The evolution of the support for Ukraine in the West in the last six months is probably the most terrible indictment of democracy I have observed in my life. In 2022, the West sustained an extremely dangerous escalation of military support for Ukraine. There were reasonable reasons to take those risks, among them, the fact that after a short and victorious Ukrainian campaign an enlarged Russia could probably become even more aggressive. But the specter of Nuclear War was more serious than ever since the final years of the Cold War, and I understood (and to some extent support) the calls for accommodation, even straightforward abandonment.  

Those calls were ignored, the risk was accepted, the nuclear saber rattling was proven a bluff, but two years after those astronomic risks were taken, the support for Ukraine is fading for no discernible reason. In America, a coalition of traitors is withholding a 60 billion support package (around 7% of total US defense spending, far less than the money spent in the most expensive year of the Afghan occupation), and in Europe were treason is less widespread, stupidity is even worse: funds for Ukraine are blocked in the EU budget, and put in risk by the Hungarian veto, instead of being directly channeled by the donors themselves.

I do not have anything especially original to add on this issue, but I want to make two remarks here in the EA Forum:

First, in the last two years almost all my charitable contributions have been for Ukraine. In my view, all my fellow Europeans shall consider Ukraine as their main priority. The world can live with a Russian Crimea or Donbass, but if Odessa, Kiev or the whole Ukraine fall into Russian hands, we will have to accommodate millions of refugees and the remaining Ukrainians will re-inforce Russia, that would become formidable. Ukrainian victory was never a realistic possibility, but the miracle of Ukrainian survival shall be supported by all means. I do not directly donate for military purposes (in my view private persons shall not be allowed to do that kind of contributions), but I have supported Caritas, Red Cross and even directly the Ukrainian government. I am perfectly aware that money is fungible and support for the Ukrainian population is also support for the war effort. In my view, Europe is as much a national community as Hellas was in the ancient world, and Ukraine has proven to be not only one of us, but probably it is currently the best of the European poleis. They are dying for our collective security, so anything we do falls short of their sacrifice. 

Secondly, I want to raise a less conventional issue: the current regime of sanctions is extremely general, and have proven somewhat unsuccessful. Of course, the true target of a sanctions regime in war time is to make imports more difficult, so when I say that sanctions have not been effective, it is not their modest effect on Russia’s GDP, or in its balance of payments what concerns me. It is the fact that we do not observe a substantial contraction in the military production. I suspect that sanctions are designed by trade and economics types with a macroeconomic design. While I have not an opinion on the design of those macro sanctions, a product and firm level targeting of critical inputs in the machine tool space is also necessary. Kamil Galeev has two Substack blogs devoted to this issue (his own, and Rhodus), and if any of the readers of this post has any connection to the national security policy makers in Ukraine, US or NATO circles, I suggest her to raise this issue to their consideration. 

Comments1


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

Hi Arturo,

I would be curious to know your thoughts on Brya Caplan's posts on pacifism (you are welcome to comment there).

Curated and popular this week
 ·  · 12m read
 · 
Economic growth is a unique field, because it is relevant to both the global development side of EA and the AI side of EA. Global development policy can be informed by models that offer helpful diagnostics into the drivers of growth, while growth models can also inform us about how AI progress will affect society. My friend asked me to create a growth theory reading list for an average EA who is interested in applying growth theory to EA concerns. This is my list. (It's shorter and more balanced between AI/GHD than this list) I hope it helps anyone who wants to dig into growth questions themselves. These papers require a fair amount of mathematical maturity. If you don't feel confident about your math, I encourage you to start with Jones 2016 to get a really strong grounding in the facts of growth, with some explanations in words for how growth economists think about fitting them into theories. Basics of growth These two papers cover the foundations of growth theory. They aren't strictly essential for understanding the other papers, but they're helpful and likely where you should start if you have no background in growth. Jones 2016 Sociologically, growth theory is all about finding facts that beg to be explained. For half a century, growth theory was almost singularly oriented around explaining the "Kaldor facts" of growth. These facts organize what theories are entertained, even though they cannot actually validate a theory – after all, a totally incorrect theory could arrive at the right answer by chance. In this way, growth theorists are engaged in detective work; they try to piece together the stories that make sense given the facts, making leaps when they have to. This places the facts of growth squarely in the center of theorizing, and Jones 2016 is the most comprehensive treatment of those facts, with accessible descriptions of how growth models try to represent those facts. You will notice that I recommend more than a few papers by Chad Jones in this
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is 99% automation of fully-remote jobs in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achieve 25% on its Frontier Math dataset (thou
Omnizoid
 ·  · 5m read
 · 
Edit 1/29: Funding is back, baby!  Crossposted from my blog.   (This could end up being the most important thing I’ve ever written. Please like and restack it—if you have a big blog, please write about it). A mother holds her sick baby to her chest. She knows he doesn’t have long to live. She hears him coughing—those body-wracking coughs—that expel mucus and phlegm, leaving him desperately gasping for air. He is just a few months old. And yet that’s how old he will be when he dies. The aforementioned scene is likely to become increasingly common in the coming years. Fortunately, there is still hope. Trump recently signed an executive order shutting off almost all foreign aid. Most terrifyingly, this included shutting off the PEPFAR program—the single most successful foreign aid program in my lifetime. PEPFAR provides treatment and prevention of HIV and AIDS—it has saved about 25 million people since its implementation in 2001, despite only taking less than 0.1% of the federal budget. Every single day that it is operative, PEPFAR supports: > * More than 222,000 people on treatment in the program collecting ARVs to stay healthy; > * More than 224,000 HIV tests, newly diagnosing 4,374 people with HIV – 10% of whom are pregnant women attending antenatal clinic visits; > * Services for 17,695 orphans and vulnerable children impacted by HIV; > * 7,163 cervical cancer screenings, newly diagnosing 363 women with cervical cancer or pre-cancerous lesions, and treating 324 women with positive cervical cancer results; > * Care and support for 3,618 women experiencing gender-based violence, including 779 women who experienced sexual violence. The most important thing PEPFAR does is provide life-saving anti-retroviral treatments to millions of victims of HIV. More than 20 million people living with HIV globally depend on daily anti-retrovirals, including over half a million children. These children, facing a deadly illness in desperately poor countries, are now going