huw
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I live for a high disagree-to-upvote ratio
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This is an extremely rich guy who isn't donating any of his money. I wouldn't call him 'aligned' at all to EA.
I would also just, be careful about reading him on his word. He's only started talking about this framing recently (I've followed him for a while because of a passing interest in Kernel). He may well just be a guy who's very scared of dying with an incomprehensible amount of money to spend on it, who's looking for some admirers.
And OP discusses market socialist systems which allow capital markets but not private capital!
This isn’t a petty distinction. It allows the definer to claim all of the benefits of markets and dodge the more negative effects of private ownership, pitting centralised price controls as inherent to anti-capitalist systems. And in the worst cases (not here) it allows people to motte-and-bailey their way out of the devastating effects of wealth inequality by claiming that ‘capitalism’ actually just means markets.
I mention all this because I see this definition a lot in rat-adjacent circles and it frustrates me, because people usually just want to talk about why disgusting levels of wealth inequality are necessary or even permissible, and then get a non-sequitur defence of markets in response.
To make it concrete, the OP’s friends are interested in economic inequality. This is absolutely an inherent consequence of private capital ownership, and therefore capitalism. In a debate, then, you’d want to start defending private capital ownership rather than markets. So I think the ‘talking past each other’ arises from a faulty definition, but just not the one that the OP identified.
A meta thing that frustrates me here is I haven’t seen much talking about incentive structures. The obvious retort to negative anecdotal evidence is the anecdotal evidence Will cited about people who had previous expressed concerns who continued to affiliate with FTX and the FTXFF, but to me, this evidence is completely meaningless because continuing to affiliate with FTX and FTXFF meant a closer proximity to money. As a corollary, the people who refused to affiliate with them did so at significant personal & professional cost for that two-year period.
Of course you had a hard time voicing these concerns! Everyone’s salaries depended on them not knowing or disseminating this information! (I am not here to accuse anyone of a cover-up, these things usually happen much less perniciously and much more subconsciously)
FWIW I find the self-indulgence angle annoying when journalists bring it up, it’s reasonable for Sam to have been reckless, stupid, and even malicious without wanting to see personal material gain from it. Moreover, I think leads others to learn the wrong lessons—as you note in your other comment, the fraud was committed by multiple people with seemingly good intentions; we should be looking more at the non-material incentives (reputation, etc.) and enabling factors of recklessness that led them to justify risks in the service of good outcomes (again, as you do below).
G'day Marissa! I'm admittedly not the best-versed in psychiatry specifically, since I've focused more on psychotherapy in the past. My general vibe from reading & research I've done is that (for pharmacotherapy only, can't speak to crisis care):
- Pharmacotherapy is robustly effective in the short-term with minimal deterioration
- It's no more effective than therapy, and is likely worse than therapy in the long-term
- Pharmacology & psychotherapy combined is better than both individually
- People might adapt to it, requiring higher and higher doses
- We don't know how it works, nor do we know how depression works ('chemical imbalance' is marketing)
- There is probably a meaningful difference between common-or-garden depression & anxiety, and all other psychiatric conditions (ex. bipolar, schizophrenia); the latter may require sustained treatment
My personal theory is that drugs are good for preventing people from doing harm to themselves for a short period, and in many cases the causes of the underlying depression go away on their own. But they probably shouldn't be used to permanently improve someone's mood, at which point we should focus on improving their environmental conditions and retraining their learned responses to stimuli.
But in a more general sense, I haven't come across a lot of general reviews assessing the effectiveness one way or the other in a deliberately unbiased way, but I haven't looked hard. I think it's likely that the role split between psychologists and psychiatrists, and the industrial split in funding between the two, is likely to make this research very hard. Anecdotally, I liked Johann Hari's Lost Connections, which begins with a pop-science assessment of the evidence against psychiatry while remaining balanced enough to describe when it's valuable, but I wouldn't call it unbiased.
Based on the timing, how likely is it that this was a partial consequence of Bostrom's personal controversies?
Two points there:
- It is $35. You can spend $35 and offset a year's worth of carbon emissions. It is not the case that 'the climate cost per ton is higher currently'.
- Because it's so cheap, you can offset CO2 without caring.
If you want to put a mental block on not emitting, you're welcome to do so, but it would be incorrect to deliberately pay more than the actual cost of offsetting those emissions. (This is what I personally do; I try to avoid emitting because I think it's generally morally good to not be excessively wasteful, but I am under no illusions that it wouldn't be very cheap for me to offset it). Frankly, at the end of the day, the biggest emitters in rich countries are industrial organisations and no amount of personal cutting-back is really going to prevent them from changing their behaviour anyway.
That’s not falsifiable
Edit: I stand by this; it was a quick way to explain the problems with Jason's comment. I don't think we should be too mean to people for not donating (in order to not dissuade them from doing it in the future), but this particular model could be used to excuse basically any behaviour as 'they might be a potential EA one day'. I don't think it's a good defence and wouldn't want to see it trotted out more often.