Timothy_Liptrot

Thoughts on Post-PhD Jobs

A brief ex­pla­na­tion of the Myan­mar coup

Best Con­se­quen­tial­ists in Poli Sci #1 : Are Par­li­a­ments Bet­ter?

PhD stu­dent mu­tual line-man­ager invitation

How do poli­ti­cal sci­en­tists do good?

Fund­ing re­quest: Pro­mot­ing EA in MENA

• Timothy_Liptrot 16 Mar 2021 3:06 UTC

  24 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Is Democ­racy a Fad?

  Democracies did not exist in the premodern world for one main reason; they were bad at war. Revolutions and republics did form in the Medieval period, particularly in capital-intensive trade hubs like Northern Italy and Northern Germany. However, most were quickly crushed under a wave of poorly armed peasant-soldiers from the coercive states next door.

  A major reason for democracies rise in the 17th-21st centuries because democracies suddenly became much better at warfare than all other systems, and have maintained this advantage ever since. The first state to create a democratic nation-state and harness it to war was the Dutch in the Dutch revolt, who shocked Europe by defeating the Habsburg Empire. Shortly afterward Britain formed a democracy-nation hybrid who set the standard for military power. All major world wars since have been resounding Democratic victories., from the War of Jenkin’s Ear to the Cold War. The main advantages of the democratic system are

  • Modern democracies had both large populations and property rights for capital, combining the two great advantages of previous state forms. Some autocracies have greatly improved their ability to accumulate capital to close this gap (Fascist Italy, China, Soviet Union).

  • Leaders pay a higher cost for defeat

  • Democracies can more credibly issue bonds (democratic advantage has faded over time)

  • Democracies rarely have to coup proof (divide and purge the military to prevent coups)

  This advantage should be completely irrelevant going forward. China and Russia may democratize, giving the democracies a clean sweep of the security council powers. But the democracies are already at maximum influence in many stable anocracies like Morocco and Jordan.

Im­prov­ing lo­cal gov­er­nance in frag­ile states—prac­ti­cal les­sons from the field

• Timothy_Liptrot 3 Jun 2020 20:53 UTC

  20 points

  0 ∶ 0

  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.

Democ­racy and Devel­op­ment, a Sim­ple Model

On Mike Berkow­itz’s 80k Podcast

Im­prov­ing lo­cal gov­er­nance in frag­ile states—prac­ti­cal les­sons #2

• Timothy_Liptrot 11 Dec 2020 21:08 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: My mis­takes on the path to impact

  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

  1. 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.

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

  What links here?

  • Vaidehi Agarwalla's comment on Vaidehi Agar­walla’s Quick takes by Vaidehi Agarwalla (7 Jan 2021 2:24 UTC; 4 points)

• Timothy_Liptrot 12 Aug 2020 21:02 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  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.

AGI Risk: How to in­ter­na­tion­ally reg­u­late in­dus­tries in non-democracies

Up and Down with the Pan­demic; Why Pan­demic Poli­cies Do Not Last and How to Change That

[Question] How to hedge in­vest­ment port­fo­lio against AI risk?

• Timothy_Liptrot 8 Oct 2020 18:10 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  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 1 Jun 2020 20:59 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  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

An at­tempt to pro­mote pre­dic­tion markets