This is a linkpost for https://ncase.me/ballot/
This interactive essay by Nicky Case (2016) is an introduction to alternative voting systems and their pros and cons. I'm posting this here as a resource for those interested in learning about them.
Curated and popular this week
·
[Edits on March 10th for clarity, two sub-sections added]
Watching what is happening in the world -- with lots of renegotiation of institutional norms within Western democracies and a parallel fracturing of the post-WW2 institutional order -- I do think we, as a community, should more seriously question our priors on the relative value of surgical/targeted and broad system-level interventions.
Speaking somewhat roughly, with EA as a movement coming of age in an era where democratic institutions and the rule-based international order were not fundamentally questioned, it seems easy to underestimate how much the world is currently changing and how much riskier a world of stronger institutional and democratic backsliding and weakened international norms might be.
Of course, working on these issues might be intractable and possibly there's nothing highly effective for EAs to do on the margin given much attention to these issues from society at large. So, I am not here to confidently state we should be working on these issues more.
But I do think in a situation of more downside risk with regards to broad system-level changes and significantly more fluidity, it seems at least worth rigorously asking whether we should shift more attention to work that is less surgical (working on specific risks) and more systemic (working on institutional quality, indirect risk factors, etc.).
While there have been many posts along those lines over the past months and there are of course some EA organizations working on these issues, it stil appears like a niche focus in the community and none of the major EA and EA-adjacent orgs (including the one I work for, though I am writing this in a personal capacity) seem to have taken it up as a serious focus and I worry it might be due to baked-in assumptions about the relative value of such work that are outdated in a time where the importance of systemic work has changed in the face of greater threat and fluidity.
When the world seems to
·
Forethought[1] is a new AI macrostrategy research group cofounded by Max Dalton, Will MacAskill, Tom Davidson, and Amrit Sidhu-Brar.
We are trying to figure out how to navigate the (potentially rapid) transition to a world with superintelligent AI systems. We aim to tackle the most important questions we can find, unrestricted by the current Overton window.
More details on our website.
Why we exist
We think that AGI might come soon (say, modal timelines to mostly-automated AI R&D in the next 2-8 years), and might significantly accelerate technological progress, leading to many different challenges. We don’t yet have a good understanding of what this change might look like or how to navigate it. Society is not prepared.
Moreover, we want the world to not just avoid catastrophe: we want to reach a really great future. We think about what this might be like (incorporating moral uncertainty), and what we can do, now, to build towards a good future.
Like all projects, this started out with a plethora of Google docs. We ran a series of seminars to explore the ideas further, and that cascaded into an organization.
This area of work feels to us like the early days of EA: we’re exploring unusual, neglected ideas, and finding research progress surprisingly tractable. And while we start out with (literally) galaxy-brained schemes, they often ground out into fairly specific and concrete ideas about what should happen next. Of course, we’re bringing principles like scope sensitivity, impartiality, etc to our thinking, and we think that these issues urgently need more morally dedicated and thoughtful people working on them.
Research
Research agendas
We are currently pursuing the following perspectives:
* Preparing for the intelligence explosion: If AI drives explosive growth there will be an enormous number of challenges we have to face. In addition to misalignment risk and biorisk, this potentially includes: how to govern the development of new weapons of mass destr
·
*Disclaimer* I am writing this post in a personal capacity; the opinions I express are my own and do not represent my employer.
I think that more people and orgs (especially nonprofits) should consider negotiating the cost of sizable expenses. In my experience, there is usually nothing to lose by respectfully asking to pay less, and doing so can sometimes save thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per hour. This is because negotiating doesn’t take very much time[1], savings can persist across multiple years, and counterparties can be surprisingly generous with discounts. Here are a few examples of expenses that may be negotiable:
For organizations
* Software or news subscriptions
* Of 35 corporate software and news providers I’ve negotiated with, 30 have been willing to provide discounts. These discounts range from 10% to 80%, with an average of around 40%.
* Leases
* A friend was able to negotiate a 22% reduction in the price per square foot on a corporate lease and secured a couple months of free rent. This led to >$480,000 in savings for their nonprofit. Other negotiable parameters include:
* Square footage counted towards rent costs
* Lease length
* A tenant improvement allowance
* Certain physical goods (e.g., smart TVs)
* Buying in bulk can be a great lever for negotiating smaller items like covid tests, and can reduce costs by 50% or more.
* Event/retreat venues (both venue price and smaller items like food and AV)
* Hotel blocks
* A quick email with the rates of comparable but more affordable hotel blocks can often save ~10%.
* Professional service contracts with large for-profit firms (e.g., IT contracts, office internet coverage)
* Insurance premiums (though I am less confident that this is negotiable)
For many products and services, a nonprofit can qualify for a discount simply by providing their IRS determination letter or getting verified on platforms like TechSoup.
In my experience, most vendors and companies
If you haven’t wandered around the Nicky Case website, I’d recommend doing so. There are a lot of interesting educational games on there, covering a wide variety of concepts such as social contagion, prisoner’s dilemmas, segregation, etc.
[Repost from my FB]
I'd like to introduce a setup that's a little different from these arbitrary axes and feels truer to life...
To avoid object-level politics, I'll use Scott's (or was it Nick's?) example:
* Party A wants to increase taxes and social services 5%, and to require everyone to electrocute themselves 8 hours a day.
* Party B wants to decrease taxes and social services 5%, and to require everyone to electrocute themselves 8 hours a day.
* Party C wants to leave taxes and social services as they are, and stop the electrocutions.
"Everyone" knows that Party C isn't serious. They get no media coverage, except as a punchline. Only people with no popularity to lose will come out openly as Party C'ers. And rather then break the dam, they make Party C association a mark of stigma.
Under FPTP, we need roughly a third of the people to *believe party C has a chance*, with no way to build momentum. Naturally, the electrocutions continue.
Under IRV (and I think any ordered ranking), we need roughly a third of people to pay attention. Then they can easily vote C>A>B or C>B>A and end the electrocutions. And if it's less than a third, it still shows a nice clear signal that Not Electrocuting Ourselves is an idea to be taken seriously.
Under Approval, people won't want to vote "C" because that gives up the chance to effect the taxes/services tradeoff which is the only thing they expect to be up for grabs. So they vote "A,C" or "B,C". And feel bad about it, because they don't actually *approve* of A or B. Which means they're voting against themselves. Now we need half of people to pay attention, and with a much weaker take-this-seriously signal. After all, "A,C" could just be intented as a hardcore vote against B (some people take the A-B rivalry very seriously).