Timothy_Liptrot

Karma: 379

Timothy_Liptrot 1 Jun 2020 20:59 UTC
8 points
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on: Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors
I am skeptical of this line of reasoning because I see little reason to believe that malevolence determined the policies in question. Game theory political scientists argue that different institutional structures make it rational or irrational for leaders to distribute public goods or targeted goods, practice repression, allow political parties. For a more in depth treatment, see the Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno De Meqsuita and Alistair Smith. Their core argument is that because dictators must appease a very small group of powerful interest leaders (generals for Mussolini, members of the centcom for Stalin, tribal and military leaders for the Abdullah II) they can protect their power by rewarding only that small group at the expense of the masses.
Here is an illustrative example of political phenomena that is difficult to explain from the leaders personality. Torture is more common in multi-party autocracies than in one-party states. If the leaders narcissism strongly influences policies and narcissism and sadism are strongly correlated, then we would expect torture to be more common in states that ban dissent. Suppose that torture is not about satisfying the personal desire of the dictator and is instead about policing dissent. Now it makes sense that if some dissent (like resistance to a new “non-security” policy) is allowed, there must be some boundary into banned dissent. Then the occurrence of torture in multi-party states makes more sense and the rarity of torture in the most severe autocracies makes sense.
Opposing personality-of-dictator explanations to ideological explanations surprised me because it ignored the strongest explanations in institutional structures of states and in political cultures. Possibly you emphasized ideology because your samples are older. While the early modernist dictators were authentically ideological, most modern autocrats espouse a bland, centrist, syncretic corporatism. Dictators like Chavez and Castro are the exception today (although their ideology does influence behavior). Here is an article which argues most dictatorships are interest driven, not ideologically driven https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/13510347.2017.1307823

Timothy_Liptrot 3 Jun 2020 20:53 UTC
20 points
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on: Will protests lead to thousands of coronavirus deaths?
I agree with your main claim that the protests will cause more deaths than they save, but I disagree with your estimate of caused deaths by at least an order of magnitude.′
The estimated change in reproduction number is not compelling. Firstly, the largest protest in American history had attendance of 3*10^6, or one in a hundred Americans. So assuming this protest is tied for most attended in US history, and other Americans behave the same, the protestors must each have an R of 30 to bring our average R from .9 to 1.25. That is 10 times the pre-SD reproduction number. Assuming the protestors have an R of 3 or 4 seems reasonable to me. Now that we know much transmission is from speaking, 10 would be the upper limit of my 95% CI. Assuming an R of the 3, reduce the estimate to 10%
Also the protests are short relative to the time a person is contagious. I doubt the protests will maintain attendance in the millions for more than two days, which is less than people are typically contagious. Therefore their influence on our effective reproduction number will be less than you estimate. Seems like people are contagious for at least 4 days, so call that a reduction by half. So reduce the estimate by a further 50%.
So I would reduce your estimate from 75,000 to 4,000. Which is still a lot. More than my expected benefit from the protests by movement building.

Timothy_Liptrot 4 Jun 2020 0:04 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Will protests lead to thousands of coronavirus deaths?
This is an interesting point. The protests are happening largely outside so there is a further reduction, possibly itself an order of magnitude. So you really need two orders of magnitude to get one hundredth of Americans to contribute .3 to the reproduction number.
Imagine putting people into a room, and measuring the number of possible transmission paths. At one person in the room there are 0 possible transmissions. At two people, there is one possible transmission. 3 people, three transmissions. 4 people, 6 transmissions. The scaling is n! where n is the number of people in the room. So if protests involve a larger average number of people in breathing contact, then protesters might have an effective R ten times higher than our regular lives.
But that scaling only lasts out as far as the droplets spread. Do we model droplets as rays, equally likely to move in any direction? Then the droplet spread drops off by r^2 as the distance to another person. Then the connection factor stops scaling quickly because as people are packed in they become further away. I do not know when the n! scaling stops, but I imagine the number of protestors within 6 feet of one another is a good metric. The last protest I was at there were like 10 people within 6 feet of me. 10! is...
Oh my. Perhaps the R0 jump will be noticable.

Timothy_Liptrot 12 Aug 2020 21:02 UTC
10 points
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in reply to: Hauke Hillebrandt’s comment on: Improving local governance in fragile states—practical lessons from the field
(first I’m a huge fan)
I’m not calibrated and I am not an expert, but I can comment as an amateur. I would give a 15% probability of a civil war in the next 5 years. There are a few reasons for my perspective.
The elite perspective
1. The faltering Lebanese economy has, so far, not lead to elite defection from concosiation.
From a game theory standpoint, the higher the value of the economy the lower the incentive on each faction to start a civil war. A civil war would drive the value of the Lebanese economy down hugely, so they would all prefer to split the pie than to upset it. If the splitting institutions have low trust and the economy isn’t valuable anyway, defection is more beneficial (this may explain South Sudan). In Lebanon the splitting institutions have been effective at preventing civil violence for 3 decades. In theory I expect that escalations become cheap as the economy collapses (less to lose). But there has not been evidence that major armed groups like Hezbollah are pulling out of the government. Instead the best armed factions seem most determined to stay in the consociational government and delay any reform. Therefore it is unlikely that armed elite factions will make a play to dominate the government [1].
2. The international environment is not favorable for a war. Much of the Lebanese civil war was caused by outside states (Syria, Israel, etc.) providing arms and motivation to internal Lebanese factions. Several states do have strong influence over Lebanese factions—Syria, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and France. The thing is, none of them want a major escalation. Syria is recovering. Iran’s economy is struggling and they already have good deterrence against the Saudis in Iraq, Yemen. The Saudi’s are overextended in Yemen. The Israeli response to the Beirut explosion was pro-detente. The French have committed to stability in Lebanon through both their public statements and their aid commitments (they’ve avoided explicitly excluding Hezbollah affiliates as a matter of aid policy, unlike others). I’m not an IR specialist, but I don’t expect any of these countries to flood Lebanon with weapons soon.
Currently, the preferred strategy of the parties in power seems a middle road between the Axis of Resistance and the West. Hezbollah keeps their guns, so the AoR is happy. But Hezbollah is held in check by the other parties, so western aid can continue.
The local perspective
1. At the local level, conflict between the people and the consociational elite is escalating. The failure of the peg is viewed as violation of the social contract and the government service provision has always been poor and politicized. The revolution has lead many Lebanese to belief that consocatiation is at the root of the problem (which I agree with). But there are plenty of Lebanese people who believe that consociation protects them from civil war and that removing the current generation of elites will solve the problem.
Its possible for anti-state protests to escalate into violence and further escalate into a civil war. I would say such escalation is unlikely with the current parties in power set against it, but its possible.
What can be done
1. Proposing new power-sharing models to Lebanon’s elites
Political Scientists have been hard at work designing new voting and governing models to transition Lebanon away from dysfunctional consociation to a more liberal or a more majoritarian model. In the past the parties have not been interested, but as the pressure for reform mounts, they may be willing.
This would look like an NGO reading lots of political science papers and selecting a few of the most workable models. Then you would try to meet with revolutionary figures (easy), the party leaders (hard), and Lebanon’s neighbors (good luck!). Activists in Serbia had all the opposition parties sign a joint statement of intent, so do something like that if possible. I do not know if anyone is trying that currently. If not, the utility could be very high but you need great connections.
I have not looked into it closely, but this area could be highly neglected. Most of the donors and NGO’s are terrified of being associated with Hezbollah in any way. But most solutions that can achieve elite buy-in need to accommodate Hezbollah’s interests. For that reason, a small organization focused just on preventing the civil war could have high influence despite the crowdedness of Lebanon aid in general.
2. Encouraging new legitimacy-making practices
In the next section we will discuss donor techniques for changing legitimacy-making practices. I’ll add a discussion of this option there.
Footnotes
1. Possible exception if Hezbollah perceives their weapons to be threatened, since Hezbollah might not trust the other faction.

Timothy_Liptrot 13 Aug 2020 17:37 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Hauke Hillebrandt’s comment on: HaukeHillebrandt’s Shortform
Are the diarrhea and substance abuse numbers annualized? (does diarrhea cost 85 m YLL/yr)

Timothy_Liptrot 14 Aug 2020 16:37 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: DPiepgrass’s comment on: Improving local governance in fragile states—practical lessons from the field
Hahaha Thank you for the feedback. I will look for places to simplify the language.

Timothy_Liptrot 15 Aug 2020 18:33 UTC
3 points
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on: Propose and vote on potential tags
Please separate global development from global health.
Global health is one part of global development, which can include political, economic and humanitarian interventions. I write on politics in developing countries, but I’m probably the only one on the forum so I don’t need my own tag.

Timothy_Liptrot 16 Aug 2020 5:22 UTC
2 points
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on: Effective Altruism movement in LMIC and Africa
Good question. I recommend reading “Poor Economics” for a background on these questions.
Not a full response, but two points.
1. Giving has less impact—as an LMIC resident you probably have less money so giving directly has lower impact. Also you can buy goods at that price anyway.
2. Improving policy has more impact—You can influence your government in ways that rich countries cannot. You likely also have access to more parts of your own society to study different perspectives. Poor Economics discusses tools for changing policy in LMIC’s better than I can.

Timothy_Liptrot 21 Aug 2020 19:41 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: DPiepgrass’s comment on: Improving local governance in fragile states—practical lessons from the field
I would guess you were downvoted for tone, but I personally double upvoted.
When you are steeped in a literature sometimes you forget how much jargon your using. Being reminded that the jargon is inaccessible is super helpful.

Timothy_Liptrot 26 Aug 2020 16:15 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors
Source: https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/103226/mod_resource/content/1/James%20Vreeland%202008.PDF
Concerns with causation:
I worry about the underlying assumption that democracies don’t encourage malevolent traits. So we observe less mass killings and rival killings in democracies than in dictatorships. One explanation is that democracies are selecting for anti-killing leaders. Another explanation is that malevolent leaders in democracies see little gain from killing while malevolent leaders in certain types of dictatorships see much gain from killing. For example, Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon seem to have a lot of malevolent traits, but they mostly refrained from political killings. So the fourth section suggests too much causation on the personalities of leaders.
But it seems to me that leaders personalities are very likely at least sometimes a substantial factor.
Fair—even if most of the difference in political killing is from institutional incentives, preventing malevolent actors from becoming dictators or presidents is big gains.
Secondly, this research agenda must recognize that authoritarian cultures may accept or encourage violence against non-comformists or “disloyal” people. It’s a deeply sad fact, but important to understand. If torturing dissidents is an expected and approved behavior it is weaker evidence of a malevolent personality (fundamental attribution error).
Targeting your interventions:
You should pay more attention to how autocrats are actually selected. There are a few good models, my favorite is selectorate theory which (in dictatorships) emphasizes trust between top lieutenants. To continue with your preferred 40′s references, Herman Goring, Himler, Keitel and Borman all hate and distrust one another. But they each trust Hitler because Hitler selected them to receive stolen wealth in exchange for support. So as long as the autocrat is alive the alliance is “stable”.
In this model they care most about malevolence when the ruling coalition/launching org selects the next dictator. This famously happened after Stalin died, when Beria (head of secret police) got overthrown and replaced with Khrushchev who promised to stop political killings. So target regimes in or near transitions.
For example, the politburo of Cuba might be interested in this research. Saudi Arabia, now that MBS has solidified control, will be less fruitful.

Timothy_Liptrot 31 Aug 2020 18:05 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors
I’m compelled by this. That the difference is only 30% of 1 standard deviation means that lots of variation could be explained by other factors. Personality of the dictator could still explain lots of variation, even a majority. There could also be a relationship between dictator personality and allowances for dissent. Thanks for explaining that!
Aside, you would be more compelling if you talked about autocrats other than Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

Timothy_Liptrot 3 Sep 2020 15:34 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors
Hmmm, that is a good question. Let me dig in more. Here are reasons to talk about others than Hitler Stalin and Mao
Coup Proofing is a common practice of dictators for political survival
Some behaviors of Hitler, Stalin and Mao have compelling institutional explanations that have become repeated behavior of long-ruling dictators. I’m thinking of coup proofing in particular. Coup proofing is a set of policies dictators enact to prevent a single small group from seizing power; rotatring or purging officers (Tukachevsky/Rommel) splitting the army into multiple factions/militias (NKVD/SS/Revolutionary Guard). We’ve since observed that lots of dictators (and coup-threatened democracies) practice coup-proofing. So I would be careful about attributing the *intra-elite* violence by particular regimes to the personalities of the leaders. Coup-proofing cannot explain violence against non-elites by those regimes.
Change in ideological motivation between early dictators and modern dictators
Secondly, Hitler, Stalin and Mao were much more ideological than most modern dictators. The Mussolini model of a “moderate” or “synarchic” authoritarianism spread more after WWII. By moderate I mean without a narrow, extreme vision of state-society interaction, not that dissent or economic freedom were allowed. Particularly today ideology structures the behavior of dictators much less. So one could argue that both Hitler and Stalin faithfully followed the visions laid out in their (terrible and warped) ideologies. If you buy that argument you would update downward on future dictators committing similar violence against non-elites.
For example, Mohammad Bin Salman has killed and tortured elite rivals, dissenters and starved many thousands of Yemenis to death. But he does not seem interested in any state project that would involve violence on the scale of Hitler/Stalin/Pol Pot.
All that said, I personally do not put much weight on my ideology argument. Firstly, the ideological explanation of Hitler and Stalin’s behavior is not that strong. Secondly just because most dictators, like MBS and the Ethiopians, have “moderate” visions of state-society relations does not prevent future radical dictators from taking power (tail risk). Note that ISIS is a deathcult that took over half of two middle income countries, and that even in the 20′s and 30′s Mein Kampf was such ridiculous nonsense that Hitler should not have risen to power.
But on a first read this is a real hole in your argument. Almost all modern dictators do not look like Hitler, Stalin and Mao due to their weak ideoligical commitments. If you include a few more modern examples you can evade this argument. Off the top of my head I would suggest:
Khomeini and Ahmedinajad—they did not murder lots of people but their stubborn refusal to compromise with the world order has impoverished Iran without causing a regime change (they changed a bit recently but 30 years of bad decisions before).
Pol Pot − 1980′s, only stopped by Vietnamese intervention
Modern Burma

Timothy_Liptrot 3 Sep 2020 18:30 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors
I have one criticism of the argument that coup-proofing prevalence is evidence for personality factors. Suppose that if people observe a game being played multiple times they are more likely to set aside their personal preferences and “play to win”. So if I were the first dictator of Iraq I might say “no I’m not going to kill generals who come from different towns, that would be evil”. And then get killed for it. And maybe the second dictator says the same thing. But by the time the third or fourth dictator rises to power he’ll either be selected for willingness to use violence or he will decide his preference for living is stronger than his preference for not killing. While I agree that many people would not commit inter-elite violence as the first leader, I suspect a much larger number would as the 5th leader. So an argument for point B.
Saddam Hussein was the 5th Iraqi leader to take power by coup within 21 years.
But on the other hand, there are lots of leaders that just stepped down when they lost the support of their ruling coalitions. And those heroes do not become famous. This is strong evidence of the importance of personality.

Timothy_Liptrot 15 Sep 2020 21:10 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Denkenberger’s comment on: How do political scientists do good?
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.

Timothy_Liptrot 16 Sep 2020 18:32 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Denkenberger’s comment on: How do political scientists do good?
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.

Timothy_Liptrot 16 Sep 2020 19:11 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: How do political scientists do good?
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.

Timothy_Liptrot 20 Sep 2020 21:49 UTC
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in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: How do political scientists do good?
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

Timothy_Liptrot 20 Sep 2020 22:07 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: esantorella’s comment on: How do political scientists do good?
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.

Timothy_Liptrot 8 Oct 2020 18:10 UTC
8 points
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on: If you like a post, tell the author!
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.

Timothy_Liptrot 8 Oct 2020 22:05 UTC
1 point
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on: I Want To Do Good—an EA puppet mini-musical!
:) ideal

Timothy_Liptrot

Coup Proofing is a common practice of dictators for political survival

Change in ideological motivation between early dictators and modern dictators