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Donation in 2021

Yes

What should we do to help Afghanistan: A brief summary

Great work! Just an FYI - it may be a problem only I'm having, but those Notion links don't seem to be working for me

Pluto

Hi AslanP, thanks for the comment. Oh thanks for the notice. Please just ignore them, I forgot to unlink notion. I did some drafts on notion~

US bill limiting patient philanthropy?

AslanP3y4

I'm not totally across this debate, but I think that the issue may be with 'perpetual' trusts, which are intended to live (and grow) forever. This is very different from a longtermist investment, which would presumably always have a vesting date, or a trigger, at which point the funds would be paid out towards worthwhile projects/causes.

I am simultaneously sympathetic towards long-term investment and future giving, where this is done deliberately, and sympathetic to the criticism of perpetual trusts which just grow and grow without ever delivering the full benefits of that compounding growth to society.

I scraped all public "Effective Altruists" Goodreads reading lists

AslanP3y27

Love this!

My recollection is that when you create a Goodreads account, you are asked whether you have read a few classics (like 1984, and possibly Thinking Fast Thinking Slow).

This can create a selection bias, as the user will say 'yes' even if they read the book years ago. They're less likely to go back, however, and add other books they read years ago.

Possible that this explains the 'most read' books?

Linch3y17

Some of the books are also mandatory reading in American public school education, or mandatory reading in other countries/institutions.

New infographic based on "The Precipice". any feedback?

AslanP3y16

Just speaking impressionistically, the minesweeper version looks much more "hazardous" than the first version.

There's something about the neatly arranged units that seems very manageable.

Obviously there's just some biases at play here, but something to be conscious of depending on the use case

Oh, and great work!

Are we entering an experiment in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?

AslanP4y4

Thanks! This response makes a lot more sense to me than many of the other materials I've been able to find online (including the various Krugman pieces I'd found, and the debate between Summers and Kelton on Bloomberg). Appreciate the time you've taken to write it.

It's still astonishing to me that we seem to have such an imperfect understanding of how monetary systems, which humans created, work. I guess it's just a product of these being very complex systems, somewhat akin to a weather system. I'd be interested to see though ... (read more)

HStencil4y11

I’m happy to hear that what I wrote was helpful!

I actually don’t think it’s that surprising that we have so much difficulty modeling the macroeconomy with high fidelity. In part, this is because of large degrees of endogeneity and general equilibrium effects (the shocks you are trying to model may alter key parameters of the models themselves), and in part, it is because contemporary macroeconomic models (i.e. DSGE/New Keynesian models) must necessarily make assumptions about human psychology in establishing their “microfoundati... (read more)

Are we entering an experiment in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?

AslanP4y4

Thanks - appreciate the response and explanation. Always nice to get clear 'Yes'/'No' response to a question!

To play the other side, isn't the mainstream response you've described really strawmanning MMT though?

First, on the inflation point, as I note in the body of the main post, MMT still says that there is a point at which additional money cause inflation, because an economy is already at its then-current productive capacity and therefore the money does not stimulate further production. This would explain the Venezuala exa... (read more)

Closed Limelike Curves

No worries! I'm always happy to help out. The main things are: 1. It's true that MMT usually recognizes that excess aggregate demand from money printing leads to increases in prices. The main error that MMT makes here is in saying that it is always possible to avoid default by printing money, even if it causes hyperinflation, so that the true constraint on government spending is its willingness to accept inflation, not its ability to continue making interest payments. The Chicago MMT question may have been poorly worded. 2. I think that these observations are just as consistent with a New Keynesian view of a liquidity trap as with MMT, but New Keynesians have the big advantage of their predictions being laid out far in advance – back in the 80s and 90s, in fact. The New Keynesian view makes significant refinements to Old Keynesian theories of aggregate demand in that it clarifies when government spending is effective in increasing aggregate demand without raising prices. Most notably, New Keynesian views model the financial sector in a lot more depth, and there's a bunch of models explaining why the way the Federal Reserve acted wouldn't be expected to cause inflation under the conditions it was facing. 3. There are three problems with this idea of the Fed as a captive lender. The first is inflation. To their credit, MMT people generally recognize this, so it's not a big problem. The second is that the Federal Reserve, and other central banks, are independent: Central banks can make decisions without interference from either the legislature or executive. This is extremely important, because the Federal Reserve needs the ability to communicate clearly to everyone that it's going to be responsible and keep inflation low, or else people lose confidence in the currency. The Federal Reserve's independence is to economists what the Supreme Court's independence is to judges. Because of this, the Federal Reserve is unlikely to print money with the intention of financing

Are we entering an experiment in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)?

AslanP4y1

Thanks - I wasn't aware of the Open Phil resource or those other readings. I'll check them out.

Agree that macroeconomics is far from a neglected subject, but given the potential impact of these issues it feels like something that I at least would like to have a more solid understanding of and views about. It also seems plausible to me that the perspective of EAs might be slightly different that mainstream economists - e.g. due to the focus on longtermism and global, rather than national, welfare.

I'll add a bibliography, including your reccom... (read more)

Phil Trammell: The case for ignoring the world’s current problems — or how becoming a ‘patient philanthropist’ could allow you to do far more good

AslanP4y1

Thanks Phil - appreciate the response! On #1, I think I get it though it's a bit counterintuitive. I take it that the proposition is that permanent (or at least long-term) reduction in x-risk has a sort of 'compounding' impact on expected value, since it reduces risk each year, and therefore would compete with patient investing, but short-term reductions in risk don't have that same 'compounding' benefit and therefore don't compete in the same way with the interest rate (which is assumed to be increase with and therefore... (read more)

Phil Trammell: The case for ignoring the world’s current problems — or how becoming a ‘patient philanthropist’ could allow you to do far more good

AslanP4y9

I'm a bit late to the party here, but just listened to the episode. Really enjoyed it and found it thought provoking, so thanks to Phil Trammel and the 80k podcast.

I had a couple of questions, so here's hoping Phil's still monitoring this post! Or, if not, that someone else is happy to answer these questions.

First, there was section where I think it was suggested the x-risks can be treated as feeding straight into interest rates, such that the premium for investing still outweighs the benefits of spending now to try to reduce those x-risks.

... (read more)

trammell

Glad you liked it, and thanks for the good questions! #1: I should definitely have spent more time on this / been more careful explaining it. Yes, x-risks should “feed straight into interest rates”, in the sense that a +1% chance of an x-risk per year should mean a 1% higher interest rate. So if you’re going to be * spending on something other than x-risk reduction; or * spending on x-risk reduction but only able to marginally lower the risk in the period you’re spending (i.e. not permanently lower the rate), and think that there will still be similar risk to mitigate in the next period conditional on survival, then you should be roughly compensated for the risk. That is, under those circumstances, if investing seemed preferable to spending in the absence of the heightened risk, it should still seem that way given the heightened risk. This does all hold despite the fact that the heightened risk would give humanity such a short life expectancy. But I totally grant that these assumptions may not hold, and that if they don’t, the heightened risk can be a reason to spend more! I just wanted to point out that there is this force pushing the other way that turns out to render the question at least ambiguous. #2: No, there’s no reductio here. Once you get big enough, i.e. are no longer a marginal contributor to the public goods you’re looking to fund, the diminishing returns to spending make it less worthwhile to grow even bigger. (E.g., in the human consumption case, you’ll eventually be rich enough that spending the first half of your fund would make people richer to the point that spending the second half would do substantially less for them.) Once the gains from further investing fallen to the point that they just balance the (extinction / expropriation / etc) risks, you should start spending, and continue to split between spending and investment so as to stay permanently on the path where you’re indifferent between the two. If you're looking to fund some narro

Why I'm Not Vegan

AslanP4y37

Putting aside any debate over the relative values you've assigned here, I think you might be making a error by the way that you try to translate relative moral harms into a dollar value, using the cost of extending a person's life through donation to GiveWell's charities.

To give an absurd example, the 'harm' caused if I were to punch a stranger in the face (assuming that I hurt them, but don't otherwise cause any permanent damage) is a fraction of the harm caused if I were to take a year off that person's life (which you ... (read more)

Jeff Kaufman

I don't think you would be morally permitted to either, because I think https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/ is right and you can offset axiology, but not morality.

markov_user

I think this is a very interesting point which I hadn't thought of before. To add to it, let's assume the "how much animals matter" values from the original post were chosen in a way more favorable to animals such that veganism seems to make economic moral sense, so we come to the conclusion "it's probably an effective intervention for an EA to go vegan". Now assume some charity finds a super-effective intervention that cuts the cost of saving a human life to 10% its previous best value. Following the original argument, that would basically mean at this point going vegan is not recommended anymore because it may now be much less effective than the one thing we're semi-arbitrarily comparing it to. It seems rather counter-intuitive that thousands of hypothetical rational EAs would now start eating meat again, simply because a charity found a cheaper way to save humans. But then again, I can't get rid of the feeling that this whole counter-argument too is arbitrary and constructed, and that it wouldn't convince me if I were of the opposite opinion, but rather seem like a kind of logic puzzle where you have to find the error of thought. Maybe despite being counter-intuitive, the absurd sounding conclusion would still be the correct one in some sense.

ShayBenMoshe4y13

I completely agree, and I too was troubled by this analysis. For me, the bottom line is:
The fact that something is of little-to-no cost, does not mean that its moral value is also little.

Furthermore, in cases like reducing animal suffering, one can both avoid being harmful himself (i.e. become vegan) AND donate to relevant charities, rather than OR.

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