All of John_Myers's Comments + Replies

This is directionally correct and is a known result in the political economy literature. Analogous techniques have been used in a range of contexts to overcome collective action problems. There is more detail in e.g. this book and my general overview here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o8TfAbYgDGKbeu6Da/vetocracy-reduction-and-other-coordination-problems-as

Many individuals are not subject to the same tight resource constraints of the NHS, so I don’t understand why we wouldn’t expect a fraction of individuals to be willing to deploy their own resources to pay for a booster? The efficient frontier for them is simply different.

This is a fascinating piece. I would be keen to read more on various aspects and see what research could be carried out. If the GDP impact estimates are correct, crime might cause even more loss of welfare in the US than is caused by housing shortages.

Thank you for your comment. I agree we could have said ‘many efforts to improve policy in the last 50 years have succeeded’. However, given our substantive analysis of the Bill, I think we would have ended up with the same concerns about its potential outcomes. In view of the impression that some people who do not work in policy or government seem to have that attempts to improve policy generally or always move things in the intended direction, we thought it helpful to highlight the risk of unintended consequences. The alternative formulation would not have made that point as clearly.

I can’t speak for the Twitter author you mention but I think our comment about quangos was primarily intended to add a minor element of humour to lighten a very long piece. I apologize if that was a poor choice on our part. Quangos were extensively joked about in the old UK television series and book Yes Minister.

My personal view about the quango (the Commission) suggested in the Bill is that without substantial revision it risks doing net damage. I certainly agree that some forms of quango may be useful, although I think it is often difficult to design th... (read more)

I think it is likely that even if you and I can't come up with improvements (although I suspect we can), a broader number of people getting involved could improve on the core ideas – looking forward to working on it together!

Thank you Nathan - this is extremely interesting. 

I have an open mind on that. I think it’s an empirical question and it depends partly on how it is done. I could envisage many circumstances where a mechanism allowing someone purportedly to speak for future generations could in fact harm those future generations.

Thank you, I think that’s very constructive.

Where I would slightly disagree is that I don’t agree that every mechanism to give future generations’ interests more of a voice need necessarily result in more costs or red tape for any change. It may be possible to construct mechanisms that give them more of a voice for positive change. (The analogy here would be street votes.) We could see the “three lines of defence” proposals as an example of that. I think it would be good to see if we can find more of those mechanisms.

Thank you Haydn. I agree about the base rate for PMBs. They can get attention from the Government –in particular as I think you know this one was designed by us to be acceptable to the Government, and the Secretary of State said that it was ‘cracking’ and that he was keen to ‘steal all of the ideas in it’. https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3047

So I recognize that general campaigning is also a valid use of PMBs in general.

As you know I’m very keen to work collaboratively on possible approaches to getting more longtermist perspectives in government.

Thank you Haydn! These are very constructive comments.

To respond briefly:

3. I am not primarily focused on what the Bill's intentions are, but on the overall likely outcomes from its presentation and enactment. In our view there is a substantial chance that the Bill as currently drafted would overall damage welfare if passed in its current form. We agree the chance of that happening is almost zero, but there may be future Bills. I have a weaker view on the effect of the Bill as a campaigning tool but I still have substantial concerns given the presence of a... (read more)

Many thanks for the thoughtful and constructive response. I agree with many of your comments.

(First, I note that our published text does not include the sentence you quoted:

We think the base rate is that most efforts to improve governance have ended in failure or worse

Instead it says this:

Ultimately, we think the base rate is that many efforts to improve policy in the last 50 years have ended in failure or worse. 

We agreed with your comments on that and amended accordingly before publishing. Thank you again for giving them.)

Responding to your two main... (read more)

It's an excellent question. Yes, I think we agree. In general I think sunlight can be a great disinfectant. If external validators' views were published then it would be easier to create pressure to improve the organisation that is doing bad work. We could also look at creating incentives for the organisation and individuals within the organisation to achieve better results as measured against the views of external validators.

Thank you very much for your response! I agree that there is a risk of capture and drift with any institution. I also agree with your point that the difference with institutions specifically mandated to deal with extreme risks is that those risks and metrics can be more precisely defined. As we say, I don't think those lines of defence proposals are complete. It may also be possible, for example, to have external prediction markets or other external validation such as paid forecasters or ‘red teams’ to monitor their performance.  I suspect we could pe... (read more)

Sorry! Thank you very much for the explanation.

Thank you for the thoughtful response! I agree with you. It's certainly not my view that EAs should focus solely on researching how they could improve the Civil Service and politics. I agree that there are many other legislative, fiscal and other ideas that could be pursued to make government analysis more long term and better. We do point to the ‘three layers’ proposal against x-risk as potentially promising (and indeed the step in that direction is one of the best parts of the Bill in my view, although I think it needs to be improved). We agree that subs... (read more)

Thank you for your question! I’m mainly suggesting 2. Some of those changes should enable negotiation to allow majority votes to bring forward development that would be almost inconceivable under current zoning systems, because of veto players. There’s a detailed example of a policy we are working on in England here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Aof6xs2jqfhEbJSxt/cause-area-uk-housing-policy

Thanks John! We are still getting encouraging signals from the current regime that they would like to take this on, and I am not aware of significant political opposition within the Conservative party; on the contrary, street votes seem to be broadly supported. Their last attempt at planning reform was always going to be deeply controversial because, unlike street votes, it was not designed to be as politically palatable as possible. I cannot say I was surprised that it ran into difficulties.

Street votes are vastly less controversial, because they have gon... (read more)

Thank you for posting this Peter. I agree that the uptake for street votes is likely to be low. (This may be like cryonics, where those who opt for cryonics assign a lower probability to cryonics being successful than those who do not.) I would highlight two things: (a) the fact that the Strong Suburbs report models enormous housing production from an uptake rate of only a few percent, and (b) the enormous, life-changingly large incentives to take up street votes - literally over a million pounds per household in some cases. I have spoken to over a hundred... (read more)

I agree with that Stephen. I might nuance it to say that there have not been such campaigns to promote policies that are optimised for political achievability.