with aid and helping others as long as they can be shown good evidence that 1) the aid is not going to be used to prevent other positive changes (basically things like exchanging humanitarian aid for continued resource extraction from a region that’s worth more than the total aid contributed, or pressuring/requiring a housing justice org to stop organizing tenants to stand up for their rights in exchange for more funding for their shelter initiatives) and 2) Aid is done in a competent manner so that it doesn’t get stolen by governments, wasted, or taken by other corrupt actors and 3) respects local wisdom and empowers people to have more of a say over decisions that most affect them. Another example would be conservation efforts that kick indigenous people off their land vs ones that center their practical experience and respect their rights.
There’s a big difference between donating to a food bank and creating the infrastructure for people to organize their own food bank and/or grow their own food of their choosing. The first one is more narrowly focused on food security whereas the latter fits with a broader food justice or food sovereignty approach. I think both are important. Many people believe the latter kind of empowerment initiatives are more sustainable in the long run and less dependent on shifts in funding, even if they’re harder to set up initially. The reason being that they redistribute power, not just resources. To sum it up, something like “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a community to fish, and give them a place to do so, and they will eat for generations.”
Hey I applied too! Hopefully at least one of us gets it. I think they probably got more than 50 applications, so it almost starts to become a lottery at that point if they only have a few spots and everyone seems like they could do it well. Or maybe that’s just easier for me to think haha.
Yeah when I was reading it I was thinking “these are high bars to reach” but I think they cover all the concerns I’ve heard. Oh glad you liked it! I probably could have said that from the start, now that I think about it.
Here is a synopsis from Primary School, a newsletter focused on democratic primaries. It’s kind of annoying to dig through their posts for the hard to see “see full post” button so I’m copy and pasting them.
EDIT FEC Update 2/5/2022
Carrick Flynn says he raised $430,000 in the first 10 days. Salinas only raised $174,000 in two months. Money isn’t everything in campaigns but that is kind of low for Salinas.--
Tl;dr: Salinas seems like a strong candidate and solid progressive who is supported by the local party. I’d be interested in seeing her first fundraising numbers when they are out.
1/27/2022
OR-06
″Oregon Medical Board member Kathleen Harder raised $129,000 in the two months since she announced her campaign, which means she’s going to be a real part of this ever-widening field of candidates. In addition to her, state Rep. Andrea Salinas, former Multnomah County Commissioner Loretta Smith, and dueling pro-cryptocurrency self-funders Matt West and Cody Reynolds, a new candidate has entered: State Rep. Teresa Alonso Leon. Leon, who is in her second term in the state house, was mentioned as a potential candidate for this seat when it was first drawn, but stayed quiet about any plans until people just assumed she wasn’t interested. That likely includes the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who endorsed Salinas last month. Leon, an immigrant herself, has been fantastic on immigrant rights issues, and has fought to include the undocumented in Oregon’s Medicaid program. But her launch and campaign website have so far been light on the policy details, and she hasn’t taken any stances in inter-party fights that would make her allegiances more clear.Leon may not even be the only candidate entering—AI researcher Carrick Flynn has filed to run. While assorted professors and researchers run for Congress all the time without anyone noticing, Flynn spent years as a relatively public-facing part of a well endowed AI-related public policy program, so he probably knows more than a few rich people.”
Originally I read this last sentence as him being more knowledgeable than rich people about AI, but now I’ve realized they probably meant he likely knows a bunch of deep pocketed individuals.
1/18/2022
″...FEC records that say that Matt West’s the one who self-funded $437,000 and raised $182,000, while Reynolds self-funded $2,000,000 and only raised $10 elsewhere.”10/13/2021
″State Rep. Andrea Salinas is considering running for the new OR-06, a safely Democratic district containing the cities of Salem and Corvallis, as well as a significant chunk of the Portland suburbs. Salinas, first appointed to her suburban house seat in 2017, made it to House leadership just a couple years later, and has spent her time in office functioning as a solid progressive: She’s supported efforts to create a public option for Oregon (because “getting to some kind of single payer system is the best thing we could do..for all people in the US”), allow prisoners to vote, and give agricultural workers overtime pay. The local Democratic establishment clearly likes her if they appointed her to office, and to leadership not long after, so she’ll be a considerable force in the primary should she run. She also helped draw the new district, so the odds of it being at least somewhat optimized for her are pretty high.”
It’s not legal to receive donations directly or indirectly from foreign nationals for any US race, but volunteering and asking people to donate is okay.
Based on what people have said here, I think Carrick sounds like a great candidate who would make a wonderful representative. However, my impression from loosely following primaries from time to time is that local reputation matters a lot. Self funders tend not to do well because they tend not to have real local support. Does Carrick have a strong base of support or message to compete against the likes of a popular progressive state rep like Salinas (I don’t believe we have fundraising numbers from her yet)? If anyone knows of a race where a similar candidate won in similar circumstances, I’d love to hear about it.
The first similar race that comes to mind for me is when Cenk Uygur ran in California in 2020. Cenk moved to the district to run for an open seat and had large financial support from his fanbase built running a progressive independent media outlet known as The Young Turks. But he only got around 6% of the vote with $1.7 million spent. Granted, there are a couple of differences here: California has Top Two/jungle primaries which means all candidates are on the same primary ballot; it was a special election which tends to have lower turnout; Cenk tends to be pretty abrasive; he never lived in the district before; the election was in a swing district; and Cenk had controversial misogynistic past blog posts from years ago when he identified as a conservative Republican and was hit hard in the media over it. He was running against a woman state rep with local party support who ultimately won the primary (although she ultimately lost the general election by a few hundred votes). I wasn’t able to find numbers for what she spent in the special election primary but she got over $5 million in all of 2020 so maybe less than half of that?
“A solar panel for the palette” I love it. I think this is a great idea. Creating tasty new cuisines with unique flavors would likely get more people to eat more tofu since some would now have plant based options that meet their taste preferences. I like the idea of not just trying to replace meat but trying to create something new or even surpass it. Plant based meat projects are important of course—but I think there’s room for other approaches too. The most successful renewable energy technologies (solar and wind) are ones that do something different than fossil fuels instead of trying to just replicate fuel based technology. Solar and wind combined can give you energy almost anywhere and without the need for combustion. Biofuels are good, but we probably wouldn’t have as many renewables if that was our only approach. I’m not aware of any evidence that solar and wind held biofuels back, so I don’t think rare tofus would hold plant meats back either.
Personally, I would love to have more kinds of tofu to try. I agree with Jeremy that getting these exotic tofus in front of some food industry experts to get their feedback would probably be a good idea.
Even better if these rare tofus are healthy and can be marketed as part of a healthy lifestyle that will make you feel great and strong. I wonder if there is some lesser known American history about tofu once being popular or enjoyed by the founding fathers or something too. I think Ben Franklin tried it. Would be great marketing material for getting people to at least give it a chance.
Looks like I missed this, but I wanted to try it out anyway. Maybe it’ll be useful to someone.
That’s a great question. Prioritizing is important. There are many problems and we want to fix what affects us. But let’s imagine this question differently.It’s pretty nice having fresh, clean water to drink, right? That’s going to be true for you today, tomorrow, and next week. It’ll be true in 10 days or 10 years. You wouldn’t consider yourself as having less of a right to clean water today than you did 10 years ago, right? And you wouldn’t want people to make decisions today that take away your water tomorrow. Or decisions 10 years ago that ruined your water today.
You’ll probably also want your kids to have clean water—and their kids too. You won’t want anyone to take that away. Because no matter how far you go into the future, they will still need clean water as much as you do today. There’s always going to be someone around who needs clean water just like us. They’ll feel the same pain, joy, and thirst. And they will be just as real and valuable as our own future self. Just as we are as real and valuable as people 10 years ago. Future people have value the same way our future self does. And just as past people ensured we would have clean water, we should ensure that future people can enjoy clean water too.
If something won’t affect anyone for a long time, then we might spend less effort and prioritize more immediate problems that are causing suffering. Here it makes sense to discount future people’s needs somewhat—not because they are worth less, but because we have more time. An asteroid 100,000 years away doesn’t mean ignore starvation today. Nor does starvation today mean we should forget those who will feel hungry tomorrow.
I’ve thought about a lot of this stuff too, so I understand how the value can seem uncertain. These are some reasons I became [more] vegan.
1. I don’t participate in factory farming suffering—any good impact is good to me, a penny saved is a penny earned. Even a small impact matters to me.
2. I avoid taking lives
3. I feel better—probably because of eating healthier and maybe also more in control of my decisions. A mostly or entirely vegan diet might also just be healthier for some reason. Chimps and Bonobos are our closest relatives and their diets are 95% vegan or more, so maybe that means something? I digress.
4. I eat healthier—most unhealthy food I am exposed to is nonvegan. If it’s disqualified by being nonvegan it eliminates a lot of unhealthy food and a lot of wasted thinking about eating it or not. I don’t feel like I’m missing out because it’s not an option and not in alignment with how I want to live and feel.
5. I build up discipline, a great transferable habit. Resisting convenience is a good skill because many convenient or easy things are bad.
6. I show other people being vegan is simple, beneficial, and enjoyable. People I know are more curious about becoming vegan now than when they didn’t know anyone.
7. I shrink my carbon footprint.
I think personal decisions matter and calculations claiming they are low impact generally miss some of the social nature of our decisions. When millions of people do something, it has a big effect. Even one person doing something has an effect. But if we only look at one person isolated from any social context, we would never think about the spillover effects and multipliers. For example, leaving a couple pieces of trash in a park makes other people more likely to do the same. We have to start somewhere because change doesn’t usually pop into existence all across society suddenly. Big shifts are often gradual until they reach tipping points. We need demand for a market to grow and mature.
It seems like a pretty low cost thing to do for those benefits. It’s hard for me to see how becoming vegan would prevent most people from doing other things. A few hours of research on what to eat to get a balanced diet was all it took for me. But maybe I am an outlier. Though I think we’re often far more flexible in our behavior than we realize. Habits are very powerful. Novel becomes normal very quickly. So it seems to me like becoming more vegan would be either neutral or beneficial for most people.
I don’t think ceding territory would be a viable solution, as this would be the exact same strategy as appeasement of Nazi Germany (though some have recently suggested Chamberlain’s appeasement may have been a strategic choice to buy time for British rearmament). It failed to stop tyrants before, and importantly—it’s not something you can take back. It’s an extreme version of giving a bully your lunch money before they beat you up—you become a repeat target for life.
With NATO neutrality, you can at least take it back (in theory) if Putin misbehaves. Russia has stated that Ukraine NATO membership is a red line for them, so an agreement regarding it seems like something that should have been discussed. I don’t know if it was or if there are certain reasons it wasn’t—I’m not privy to any diplomatic discussions or strategy.
I’m not sure I would call giving weapons to Ukraine, sanctioning Russia, and hunting down war supporting Oligarchs’ assets as appeasement. It’s not the maximum response but it is an escalation of response to Putin’s attack. It might be enough to scare elites who support Putin without causing further escalation, which is dangerous since we are dealing with a country that has nuclear weapons, which wasn’t the case with the Nazi regime in WW2.
It’s important to distinguish between concessions. Removing missiles that can strike a country in exchange for removing missiles that can strike another country is VERY different than helping a dictator to take over parts of a country when they threaten violence. Once you start, where are you going to stop? The problem also isn’t just Putin, the problem is every tyrant watching the response here. Most of the world is not part of NATO. If Russia succeeds, China’s government may be emboldened to go after Taiwan, for example.
Border could be closed as soon as Friday when the Federation Council hosts a special meeting.
This is a really interesting framework. If you’re interested in diving into some ideas for more transformative social change I think I can recommend a few, though I’m not that knowledgeable about them.
Participatory Economics or Parecon—if nothing else it does seem pretty detailed from what I can gather. Very theory based in terms of a blueprint for a possible society. Bolo ’bolo is another theoretical but specific example like this, but in a different direction.
Democratic Confederalism in Rojava/the Democratic Forces of Northern Syria. I think this one can be harder to find info on, but it’s a current real world movement example. There are some books and articles on it. The Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization series and Sociology of Freedom go more into the philosophy side rather than the existing on-the-ground specifics. The Zapatistas are another real world movement example.
The Catalan Integral Cooperative is a specific organization practicing a more commons based socioeconomic system. (Also see Elinor Ostrom and others who have detailed effectively governed commons around the world and the principles they operate under). https://commonstransition.org/the-catalan-integral-cooperative-an-organizational-study-of-a-post-capitalist-cooperative/
Cooperation Jackson is another kind of organization level ecosystem example.
If you find these useful, I could probably think of a few more examples.