the_jaded_one

Karma: 108

the_jaded_one Mar 2, 2017, 9:43 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Ben_West🔸’s comment on: Vote Pairing is a Cost-Effective Political Intervention

2016 only one candidate had any sort of policy at all about farmed animals, so it didn’t require a very extensive policy analysis to figure out who is preferable.

Beware of unintended consequences, though. The path from “Nice things are written about X on a candidate’s promotional materials” to “Overall, X improved” is a very circuitous one in human politics.

The same is true for other EA focus areas.

A lot of people in EA seem to assume, without a thorough argument, that direct support for certain political tribes is good for all EA causes. I would like to see some effort put into something like a quasi realistic simulation of human political processes to back up claims like this. (Not that I am demanding specific evidence before I will believe these claims—just that it would be a good idea). Real-world human politicking seems to be full of crucial considerations.

I also feel like when we talk about human political issues, we lack an understanding of, or don’t bother to think about, the causal dynamics behind how politics works in humans. I am specifically talking about things like signalling

the_jaded_one Feb 23, 2017, 8:01 PM
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in reply to: Daniel_Eth’s comment on: The Moral Obligation to Organize
I think we can push issues towards being less political by reframing them and persuading others to reframe them.

Abortion, gun control, tax rate—these issues are so central to the left-right political divide that they will never be depoliticized.

Climate change is not like them IMO. I think it can be pushed away from the political left-right axis if it can be reframed so that doing something about climate change is no longer seen as supporting left-wing ideas about big government. There is an angle about efficiency, fairness & cutting red tape (carbon tax) and another angle about innovation and industry (e.g. Tesla). I think we should be pushing those very hard.

the_jaded_one Feb 19, 2017, 10:39 AM
15 points
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on: The Moral Obligation to Organize
Political organizing is a highly accessible way for many EAs to have a potentially high impact. Many of us are doing it already. We propose that as a community we recognize it more formally as way to do good within an EA framework

I agree that EAs should look much more broadly at ways to do good, but I feel like doing political stuff to do good is a trap, or at least is full of traps.

Why do humans have politics? Why don’t we just fire all the politicians and have a professional civil service that just does what’s good?
- Because people have different goals or values, and if a powerful group ends up in control of the apparatus of the state and pushes its agenda very hard and pisses a lot of people off, it is better to have that group ousted in an election than in a civil war.
But the takeaway is that politics is the arena in which we discuss ideas where different people in our societies disagree on what counts as good, and as a result it is a somewhat toxic arena with relatively poor intellectual standards. It strongly resists good decision-making and good quality debate, and strongly encourages rhetoric. EA needs to take sides in this like I need more holes in my head.

I think it would be fruitful for EA to get involved in politics, but not by taking sides; I get the impression that the best thing EAs can do is try to find pareto improvements that help both sides, and by making issues that are political into nonpolitical issues by de-ideologizing them and finding solutions that make everyone happy and make the world a better place.

Take a leaf out of Elon Musks’s book. The right wing in the USA is engaging in some pretty crazy irrationality and science denial about global warming. Many people might see this as an opportunity to score points against the right, but global warming will not be solved by political hot air, it will be solved by making fossil fuels economically marginal or nonviable in most applications. In particular, we need to reduce car related emissions to near zero. So Musks goes and builds fast, sexy macho cars in factories in the USA which provide tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs for blue collar US workers, and emphasizes them as innovative, forward looking and pro-US. Our new right wing president is lapping it up. This is what effective altruism in politics looks like: the rhetoric (“look at these sexy, innovative US-made cars!”) is in service of the goal (eliminating gasoline cars and therefore eventually CO2 emissions), not the other way around.

And if you want to see the opposite, go look at this. People are cancelling their Tesla orders because Musk is “acting as a conduit to the rise of white nationalism and fascism in the United States”. Musk has an actual solution to a serious problem, and people on the political left want to destroy it because it doesn’t conform perfectly to their political ideology. Did these people stop to think about whether this nascent boycott makes sense from a consequentialist perspective? As in, “let’s delay the solution to a pressing global problem in order to mildly inconvenience our political enemy”?

Collaborating with existing social justice movements

I would personally like to see EA become more like Elon Musk and less like Buzzfeed. The Trump administration and movement is a bit like a screaming toddler; it’s much easier to deal with by distracting it with it’s favorite toys (“Macho! Innovative! Made in the US!”) than by trying to start an argument with it. How can we find ways to persuade the Trump administration—or any other popular right wing regime—that doing good is in its interest and conforms to its ideology? How can we sound right wing enough that the political right (who currently hold all the legislative power in the US) practically thinks they thought of our ideas themselves?

the_jaded_one Feb 18, 2017, 6:32 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Daniel_Eth’s comment on: The Moral Obligation to Organize

I think we should align with the left on climate change, for example.

re: climate change, it would be really nice if we could persuade the political right (and left) that climate change is apolitical and that it is just a generally sensible thing to tackle it, like building roads is apolitical and just generally sensible.

Technology is on our side here: electric cars are going mainsteam, wind and solar are getting better. I believe that we have now entered a regime where climate change will fix itself as humanity naturally switches over to clean energy, and the best thing that politics can do is get out of the way.

the_jaded_one Feb 1, 2017, 9:43 PM
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in reply to: BenHoffman’s comment on: Collaborators Wanted: Could war disrupt EA orgs in the US or UK in the next 10 years?

What disruptions are EAs especially well placed to mitigate?

I like this one. If you plan to do good in an uncertain future, it makes sense to take advantage of altruism’s risk neutrality and put a lot of effort into scenarios that are reasonably likely but also favour your own impact.

In the event of a major disruption or catastrophe such as a war or negative political event in the EA heartland, this would mean that global health work would suddenly become pretty useless—no-one would have the will or means to help distant (in space) people. But we would suddenly have much more leverage to help people who are distant in time, by trying to positively affect any recovery of civilisation. That could be by making it happen sooner, or by giving it some form of aid that is cheap for us. Robust preservation of information is a good idea. If there were a major disaster that destroyed the internet and most servers, and then a long period of civilisational downtime, it might make sense to try and save and distribute key information, for example Wikipedia, the, certain key books, sites, courses, etc.

There might also be attempts to distort history in a very thorough way. Perhaps steps can be taken against this.

the_jaded_one Feb 1, 2017, 5:41 PM
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in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

some of OpenPhil are probably reading it

...

The fix is to email them a link, and to try to give arguments that you think they would appreciate as input for how they could improve their activities.

Those arguments are in the post.

I am writing under a pseudonym so I don’t have an easy way of emailing them without it going to their spam folder. I have sent an email pointing them to the post, though.

the_jaded_one Feb 1, 2017, 5:33 PM
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in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

If the issue is that the charities are in fact ineffective, then you haven’t provided any direct evidence of this, only the indirect point that political charities are often ineffective.

Where is the direct evidence that Cosecha is highly effective?

the_jaded_one Feb 1, 2017, 5:13 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

I don’t think this is the right way to model marginal probability, to put it lightly. :)

Well really you’re trying to look at d/dx P(Hillary Win|spend x), and one way to do that is to model that as a linear function. More realistically it is something like a sigmoid.

For some numbers, see this

So if we assume: P(Hillary Win|total spend $300M) = 25% P(Hillary Win|total spend $3Bn) = 75%

Then the average value of d/dx P(Hillary Win|spend x) over that range is going to be 2700M/0.5 = $5.5Bn per unit of probability. Most likely the value of the derivative at the actual value isn’t too far off the average.

This isn’t too far from $1000/vote x 3 million votes = $3Bn.

the_jaded_one Feb 1, 2017, 12:01 PM
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes
Well if we go with $1000 per vote and we need to shift 3 million votes, that’s $3bn. Now let’s map $3bn to, say, a 25% increased probability of winning, under a reasonable pre-election distribution.

Then you can think of the election costing $12bn, for a benefit of 4tn, which is a factor of 400.

the_jaded_one Feb 1, 2017, 7:59 AM
−1 points
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in reply to: Daniel_Eth’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes
Hillary outspent Trump by a factor of 2 and lost by a large margin, so it’s something of a questionable decision.

EDIT: I think a more realistic model might go something like this; you can tweak the figures to shift a factor of 2-3 but not much more:

P(Hillary Win|total spend $300M) = 25% P(Hillary Win|total spend $3Bn) = 75%

Then the average value of d/dx P(Hillary Win|spend x) over that range is going to be 2700M/0.5 = $5.5Bn per unit of probability. Most likely the value of the derivative at the actual value isn’t too far off the average.

This isn’t too far from $1000/vote x 3 million votes = $3Bn.

So we could look at something like $5Bn/unit probability at the margin, or each $1 increasing the probability of Hillary winning by ¹⁄_{5,000,000,000}

You could probably do a very similar analysis for any political election at roughly this level of existing funding.

We can take a first approximation to the expected disutility of a very bad Trump presidency at $4Tn or one full years’ GDP. This implies a very confident belief in an extremely negative outcome about Trump.

Is it competitive with global poverty? Well it seems like it is on a fairly similar level, since for $5000 you can save a life which is typically valued at something like $5-$25M, which is a similar “rate of return” to paying 5Bn for 4Tn via the Clinton campaign.

Is this competitive with MIRI or the other AI risk orgs? Probably not, but your beliefs about AI risk factor into this quite a lot.

the_jaded_one Jan 29, 2017, 8:17 PM
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in reply to: jsteinhardt’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

I don’t think that can function as an argument that the recommendation shouldn’t have been made in the first place

I agree, and I didn’t mention that document or my degree of trust in it.

I feel your overall engagement here hasn’t been very productive.

I suppose it depends what you want to produce. If debates were predictably productive I presume people would just update without even having to have a debate.

it feels like you’re reaching for whatever counterarguments you can think of, without considering whether someone who disagreed with you would have an immediate response

What counterarguments is one supposed to make, other than the ones one thinks of? I suppose the alternative is to not make a counterargument, or start a debate with all possible lines of play fully worked out and prepared? A high standard, to be sure. Sometimes one doesn’t correctly anticipate the actual responses. Is there some tax on number of comments or responses? I mean this is valid to an extent, if someone is making really dumb arguments, but then again sometimes one has to ask the emperor why he isn’t wearing any clothes.

the_jaded_one Jan 29, 2017, 7:57 PM
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in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes
Can you elaborate?

the_jaded_one Jan 29, 2017, 6:22 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes
Comments from anyone involved in Open Philanthropy are welcome here.

the_jaded_one Jan 29, 2017, 6:18 PM
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in reply to: ozymandias’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

policy expertise in a particular field

What is policy expertise in the field of deciding that it is a good idea to encourage illegal immigration? I feel like we are (mis)using words here to make some extremely dodgy inferences. Chloe studied worked for the ACLU and a law firm, focusing on litigating police misconduct and aiming to reduce incarceration, and then Open Phil. This doesn’t IMO qualify her to decide that increasing legal and illegal immigration is a good idea, and doesn’t endow her with expertise on that question.

Is your claim that Chloe Cockburn has failed to consider policy ideas associated with the right-wing, and thus has not done her due diligence to know that what she recommends is actually the best course? If so, what is your evidence for this claim?

Well what is your evidence that she has done her due diligence to know that what she recommends is actually the best course?

the_jaded_one Jan 29, 2017, 5:53 PM
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in reply to: ozymandias’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

I am confused. If you took it as given, why bother talking about whether Alliance for Safety and Justice and Cosecha are good charities?

Well, I am free to both assert that it is a sensible background assumption that it is not usually good for EA to do highly political things, and also argue a few relevant special cases of highly political EA things that aren’t good, without taking on the bigger task of specifying and defending my assumption. But I offer Robin Hanson’s post as some degree of defence.

I expect that they would become culture-war issues as soon as they become more prominent. Do you disagree?

I disagree strongly for synthetic meat, it will be an open-and-shut case once the quality surpasses real meat. I think wild animal suffering is emotive and will generate debate, but I don’t think it will split left-right, mostly because I can’t even decide which of {left, right} maps to {wild-suffering-bad, wild-suffering-OK}.

Or do you think that the appropriate role of EA is to elevate issues into culture-war prominence and then step aside?

Well hopefully EA can elevate issues that are approximately-pareto-improvements from irrelevance to broad-consensus, skipping out any kind of war.

that’s a tribal war between economists and epidemiologists?

What?

Or do you mean that they shouldn’t take sides in issues associated with the American left and right, even if they sincerely believe that one of those issues is the best way to improve the world?

yes, this. And if they do believe that one particular side of the the US/EU culture war is the most important cause, then they should provide rock solid evidence that it is, that deals with the best arguments from the other side as well as the argument from marginal utility of extra effort, which is critically missing in the OP.

the_jaded_one Jan 29, 2017, 4:48 PM
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in reply to: JoshYou’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

More generally, you keep trying to frame your points as politically neutral “meta” considerations but it definitely feels like you have an axe to grind against the activist left which motivates a lot of what you’re saying.

Well if EA is funding the activist left, justifying it by saying that a “trusted expert” (who just happens to be a leftist activist!) said it was a good idea, what exactly do you expect me to do?

And if people who disagree with leftist activism aren’t allowed to bring up “meta” considerations when those considerations are inconvenient for leftist activism, then who is going to do it?

the_jaded_one Jan 29, 2017, 4:38 PM
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in reply to: ozymandias’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

if your argument were taken to its endpoint, we ought not trust GiveWell because its employees sometimes talk about how great malaria nets and deworming are on social media.

I don’t trust them, to the extent that I endorse these causes, I trust their arguments (having read them) and data, and I trust the implicit critical process that has failed to come up with reasons why deworming isn’t that good (to the extent that it hasn’t).

the_jaded_one Jan 29, 2017, 4:35 PM
1 point
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in reply to: ozymandias’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

reducing deportations of undocumented immigrants would reduce incarceration (through reducing the number of people in ICE detention)

That is true, but it is politicized inference. You could also reduce the number of people in ICE detention at any given time by deporting them much more quickly. Or you could reduce the number of undocumented immigrants by making it harder for them to get in in the first place, for example by building a large wall on the southern US border.

So I would characterize this as a politically biased opinion first and foremost. It’s not even an opinion that requires being informed—it’s obvious that you could reduce incarceration by releasing people from detention and just letting them have whatever they were trying to illegally take, you don’t need a law degree to make this inference, but you do need a political slant to claim that it’s a good idea.

And the totality of policies espoused by people such as Chloe Cockburn would be to flood the US with even more immigrants from poorer countries, not just to grant legal status to existing ones. This is entryism, and it is a highly political move that many people are deeply opposed to because they see it as part one of a plan to wipe them and their culture out. I don’t think that’s a good fit for an EA cause—even if you think it’s a good idea, it makes sense to separate it from EA.

the_jaded_one Jan 29, 2017, 4:18 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Robert_Wiblin’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

when you just as easily could have addressed it to OpenPhil

This is true—and I would say that a lot of the same questions could be directed to OpenPhil.

process that minimised the influence of my personal opinions

But there should be some ultimate sanity checking on that process; if some process ends up recommending something that isn’t really a good recommendation, then is it a good process?

it can save you from wasting time going down rabbit holes.

Yes, that’s true, and I would consider it a pro which I consider to be outweighed by other factors.

the_jaded_one Jan 29, 2017, 3:55 PM
5 points
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in reply to: ozymandias’s comment on: 80,000 Hours: EA and Highly Political Causes

I think dividing these three claims more clearly would make it easier for me to follow your argument: effective altruist charity suggestion lists should not endorse political charities.

This is a rather large topic, I don’t think it would be wise to try and specify and defend that abstract claim in the same post as talking about a specific situation. I take it as given, at least here. Perhaps I will do a followup, but I think it would be hard to do the topic justice in, say, 5-10 hours which is what I realistically have.

Of course, an identical critique applies to animal welfare charities: many, many traditionalists/conservatives/non-social-justice-people are turned off by animal welfare activism.

Animal welfare activism is controversial, but it hasn’t been subsumed into the culture war in the way immigration, race and social justice have. Some parts of animal welfare activism, such as veganism are left-associated, but other parts like wild animal suffering and synthetic meat most certainly are not. So in my mind, animal welfare activism is suitable for EA involvement.

And xrisk charities tend to turn off, to a first approximation, everyone.

AI-risk as offputting is becoming less true over time, but EA should not be aiming to appeal to everyone. Rather I think that EA should be aiming to not take sides in tribal wars.

Is your belief that it is morally wrong to ever specifically help one group because you believe they are worse off than other groups?

No, but in the specific case of the US culture war I think it is a bad idea to move in the “Black lives matter” direction. In the case of the tradeoff between incarceration and public safety, I don’t think there is any good reason to make it into a race issue, because that immediately sends the signal that you are interested in raising the status and outcomes of your “favorite” race at the cost of other races. This is a tradeoff situation where benefits targeted at a specific group will harm people who are not from that group in a fairly direct way.

On the other hand if GiveDirectly gives cash to women in some third world country, and that cash comes from voluntary payments in the west, it is going to be an improvement for everyone in the receiving community as their local economy is stimulated.