yefreitor

Karma: 163

yefreitor 23 Mar 2023 1:56 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Common-sense sentience is dubious
I’ve been told that this essay supports the position of ‘illusionism’.
I don’t think this is correct. The illusionist position is that the only actual explananda are our beliefs about phenomenal properties (or rather, the brain-states responsible for utterances like “pain is bad”, since beliefs are another folk-psychological concept supposedly ripe for elimination): once those are accounted for, there will be nothing left to explain and no reason to continue believing in qualia.
For an attack on the reliability of our common-sense beliefs about qualia to constitute a defense of illusionism, we would have to think that our belief in qualia would be unjustified were it not for those intuitions. But this is begging the question—if phenomenal properties do exist and we do have first-hand access to them, then that, not common-sense, is our principal justification for believing in them.

yefreitor 3 Apr 2023 3:02 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Orthogonality is Expensive
From the linked post
A common assumption about AGI is the orthogonality thesis, which argues that goals/utility functions and the core intelligence of an AGI system are orthogonal or can be cleanly factored apart.
This may or may not be an “orthogonality thesis” (I haven’t seen this usage before, but I also haven’t looked for it), but the orthogonality thesis I’m familiar with has the quantifiers the other way around: for any goal, there exists a possible AGI that will attempt carry it out.^[1] Even if mixing-and-matching a dumb industrial control system with a smart friendly AI is safe, that doesn’t mean that a smart industrial control system arrived at through some other route won’t paperclip you.
1. ^
  Though in practice what people making likely-doom arguments really mean is that a generic human-created AI will not have recognizably human values, which is a somewhat stronger claim.

yefreitor 3 Apr 2023 5:13 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Orthogonality is Expensive
Your definition is trivially true: all it requires is that an AGI having a specified goal is not physically impossible. But that doesn’t prove that all goals are equally likely to occur, or even that AGI will have “goals” at all.
Yes, of course (hence the footnote).
The way I see it deployed in practice is to say that a “dumb” AI will have some silly goal like “build squiggles”, will go through an intelligence scale-up, and will keep that goal in hyper-intelligent form. (and then pursuing that goal will result in disaster).
My reading of the doomer view (which I don’t necessarily endorse) is quite different: a dumb AI starts with some useful goal, goes through an intelligence scale-up that slightly perturbs its goal in some direction—and because goals compatible with human life are a tiny thread winding their way through a stupidly high-dimensional manifold of all possible goals, ends up misaligned by default.
This doesn’t especially hinge on whether these perturbations can be in any direction or only a few (as is the case if goals are strongly constrained by architecture), except in the case where they run only along the human-survival curve. Any transverse component whatsoever means you get pushed off-manifold almost always. And this is plausible (I think) only in the case where human values are not a tiny golden thread, but actually rather large and fuzzily full-dimensional.

yefreitor 5 Apr 2023 22:46 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 0
on: The Orthogonality Thesis is Not Obviously True
It seems that, if this ‘certain hedonist’ were really fully rational, they would start caring about their pleasures and pains equally across days. They would recognize that the day of the week does not matter to the badness of their pains. Thus, in a similar sense, if something is 10,000,000 times smarter than Von Neumann, and can think hundreds of thousands of pages worth of thoughts in the span of minutes, it would conclude that pleasure is worth pursuing and paperclips are not.
This argument is really straightforward. If moral realism were true, then if something became super smart, so too would it realize that some things were worth pursuing.
This is not what Parfit is arguing. The Future Tuesday Indifference thought experiment is part of Parfit’s defense of irreducible normativity:
- if the subjectivist position that acting rationally is reducible to acting in accordance with some consistent set of beliefs and preferences is true, then Future Tuesday Indifference is rational
- Future Tuesday Indifference is irrational
- So the subjectivist position is false
Our certain hedonist’s problem is not an epistemic one: it’s not that they don’t know what pain is like on Tuesday, or that they’re not smart enough to realize that Tuesday is an arbitrary label and in truth days are simply days, or that they’ve failed to reach reflective equilibrium. They’re acting in perfect accord with their coherent extrapolated volition—the problem is just that it’s a ridiculous thing to want.
Assuming that a sufficiently intelligent agent would necessarily be rational in this sense to argue against the orthogonality thesis is circular.

yefreitor 6 Apr 2023 2:54 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Harrison Durland’s comment on: The Orthogonality Thesis is Not Obviously True
If yefreitor is saying what I planned to say, the simpler version is just “there’s nothing ‘irrational’ about having a utility function that says ‘no experience matters every Tuesday.’”
Parfit’s position (and mine) is that Future Tuesday Indifference is manifestly irrational. But this has little to do with what sort of preferences sufficiently intelligent agents can have.
No, they literally have no negative (or positive) experience on Tuesdays
No, that’s explicitly ruled out in the setup. They have experiences on Tuesday, those experiences have the usual valence—they just fail to act accordingly. Here’s the full context from Reasons and Persons:
Consider next this imaginary case. A certain hedonist cares greatly about the quality of his future experiences. With one exception, he cares equally about all the parts of his future. The exception is that he has Future-Tuesday-Indifference. Throughout every Tuesday he cares in the normal way about what is happening to him. But he never cares about possible pains or pleasures on a future Tuesday. Thus he would choose a painful operation on the following Tuesday rather than a much less painful operation on the following Wednesday. This choice would not be the result of any false beliefs. This man knows that the operation will be much more painful if it is on Tuesday. Nor does
he have false beliefs about personal identity. He agrees that it will be just as much him who will be suffering on Tuesday. Nor does he have false beliefs about time. He knows that Tuesday is merely part of a conventional calendar, with an arbitrary name taken from a false religion. Nor has he any other beliefs that might help to justify his indifference to pain on future Tuesdays. This indifference is a bare fact. When he is planning his future, it is simply true that he always prefers the prospect of great suffering on a Tuesday to the mildest pain on any other day.
This man’s pattern of concern is irrational. Why does he prefer agony on Tuesday to mild pain on any other day? Simply because the agony will be on a Tuesday. This is no reason. If someone must choose between suffering agony on Tuesday or mild pain on Wednesday, the fact that the agony will be on a Tuesday is no reason for preferring it. Preferring the worse of two pains, for no reason, is irrational.

yefreitor 9 Apr 2023 23:23 UTC
8 points
2 ∶ 0
on: What the Moral Truth might be makes no difference to what will happen
Several objections in no particular order
- I think your first section is correct, but you conclude far too much from it: failing to act in perfect accord with the moral truth does not mean you’re not influenced by it at all. Humans fail your conditions 4-7 and yet are occasionally influenced by moral facts in ways that matter.
- On the one hand, you assume that civilizations are agents which can simply decide to adopt this or that strategy; on the other hand, you expect intense selection within civilizations, such that their members behave so as to maximize their own reproductive success. But these can’t both be true: you can throw all of your surplus into expanding as fast as possible, or you can spend it on internal competition, or you can do something in between, but you can’t spend it all on both.
- I don’t think
  
  > Within a civilization, we should expect the agents who have the values that are the most adapted/competitive to survival, replication, and expansion to eventually be selected for
  
  is the right conclusion to draw from Hanson’s paper. The selection effects he’s talking about act on different regions of the frontier of a given civilization. Those living in the interior (who will be the vast majority of the population in the extreme long-run) may be disproportionately descended from fast expanders, but will not face the same pressure themselves.
- There are many different units of selection, and they can’t all be subject to arbitrarily intense selection pressure simultaneously: cancer cells don’t build spaceships.

yefreitor 11 Apr 2023 2:56 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jim Buhler’s comment on: What the Moral Truth might be makes no difference to what will happen
All I’m saying is that those who are the most bullish on space colonization will colonize more space.
Sure, but that doesn’t tell you much about what happens afterwards. If the initial colonists’ values are locked in ~forever, we should probably expect value drift to be weak in general, which means frontier selection effects have a lot less variation to work with.
At the extreme lower limit with no drift at all, most agents within a mature civilization are about as expansionist as the most expansionist of the initial colonists—but no more so. And this might not be all that much in the grand scheme of things.
At the other end, where most of the space of possible values gets explored, maybe you do get a shockwave of superintelligent sociopaths racing outwards at relativistic speeds—but you also get a vast interior that favors (relatively speaking) long-term survival and material efficiency.

yefreitor 11 Apr 2023 3:06 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jim Buhler’s comment on: What the Moral Truth might be makes no difference to what will happen
I remain skeptical because this would imply the orthogonality thesis is almost completely false.
The orthogonality thesis could be (and I think almost certainly is) false with respect to some agent-generating processes (e.g., natural selection) and true with respect to others (e.g. Q-learning).

yefreitor 11 Apr 2023 4:08 UTC
21 points
3 ∶ 3
in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Nobody’s on the ball on AGI alignment
I agree that the very strong sort of alignment you describe—with the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of humanity, or the collective interest of all sentient beings, or The Form of The Good—is probably impossible and perhaps ill-posed. Insofar as we need this sort of aligned AI for things to go as well as they possibly could, they won’t.
But I don’t see why that’s the only acceptable target. Aligning a superintelligence with the will of basically any psychologically normal human being (narrower than any realistic target except perhaps a profit-maximizer—in which case yeah, we’re doomed) would still be an ok outcome for humans: it certainly doesn’t end in paperclips. And alignment with someone even slightly inclined towards impartial benevolence probably goes much better than the status quo, especially for the extremely poor.
(Animals are at much more risk here, but their current situation is also much worse: I’m extremely uncertain how a far richer world would treat factory farming)

yefreitor 13 Apr 2023 9:55 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Evolution provides no evidence for the sharp left turn
It seems to me that humans have had (at least) two sharp left turns:
- behavioral modernity: humans rapidly (compared to the pace of early human evolution) become vastly more capable than other hominins
- the neolithic revolution and everything after: complex agricultural societies rapidly (compared to the pace of early human cultural change) become vastly more capable than other human groups
You’ve offered a plausible account of the development of behavioral modernity—but why do we get another qualitative jump in capabilities once we get enough behaviorally modern humans together? I suspect the answer hinges more on high-level facts about human intelligence than the specific mechanisms that brought it about. If so, then worrying about analogous developments in AI is appropriate.

yefreitor 1 May 2023 1:19 UTC
31 points
5 ∶ 3
on: Bridging EA’s Gender Gap: Input From 60 People
One of these topics is how EA does not focus specifically on gender inequality issues in its thinking (e.g. ‘the patriarchy’ is not a problem recommended to work on by the EA community). Another topic is the idea of one of the groups that women connect more to ethics of care (see footnote for definition).^[1] They suspect that this type of ethics is not emphasized in EA and that that could be one of the reasons why EA is less popular among women compared to men …
… be more open to scholars of feminism, queer studies and gender studies
I think this is conflating the preferences of women in general with those of women from a particular class and cultural milieu^[1]: highly educated urban professional-managerial class liberals^[2] in the developed world.
Broad-spectrum appeals to (what are perceived as) their tastes and interests (as opposed to measures targeted at the interests of women qua women, like attempts to reduce sexual harassment):
- may or may not improve EA’s gender ratio: my best guess is a very low confidence “yes, but not by much”
- will likely make EA less welcoming to people who haven’t been acculturated (typically through western university education) into PMC norms and tastes.
- will almost certainly make EA less welcoming to people to whom PMC culture is hostile or patronizing: in particular Christians and blue-collar laborers (who together constitute a majority of the US population), and local elites outside major urban areas (who control a significant fraction of its wealth).
This is not necessarily a bad choice. As something of a “liberal elite” myself, while I think the dominance of highly educated liberals within EA is both annoying and an epistemic weakness, the unfortunate fact of the matter is that EA is not a mass movement or likely to become one. Accepting a certain degree of parochialism in exchange for money and influence is probably worth it, and the PMC is probably the least-misaligned of all the patrons available.
But it is a dangerous choice, and not one that can be easily reversed. We shouldn’t sleepwalk into it.
It used to be fashionable to worry about EA spiraling into quasi-religious extremism. Personally, I think a descent into characterless opportunism is far, far more likely. We’ll take one more tiny step towards alignment with our chosen power base, cross some critical threshold from “involvement in EA looks good in contexts X Y and Z” to “involvement in EA is a good general-purpose elite resume builder”, and that’ll be that.
1. ^
  Or more precisely: the socially-normative views of that class and culture, which are often but not always the actual views of the majority.
2. ^
  AKA “coastal elites”, “stuff white people like”, “high cultural capital”, “the brahmin left” - there are no non-controversial labels for them (ok, us) but I know you know who I’m talking about.

yefreitor 1 May 2023 14:48 UTC
15 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Bridging EA’s Gender Gap: Input From 60 People
There’s feminism and then there’s feminism (and also feminism, feminism, and feminism). Even within the academy you have radfems (e.g. Julie Bindel) and queer theorists (e.g. Julia Serano) and liberals (e.g. Martha Nussbaum) at each other’s throats—and I very much doubt that the average self-identified feminist has any of them in mind (as opposed to, say, maternal leave and abortion access) when they claim that label.

yefreitor 1 May 2023 22:42 UTC
14 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Bridging EA’s Gender Gap: Input From 60 People
I’m seeing an argument against dogmatically enforcing particular sub-branches of feminism
I don’t think these are sub-branches of any single coherent thing, any more than contemporary left-of-center politics is just hashing things out between factions of the Jacobin club. Feminism is at most a loose intellectual tradition, not an ideology.
The actual cluster-structure here is something like
- the self-identified left
  - radical feminism (not “feminism which is radical”) is largely its own thing
  - the liberal left
    mainstream liberalism
    academic liberal feminism
    traditional feminist political organizations: NOW, Planned Parenthood, etc.
    the new left and its descendants
    queer theory, “third wave” feminism
    “woke” politics
    anarchism, libertarian socialism, etc.
    the environmental movement, other “hippie” groups (the actual hippies somewhat less so)
  - the radical left
    Marxism
    Radical social democracy (some overlap with liberalism)
    “materialist” feminism (largely extinct)
What stance do you actually want EA to take when it comes to this issue? Do you want to shun feminist scholars, or declare their opinions to be unworthy of serious thought?
Engagement with radical feminism would be both actively harmful and, given their well-deserved reputation for rabid transphobia, a serious reputational risk. They should be completely ignored.
EA is already quite engaged with mainstream liberalism. This is basically fine, but the fact that it’s often not acknowledged as an ideological stance is very bad: many EAs have a missing gear called “other worldviews make perfect sense on their own terms and are not deformed versions of your own”. No change in attitude vis a vis liberal feminism is needed, just go take some old books seriously for a while or something.
The New Left has a bit to offer on the “big ideas” front, but it has terrible epistemics, worse praxis, and is also weird and alienating to a significant fraction of the population. I think it would be a serious mistake for EA organizations to promote their frameworks. Engagement with people who already buy it seems unlikely to matter much either way—it’s an almost completely incommensurable worldview.
Any good-faith engagement whatsoever with left-of-liberal politics would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.

yefreitor 2 May 2023 14:34 UTC
3 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Kerkko Pelttari’s comment on: Bridging EA’s Gender Gap: Input From 60 People
I don’t really know what the solutions for this are. On a personal level I think perhaps I need to read more old books or participate in reading circles where non-EA books are read.
I would suggest, as a perhaps easier on-ramp, reading writing by analytic philosophers defending the views of people from other traditions or eras. A few examples:
- A Spirit of Trust, Robert Brandom (Hegel)
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn (not really a defense of premodern physics, which is of course empirically wrong, but a defense of its coherence)
- Pragmatism as a Way of Life, Hilary and Ruth Putnam (American Pragmatism)
- Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, G.A. Cohen (historical materialism)

yefreitor 2 May 2023 15:13 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Bridging EA’s Gender Gap: Input From 60 People
But perhaps “many people (and many EAs) likely place <50% credence on” is not a good operationalization of “controversial.” In that case maybe it’d be helpful to operationalize what we mean by that word.
I think the relevant consideration here isn’t whether a post is (implicitly or not) assuming controversial premises, it’s the degree to which it’s (implicitly or not) recommending controversial courses of action.
There’s a big difference between a longtermist analysis of the importance of nuclear nonproliferation and a longtermist analysis of airstrikes on foreign data centers, for instance.

yefreitor 2 May 2023 15:26 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: The costs of caution
Insofar as AI x-risk looks like LLMs while awesome stuff like medicine (and robotics and autonomous vehicles and more) doesn’t look like LLMs, caution on LLMs doesn’t delay other awesome stuff.* So when you talk about slowing AI progress, make it clear that you only mean AI on the path to dangerous capabilities.
AI biologists seem extremely dangerous to me—something “merely” as good at viral genomes as GPT-4 is at language would already be an existential threat to human civilization, if not necessarily homo sapiens.

yefreitor 2 May 2023 23:23 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 1
on: AGI rising: why we are in a new era of acute risk and increasing public awareness, and what to do now
Common objections to this narrative are that there won’t be enough compute, or data, for this to happen. These don’t hold water after a cursory examination of our situation. We are nowhere near close to the physical limits to computation (the theoretical limit set by physics is, to a first approximation, as many orders of magnitude above current infrastructure as current infrastructure is above the babbage engine).
And we are nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, nowhere near being able to even begin approaching them. We’re closer to nanotech. We’re closer to dyson spheres. I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s like an iron-age armorsmith worrying about the physical limits of tensile strength.
Hardware overhang is a legitimate concern but you hurt your argument quite badly by mixing it with this stuff. In the whole history of the universe no one will ever be hit in the head with an entire ringworld. It’s steel you have to worry about.

yefreitor 4 May 2023 6:12 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Understand how other people think: a theory of worldviews.
I think this article is quite badly mistaken, both in its account of what particular groups believe and its understanding of worldviews as such. It’s also an excellent illustration of what happens when you fail to notice the walls of your own “snowglobe”—in this case, contemporary Anglophone politics (such as it is) as seen from the inside.
This is a domain where the most visible fault lines between worldviews really are about The Right and The Good—to a certain degree because politics has always been about The Right and The Good, but also because we happen to live in a culture—a worldview—that excludes most other substantive disagreements (from “are any normative claims even truth-apt, let alone true?” to “to what extent is political persuasion possible?” to “are real economies close to equilibrium?”) from the political sphere.
On the rare occasions when other issues make their way into public discourse (or when you wait for things to get heated elsewhere), you see just as much baffled incomprehension.
- “Why do mathematicians complicate things by talking about real numbers, in real life you can only ever observe rationals” (missing insight: “the” real numbers are more complicated as a set but simpler as e.g. a topological space (or other relevant structure))
- “Qualia don’t offer any explanatory power, this is just rehashed vitalism” (missing insight: they’re explananda, not explanations)
- “Dark matter is just some placeholder physicists came up with to explain there being too much gravity, they should change the theory instead, why should I believe in something I can’t even see?” (missing insight: all objects are placeholders to explain our measurements)
Worldviews are not principally about moral beliefs because they’re not principally about beliefs. They’re principally about concepts—the ones you use habitually, the ones you recognize, the ones you actively reject, the ones you don’t even know you’re missing—and the relations between them. The object-level disagreements are, for the most part, further downstream.
An example from the linked post: the “American Communists” table (which I’m going to round off to “Marxists”) is more wrong than right. Relevant excerpt:
- Intrinsic values: Equality
- Where does good come from? Labor, and workers owning the means of production
- Where does bad come from? Capitalism and class systems
- Who deserves good things? Workers
- What should you do to be good? Try to abolish capitalism and support labor rights
The missing insight here, I think, is that unlike most of the other entries (but like the “Silicon Valley Techno-Optimists”, with whom they share far more than most members of either group would care to admit), Marxists see themselves as carrying out a historical process, not advocating for a set of values.
The view of history, accordingly, should come first. Tanner Greer’s account here is a good one
Orthodox Marxism describes the last few thousand years of history as a dialectical advance, each step in humankind’s social evolution an emancipation from natural forces paired with deepening servitude to artificial ones. The problem is not greedy capitalists, but capitalism, a structure of incentives that gives capitalists no option but to live rapacious. It was not the capitalists’ fault, really: for those inside the vortex there is no escape from the ceaseless whirl. We all live in thrall to the depersonalized incentives of the capitalist machine; we all are slaves to the blind force of the marketplace. The game cannot be changed by those stuck playing it: one must play or perish. The only solution possible is for an outside force to intervene and reshape the terms of the game. Socialist revolution will be that force. With no stake in the current order, the propertyless masses will wipe the slate clean. Human life in the world to come will be twice blessed: technology and industry has freed mankind from the shackles of nature. Revolution will now break the artificial shackles that technology and industry themselves had forged. From that point forward great decisions will not be filtered through the partial interests of the individual, but decided rationally, with the entire whole in mind. Then mankind would be free! Free from the manipulations of the market! Free from egoism, from indecency, from all the terrible things the system forces us to do to each other! Moloch vanquished, human life would finally flourish as our inborn natures intended.
Intrinsic values? Human ones, no further comment. Where does bad come from? Moloch. Where does good come from? Also Moloch. What should you do to [kill Moloch]? Feed it until it chokes on its own waste.
This is not a worldview that fits in a value-system shaped hole.

yefreitor 5 May 2023 18:15 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: spencerg’s comment on: Understand how other people think: a theory of worldviews.
If you think that American communists don’t have an unusually strong intrinsic value of equality then I think you’re mistaken
My claim is that it’s not an intrinsic value—it’s the result of “instrumental convergence” between adherents of many different value systems, grounded in their shared conception of our present circumstances. If our circumstances were different, the conclusions would be too.
If, for instance, the United States had a robust social-democratic welfare state, most communists would be much less concerned with equality than they are now.
If it were instead some sort of agrarian yeoman-republic (certainly impossible now, but conceivable if early American history had gone very differently), then plausibly communists could instead take a mildly anti-egalitarian tack—inefficient small farmers frustrating the development of the productive forces and so on.
What you would never get, regardless of prevailing conditions, are communists who are also market fundamentalists.
If you think worldviews aren’t to a substantial extent about beliefs that I suspect we just mean different things by “worldviews”.
Really what I think is that beliefs can’t, in general, be cleanly separated from attitudes and concepts and mere habits of thought and so on—at the end of the day human cognition is what it is. But to the extent that there are distinguished object- and meta-levels, I think meta-level variation is the strongest driver of object-level variation between at least moderately educated people.
For instance, I would not call a bunch of the examples you gave “worldviews.”
Those were intended as characteristic beliefs that would pick out clearly recognizable clusters, not entire worldviews themselves. “Love Thy Neighbor” as a substitute for “Christianity”—except that I don’t have good names for the worldviews in question.
I’ve likely overestimated how salient the concrete-instrumentalist-(problem solver) vs. abstract-(scientific realist)-(theory builder) divide is for most people, but I think the two are clearly at least as different and understand each other at least as poorly as mainstream liberals and conservatives in the US.

yefreitor 6 May 2023 3:35 UTC
9 points
4 ∶ 1
in reply to: Ben_West’s comment on: What is effective altruism? How could it be improved?
but it’s not clear to me that the assumptions of these theorems are actually satisfied by EA
Definitely not. A small sample of the obstacles to applying the welfare theorems here:
- Certain “trades” have very large negative externalities due to the risk of reputational harm
- The largest few funders have huge amounts of market power.
- We’re extremely far from perfect information. “Consumers” don’t even have good knowledge of their own utility functions in most cases.
- EA is not a complete system of markets—the vast majority of possible charitable interventions are not on offer at any given time.
- Perhaps most importantly: “sellers” aren’t profit-maximizers
But even if EA did approximate a perfectly competitive market, that would imply very little about its effectiveness. The first welfare theorem says that perfect competition gets you a Pareto-efficient outcome, but Pareto-efficient outcomes can be almost arbitrarily bad. “The king owns literally everything” is Pareto-efficient. The second welfare theorem is where all the oomph comes from: given perfect competition, you can reach any point on the Pareto-frontier—by redistributing resources and then letting the market reequilibrate. But EA is not a state and cannot carry out redistribution, so this gets us nothing.