All of JohannWolfgang's Comments + Replies

Also do administrators profit from more crimes in a public system? It of course increases the demand for administrators, but I don't see how it would increase the salary of a significant number of them.

Not really, but that's besides the point.

Actually, I was referring to a point you made in an earlier comment:

So a lobbying prison (1) benefits from more inmates in the future, [...]. Points 1 and 2 are the same under the current prison system.

So do we both agree that (1) does not hold in the current system?

I would assume that for a private prison that has become good at its business the benefits of more inmates would outweigh the liabilities and that at some point it would (in principle, ignoring the free rider problem for a moment) become easier to increase the profits by increasing the revenue by making more things illegal than trying to reduce the reoffending rate. Also do administrators profit from more crimes in a public system? It of course increases the demand for administrators, but I don't see how it would increase the salary of a significant number... (read more)

a lot of german students seem to not take their studies very seriously, so the percentage of students registered at the university that would invest significant time in a local group is reduced before even looking at things like value alignment and stuff.

That does not seem to be a problem for all the uni politics groups? Also, maybe we could turn this into a selling point? I personally find EA stuff so much more interesting than my studies.

I think of federalism and further European integration as opposite ideas. More integration means moving towards having a single point of failure where we currently have 27. For instance, the commission bungled the acquisition of vaccines in 2020. Consequently, vaccination rates in the European Union lagged behind those in Britain by about one month (see this graph).

Neither do I think that joint investments in AI and climate joint require further integration, but I guess it would strengthen the European position wrt foreign policy.

Also I would like to point out that although catheters are still bad, they are much better that what we used to have, which proves improvements possible and this is more important to tractability than today's dire situation.

I checked the numbers thinking that a 1 to 100 ratio in your example should be much larger, that actually the trade-off should be more like 1 to 10000. Turns out that is not the case. If 9% of the world's population is over 65 (I assume you wanted to compare a person's possible impact on aging with their possible impact on the bladder), the ratio is more like 1 to 11. So I have to retract my statement that peeing is on the same scale as aging and poverty. That being said, I still think this is a very important issue and while the most effective p... (read more)

Honestly, I can't blame them in either case. I suppose the joke is not funny if you don't know the original and the EA community is open enough to new, unusual ideas that it might attract the sort of crazy people who actually think removing the bladder is a good idea. Also, I told everybody who prove-read the post that it was intended as a parody. Maybe otherwise that is entirely non-obvious. And obviously compared to the normal content on the forum it might be seen as a waste of time to read this.

Thank you for your comment. I agree that poverty, animal welfare and aging are more intense forms of suffering and they should definetely addressed by the EA community and in fact they already are (aging maybe not as much as the others). When I wrote that the bladder is a large-scale problem, I literally meant scale in a narrow sense: every of all 7.8 billion has to pee say 7 times a day. That means that we, as a species, have to undergo this annoying thing almost 20 trillion times a year. That is why is think that, even multiplying with the low intensity,... (read more)

Good point.

The payoffs for the prison don't exist, but that might be fixed - at least to some extent - by introducing premiums and there are payoffs for the state. Although states are not as constrainted for funding as private companies, the costs of imprisonments have not gone unnoticed.

Another perverse incentive: campaign for making more offenses punishable by prison sentences.

Thank you for the clarifications.

But there are people who are informed enough to be willing to make a bet on the matter.

According to Peter's comment, there already seem to be many informed people around working both inside and outside the prison system. Maybe it would be sufficient incentivize them better to make those bets, by introducing premiums for prisons that reduce the number of reconvictions of their previous inmates, taking into account some priors how likely they were to recidivate based on what their crime was and socio-economic backgroun... (read more)

First, two rather technical notes: in your graphics you have areas represent both positive (assuming the future contribution might be positive) and negative figures, which is confusing IMO. If the second figure is to represent net contribution, maybe state that explicitly. Also, I don't understand one of the formulae, namely

I thought ${\Pi }_{Bob}=M_{Bob}+N_{Bob}$ and I don't see why $N_{Bob}=-Fundin{g}_{Bob}-Crime{s}_{Bob}$ or did I miss something?

Then, though I get your approach's theoretical appeal,... (read more)