Yelnats T.J.

Karma: 499

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. 21 Jul 2022 18:00 UTC
22 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Probably Shouldn’t Try to Exercise Direct Political Power
I appreciate the discourse (upvoted) but don’t agree with the conclusion.
These are not my complete thoughts on the piece, but I want to make a couple points:
#1 your takeaway from looking at the Squad and the Tea Party could be premature.
I agree that it’s hard to overcome the inertia of status quo in our government. However, I don’t think the fact that the Squad or the Tea Party haven’t achieved their most grandiose goals (although the Tea Party came close) means the question is settled. Movement politics and moving the needle on ideology in the electorate takes time and the success could come ten or forty years in the future (look at how long it took Right-wing evangelicals to get their win over Roe V Wade). That success could also never come, but we will only be more confident in that conclusion the more that time passes.
Also, grandiose goals is not the only measurement, we could also look at smaller wins such as smaller bills, amendments, backroom deals (admittedly hard to evaluate), and concessions from the establishment (look what the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus did to the careers of John Boehner and Paul Ryan).
#2 Are you content enough with our current government (especially considering suffering, X-risks, and the long-term future) for EAs to not try to exercise direct political power?
Here are some questions:
1. Do you think that the current functioning of our government is sufficient to advert existential events? Asked another way: how tolerable are the weaknesses in our current government, especially for addressing x-risks?
2. Do you think the political system will change itself to a sufficient degree in an acceptable amount of time?
3. If outside forces are needed to bring about the necessary change in our political system/government, can they be successful without trying to exercise direct power?
4. Can EAs eventually be consequential in this space?
The more that you think the answers are 1) no 2) no 3) no 4) yes, the more you should agree that EAs should seek all forms of political power including direct political power.
In summation: to reach our desired destination (i.e. acceptable X-risk levels), we inevitably need governments—especially the government of the strongest superpower, the United States—to take significant measures that are not in the trajectory of the status quo. Thus, to overcome the institutional inertia and to make government function better/implement needed risk mitigation, we need to capture political power. Considering the stakes, can we afford to not pursue direct political power? Capturing political power is a long-term project, but EA is better suited than many other cause-driven communities to successfully capture consequential political power in the long term.
I think this argument also applies to suffering and the long-term future. These problems/issues are immense. The largest, wealthiest, and most powerful organizations on Earth are governments of world powers. Unless we are content to just increments of progress whilst never actually achieving are target end goal, we have to do dramatic things through governance and that involves attaining political power. And the most direct form of political power is elected office.
Conclusion
I disagree with your conclusion, but I think this is a necessary discourse that will push EA to improve how it mitigates collateral damage from involving itself in politics and also improves the strategies and tactics it uses in politics.

Yelnats T.J. 29 Jul 2022 3:54 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
on: The most important climate change uncertainty
We talked about this at EAGxBoston and I’m so glad you posted this. Something from our conversation that you don’t mention here but I think is also relevant is the problem modeling the effects of systemic species lost and the cascading effect across ecosystems.

Yelnats T.J. 10 Aug 2022 14:30 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Against Loneliness: Cause Exploration
Liberalizing regulation of tobacco and alcohol
My understanding is that public health experts are in consensus that this is very bad for public health, and your analysis doesn’t touch on this at all.
Charity Entrepreneurship actually has tried spinning up charities to do the exact opposite in other parts of the world because of how strong the evidence and ROI is (see links below).
https://3394c0c6-1f1a-4f86-a2db-df07ca1e24b2.filesusr.com/ugd/26c75f_2081c09f8f20405e89105ac88c01ec6d.pdf
https://3394c0c6-1f1a-4f86-a2db-df07ca1e24b2.filesusr.com/ugd/9475db_9764c3985ff04dcd904471097fc478e7.pdf
Maybe I read it too fast, but it seems like your suggestion is all based on one study about tobacco that doesn’t even support your claim about alcohol.
For those reasons I am very skeptical of this suggestion.
Promoting fraternal organizations
You start about by talking about Masons and Elks but later reference American fraternal organizations. I don’t know if you include sororities in this, but I would suggest bringing sororities to parity with the rules of fraternities.
Right now, most sororities are not allowed to host parties with alcohol (amongst other rules like not taking pictures with alcohol while wearing their “letters”) and this makes fraternities the only game in town—an uncompetitive market. Fraternities thus design parties to favor the desires of their men whilst neglecting the wants of sorority women and other college women (many under 21 because the bars won’t serve them but fraternities will). This has contributed to rape culture and sexual violence—the subject I worked on throughout university. Sorority women I talked to thought that enabling sororities to host parties would bring competition into the “party market” that would push fraternities to be more inclusive in their parties.
Just a thought.
Promoting religious organizations
I think any argument on promotion of religion should also account for the arguments of the harms of religion. This is a very expansive and contested topic so I won’t dive into here, but many people would make the argument that the harms of more religion outweigh the effects on loneliness or other positive effects. I think future discussion should highlight some of the leading arguments on both sides.

Yelnats T.J. 10 Aug 2022 14:40 UTC
−1 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: ColdButtonIssues’s comment on: Against Loneliness: Cause Exploration
Thanks for the clarification!

Yelnats T.J. 13 Aug 2022 23:10 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: How to Talk to Lefties in Your Intro Fellowship
TL;DR Of Leftists, Leftists that focus on climate disruption and structural change are the most naturally EA-aligned .
Thanks for this post, it gives a lot of actionable specifics. This comes from someone that is one of those “a foot in both worlds.”
BTW: I worked a lot on sexual violence prevention and climate disruption in university. (Which I think was very utilitarian. I did BOTECs demonstrating sexual violence was the biggest issue affecting the student population, and working in the small scope of a university campus (bigger fish in a smaller pound) gave me a lot of useful policy and politics experience you don’t get working on national issues (small fish in big pound)).
A note to my EA peers:
Don’t let the more vocal reactionary camp of the Left distort your whole view of the community. There are multiple strains of Leftism. In my interactions with non-Leftist EAs, I’ve come across multiple EAs that seem to think Leftists are 90% this reactionary type. My very very very rough guess is that they constitute between 20-40%.
Potentially useful framework to identify low-hanging fruit leftists
I am going to suggest an oversimplified framework that can be helpful for identifying which Leftists/Progressives are most likely to appreciate EA.—A spectrum from reactionary to strategic.
I’ve seen Leftists all across this spectrum in my experience in activist circles. There is a reactionary faction that tends to overlap with the social justice camp that is very fired up about injustices on an identarian basis. My guess is that these are much more time-intensive converts.
The camp that I think is a low-hanging fruit is the camp that my friends and I occupy: strategic Leftists—these are systems thinkers that use a lot of utilitarian reasoning and will be disciplined in trying to reach those ends. My Leftist friends that are EA, EA-sympathetic, and who might become EA in the future are from this camp.
Here are the two highly visible things I would use to approximate where Leftists are on that spectrum:
1. Cause selection amongst Leftists causes
2. How much they engage (or don’t) in unconstructive culture war interactions
#1
Look for Leftists that prioritize climate disruption and structural change (i.e. money-in-politics, voting, and other government reforms) because they are likely making those choices based on considerations of existential risk (climate disruption) and return on investment/force-multiplier effect (structural change). A Leftist that isn’t trying to maximize impact and isn’t being strategic are likely the ones that, for example, are one month focused on gun control because of school shootings, the next month focused on pro-choice protests.
#2
Reactionary Leftists don’t restrain themselves from engaging in the culture war. They feel just and righteous engaging in interactions that likely polarize their opponent even farther from their position. Strategic Leftists know this hurts their agenda and will be more patient and deliberate in their language when engaging with a person with opposing views. They will also know to shift the focus from culture war issues to class/anti-establishment issues with Right-wing populists.
Note:
This is my working theory informed by my experiences. There is risk it is not generalizable and that the Leftists friend circle I am in is not representative.
I would be interested in working with anyone on trying to test this framework.
What Leftists can offer to EA
- Good organizers.
  - They have learned to organize and build communities without a lot of money, as well as to thoughtfully build inclusive spaces (caveat: we have seen some of this go overboard to where identity trumps intellectual merit).
- The value of politics
  - They understand how government is a force multiplier and that most things we care about eventually intersect, or are even bottlenecked by, government and politics.
  - This is why in university I chose to spend my time working on political stuff instead of engaging more with EA. EA has since grown more into appreciating the power of policy and politics, and thus EA needs more talent to scale into this space (and Lefties becoming EAs can help with this).
What EAs can offer to Leftists
- A broader view of existential risk
  - i.e. things other than climate disruption
- The divergence of justice and effectiveness
  - i.e. in most scenarios you are hurting your agenda through antagonism and shouting people down, even if the other people are engaging in soft bigotry. Leftists need to be more utilitarian in their interactions.

Yelnats T.J. 15 Aug 2022 0:09 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: quinn’s comment on: How to Talk to Lefties in Your Intro Fellowship
“Lefties are quite likely to experience cognitive dissonance at conferences with catering staff…”
are you saying that Lefties will experience cognitive dissonance because they don’t believe in going to things that have working class staff? Or that they will feel unease seeing people less fortunate than them? Or am I missing something here?

Yelnats T.J. 24 Aug 2022 3:04 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Announcing a new introduction to effective altruism
“The goal of the essay is to accurately get across what effective altruism is, rather than to be as inspiring as possible to new people who might get involved. ”
Is there an existing one that focuses on being inspiring? A link to that would be useful.

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

Yelnats T.J.31 Aug 2022 19:18 UTC

20 points

2 comments18 min readEA link

Yelnats T.J. 1 Sep 2022 17:04 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Thomas Kwa’s comment on: The top X-factor EA neglects: destabilization of the United States
What do you mean by it’s not an appropriate reference class? If you are saying that being on the edge of the reference class means that the median/mean probability of the reference class is less applicable then I would agree with you.
That is also why I deliberately used the word “suggest” because I am not claiming that the U.S. has a 4% annual risk, but I think it’s plausible and it’s a point for concern.
I am working on an extended version that should go up next week (because OP had the 5k world limit for these submissions). I hope to do a more thorough job with the significance (or lack thereof) of Walter’s book.
Note: I am not heavily persuaded by Walter’s empirical case at the moment (as I mentioned in a footnote). I think the mechanistic picture of the situation is the more compelling case for why the U.S. is at risk of civil conflict.
I don’t think the Metaculus prediction is right. I am hoping that me pushing this argument will get people to update their priors and that this will be reflected in a recalibration of the Metaculus score. At this moment, my belief is that 15% chance of destabilization (or eclipsing the point of no return on the way to destabilization) in the next 10 years is the lower bound of what is reasonable. (this is something I have included in the extended version).

Yelnats T.J. 13 Sep 2022 15:02 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 3
on: Podcast: Questions for John Halstead
I read through all the comments in this post:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nBN6NENeudd2uJBCQ
including Halstead’s. And I found the counterarguments to Halstead’s to be more persuasive. If I have time I can go back and highlight the specific ones, but I’d be interested in his response to the the responses to his comment.

Yelnats T.J. 12 Oct 2022 18:41 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: anonymous6’s comment on: Cultural EA considerations for Nordic folks
As a native of Southern California that has lived on the east coast (D.C. area) for the last 10 years, I can believe that we Californians are worse offenders of this; but I think a more accurate generalization might be that this is a behavior of American millennials. I’ve seen this a lot on the east coast and I think it’s more of a generational thing i.e. the lack of follow-through on suggested plans.
I’d be interested if this an anglo-millenial thing or if you see it across millennials in the Global North. I’ve just always imagine that French and Dutch people, for example, do the same thing.

Yelnats T.J. 19 Oct 2022 23:21 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Call for applications for Zanzibar residency
Are the flights covered to get to East Africa?

Yelnats T.J. 23 Oct 2022 19:31 UTC
18 points
11 ∶ 10
in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: Brief evaluations of top-10 billionnaires
I was surprised how slim the reviews were of the billionaires given the hours spent on it TBH. I think we do a disservice oversimplifying the impact (or lack thereof of billionaires) and not hold them to a stricter standard. Below are some examples of things I would have mentioned.
- Bill Gates has tried to keep the IP of COVID vaccines from being released to manufacturers of countries like India. I don’t think the case of COVID IP is open and shut, but it’s quite possible that Gates is contributing to lots of unecessary COVID deaths.
- Elon Musk did a great service by making electric vehicles trendy, but he is also really hurting the climate by working against public transit and pushing car ownership. To the extent we produce new vehicles, they should be electric. But addressing climate change means reducing car ownership/car production not maintaining or growing the status quo—building electric cars is still significantly harmful to the environment.
- You mention Elon’s allged intention to make Twitter a better public good which has often been brought up in terms of free speech. But you don’t mention Elon has an anti-free-speech track record of going after (legitimate) critics of him and trying to get them deplatformed. We should be concerned how he might actually lead Twitter.
- Jeff Bezos’ Amazon unecessarily pushes consumerism which is quite harmful for the environment, as you point out with Arnault. Amazon would still be thriving without trying to manipulate people’s psychology to get them to buy more things. This is also arguably bad for the consumer if they make purchases that end up being of little value.
- For what it’s worth, Gates broke a lot of IP law in Microsoft’s origins and didn’t become philanthropic until Microsoft was under investigation for being a monopoly.
It’s omissions like these that make me think this post contributes more so to bad discourse about billionaires than a good discourse.

Don’t take it personally. I think you could resolve this stuff by being more holistic in the review. Or if this is just an idea you are playing around with, then I would leave off the grades.

Yelnats T.J. 24 Oct 2022 0:20 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Brief evaluations of top-10 billionnaires
Why does Larry Page get a “B” and Sergei Brin get a “B-”? what is Brin doing that is worse than Page and vice versa?

Yelnats T.J. 24 Oct 2022 0:38 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Brief evaluations of top-10 billionnaires
For me this isn’t counterproductive because it’s “brief.” It’s counterproductive because even in being brief it still misses important considerations. Take a look at the issues that I highlight in my earlier comment. I did all of that without any research. I typed it out during a long metro ride. For me this wasn’t “brief,” it was half-baked, and it contributes to problematic framing around billionaires that doesn’t hold them to higher moral standards. (In my book, Bill Gates shouldn’t get higher than a B+ and the rest of the Western billionaires are C or lower).

Unless the author had minimal familiarity with billionaires, I am having trouble seeing how we arrived at these assessments after 20 hours of research. Maybe elaborating on the research process would illuminate why there are blind spots.

Yelnats T.J. 26 Oct 2022 22:51 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Recommend Me EAs To Write About
How long will you be checking that link? Say a new person comes onto my radar 6 months from now, will it still be relevant to submit a rec via that link?

Yelnats T.J. 15 Nov 2022 6:42 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Stop Thinking about FTX. Think About Getting Zika Instead.
I’m interested in the malaria trials at UMD and other applicable ones for a 28 y/o male in the DMV.

Yelnats T.J. 24 Nov 2022 22:41 UTC
13 points
3 ∶ 0
on: The biggest red flag about SBF
I don’t think the content of the commercial was objectionable. I think it’s on par with all the other fanciful commercials out there. (Given, I think there is a larger moral conversation about commercials/marketing undermining the free will of people to make decisions based on their cognition and not through emotions and biases).

I think you are right that crypto is not the same type of asset as owning a stock or real estate, and the fact that regular people will more frequently come out as net losers in crypto than with stocks or real estate should have prompted moral questions. Because that means the success of FTX/SBF (and thus his potential EA giving) was in tension with financial welfare of many regular people.
I think another observation is that Super Bowl commercials and putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a basketball arena and a video game team were HUGE investments that should have been predicated on some serious ROI analysis and probably should have prompted questions from EAs adjacent to FTX’s inner circle. Apparently the video-game team sponsorship was tens of millions of dollars above the price for a sponsorship in that industry.

It’s not that these high-dollar marketing investments couldn’t be justified ROI-wise, but they should have prompted questions (by EAs that had direct contact with FTX) about if due diligence was been conducted by the FTX team, considering the stakes.

In general I think the most realistic red flags that could have been spotted was the management practices of FTX’s inner circle. One of those being the large amount of money burned on marketing, especially sponsoring that team way above the market price (it reeks of being a decision driven by the inner circle’s affinity for video games than a prudent marketing decision).

I think the line of questioning we need to ask about red flags should be directed towards the EA orgs and influential EAs that interacted directly with the FTX team, and it should go like this: Did they miss the red flags because they legit weren’t aware of any; did they see red flags but not recognize them as being red flags; did they recognize red flags but decide that things must be okay because the people at FTX are closer to the situation and are reasonable people; did they recognize red flags but not bring them up to people at FTX because they didn’t want to offend or felt they couldn’t approach FTX about those issues.

Yelnats T.J. 19 Dec 2022 3:26 UTC
2 points
2 ∶ 0
on: List of cause areas that EA should potentially prioritise more
I’d add specifically transforming American governance/political system and protecting the United States from destabilization/the anti-democratic threat. (I’m singling out the United States because of its consequences as the world’s superpower.)

Yelnats T.J. 20 Dec 2022 1:01 UTC
5 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Stijn’s comment on: The deathprint of replacing beef by chicken and insect meat
I agree it’s very complicated, but it seems possible the results from wild animal suffering/death could be enough to negate the gains you think will come from farmed animals. Hence, I think the policy recommendations should with a big uncertainty cauvea t. It’s possible those recommendations could make things worse.

Yelnats T.J.

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

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