Yelnats T.J.

Karma: 783

Co-founder of Concentric Policies

CE Incubatee 2023

Talk to me about American governance/political systems/democracy

My journey to EA:

2009: start arriving at utilitarian-adjacent ethics
Dec 2012: read Peter Singer’s Famine Affluence and Morality
Circa 2013/14: find my way to EA through googling about Singer and FAaM
2014-2019: in the orbit of EA. i.e. will talk to people about morality and utilitarian stuff but not very engaged in the community aside from attending uni club meeting every once and while.
2020: EAGxVirtual (I’m starting to move from the orbit closer to the actual community)
2022: Dive deep into the community. And now we arrive at the present day.

Yelnats T.J. 20 Dec 2024 0:33 UTC
1 point
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on: Transitioning from school to work is hard! Some advice on managing the self
Thanks for your openness. Not an easy thing to do but gives a lot value to the reader.

Also great advice

Yelnats T.J. 7 Dec 2024 19:42 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Austin’s comment on: Invest in ACX Grants projects!
Thanks for the info. I had been anticipating it would be in December like last year. This is helpful to know.

Yelnats T.J. 6 Dec 2024 21:56 UTC
3 points
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on: Invest in ACX Grants projects!
When will ACX 2025 grant applications open?

Yelnats T.J. 21 Nov 2024 5:03 UTC
4 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: MarcusAbramovitch’s comment on: Averting autocracy in the United States of America
As we discussed at EAG B, the material change between the 1st term and 2nd term is that there were many “adults in the room” who kept the former president from fulfilling his worst instincts. Whereas now there has been a 4-year effort to cultivate a pipeline of loyalists to staff the government. Ezra’s episode on Trump and his disinhibition is a good piece on the topic.
The nominations for the national security apparatus are the strongest signal that he wants power consolidated and will test GOP Senators out the gate if they will be a check on his power.
I think Ezra’s start to the podcast that Michael linked was apt. If someone two months ago said that Gaetz, Gabbard, and Hegeseth were going to be nominated for DoJ, DNI, DoD, it would have been framed as hyperbolic doomer Liberal talk. However that is the universe we are in.
Have the nominations and the proposal to purge military generals updated your priors at all since EAG B?

Yelnats T.J. 21 Nov 2024 4:49 UTC
3 points
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on: Averting autocracy in the United States of America
A post/submission I wrote to OP two years ago has some thoughts on this:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kmx3rKh2K4ANwMqpW/destabilization-of-the-united-states-the-top-x-factor-ea
It has some recommended readings and outlines potential interventions.
I’m still distilling what I would add to it in the present day.
The top thing on my mind is the proposed board to purge generals. (Note: presidents already have the authority to dismiss generals, however the implication of this proposal is that they want to purge so many generals that they need a systematic vehicle to do it.) As I wrote in my piece, our biggest bulwark against an authoritarian power grab is that the United States Military is very strong, professional, competent, and apolitical. Any changes away from that status quo should raise alarm bells.
The nominations to the military/national security apparatus are clearly about total loyalty over competence. These are the military and intelligence services that when captured in other countries by authoritarians have cemented regimes.
Interventions in the immediate term targeted at disrupting the consolidation of power (in the aforementioned moves) could be very high leverage.
For a longer-term intervention that focuses more on the upstream drivers of our political dysfunction which enables authoritarians, I still back the idea of doing local/state ballot initiatives to reform the political system. A gap I see in the space is that political system reform via initiatives is pursued piecemeal instead of comprehensively. Also, anti-establishment sentiments poll very high amongst Americans including the Left and Right, yet that bi-populist agreement is not being effectively tapped. Not only could mobilizing it help get initiatives over the line, but it would create depolarizing interactions between regular citizens.

Yelnats T.J. 7 Nov 2024 18:24 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Yelnats T.J.’s comment on: Bad omens for US farmed animal policy work?
I think one of the most compelling cases is using voter initiatives for political system reform.
The short argument is that a large portion of EA has bought into policy as high EV because the high-leverage impact more than compensates for the hits-based nature of it. However, upstream of policy is politics. Generally, the problem is not a lack of solutions but a lack of political will. Yet, even upstream of politics is the political system which creates the selection effects for who gets into office and the incentives that act on them while in office.
Political system reform, while more challenging to quantify, theoretically has very very very high ROI because you are addressing the coefficient of a coefficient acting on policy.
However, legislators have proven resistant to changing the rules of how they got to power. Hence, prominent people/organizations in the money-in-politics and electoral reform space have opted to use ballot initiatives to circumvent the legislature.

Yelnats T.J. 7 Nov 2024 18:23 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Tyler Johnston’s comment on: Bad omens for US farmed animal policy work?
I’m of the opinion EAs are underutilizing ballot/voter initiatives. This is something I plan on writing up on the Forum at some point. (If anyone is interested in exploring voter initiatives as an intervention, please reach out)
The veto of SB 1047 should also raise the salience of ballot initiatives in EA.

Yelnats T.J. 7 Nov 2024 15:31 UTC
43 points
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on: Bad omens for US farmed animal policy work?
I see one piece of important analysis is missing: the money differential

Campaigns that lost in 2024 (TLDR: 4 of the 5 were outspent)
- No on Measure J (California) outspent the yes campaign 8 to 1 (according to the yes campaign). Measure J is losing by 70 percentage points with 75% of the vote reported.
- As of Sept 30: in favor of Initiatives 308 & 309 (Colorado) spent $244,000; Hands off my Hat (this biggest group opposing 308 and which also opposes 309) spent $368,000. 308 lost by 16 percentage points.
- As of Nov 4: proponents of Iniaitive 309 spent $0.6 million whilst opponents spent $3.8 million. 309 lost by 30 percentage points.
- Proposition 127 (Colorado) had $2.3 million spent against it and had $2.8 million spent for it. It lost by 10 percentage points.
- Yes on Amendment 2 (Florida) outspent the opposition $1.1 million to $0.1 million. It won by 34 percentage points.
Previous campaigns that won (TLDR: 0 of the 3 were outspent)
- Advocates for Proposition 12 (California, 2018) outspent opponents $12.5 million to $0.3 million. It won by 26 percentage points.
- Advocates for Question 3 (Massachusetts, 2016) outspent opponents $2.7 million to $0.3 million. It won by 55 percentage points.
- Advocates for Proposition 2 (California, 2008) donated $10.6 million to $8.9 million donated by its opponents. It won by 26 percentage points.
The correlation between money spent/outspending your opponent is clear.
What links here?
- Bad omens for US farmed animal policy work? by Tyler Johnston (6 Nov 2024 21:03 UTC; 130 points)

Yelnats T.J. 7 Nov 2024 14:51 UTC
−1 points
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on: Bad omens for US farmed animal policy work?
[prematurley posted draft of comment]

Yelnats T.J. 7 Nov 2024 14:31 UTC
−1 points
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on: Bad omens for US farmed animal policy work?
[prematurley posted draft of comment]

Yelnats T.J. 23 Aug 2024 5:16 UTC
−6 points
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on: The case for contributing to the 2024 US election with your time & money
This is the best Forum post I’ve read the entire year

Yelnats T.J. 15 Aug 2024 22:59 UTC
13 points
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on: Who would you like to see speak at EA Global?
Ezra Klein

Yelnats T.J. 15 Aug 2024 22:59 UTC
11 points
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on: Who would you like to see speak at EA Global?
I’d like to see any speaker that will talk about democracy protection and political system reform as these topics seem neglected at EAGs given the amount of EAs that actually engage with the topic

Destabilization of the United States: The top X-factor EA neglects?

Yelnats T.J.15 Jul 2024 2:54 UTC

177 points

29 comments39 min readEA link

Yelnats T.J. 21 May 2024 23:42 UTC
20 points
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on: Marisa, the Co-Founder of EA Anywhere, Has Passed Away
This is devastating to find out. My interactions with Marisa were very limited but quite significant to me.
I rescued a two-month street kitten while on the EA Zanzibar residency. When I got back stateside, she tested (faint) positive for a disease and my partner did not want to risk exposing the other cats to her. I urgently needed to find a place to stay with her while we waited to re-test her, and I was running out of options.
I had only met Marisa once in-person before. A mutual friend suggested talking to her. She was visiting family for the Easter weekend and let me stay with my kitten at her place. Marisa was invaluable in that moment of personal crisis for me.

Yelnats T.J. 16 Apr 2024 23:55 UTC
4 points
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on: Why so many small charities?
Joey has answered this before elsewhere (i.e. why doesn’t CE just open programs instead of spin-off charities). The answer is that starting a chair leads to more ownership and thus better results.
I’d also add that many programs in one charity raises the stakes of the leadership’s judgement/decision-making. More charities in a way acts like diversification.

Yelnats T.J. 8 Feb 2024 6:45 UTC
2 points
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on: How would you approach an introduction to Effective Altruism in 1 hour in a class of second-year Philosophy students?
I would start with some version of the child drowning scenario in Peter Singer’s Famine Affluence and Morality.

Yelnats T.J. 7 Feb 2024 18:59 UTC
13 points
5 ∶ 1
in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: Introducing the Effektiv Spenden “Defending Democracy” fund
Two considerations:
1. does protecting democracy have to be “painting with leftist colors”?
2. even if it was, does the ROI justify it?

On the first, as noted in this EAGxVirtual lightning talk I gave on the US context, the design of the political system is a big upstream cause of authoritarian voter bases and to a larger extent authoritarian politicians. Many of the reforms to the US political system that would in the short to long term reduce the antidemocratic threat are “bi-populist,” as I like to call it.

Left- and Right-wing populists are generally for campaign finance reform, preventing politicians from becoming lobbyists, having a districting and voting system that enables third parties, etc. There are some notable ver partisan exceptions like moving from the electoral college to national popular vote and making the Senate less minoritarian.

In the US context, I think disciplined and skilled advocates can keep political system reform as populist/anti-establishment issue and avoid culture war framing. I’m not sure how this generalizes to Europe or Germany. While I don’t think it generalizes 100%, I suspect it generalizes at least a little.

On the second, I think the ROI from this issue is uniquely higher than other political issues. small-L liberal democracies (e.g. Germany, United States, Italy, etc) falling into something other than liberal democracies (Hungary is a good example of this) strikes me as patently super bad for suffering of humans/animals, the longterm future, EA agenda, and any other issues that we might care about. I think this is uniquely true of the United States because it is the world superpower and leading place for emerging technologies. However, the stakes are high even in places like Germany. How much would be lost alone by an authoritarian nativist government coming to power and eliminating all German foreign aid?

In short, if the Great Powers stop being liberal democracies, a lot of our agenda becomes moot because we will now have bigger problems. Instead of working to make German aid more effective, we will be working to get the govt to give any aid at all and ensure an authoritarian govt doesn’t manipulate the political process to never relinquish power. Instead of working to get the United States Government to approach international AI coordination in a way that doesn’t lead to an international arms race in capabilities, we will be fighting to keep a strongman from disrupting the global world order that that coordination is underpinned by.

Yelnats T.J. 7 Feb 2024 18:29 UTC
4 points
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on: Introducing the Effektiv Spenden “Defending Democracy” fund
Here is another EA Forum post that talks at length about democracy defense in the US context.

Yelnats T.J. 19 Jan 2024 5:15 UTC
1 point
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on: US Poverty Interventions: how should we prioritize?
I would try to improve the political system which is upstream of the dysfunctional politics which is upstream of bad policy that leads to needless policy in the US. I think you’ll get better ROI be cause the dividends will affect so many other areas EAs care about.

Yelnats T.J.

Desta­bi­liza­tion of the United States: The top X-fac­tor EA ne­glects?

Destabilization of the United States: The top X-factor EA neglects?