Someone should do this experiment one day. Compare the performance of people using Bayesian reasoning vs other reasoning methods, and see if there actually is an advantage to one heuristic over another.
Radical Empath Ismam
Karma: 374
You’re absolutely right in my opinion Abraham. EV is a mathematical convenience and simplification that might work most of the time, but certainly not all.
I feel words like “expected value” are confusing & miselading (nothing expected about it—it’s a misnomer and accident of history/ translation from french that it’s called that), and this community would do well to avoid unnecessary jargon. I need to write up a post about this.
If we substituted the word “expected value” with mean or average, which is literally what it is (and I meet so many people in this community who get this wrong), it would be just as accurate but much more easier to understand, even to technical people. And many people understand that mean is not always the most appropriate statistic to use espescially with skewed distributions, e.g. reporting on incomes is often done with median, and that’s perfectly fine.
Expected value should also not be confused with expected utility (or as I prefer the mean utility). You use the terms interchangeably in your post as do many people in this community, it’s fine in causal conversation but it is worth being specific when necessary in discussions like this. I suspect because the word “value” in expected value implies some humanistic desireable ideal, but that’s what the word utility is for.
You also say use the term “in expectation” to mean the most likeliest outcome (i.e. the mode outcome) or more than 50%. I’m not familiar with that langauge—maybe it is accurate, but to me it is confusing when you can simply say the mode or the likeliest outcome.
So ultimately I suspect your dilemmas boil down to the recognition that there are circumstances where mean, mode, median, (and in fact even more statistics) can be maximised and we get different optimal decisions depending on the statistic we use.
At the end of the day we want to: maximise utility. But if utility has a probability distribution, it’s hard to maxmise without using some statistic (mean, mode, median etc) that maps a probability distribution to a real number. Using mean (EV) is not completely arbitrary I believe (it has some nice preperties), but it’s not fully settled. I personally think it has problems.
You have a point that safety isn’t a negative externality in the way pollution is. I will concede that. Never really thought of it like that.
To clarify, I am not arguing that safety standards should be more or less strict. I just think they should be overwhelmingly determined by companies and workers instead of imposed by governments.
Don’t you think unions have an important role to play in this? Because as a worker, especially in a poor country, there’s a lot of asymmetry. It’s difficult and often impossible to assess the risk of a workplace before you’ve started. You lack the expertise to understand the breadth of all the safety issues, and don’t have the information readily available to accurately compare safety across different firms.
And if governments can step in, productively with union & employer stakeholders, set sensible rules on safety (minimum safety standards, workplace assessment ratings), that makes it much easier for workers to assess safety of different firms, make better judgements, bargain for higher pay at more dangerous firms, allocate their labour more economical efficiently. Helps employers compete too.
Maybe you are arguing against the rules being too inflexible? Maybe you are just against first world unions don’t always have the interests of third world workers in mind but maybe third world unions are ok?
“The Indian state of Kerala is widely recognised as having high living standards relative to the rest of India due to the strong presence of militant unions and labour standards.”
I think the causality goes the other way around. A higher income per capita means people are willing to pay more to protect their health, and therefore push for stricter safety standards.
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the Kerala case study. Kerala actually has a lower per capita income. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model
I think it’s a good case study to challenge this line of argument. I’d say that example is a clear case where the causality is opposite to how you described. A lot of the social democratic countries show that trend. The Nordic countries famously were amongst the poorest parts of Europe when they adopted the Nordic model pushed by militant labour movements in those countries.
That’s the way our economic system works. Competing on the price of labour is fine and desirable—that helps sends signals to the global economy on how to order itself for optimal output.
But competing on safety is like a negative externality, like companies emitting pollution.
Safety is not an onerous cost either. As a cost, it would be in line with doing business in the jurisdiction. If the cost of labour is low in a poor country, so too is the lower cost of implementing safety.
Is there a specific country or example you would like to see safety standards held back on the grounds of higher employment? I’ve never heard of onerous safety standards being a cited as a reason for suppressed economic development. The Rana plaza fire safety reforms were widely lauded.
The Indian state of Kerala is widely recognised as having high living standards relative to the rest of India due to the strong presence of militant unions and labour standards.
Maybe there’s a theoretic economic argument but it seems very edge-casey in the real world.
I actually think Kernaghan is making a good point and you’ve failed to appreciate his logic in full. Third world country businesses should not be able compete by having lower safety standards. Kernaghan is right, that creates a moral hazard, it pressures jurisdictions with high standards to lower them. It rewards bad behaviour here and there. We don’t want that surely. No one wants that.
But third world country businesses should be able compete by having lower wages for their workers, operating in a low cost environment etc. That does accurately capture the relative economic advantage.
That is insane that you can embed a OWID chart into a forum reply 😂
Now, maybe the worry is that while longtermists are doing good stuff now, they might eventually do terrible things for the sake of the long-term future
Longtermists have (past-tense) done bad things. The worry is now evidenced by a track record. It’s not some theoretical worry about the future. Are we still not able to admit this as a movement?
Things done under the guise of longtermism:
Political lobbying for crypto done in the name of “pandemic prevention”
Gabe Bankman-Fried’s plans to purchase the island nation of Nauru
The Longtermism castle
Connections to various far-right projects
SBF’s funding of Praxis Society
FLI’s grant offer to a pro-nazi group
Far right personalities connecting their ideologies to longtermism
I can’t even begin to estimate the harm done by SBF’s political interference, succesfully electing his crypto-friendly candidates to the world’s most powerful institution of democracy, the US House. Permanently altering the course of world history, ending the careers of some very promising principled candidates who refused to take big money.
Race science is well-established pseudoscience recognised by the scientific community. This why I roll my eyes when EAs think of themselves as elite or smarter than average. There are, fortunately or unfortunately, anti-intellectual currents within this movement, and race science isn’t the only pseudoscientific inclination in my opinion, and in the opinion of a few others in this movement I have learned.
Unlike you however I actually am grateful for EAs anti-science streak to be so nakedly visible, because it is actually valuable information for outsiders and insiders to know. Knowledge of the EAs embracing race science should inform the public how seriously to take this movement, and can only help weed out the good parts of EA from the bad.
We shouldn’t mask up the shortcomings of EA to make it look like a better movement than it actually is.
I also want to say I’ve been really impressed by the work of the Quincy Institute (https://quincyinst.org/). They advocate for an anti-war & anti-interventionist foreign policy, which is very neglected amongst think tanks in this area due to the high levels of funding by weapons-makers and the military-industrial complex. They’re work on the Iran nuclear deal was highly lauded.
Nuclear weapons are of course a specific area they focus on, but their more holistic Anti-war & Anti-interventionist advocacy has noticeably improved the foreign policy debate and challenged hawkish perspectives that dominate this space and I suspect is a very effective way to reduce X-Risk.
Would love to see EAs engaged in Anti-war & Anti-interventionist spaces as they seem very neglected and a chance to make an outsized impact.
The nobel-winning ICANW also does really excellent work and spoke at EAGx Australia.
Can I add one more fear—mischaracterising the scientific credibility of scientific racism/ HBD.
Having these voices like Hanania & Razib Khan at Manifest (with no counterbalance) is going to make people think that there is more scientific support for the “race realist/ HBD” position than there actually is.
In actual fact, the opposite is true.
Response by evolutionary biologists responded to Nicholas Wade’s book: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/books/review/letters-a-troublesome-inheritance.html the
American Society of Human Genetics statement https://www.cell.com/ajhg/pdf/S0002-9297(18)30363-X.pdf and the American Association of Biological Anthropologists statement https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/
Further papers on Race & IQ https://r.jordan.im/download/racism/bird2021.pdf https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bies.202100204?
I was involved in the EA movement from around 2014 in Sydney Australia, which I expect is similar to the UK as you mentioned (but all the same, the UK & Australia were and are major centres for the EA movement and our lack of interaction with the Rationalist community in those early days should be noted).
From my recollection, in those early days the local EA Sydney community would co-host events with the local Less Wrong Rationality, Transhumanist, and the Science Party groups just to get the numbers up for events. So yes, the Rationalists did mix with EA, but their contribution was on-par with the Transhumanists.
I don’t recall rationality being a major part of major EA literature at the time (The Most Good You Can Do, The Life You Can Save). Even utilitarianism was downplayed as being fundamental to being an EA. It was later on that Rationality became more influential.
I’m in favour of distancing “Rationality” from EA.
As I’ve said elsewhere, Less-Wrong “rationality” isn’t foundational to EA and it’s not even the accepted school of critical thinking.
For example, I personally come from the “scientific skepticism” tradition (think Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Steven Novella, James Randi, etc...), and in my opinion, since EA is simply scientific skepticism applied to charity, scientific skepticism is the much more natural basis for critical thinking in the EA movement than LW.
I’ve been in the EA movement for a long time and I can attest Rationality did not play any part in the EA movement in the early days.
I feel exactly the same way. I love the idea of “lowercase” effective altruism. I’ve also dabbled with term “evidence-based altruism”, where “evidence-based” I hope signals to people that I am not interested in hypothetical/rationalist/extremely philosophical issues.
Manifest 2025 https://youtu.be/FVvg1CKBE20
Radical Empath Ismam’s Quick takes
EA to “decouple” from LW/rationality
I mean, why not? Less-wrong “rationality” isn’t foundational to EA, it’s not even the accepted school of criticial thinking.
For example, I personally come from the “scientific skepticism” tradition (think Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Steven Novella, James Randi, etc...), and in my opinion, since EA is simply scientific skepticism applied to charity, scientific skepticism is the much more natural basis for criticial thinking in the EA movement than LW.
You should absolutely do it, and I would agree that you probably would not receive material backlash.
But I would be careful to assume that your success means that any plain old person can critique EA and receive a warm reception.
You’ve spent a long time building amicable relationships with EAs (I suspect by walking on eggshells, self-censoring—hope I am not being presumptuous here David).
It is confusing I agree, but the confusion isn’t helped by coming up with further conflicting definitions.
I’ve studied & work in finance, and as I understand things, the term capital markets really just refers to the market of longer-term debt/equity instruments (e.g. bonds, shares etc). That term sits in contrast to money markets which refers to short-term instruments (e.g. repos, bills which are just bonds that mature ⇐ 90 days).
There’s nothing particular about capital markets that are particularly more objectionable to socialists than say the money market, so your emphasis on capital markets is misplaced in my opinion.
RE participatory socialism, I was not familiar with this idea, but from a quick read it does seem to advocate for the majority of the economy to operate under public or worker ownership of the means of production. So I think this would generally be considered socialism under the official definition of socialism. Happy to be corrected if I’ve misunderstood Piketty’s system.
Social democracy, whilst it may involve some elements of socialism (welfare state, unions, large public sector, state ownership of some companies), and may be embraced by socialists as a transitory economic system towards socialism, is generally considered a form of capitalism. Historically it gets more complicated, where the terms social democracy and democratic socialism were interchangeable (e.g. the precursor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, was the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party). But with history, they’ve come to mean different things.
So in summary, I think you are wrong to point to Participatory socialism and social democracy as not involving public ownership of the means of production, or being socialism respectivel. And I think you are furthering the confusion of these ideas by emphasizing the importance of capital markets in this discussion.
I do applaud you looking into this and the ideas of Piketty & the nordic model. But be careful about theorising too much on your own when there is a wealth of existing work produced by more informed/ dedicated people (including academics, commentators) you could leverage. For example, jacobin, the socialist magazine, has a few articles on what AI means for socialists: https://jacobin.com/2024/01/workers-labor-artificial-intelligence-technology An article like that could have been a good starting point for you to support/ critique in the forum post.
Keep looking into this stuff—glad to see it being posted on the progress forum also. These discussions are needed more for sure.
I’m surprised you didn’t bring up the most commonly cited defintions of capitalism and socialism.
Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production.
Socialism is the public ownership of the means of production.
Whilst there’s a great deal of variation in how people envision their form of captialism/ socialism, the above are the generally agreed upon dictionary definitions of the two economic systems.
People in the digital minds should seriously take the Pope’s wisdom and clarity on this issue to heart, and be open to the Catholic position.
Pope makes a lot of good points in my opinion.
The tone of this article by default assuming the church’s position isn’t even worth considering runs me the wrong way.