All of Alex319's Comments + Replies

Did you mean "underestimate how hard it is" rather than "overestimate"? Or are you saying it is easier than people think?

I don't think that the analogy between X-risk work and this kind of protest makes sense.

The reason X-risk work is so impactful is that very few people are working on X-risk at all. As you say, if more people worked on X-risk, the (marginal) impact of each one would be lower, but that's a good thing because more work would be getting done.

The claim being made about the animal welfare activists is that the mechanism of change relies on both the "high-impact" organizers, as well as the "low-impact" responsive consumers who will change their behavior in respon... (read more)

That is some useful information. It seems like what you're saying is that these campaigns really involve three different groups:

(a) the "inner circle" of 10-100 activists that are organizing the campaign,

(b) some larger number of supporters that are waiting in the wings to execute the threatened protests if the original demands aren't met,

(c) the "audience" of the protests - i.e. this is the general public who will be driven away from the target in response to the protests.

And it's really only group (c) that needs to be big enough as a fraction of the targ... (read more)

I'm a little confused by the claim that "personal choices" aren't effective, but corporate pressure campaigns are. Isn't the way a corporate pressure campaign works that you convince the target that they will be boycotted unless they make the changes you are demanding? So the corporate pressure campaign is only effective if you have people that are willing to change their personal choices. Or am I misunderstanding and that's not how corporate pressure campaigns work?

I think these sorts of critiques don’t just apply to EA - it seems to me like just about any intervention would fall into one of them.

AMF-style interventions that focus on specific problems, like malaria nets? As you discuss, these avoid problems 1 and 2 (because they’re doing a specific thing that wasn’t already being done, so they’re not taking away local jobs or displacing local capacity) but are vulnerable to problem 3 (because the specific thing they’re doing may not be what the locals want)

Maybe organizations could avoid problem 3 by setting up ... (read more)

I don't have any particular ideas for projects to start in this area, but if there are any projects that are already going on, I might be interested in supporting them. You can contact me to DM if/when you have anything to share!

I am following this issue and, like everyone else here, am also extremely concerned. I am very interested in what I can do right now to help. Are there useful places to donate right now? I am an ETGer who normally gives about $100-200k per year and I would be willing to donate that amount or more if there were a good opportunity.

About this footnote:

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Carol Adams even informs us that:

Sebo and Singer flourish as academics in a white supremacist patriarchal society because others, including people of color and those who identify as women, are pushed down. (p. 135, emphasis added.)

Maybe treading on the oppressed is a crucial part of Singer’s daily writing routine, without which he would never have written a word? If there’s some other reason to believe this wild causal claim, we’re never told what it is.

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Here's a potential more cha... (read more)

Of course that depends on whether everyone else is also evacuating. For instance do we expect that if a tactical nuke is used in Ukraine a significant amount of the US population will be trying to evacuate? As has been mentioned before there was not a significant percentage of the US population trying to evacuate even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that was probably a much higher risk and more salient situation than we face now.

One thing that would be really useful in terms of personal planning, and maybe would be a good idea to have a top level post on, is something like:

What is P(I survive | I am in location X when a nuclear war breaks out)

for different values of X such as:

(A) a big NATO city like NYC

(B) a small town in the USA away from any nuclear targets

(C) somewhere outside the US/NATO but still in the northern hemisphere, like Mexico. (I chose Mexico because that's probably the easiest non-NATO country for Americans to get to)

(D) somewhere like Argentina or Australia, the ... (read more)

This was really helpful. I'm living in New York City and am also making the decision about when/whether to evacuate, so it was useful to see the thoughts of expert forecasters. I wouldn't consider myself an expert forecaster and don't really think I have much knowledge of nuclear issues, so here's a couple other thoughts and questions:

- I'm a little surprised that P(London being attacked | nuclear conflict) seemed so low since I would have expected that that would be one of the highest priority targets. What informed that and would you expect somewhere lik... (read more)

For what it’s worth, while Facebook’s Forecast was met with some amount of skepticism, I wouldn’t say it was “dismissed” out of hand.

To clarify, when I made the comment about it being "dismissed", I wasn't thinking so much about media coverage as I was about individual Facebook users seeing prediction app suggestions in their feed  I was thinking that there are already a lot of unscientific and clickbait-y quizzes and games that get posted to Facebook, and was concerned that users might lump this in with those if it is presented in a similar way... (read more)

I'm not an expert on social media or journalism, but just some fairly low-confidence thoughts - it seems like this is areally interesting idea, but it seems very odd to think of it as a Facebook feature (or other social media platform):

• Facebook and social media in general don't really have an intellectual "brand". It seems likely that if you did this as a Facebook feature, it would be more likely to get dismissed as "just another silly Facebook game." Or if most of the people using it weren't putting much effort into it, the predictionslikely  wouldn'

You mention that:

Neither we nor they had any way of forecasting or quantifying the possible impact of [Extinction Rebellion]

and go on to talk about this is an example of the type of intervention that EA is likely to miss due to lack of quantifiability.

One think that would help us understand your point is to answer the following question:

If it's really not possible to make any kind of forecast about the impact of grassroots activism (or whatever intervention you would prefer), then on what basis do you support your claim that supporting grassroots act... (read more)

A more charitable interpretation of the author's point might be something like the following:

(1) Since EAs look at quantitative factors like the expected number of lives saved by an intervention, they need to be able to quantify their uncertainty.

(2) Interventions that target large, interconnected systems are harder to quantify the results of than interventions that target individuals. For instance, consider health-improving interventions. The intervention "give medication X to people who have condition Y" is easy to test with an RCT. Howeve... (read more)

As for the question of "what do the authors consider to be root causes," here's my reading of the article. Consider the case of factory farming. Probably all of us agree that the following are all necessary causes:

(1) There's lots of demand for meat.

(2) Factory farming is currently the technology that can produce meat most efficiently and cost-effectively.

(3) Producers of meat just care about production efficiency and cost-effectiveness, not animal suffering.

I suspect you and other EAs focus on item (2) when you are talking about "... (read more)