Great piece!

You can always replace chicken meat with plant-based foods for health reasons, or if you are very concerned about GHG emissions. I am not

I think signaling that you don't think GHG emissions are important does not help your message here / makes this less convincing that it would otherwise be!

I think we are relatively close and at the risk of misunderstanding.

I am not saying psychology isn't part of this and that this work isn't extremely valuable, I am a big fan of what you and Stefan are doing.

I would just say it is a fairly small part of the question of collective decision making / societal outcomes, e.g. if one wanted to start a program on understanding decision making in key GCR areas better then what I would expect in the next sentence would be something like "we are assembling a team of historians, political scientists, economists, social psychologists, etc." not "here is a research agenda focused on psychology and behavioral science." Maybe psychology and behavioral science were 5-20% of such an effort.

The reason I react strongly here is because I think EA has a tendency to underappreciate social sciences outside economics and we do so at our own peril, e.g. it seems likely that having more people trained in policy and social sciences would have avoided the blindspot of being late on AI governance, for example.

Critical decisions about advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, pandemic preparedness, or nuclear conflict, as well as policies shaping safety, leadership, and long-term wellbeing, depend on human psychology. 

I am surprised by this. Ultimately, almost all of these decisions primarily happen in social and institutional contexts where most of the variance in outcomes is, arguably, not the result of individual psychology but of differences in institutional structures, culture, politics, economics, etc. 

E.g. if one wanted to understand the context of these decisions better (which I think is critical!) shouldn't this primarily motivate a social science research agenda focused on questions such as, for example, "how do get decisions about advanced technologies made?", "what are the best leverage points?" etc.

Put somewhat differently, insofar as it a key insight of the social sciences (including economics) that societal outcomes cannot be reduced to individual-level psychology because they emerge from the (strategic) interaction and complex dynamics of billions of actors, I am surprised about this focus, at least insofar as the motivation is better understanding collective decision-making and actions taken in key GCR-areas.

Worth pointing out that FP staff who could reply on this is on Thanksgiving break, so will probably take until next week.

So, he did some bad things but it was around expectation and nothing yet in the tails and thus I shouldn't update in the direction of totalitarianism.

No one speaks of totalitarianism here, but a risk of authoritarian drift.

Over the past two weeks, the President-Elect has indicated he wants to appoint extreme loyalists without substantive qualifications to positions most relevant for democracy working well (or not) (DOJ, DOD, etc.). He is also trying to weaken the power of the Republican Senate Majority, both via the threat of recess appointments plus generally by pushing the Senate to confirm unqualified candidates.

I don't think anyone knows what will happen, but I think being confident that he is not doing anything in the tails seems overconfident, what he is doing now is exactly what one would be doing if one wanted to move towards more authoritarianism.

 

I was convinced of this for the election and for election integrity efforts around the election. I am less convinced this holds for the work now that is comparatively longer, less flashy, and costlier.

The worry that people have with Gabbard is that her sympathies with Russia and Syria would essentially make it hard for her own and allied intelligence services to trust her severely undermining the function she is to serve.

This strikes me as too optimistic/not taking the evidence from the last two elections seriously enough.

In both of them a leading contender for the Presidency did not commit to a peaceful transfer of power. In one of them he incited an insurrection. In both of them, more severe outcomes were prevented by contingent factors.

Thanks!

I think if we optimize for short-term impact we would want a list that focuses on short-lived pollutants (e.g. methane) or short-term adaptation measures.

I think the weakness of the article for EA prioritization is that it optimizes for something -- domestic certain reductions within countries -- that is not related to any globally relevant target metric.

E.g. irrespective of whether one optimizes for the short-term or long-term in neither scenario will the focus on national target achievement be relevant directly (it might matter somewhat indirectly via signaling). Obviously, it is a good article for national policy makers that want to achieve national targets.

Thanks!

I agree that policies can be combined but that doesn't really change the fundamental problem that evaluating policies for their certain local short-term impact will move us away from more impactful policies.