My professor Hans Noel is featured in the article. Nice.
Timothy_Liptrot
Karma: 382
I have a friend who is making the first two mistakes. They are in a different field from EA but similar totalizing vibe. They rarely apply to jobs that are outside their field-role but which would provide valuable career capital. They are also quite depressed from the long unemployment.
What can I say to help them not make these mistakes?
I disagree Max. We can all recall anecdotes of overconfidence because they create well-publicized narratives. With hindsight bias, it seems obvious that overconfidence was the subject. So naturally we overestimate overconfidence risks, just like nuclear power.
The costs of under confidence are invisible and ubiquitous. A grad student fails to submit her paper. An applicant doesn’t apply. A graduate doesn’t write down her NGO idea. Because you can’t see the costs of underconfidence, they could be hundreds or thousands of times the overconfidence costs.
To break apart the question
Should people update based on evidence and not have rigid world-models. Is people disagreeing with you moderate evidence?
Yes to both
Once someone builds the best world-model they can, should they defer to higher-status people’s models
Much much less often than we currently do
How much should we weight disagreement between our models and the models of others?
Thanks for making this. I experienced similar struggles in young adulthood and watched my friends go through them as well. It sucks that so many institutions leave young people with bad models of job-world and inflexible epistemology. It hits when we most need self-reliance and accuracy. IMO, the university professors are the worst offenders.
My disorganized thoughts
Trusting your own models is invaluable. When I was 25 I had a major breakdown from career stress (read about it here). I realized my choices had been unimpeachable and bad. I always did “what I was supposed to do”. But the outcomes would have been better if I trusted my own models.
There aren’t consolation prizes for following socially approved world models. There are just outcomes. I decided to trust my own evidence and interpretation much more after that.
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It stuns me how often young people under-apply for jobs. The costs of over-applying are comparatively small. How to talk my friends out of it?
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I’m not sure you took risks, in an emotional sense. Under-applying protects against rejection. Loyalty protect against abandonment. In the moment, applying to an additional job and exploring a new career path feel very risky. I generally encourage young people to apply for tons of things, try new fields and move to new (developing) countries. I believe the strategies that feel risky are often the most effective, since they differentiate you and offer new skills. Maybe “risk” is the wrong heuristic for young people, who understand the world too little.
Great question! That is an incorrect interpretation, but this is the fault of the authors for their terrible reporting of the results not maintaining their reproduction data. I noticed the problems after writing.
Basically, those coefficients are the effect of one more year of parliamentarism in your history. So the .004 coefficient on corruption control means that 100 years of parliamentarism (1901-2001) is associated with a .4 increase.
I would also note that the dummy factors are stacked against parliamentarism. Think of it this way. In around 1880, Europe. East Asia and the Commonwealth chose parliamentarism while Latin America, the Francophone countries and (later) Africa chose presidentialism. We can’t know if parl is the reason governance is worse in the later group, so we assume the reason is something else. But this is a strong assumption, we cannot rerun history and give the Norwejian constitution to Chile. So you should update up a bit toward parliamentarism.
To take import duties for example. If you keep country dummies in, 50 years of parl is associated with a 2.5% decrease in duties, half the impact of being a democracy. If you remove the continent dummies, then 50 years of parl is about as good as being a democracy.
Generally I would multiply the effect of parl by 50 then compare it to gdp per capita to ballpark total effect.
I don’t know yet. I am curious.
Drutman is bae.
Good question. The key is that Gerring’s paper ADJUSTED FOR DEMOCRACY. So it really means that “parliaments are better when they successfully become democracies”, not “parliaments are better in general”. This is a big stupid on Gerring’s part. I just noticed it and am mad. Anyway-
South Sudan becoming a democracy was very hard due to the proto-state institutions before independence. Ethno-nationalist patrimonial warlord autocracies dominated pre-independence South Sudan and had effectively won their independence in a long and bloody civil war. And there were two warlordships of similar power and ethnic bases (and polygamy). Describing the main factions can get long and complicated and I could easily make a mistake. I’ll just talk about three groups, the majority SPLM faction (mostly Dinka), the minority SPLM faction (mostly Nuer) and the International Community. I’m not an expert, so consider this a guess.
For the head of the majority faction (Salva Kiir) presidentialism is good because it concentrates power and patronage opportunities in his hands. He wants the presidency to have strong independence from the legislature. Remember the legislature is full of his lackeys. Being subservient to 300 lackeys makes corruption hard; capable people sneak in and bribes are more expensive (See Bueno De Mesquita, selectorate theory). This is the main reason, IMO.
For the head of the minority faction (Riek Machar), presidentialism also sounds nice because the upper house represented provincial governments. So the Nuer-dominated provinces have institutionalized power, maybe a veto. Note that war broke out a few months after Salva Kiir fired his ministers to consolidate power.
For the international community, the main thing is making sure that the government splits the money fairly. They know that state capacity will be tiny. In practice, they will be providing the services. But as long as the majority and minority faction are sharing the windfalls into their respective pyramid schemes fairly, a civil war might not happen. The massive corruption must seem fair to each warlord. Presidentialism should make this easier as well (checks and balances, multiple state actors with their own mandate).
If these actors were maximizing the quality of the health ministry in 20 years, Gerring would have been relevant. But none of them were.
Maybe. That’s orthogonal to my comment. I was responding to
My default belief is that a politician implying something he knows the listener wants to hear is not evidence he’s believes or will act on that implication.
As to the empirical content of “evidence-based policy”, I’m not an expert on that question yet.
Good questions Thomas. The point of the blog series is to highlight papers that ask the right questions and use the right methods to have consequentialist value. I am not arguing that the Gerring paper is the last word. I’ll answer a few of your questions, though.
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We know they aren’t p-hacking in the selection of dependent variables because there are very few such variables that cover every country-year of interest. How many organizations measured the governance quality of Liberia, Columbia and Denmark in 1953. I’m working on introducing a new one using weather station quality.
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I didn’t want to dive into the regression table in my blog post. All models used adjust for continent. They also adjust for distance to financial center. I would also point out that if the continents with lots of presidential regimes have less cross-border trade, this is evidence against quality of governance of presidentialism.
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There is a later study with an expanded dataset that supported the null on GDP, but I didn’t include it because it ignored the 13 other governance indicators. This isn’t my main research area so I won’t do a full literature review for this blog post. In municipalities the same result is robustly observed.
If robustly establishing causation means “adjusting for every factor which could possibly affect governance outcomes at the country level”, then the question is clearly unanswerable. There are hundreds of such factors and RCT’s are impossible. But as consequentialists our goal isn’t to achieve some arbitrary degree of confidence in our beliefs. The goal is to make better decisions. Since your prior on pres v. parl should be near .5, this evidence compellingly moves us toward the parl side, maybe to .7 . For a constitutional designer, that’s a hugely valuable update. There remains a 30% chance of making the wrong decision, but that’s way better than a 50% chance of making the wrong decision. Therefore if even one constitutional designer reads this paper, the QALY’s that Gerring et al. have made is huge.
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:) ideal
No time to call up the paper, but the basic answer is that such statements are evidence.
A common pattern is that politicians can propose policy A or B before entering office, but have an incentive to implement A once elected. So some of the politicians who propose B will switch to A once elected. But none of the politicians who support A will switch to B. For example this happens with economic security vs. economic efficiency platforms in Latin America (politicians prefer efficiency policies more once elected). About half of them switched in the study I read, and no efficiency campaigns switched to security after election.
That means the voter choice is simple. Even if you belief a politician might switch off B, the politician who is campaigning on B is always more likely to do B than the politician campaigning on A. This applies to head to head elections only ofc.
So the optimal decision theoretic choice is to support the politician who advocates for your policy in the election.
As an author, this is SO TRUE.
Honestly the “people only comment to criticize” pattern incentivizes authors to be edgy to get any feedback on their ideas at all.
Best Consequentialists in Poli Sci #1 : Are Parliaments Better?
Thanks for the comment. I’ve decided the most important thing is to learn to do my own expected value analysis for research programs.
Maybe econ is different from poli sci, but my experience is that grad students are extremely attuned to what the academic job market rewards, and if they don’t start out that way, their advisors eventually push them in that direction.”
I’ve been exploring this, and it appears to be a difference between the disciplines. Not sure why yet.
Since the academic market rewards difficult, technical work, the sort of work that doesn’t do well on the job market can also be fairly tractable.”
This makes sense. For example, looking at why some countries start charter cities and some do not would be very qualitative and poorly rewarded. But it would be really high-QALY.
Descriptive work
That actually makes a lot of sense. There could be some great descriptive work on aid which is non-causal.
Replications get okay rewards in Poli-Sci, since you might find a different method decision and be able to publish a new results. I plan to do lots of these.
I’d also love to see some meta-research on what researchers believe to be the highest-impact topics to study. Maybe you could ask faculty in your department what they would recommend an altruist work on? I wish I’d spoken to more of my professors about this since their suggestions were invaluable.
Thanks for this advice. It is valuable and I have already started doing it. Responses vary by professor. Some of them are like “utility...for people...we’ve never asked that question in this field. I have no idea” and some are like “yes of course, here are my thoughts”. As a culture, political science is surprisingly non-activist compared to economics, in the sense that many pol scientists take no normative positions. Lots to learn about here.
The question of how best to represent the interests of future persons is a good core question. My problem is more with their method of answering it. There’s a great tradition of political philosophers thinking “what would be the ideal institution according to X moral philosophy” and then designing an institution backward from that. I consider this approach both crowded and low-leverage (John and McAskill are more in a middle position). The alternative is to look at how institutions work in practice then judge them against different ethical objectives, which is a bit more neglected. I also think the second approach is more effective. So writing at the same questions as John and McAskill could have good added value. If I have time I will take a look at Gov AI
Just read the paper and you are correct, my questions do differ. I should just make a post of my own about this I guess.
Firstly, I am skeptical that the future is best represented by creating special institutions. If people lose trust that their government cares about their interests the risks to democracy and state capacity are large, and introducing a new interest group endangers that trust. The alternative to directly representing the future is to consider which institutional arrangements create policies most beneficial to future people. They acknowledge a similar critique on page 15.
Future’s assemblies—the analogy to the Irish assemblies is interesting. However, the Irish assemblies were selected for each issue separately, not for life. Here are several reasons they shouldn’t be selected for life.
1. Selecting representatives for life greatly increases the benefits to actors that capture members.
2. Factions that by chance are under-represented in the future assembly must wait a long time for a change, so exiting is a more appealing option to them.
3. Are we sure why the Irish assemblors chose to think about the issue One possible explanation is that because they were only asked to make 1 decision, selecting an ideology and selecting a position on the issue were equally as cognitively expensive (they didn’t have to think that hard). If that hypothesis is true, then when we ask the same set of assemblers to make many decisions they might realize that adopting an ideology makes the decision easier and they feel just as “right” afterward.
Well that’s enough for now, I should get back to work. Thanks for sending the paper, hopefully I can write a full post on it.
The electricity one is outside of our data range. States occasionally fail to provide electricity for weird price-politics reasons. But when that occurs, private sector electricity suppliers form fast (this can be a self-reinforcing policy as the new suppliers resist centralization). But that does suggest that as long as a community can pay for fuel, they will produce electricity. If our current institutions fail to provide electricity, people can form new ones fast.
I’ll think about agricultural output for the moment. I would, anecdotally, assume political effects from that. Bread protests remain pretty common and many states continue bizarrely inefficient bread subsidies. Rulers probably do this because they believe that grain prices are related to their survival. Furthermore, if bread price increases are correlated with anti-government actions or violence, then it’s plausible to to forecast an increase in civil wars with a 10% decrease in agricultural output.
But let’s step back. By comparing changes in agricultural production with changes in grain prices I am comparing apples to oranges. The relevant object is the change in price of grains year-on-year. So how much would a 10% drop in agricultural production actually change the price of grains? And how has the salary of the very poor evolved relative to that price of grain over time? The global price of wheat has doubled once since WW2 . Of course there was also a major fuel shock that year. Country level data would probably be more useful for relating food price shocks to political effects.
A second problem is that the long term political effects could be negative or positive. Civil wars seem really bad for political systems partly because they often end in systems with more veto points and less independent problem-solvey states. But there’s also evidence that the pressure of regime change is good, since it incentivizes a ruler to grow their economy to meet higher demands for food. De Mesquita and Easterly would both argue that leaders often lack incentives to improve the lives of their people (over satisfying narrow special interests). Translating changes in regime type to long term utility AFAIK has not been done, at least outside the most simplistic categories.
Actually, that could be a starting point. If we don’t know the long term effects of majoritarian, minoritarian, concosiational, corporatist, monist, pluralist state structures, we cannot translate those values to long term utility. For example, it might be that majoritarian middle-income states are more likely to grow than minoritarians. Political scientists as a group hesitate t o assign utility values to different traits of political systems, so doing that would be fun and useful.
Sorry for rambling.
Hmmm. That is an interesting question.
I was thinking recently about how stable patronage networks are during currency collapses, which might bear on the question.
Very rapid state collapses have occurred when side lost access to arms, as in Afghanistan in 1992. Investigating state collapse instances to estimate how much economic or social damage causes state collapse should be possible.
The world wars probably contain the closest example of a middle-income country undergoing state-collapse. Come to think of it, you could make an argument that state collapse occurs quickly during food shortages by looking at Austria-Hungary’s collapse in 1918. There could be interesting arguments there.
I think the collapse of a civilization is a bit conceptually unclear, so that would be very difficult to investigate. Is civilization collapsed when regional leaders cease to identify with a westphalian state? Is civilization collapsed when the social contract is rewritten to return to the coercive premodern order? To make these questions more practical, did Italy collapse in 1943, when Italy became divided but Italians mostly refused to kill each other. Or did Austria-Hungary collapse in 1918 when it broke up into multiple sovereignty? But I could assert a few different definitions then construct a set of cases for each of them.
I’ll look into past work on this subject.
I haven’t ported the citations to this format yet, fyi