But how is public ownership of firms compatible with ownership of firms being exchanged on markets?

Because governments can trade. E.g., if the governments of the Netherlands and Germany are looking to sell some firms they own, and the governments of Belgium and Luxembourg are giving competing offers to buy those firms, we have a market without the firms being privately owned.

Good post.

Economics is completely bankrupt as a science

His thesis still irritates me. Lukeprog claims philosophers are doing shoddy work, and he can e.g. solve meta-ethics all by himself. He starts writing his meta-ethics sequence and it has just the basic intro stuff, but nonetheless since he claimed he could solve it, it gets promoted to one of the few curated sequences on Less Wrong. And then he just...stops, he never gets even close to solving meta-ethics and it remains in the Less Wrong curated sequences. It's been 6 years since the last post Lukeprog... (read more)

How do you have capital markets without private capital?

If the capital is not privately owned (private property) but rather socially owned, for example public property (owned by a state entity), collective property (owned by a collective),  cooperative property (owned by a co-op), etc...

Hi Vasco,

Thanks for notifying me, it's probably because the EA forum switched editors (and maybe also compression algorithm) a while back. I remember struggling with adding images to the forum in the beginning, and now it's easy.

I looked at some old posts and it seems like those that used .png and .jpg still displayed them, so people don't need to check up on their old posts. I looked at older comments and both .jpg and .png still work from three years back. I also found an .png in a comment from five years back. Hopefully this helps the devs with debuggin... (read more)

removing important parts of one's body

I mean it's not an important body part, you can live perfectly well with only one kidney, which is why I'm giving it away. If by some cruel twist of fate I do end up needing another kidney, I'll be on the top of the recipient list thanks to my donation.

I think you might be influenced a lot by your feelings

Of course I am, empathy is a feeling after all. I don't see why this is a reason to not do it.

wait a few years after you have graduated and you have a comfortable, stable income

I will not do the procedure during the s... (read more)

• I don't think we can just equate 15 QALY's to 15 DALY's, these are different metrics. I tried to find a converter online but it looks like there is no consensus on how to do that.
• Additional benefits of making someone an EA include: doing part-time/volunteer work (e.g. currently everyone at effectief geven is a volunteer), and them making other people EAs (spreading the generated expected QALY's further).
• Same things could be said for veganism, which is less likely with a one time donation since people don't make that part of their identity. But the cost-eff

I already give everything, except what's required for the bare living necessities, away. The analysis is warranted seeing as the cost-effectiveness is so high (see other comment) and analyzing which intervention is higher impact is just a general ethical/EA practice, even when we aren't talking about ~15 QALYs

EDIT: This is not as impressive as it seems at first glance. I'm a student so I only buy cheap things anyways (which means I get a modest-proposal-esque thought every time e.g. This 30 dollar jacket costs as much as curing one person of blindness). We... (read more)

Hi Vasco,

I already do work for an animal welfare organization. I looked at the study and it's not about Belgian hospitals, so it doesn't really apply to me. Some of the listed costs aren't present (I don't have a wage so no wage loss), those that are present are mostly paid for by the state (travel, accommodation, medical...) and those that aren't are paid for by my parents (housework). The only one that applies is "Small cash payments for grocery items (eg, tissue paper)" which is negligible, so the expected DALY per dollar is extremely high.

In Belgium yo... (read more)

You raise some minor objections but I think the biggest problem with charter cities (apart from the lack of empirical evidence of their effectiveness^[1]) is the free-rider problem. Society uses taxes to invest in common goods such as education, healthcare, research... If rich people use these common goods to generate their wealth, but then once it's time to start paying their taxes, opt to create a tax haven charter city instead, we will have an underinvestment in these public goods and we'll get a race to the bottom. For an eventual endpoint of this race ... (read more)

I found this topic first from a short snippet in The Week, then from the news article https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/maintaining-a-vegetarian-diet-might-be-in-your-genes-180983021.

Remove the dot at the end, otherwise it's a dead link.

It is important to note that behavior is always in relation to an environment, so we can't say that some behavior is 70% caused by genetics, the most we can say is that something is 70% caused by genetics in this specific environment. This is easy to check with a thought experiment, lets take these people whose "wil... (read more)

Incredible work!

Your previous research/intervention in Kenya showed that UBI can have a positive impact, not only on the recipient villages, but also on nearby villages.

In this study the welfare of those in nearby villages seems to not be the focus. Although you did look at nearby markets which had a somewhat disappointing conclusion:

We do not reject the null that consumer prices in nearby markets were unchanged, both for agricultural and non-agricultural products, though to be fair these estimates are not precise enough to rule out meaningful appreciation

The Belgian senate votes to add animal welfare to the constitution.

It's been a journey. I work for GAIA, a Belgian animal advocacy group that for years has tried to get animal welfare added to the constitution. Today we were present as a supermajority of the senate came out in favor of our proposed constitutional amendment. The relevant section reads:

In exercising their respective powers, the Federal State, the Communities and the Regions strive to protect and care for animals as sentient beings.

It's a very good day for Belgian animals but I do want to not... (read more)

Thank you!

Yes, I agree distributions are better than single numbers. I think part of the problem for podcasts/conversations is that it's easier to quickly say a number than a probability distribution, though that excuse works slightly less well for the written medium.

I didn't base it off an existing method. While @Jobst tells me I have good "math instincts" that has yet to translate itself into actually being good at math, so this mostly comes from me reading the philosophical literature and trying to come up with solutions to some of the proposed problems... (read more)

It seems I didn't get brigaded [tap on wood], but I still feel uneasy answering this. You got some downvotes on this comment initially which means the karma system pushes you to not reply, in the same way it pushed me to not reply to the HBD-proponents I was debating. This voting-power-by-popularity system doesn't incentivize having conversations, so feel free to answer in the comment section on your substack instead. I will edit in a link to it at the end of this comment if you do so. This comment is going to be shorter anyway.

Firstly, I wanted to say tha... (read more)

For example, Francis and Kirkegaard (2022) employ the use of instrumental variables

I can view an astonishing amount of publications for free through my university, but they haven't opted to include this one, weird... So should I pay money to see this "Mankind Quarterly" publication?

When I googled it I found that Mankind Quarterly includes among its founders Henry Garrett an American psychologist who testified in favor of segregated schools during Brown versus Board of Education, Corrado Gini who was president of the Italian genetics and eugenics Society in... (read more)

Say you had to choose between two options:

Option 1: A 99% chance that everyone on earth gets tortured for all of time (-100 utils per person) and a 1% chance that a septillion happy people get created (+90 utils pp) for all of time

Option 2: A 100% chance that everyone on earth becomes maximally happy for all of time (+100 utils pp)

Let's assume the population in both these scenario's remain stable over time (or grow similarly), Expected Value Theory (and classic utilitarianism by extension) says we should choose option 1, even though this has a 99% chance o... (read more)

Gunman: [points a sniper rifle at a faraway kid] Give me $10 or I'll kill this kid.

Utilitarian: I’m sorry, why should I believe that you will let the kid live if I give you $10? Also, I can’t give you the money because that would set a bad precedent. If people know I always give money to gunmen that would encourage people to start taking hostages and demanding money from me.

Gunman: I promise I will let her live and to keep it a secret. See, I have this bomb-collar that will explode if I try to remove it. Here's a detonator that starts working in 1 hour, no... (read more)

If you want to contribute to the fight against TB, John Green published another video today in which he explains an unrealized way a company could bring the cost of TB detection way down. He then points to a way we can pressure said company to make this change:

Since his last attempt to bully a company into doing the right thing was mostly successful, I think this attempt has a good chance of succes too.

I agree about the bad engineering. Apart from boundary norms we might also want to consider making our organizations more democratic. This kind of power abuse is a lot harder when power is more equally distributed among the workers. Bosses making money while paying employees nothing or very little occurs everywhere, but co-ops tend to have a lot less inequality within firms. They also create higher job satisfaction, life satisfaction and social trust. Furthermore, research has shown that employees getting more ownership of the company is associated with hi... (read more)

I can't turn this into a utility function because there's too much agnosticism (and I think human utility functions are fictitious anyway). I will say that my preferences seem to be guided not only by a desire for intergenerational equality, but also for intergenerational agency.

If I'm a decision maker I'm going to consult all the relevant parties, but I can't do that for the next generation. The next generation gets no say in the matter and yet feels the consequences just as vividly. There is no option where the next generation is (ex-ante) better off tha... (read more)

Here's my (short) story: 

The Black Knight's Gambit

It's not about any of the proposed issues, instead it's about the dangers of using AI to control other AI. Even if we can't think of a way they could cooperate, they might, so in solving that you'll end up with an infinite regress problem.

Jobst and I want to improve AI-safety by supplementing RLHF with a consensus generating voting system. Last week we did a small experiment at a conference. Here is the poster we used to explain this idea to the attendants:

Here's the PDF

Reddit user blueshoesrcool discovered that Effective Ventures (the umbrella organization for the Centre for Effective Altruism, 80000 hours, GWWC, etc) has missed its charity reporting deadline by 27 days.

Given that there's already a regulatory inquiry into Effective Ventures Foundation, maybe someone should look into this.

The results of the Dutch provincial elections are in. The Party for the Animals (the party that banned factory farming, but people ignored it) has increased its number of seats in the senate from 3 to 4 (out of 75).

Before you start cheering I should mention that the Farmer–Citizen Movement (who are very conservative when it comes to animal rights) have burst onto the scene with 16 seats (making them the largest party).

With farming and livestock becoming a hot button issue in the Netherlands there's a chance that animal rights will now become a polarizing i... (read more)

EDIT: Biden Backs $8 Billion Alaska Oil Project. I don't know why someone gave this shortform an immediate -9 downvote, but for those EAs that still care about climate change, thank you.

A massive and controversial new oil production project in Alaska is under review by the US Department of the Interior.

ConocoPhillips' massive Willow Project would be a climate disaster, locking in at least 30 years of fossil fuel production on sensitive Arctic ecosystems near Indigenous communities. It would unleash high levels of pollution - roughly the equivalent of 66-76... (read more)

Hi Jack, welcome to the forum!

When you hover over your username in to top right corner you can see the option "New Question". When you want a question answered we usually use that type of post, since its specifically build for it and it allows us to separate the answers to the question from the more general comments.

If you want a poll, I recommend the subreddit r/EffectiveAltruism which allows you to make one for yourself.

Hope this helps.

Allowing anonymous predictions causes a whole bunch of other problems. But even we could somehow get rid of coordination mechanisms like: dominance assurance contracts, the fear of losing your social network, or psychological loyalty towards your ingroup,  is it really in your own interest to lose the source of income for you and your children for a <51% chance of a one time payout, or will the outcomes of conditional prediction markets be biased towards the interests of rich people?

won't affect my trading much

It will affect the trading and worse it will affect the trading inconsistently so we can't even use mathematics to subtract it. When the president promises not to manipulate the market about event X some people will trust him 90% and bet accordingly while others will trust him 10% and bet according to that. But that's not the same thing as people having 10% credence event X will happen, it can be that you think the president is trustworthy but the event itself is unlikely.
On top of that the president might react to the market, e... (read more)

But is it in your individual interest? Is making enemies of your friends and family while losing a guaranteed lifelong stream of income for you and your children really worth it for the possibility of having a one time large payout?
What about with different probabilities? What if you think the policy has a 51% chance of helping the poor and a 49% chance of doing nothing. This would be a fantastic policy to try but even without coordination mechanisms like dominance assurance contracts, I doubt a self interested rich person would sacrifice their social netw... (read more)

Won't conditional prediction markets give rich people more ways to influence policy?
Let's say the people of Examplestan have a large underclass who live paycheck to paycheck and a small upperclass who gets their money from inheritance. The government is thinking of introducing a bill that would make their tax revenue come less from paychecks and more from inheritance. Democracy advocates want to put it to a vote, but a group of futarchy lobbyists convince the government to run a conditional prediction market instead.

The market question is "If we replace th... (read more)

You can easily manipulate the markets without getting caught, which makes a persons promise to not manipulate the market impossible to check and therefore impossible to trust.

And it's not just markets about yourself that are easy to manipulate, it's markets about everything you can change. So if there is a market about if the bin in my street will be tipped over, that market isn't about me, but it's trivially easy to manipulate. As humanity becomes more powerful the things we can change become larger and larger and the things we can use prediction markets ... (read more)

The Netherlands passed a law that would ban factory farming.

It was introduced by the Party for the Animals  and passed in 2021. However, it only passed because the government had just fallen and the senate was distracted by passing covid laws, which meant they were very busy and didn't have a debate about it. Since the law is rather vague there's a good chance it wouldn't have passed without the covid crisis.

It was supposed to start this year, but the minister of agriculture has decided he will straight up ignore the law . The current government is no... (read more)

After years of using this forum I started to have problems with my writings not appearing on the frontpage and the mods not answering my messages the day I started criticizing EA.

This may very well be a coincidence in which case I genuinely apologize for the implied accusal. I still think it's important to mention it in case other people are having the same problem.

EDIT: After commenting this I suddenly lost a lot of karma due to downvotes:

EDIT 2: To respond to the reply, it's not all messages on the intercom, and it's been happening for a bit longer than ... (read more)

But I think that those who have spent a long time on the forum do tend to be better informed and I do want their votes to count for more.

You made about +448 karma from the last post. When an actual scientist like Jobst comes here and posts a very well informed post, it get's +1 karma (from me, love ya Jobst). People like Jobst have a fulltime job as a scientist and are too productive to  spend most of their time online, and when they do go online they are so well informed it won't give them any voting power because terminally online people like us are... (read more)

You could've made a poll. That wouldn't have given you nearly as much karma/voting-power, and that wouldn't have given those who already have a lot of power the ability to influence the results. For the record I'm not angry at you, I'm angry at the karma system and the groupthink it generates. Given that I also have undemocratic power, I will stick to my own principles and not vote on these questions.

I think Sam Bankman-Fried should be removed from this page.

I don't think this page is especially conducive to combatting hero worship, but even if we decide to keep it I think we should rethink who is included and excluded from this page (maybe with a poll?)

This post has convinced me to stay in the EA community. If I could give all the votes I have given to my own writings to this post, I would. Many of the things in this post I've been saying for a long time (and have been downvoted for) so I'm happy to see that this post has at least a somewhat positive reaction.

To add to what this post outlines. While the social sciences are often ignored in the EA community one notable exception to that is (orthodox) economics. I find it ironic that one of the few fields where EA's are willing to look outside their own in... (read more)

How about: getting a lot of downvotes from new accounts doesn't decrease your voting-power and doesn't mean your comments won't show up on the frontpage?
Half a dozen of my latest comments  have responded to HBDers. Since they get a notification it doesn't surprise me that those comments get immediate downvotes which hides them from the frontpage and subsequently means that they can easily decrease my voting-power on this forum (it went from 5 karma for a strong upvote to now 4 karma for a strong upvote).
Giving brigaders the power to hide things from the frontpage and decide which people have more voting-power on this forum seems undesirable.

Why did you reply to MissionCriticalBit when it was I who made that claim? I almost didn't see it.
Also pointing out that the academics who study this stuff for a living don't believe in it is not fallacious, but rather a very useful piece of information.
Anyway, I wanted to give the HBDers another shot so I downloaded the survey (can we all agree that paywalls for publicly funded research is bullshit?) and I have two important things to note: genetic gaps is not equivalent to racial gaps, and the survey itself admits it is unrepresentative.
It was an interne... (read more)

This list is a good example of the sort of arguments that look persuasive to those already opposed to HBD, but can push people on the fence towards accepting it, so it may be net-negative from your perspective. This is what has happened to me, and I'll elaborate on why – so that you may rethink your approach, if nothing else.

Even if you think my reasons failed, why would that push you towards accepting it? HBD is a hypothesis for how the world works, so the burden of proof is on HBD and giving a bad reason not to believe in HBD is not evidence for HBD. To ... (read more)

The topic is extremely taboo

And with good reason, out of the billions of possible correlations to talk about this is one of the very few that will help racists.

Writing on such topics does the opposite of favoring your academic career

True, but most people can't cut it in academia and if one fancies themselves a researcher this path will allow you to continue to keep doing that without a lot of intellectual competition. Plus you can still get funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund (I call them shady because they funded the distribution of 'Er... (read more)

but I also think it's a bit unfair to point this out in the context of Kaspar Brandner sharing a lot of links after you did the same thing first

Yeah that's fair. I mean I did give summaries, but it's still fair. If I could go back in time I would've posted that comment first and I would've tried to explain my emotions/reasoning process to the HBDers on this forum more.

I would have said: I get the allure of taboo studies. I want to be a moral philosopher, but moral philosophers are very smart and they don't get a lot of funding. So even if I work very very ... (read more)

Given my priors and respect for my leisure time I'm not going to read those giant threads. I won't downvote you since I haven't actually read it, but let me ask you a related question:

Do you think that out of the billions of possible correlations in the social sciences, the best use of our finite time on earth is to study this one?
The incredibly flawed measure of 'low iq' is correlated with the arbitrary socially-contingent western category of 'black people' (almost certainly because of environmental factors). But there are millions of things correlated wi... (read more)

Oops! Sorry, I only discovered the second link

It's fine.
Studies don't just use identical twins but twins in general. You are equating my two claims and attacking claims that I haven't even made, I never talked about "whether or not some disease has a genetic component to it, when a twin study shows that there is?". I made a claim that twins, even identical twins, don't share exactly the same DNA and provided a link to an article that gave more information, and I made a second claim that twin studies were flawed and provided that claim with a link to an art... (read more)

These are two separate links for two separate claims. 'Twin studies are flawed in methodology.' and 'Twins, even identical twins, simply do not have exactly the same DNA.', both of which are true. The confidence in the proposed HBD conclusions is simply not warranted by the evidence.

Many twin studies have the assumption that they share 100% of their DNA (which is false) and that they share the exact same environment (which is also false). This leads to underestimating environmental factors  and underestimating non-genetic biological factors.
Furthermor... (read more)

Okay, if there's anyone here who actually believes in HBD, here's a couple reasons why you shouldn't:

Human biodiversity is actually pretty low. Homo sapiens has been through a number of bottlenecks.

Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn't die out. This is known as the Identical Ancestors Point.

Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that s... (read more)

The consumption-based per capita CO2-emissions in almost all high-income countries (e.g. EU, US,...) dropped by about 25% the past 15 years (since 2005)

I would argue that we shouldn't look at "per capita" but CO2 emissions as a whole, since the climate isn't going to be more lenient just because we have more people. Most countries haven't been able to decouple their overall consumption-based CO2 emissions from their GDP, including our country:

And the world as a whole:

Now a couple countries have managed to decouple it so it is technically possible, but... (read more)

True, here are the results you're talking about:

Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Accept or lean toward: scientific realism	699 / 931 (75.1%)
Other	124 / 931 (13.3%)
Accept or lean toward: scientific anti-realism	108 / 931 (11.6%)

His views are moderately popular in general with:

• 51.37% accept or lean towards correspondence
• 51.93% accept or lean towards physicalism
• 30.56% accept or lean towards consequentialism
• 53.64% accept or lean towards classical logic (although that doesn't tell us whether the philosophers think it has normative force).

I wi... (read more)

I can't speak to Yudkowsky's knowledge of physics, economics, psychology etc, but as someone who studies philosophy I can tell you his philosophical segments are pretty weak.
It's clear that he hasn't read a lot of philosophy and he is very dismissive of the field as a whole. He also has a tendency to reinvent the wheel (e.g his 'Requiredism' is what philosophers would call compatibilism).

When I read the sequences as a teenager I was very impressed by his philosophy, but as I got older and started reading more I realized how little he actually engaged with ... (read more)