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All of cwgoes's Comments + Replies

EA considerations regarding increasing political polarization
cwgoes4y35
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Thanks for the write-up. I think historical examples can be helpful in understanding the nature of current social tendencies, but I also think it is important to precisely analyse the possible deleterious impacts of de-platforming or "cancel culture", which differ substantially from the analogous occurrences you cite in the Cultural Revolution. In particular, I think it is necessary to distinguish between the first-order effects, which I think are not very severe, and the second-order or third-order effects, which are more concerning.

By first-ord... (read more)

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Phil_Thomas
4y
Right, and the Democratic Party would have to be much weaker as an institution to allow a leader with this intent to gain power. This is why political scientists seemed happy with the results of the primary -- it meant we had at least one partially functioning major party.
xccf4y14
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EDIT: I want to highlight this take by someone who's much more knowledgable than I am; you should probably read it before reading my comment.

First, the immediate stakes are far lower - in the Cultural Revolution, "counter-revolutionary revisionists" were sent cross-country to re-education camps, tortured, killed, even eaten. As far as I am aware, none of these things have happened recently in America to public figures (or made-public-by-Twitter figures) as a result of the sort of backlash you discuss.

This hasn't happened yet, and probab... (read more)

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What is EA opinion on The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists?
Answer by cwgoesDec 03, 201915
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I don't recommend the public-facing website. Their journal is higher-quality and tends to focus more on longer-term strategic questions / analysis, although there's still a lot of variance. Older issues are pay-walled but I believe articles are open-access for a short time when published.

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VPetukhov
4y
Thanks, that's important piece of information! I've read only on their paper on The existential threat of antimicrobial resistance, and I think the author presents only one side and missed too much of crucial information. But as you say the variance is high, I'll take a deeper look.
Altruistic equity allocation
cwgoes5y4
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I find the broad proposal of quantifying impact in an equity-like form and providing that "impact equity" to contributing stakeholders proportionally to their contribution to the organization's impact in an attempt to improve the efficiency of the matching market between organizations and donors compelling. I also think it may have several second-order effects, of which some may be positive and some may be negative, which merit consideration.

More efficient matching markets between organizations and donors

It seems plausible that quantizable i... (read more)

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Paul_Christiano
5y
It would come down to donor predictions, and different donors will generally have quite different predictions (similar to for-profit investing). I agree there is a further difference where donors will also value different outputs differently. I mostly consider this an advantage of quantifying :) (I also think that impacts should sum to 1, not >1---in the sense that a project is worthwhile iff there is a way of allocating its impact that makes everyone happy, modulo the issue where you may need to separate impact into tranches for unaligned employees who value different parts of that impact.) This seems like a real downside.