Great stuff, thanks!
Tobias_Baumann
Karma: 859
Hi Michael,
thanks for the comment!
Could you expand on what you mean by the first part of that sentence, and what makes you say that?
I just meant that proposals to represent future non-human animals will likely gain less traction than the idea of representing future humans. But I agree that it would be perfectly possible to do it (as you say). And of course I’d be strongly in favour of having a Parliamentary Committee for all Future Sentient Beings or something like that, but again, that’s not politically feasible anytime soon. So we have to find a sweet spot where a proposal is both realistic and would be a significant improvement from our perspective.
It seems we could analogously subsidize liquid prediction markets for things like the results in 2045, conditional on passing X or Y policy, of whatever our best metrics are for the welfare or preference-satisfaction of animals, or of AIs whose experiences matter but who aren’t moral agents. And then people could say things like “The market expects that [proxy] will indicate in that [group of moral patients] will be better off in 2045 if pass [policy X] than if we pass [policy Y].”
Of course, coming up with such metrics is hard, but that seems like a problem we’ll want to fix anyway.
I agree, and I’d be really excited about such prediction markets! However, perhaps the case of nonhuman animals differs in that it is often quite clear what policies would be better for animals (e.g. better welfare standards), whether it’s current or future animals, and the bottleneck is just the lack of political will to do it. (But it would be valuable to know more about which policies would be most important—e.g. perhaps such markets would say that funding cultivated meat research is 10x as important as other reforms.)
By contrast, it seems less clear what we could do now to benefit future moral agents (seeing as they’ll be able to decide for themselves what to do), so perhaps there is more of a need for prediction markets.
Hi Tyler,
thanks for the detailed and thoughtful comment!
I find much less compelling the idea that “if there is the political will to seriously consider future generations, it’s unnecessary to set up additional institutions to do so,” and “if people do not care about the long-term future,” they would not agree to such measures. The main reason I find this uncompelling is just that it overgenerates in very implausible ways. Why should women have the vote? Why should discrimination be illegal?
Yeah, I agree that there are plenty of reasons why institutional reform could be valuable. I didn’t mean to endorse that objection (at least not in a strong form). I like your point about how longtermist institutions may shift norms and attitudes.
I don’t know if you meant to narrow in on only those reforms I mention which attempt to create literal representation of future generations or if you meant to bring into focus all attempts to ameliorate political short-termism.
I mostly had the former in mind when writing the post, though other attempts to ameliorate short-termism are also plausibly very important.
I’m glad to see CLR take something of an interest in this topic
Might just be a typo but this post is by CRS (Center for Reducing Suffering), not CLR (Center on long-term risk). (It’s easy to mix up because CRS is new, CLR recently re-branded, and both focus on s-risks.)
As a classical utilitarian, I’m also not particularly bothered by the philosophical problems you set out above, but some of these problems are the subject of my dissertation and I hope that I have some solutions for you soon.
Looking forward to reading it!
Hey Jamie, thanks for the pointer! I wasn’t aware of this.
Another relevant critique of whether colonisation is a good idea is Daniel Deudney’s new book Dark Skies.
I myself have also written up some more thoughts on space colonisation in the meantime and have become more sceptical about the possibility of large-scale space settlement happening anytime soon.
Representing future generations in the political process
Great work, thanks for sharing!
Great post—I think it’s extremely important to explore many different problem areas!
Some further plausible (in my opinion) candidates are shaping genetic enhancement, reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors, invertebrate welfare and space governance.
Great work, thanks for writing this up! I agree that excessive polarisation is an important issue and warrants more EA attention. In particular, polarisation is an important risk factor for s-risks.
Political polarization, as measured by political scientists, has clearly gone up in the last 20 years.
It is worth noting that this is a US-centric perspective and the broader picture is more mixed, with polarisation increasing in some countries and decreasing in others.
If there’s more I’m missing, feel free to provide links in the comment section.
Olaf van der Veen has written a thesis on this, analysing four possible interventions to reduce polarisation: (1) switching from FPTP to proportional representation, (2) making voting compulsory, (3) increasing the presence of public service broadcasting, and (4) creating deliberative citizen’s assemblies. Olaf’s takeaway (as far as I understand it) is that those interventions seem compelling and fairly tractable but the evidence of possible impacts is often not very strong.
I myself have also written about electoral reform as a possible way to reduce polarisation, and malevolent individuals in power also seem closely related to increased polarisation.
Amazing work, thanks for writing this up!
The drawdowns of major ETFs on this (e.g. EMB / JNK) during the corona crash or 2008 are roughly 2⁄3 to 3⁄4 of how much stocks (the S&P 500) went down. So I agree the diversification benefit is limited. The question, bracketing the point on leverage extra cost, is whether the positive EV of emerging markets bonds / high yield bonds is more or less than 2⁄3 to 3⁄4 of the positive EV of stocks. That’s pretty hard to say—there’s a lot of uncertainty on both sides. But if that is the case and one can borrow at very good rates (e.g. through futures or box spread financing) then the best portfolio should be a levered up combination of bonds & stocks rather than just stocks.
FWIW, I’m in a similar position regarding my personal portfolio; I’ve so far not invested in these asset classes but am actively considering it.
What are your thoughts on high-yield corporate bonds or emerging markets bonds? This kind of bond offers non-zero interest rates but of course also entail higher risk. Also, these markets aren’t (to my knowledge) distorted by the Fed buying huge amounts of bonds.
Theoretically, there should be some diversification benefit from adding this kind of bond, though it’s all positively correlated. But unfortunately, ETFs on these kinds of bonds have much higher fees.
Peter’s point is that it makes a lot of sense to have certain norms about not causing serious direct harm, and one should arguably follow such norms rather than expecting some complex longtermist cost-benefit analysis.
Put differently, I think it is very important, from a longtermist perspective, to advance the idea that animals matter and that we consequently should not harm them (particularly for reasons as frivolous as eating meat).
Great post, thanks for writing this up!
Thanks for commenting!
I agree that early detection in children is an interesting idea. If certain childhood behaviours can be shown to reliably predict malevolence, then this could be part of a manipulation-proof test. However, as you say, there are many pitfalls to be avoided.
I am not well versed in the literature but my impression is that things like torturing animals, bullying, general violence, or callous-unemotional personality traits (as assessed by others) are somewhat predictive of malevolence. But the problem is that you’ll probably also get many false positives from those indicators.
Regarding environmental or developmental interventions, we write this in Appendix B:
Malevolent personality traits are plausibly exacerbated by adverse (childhood) environments—e.g. ones rife with abuse, bullying, violence or poverty (cf. Walsh & Wu, 2008). Thus, research to identify interventions to improve such environmental factors could be valuable. (However, the relevant areas appear to be very crowded. Also, the shared environment appears to have a rather small effect on personality, including personality disorders (Knopik et al., 2018, ch. 16; Johnson et al., 2008; Plomin, 2019; Torgersen, 2009).)
Perhaps improving parenting standards and childhood environments could actually be a fairly promising EA cause. For instance, early advocacy against hitting children may have been a pretty effective lever to make society more civilised and less violent in general.
Thanks for the comment!
I would guess that having better tests of malevolence, or even just a better understanding of it, may help with this problem. Perhaps a takeaway is that we should not just raise awareness (which can backfire via “witch hunts”), but instead try to improve our scientific understanding and communicate that to the public, which hopefully makes it harder to falsely accuse people.
In general, I don’t know what can be done about people using any means necessary to smear political opponents. It seems that the way to address this is to have good norms favoring “clean” political discourse, and good processes to find out whether allegations are true; but it’s not clear what can be done to establish such norms.
See here for a very similar question (and answers): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ihDhDt375xHf9wBCo/uk-donor-advised-funds
Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors
Great work, thanks for sharing! It’s great to see this getting more attention in EA.
Just for those deciding whether to read the full thesis: it analyses four possible interventions to reduce polarisation: (1) switching from FPTP to proportional representation, (2) making voting compulsory, (3) increasing the presence of public service broadcasting, and (4) creating deliberative citizen’s assemblies. Olaf’s takeaway (as far as I understand it) is that those interventions seem compelling and fairly tractable but the evidence of possible impacts is often not very strong.
Well, historically, there have been quite a few pandemics that killed more than 10% of people, e.g. the Black Death or Plague of Justinian. There’s been no pandemic that killed everyone.
Is your point that it’s different for anthropogenic risks? Then I guess we could look at wars for historic examples. Indeed, there have been wars that killed something on the order of 10% of people, at least in the warring nations, and IMO that is a good argument to take the risk of a major war quite seriously.
But there have been far more wars that killed fewer people, and none that caused extinction. The literature usually models the number of casualties as a Pareto distribution, which means that the probability density is monotonically decreasing in the number of deaths. (For a broader reference class of atrocities, genocides, civil wars etc., I think the picture is similar.)
But we don’t in fact see lots of unknown risks killing even 0.1% of the population.
Smoking, lack of exercise, and unhealthy diets each kill more than 0.1% of the population each year. Coronavirus may kill 0.1% in some countries. The advent of cars in the 20th century resulted in 60 million road deaths, which is maybe 0.5% of everyone alive over that time (I haven’t checked this in detail). That can be seen as an unknown from the perspective of someone in 1900. Granted, some of those are more gradual than the sort of catastrophe people have in mind—but actually I’m not sure why that matters.
Looking at individual nations, I’m sure you can find many examples of civil wars, famines, etc. killing 0.1% of the population of a certain country, but far fewer examples killing 10% (though there are some). I’m not claiming the latter is 100x less likely but it is clearly much less likely.
You could have made the exact same argument in 1917, in 1944, etc. and you would have been wildly wrong.
I don’t understand this. What do you think the exact same argument would have been, and why was that wildly wrong?
This could be relevant. It’s not about the exact same question (it looks at the distribution of future suffering, not of impact) but some parts might be transferable.