All of kbog's Comments + Replies

If there are 100 nonillion potential people, there is nothing that could happen in your lifetime that could possibly matter compared to ensuring the continued survival of humanity. All resources should be diverted to preventing existential risk, even if we really don't know whether these risks are real or these efforts are effective, because the value at stake is simply too large.

If true, so much the worse for other causes. But I don't think it's true, longtermism can also imply that we should focus on expanding civilization more quickly or putting humanit... (read more)

Even without world government, other governments can punish those which make threats (economically, politically etc.) to the point of making threats a bad deal for those that make them. 

Sure, if all the governments around the world agree to punish all other countries which make threats. But the governments around the world have not agreed to do this, nor will they. For example, China routinely threatens Taiwan and never gets punished for it at all. North Korea does not get punished for threatening South Korea. Serbia does not get punished for threaten... (read more)

GCRI Statement on Race and Intelligence | Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (gcrinstitute.org)

Seth Baum on behalf of GCRI writes a statement on the controversy.

Worth noting that in this statement Seth justifies the practice of digging through old emails in order to expose offensive statements people have made in the past. Based on this I assume a risk that Seth/GCRI might leak anything I say in an email, and if they have this mindset then I worry that other EA organizations might have it as well. I would prefer to deal with EA organizations which express a commitment against leaking private communications. 

Welcome to the forum.

Conceding anything to Putin and his collaborators at this point will only give them reasons to believe their tactics work and so, nuclear and military threats will never end.

Nuclear and military threats will never end no matter what we do because there is no world government to stop them.

Invading Crimea will show that Russia's scheme to seize Crimea in 2014 was a failure. It will also show that Ukraine's scheme to seize Crimea in 2023 is successful. No matter who wins in a war, one side provides an example of military threats working a... (read more)

If EA is net harmful then people shouldn't work directly on solving problems either, we should just pack up and go home.

I doubt a billionaire exists that actually made their money morally.

Why?

Quant altruism, more reasonably.

One good reason to claim ownership to billions of dollars is that you are going to donate billions of dollars to effective charities.

Crimea was a part of Ukraine when it was conquered by Russian troops. Unambiguously. 

That's beside the point, I wasn't claiming otherwise. The point is that Taiwan is more like those other cases.

If you only enforce the rules when there is already a military conclusion, you're not enforcing international law, you're saying that might makes right.

I wasn't arguing against the use of sanctions to punish countries for violating international law (or some laws, at least).

And enforcing law requires might, and sanctions are might of a different form, so this ... (read more)

My fundamental belief here is that the norms on a countries borders should be decided by referendum, and then respected (i.e. not invaded). 

If you think borders should be decided by referendum then you should endorse a substantive right to having a referendum in the first place. That implies that Crimea should be able to hold a referendum even if Kyiv refuses to allow it.

The 2014 referendum was one month after Russia invaded Crimea. I wouldn't trust the results of it (a 96% result to join Russia is implausible)

See the link I provided to my other post ... (read more)

If you want different life experiences, look first for people who had a different career path (or are parents), come from a foreign country with a completely different culture, or are 40+ years old (rare in EA).

I think these things cause much more relevant differences in life experience compared to things like getting genital surgery, experiencing microaggressions, getting called a racial slur, etc.

Really depends on context and I don't recall a concrete example of the community going awry here. You're proposing this as a change to EA, but I'm not sure it isn't already true.

If you compare apples to apples, a paper and a blog answering the same question, and the blog does not cite the paper, then sure the paper is better. But usually there are good contextual reasons for referring to blogs.

Also, peer review is pretty crappy, the main thing is having an academic sit down and write very carefully.

Let's not forget retribution - ensuring that wrongdoers experience the suffering that they deserve. Or more modestly, disregarding their well-being.

#2. From the absolute beginnings, EA has been vocal about being broader than utilitarianism. The proposal being voted on here looks instead like elevating progressivism to the same status as utilitarianism, which is a bad idea.

I think the format is fine, you just have to write a clear and actionable proposal, with unambiguous meaning.

I'd be unsure about pushing too far against pro-retaking rhetoric (and thus devaluing Ukraine's bargaining chip) in more public media spaces. 

No need to worry, Ukraine and NATO governments will largely desire an invasion of Crimea even if the entire EA community agrees with me and lobbies as hard as possible. There is more of the opposite problem - that Ukrainians are too fixed on total victory to allow for a peace deal, making all of their bargaining chips pointless.

We should recruit more from every field.

Is a more precise idea: "EA should spend less time trying to recruit from philosophy, economics and STEM, in order to spend more time trying to recruit from the humanities and social studies"?

Edit: although with philosophy and economics, those are already humanities and social studies...

This reads more like a list of suggestions than an argument. You're making twenty or thirty points, but as far as I've read (I admit I didn't get thru the whole thing) not giving any one of them the level of argumentation that would unpack the issue for a skeptic. There's a lot that I could dispute, but I feel like arguing things here is a waste of time; it's just not a good format to discuss so many issues in a single comment section. 

I will mention one thing:

The EA community is notoriously homogenous, and the “average EA” is extremely easy to imagin

Not everyone has the same ethical beliefs.

Or is ethics only something to preach to others, but to avoid when it impacts your own money?

You say this as if the EA community has made a habit of policing the ethics of the sources of other people's funding. But whenever people have demanded non-EA charitable organizations to relinquish money from the villain of the year, e.g. Jimmy Saville or the Sackler family, I have always thought that was silly, and I suspect other EAs tend to agree.

Thank you for the important clarification regarding FTX.

I still think the idea of longtermism -> rulebreaking is something philosophically meaningful that merits my response even if FTX does not serve as a true example.

I hate to share something like this, but feel a need to get it off my chest - I increasingly feel disillusioned with the idea of altruism on behalf of people who, more likely than not, dislike EA more than they like it. The amount of hatred some sections of the populace have against the EA community coupled with the limited amount of support makes me doubt the ethical arguments for charity. I would donate all of my excess income if it went to help other EAs but not if it's going to ordinary people who either don't care or worse.  I think my ethics now... (read more)

Here is the report (at first I'd been unable to find it)

If they are indeed net positive it does seem useful to establish consensus that that is so!

At this section of my policy platform I have compiled sources with all the major arguments I could find regarding nuclear power. Specifically, under the heading "Fission power should be supported although it is expensive and not necessary"

https://happinesspolitics.org/platform.html#cleanenergy

I think with this compilation of pros/cons, and a background understanding that fossil fuel use is harmful, it is easy... (read more)

Some comments on "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"

This podcast is kind of relevant: Tom Moynihan on why prior generations missed some of the biggest priorities of all - 80,000 Hours (80000hours.org)

So people in the Middle Ages believed that the best thing was to save more souls, but I don't think that exactly failed. That is, if a man's goal was to have more people believe in Christianity, and he went with sincerity in the Crusades or colonial missionary expeditions, he probably did help achieve that goal.

Likewise, for people in the 1700s,... (read more)

I recall the Founder's Pledge report on climate change some years ago discussed nuclear proliferation from nuclear energy and it seemed like nuclear power plants could equally promote proliferation or work against it (the latter by using up the supply of nuclear fuel). Considering how many lives have been taken by fossil fuels, I feel it's clear that nuclear energy has been net good. That said I have a hard time believing that a longtermist in the 1960s would oppose nuclear power plants.

Not that I disagree with the general idea that if you imagine longtermists in the past, they could have come up with a lot of neutral or even harmful ideas.

Yes, that's a good point. Since writing this post I've become a bit more negative about space colonization in general for humanity, but for the reason you bring up, I remain slightly positive about space colonization by certain countries including the USA.

I think we would agree that just because a reform won't fix everything doesn't count as a reason not to do it. I suppose you're simply saying that better voting methods will only cause a mild improvement in governance, not a major improvement. But I would argue that the characteristics of political institutions are a major explanation for why things like horrendous human rights violations sometimes do or don't happen.

Is the writing intuitive? Are any concepts difficult to grasp?

The presentation of your website looks basically alright, but it seems your format is to start with the problem, go through a bit of a story, explain concepts of voting methods, and then wind up with the solution at the end. That works for some contexts but in a more academic or technical flavored setting, and what I find easier to work with, is to start with the thesis upfront and then unpack it with details lower down. The blogging/rhetorical style is understandable for the front page of the ... (read more)

For a while I considered a career path of being a Civil Affairs officer in the Army National Guard alongside graduate economics school and a career in developmental economics. It seemed like it would have fairly good synergy, so you might look into doing that. However, for a junior to try to join the military in the hopes of getting funding for grad school... that is an unusual path. As a junior you may be too late for ROTC or maybe not. You might want to talk directly and immediately to an ROTC department and an Officer Strength Manager.

Nice post. I largely agree (as someone who was in the US Army National Guard for a few years).

To push back a little, I didn't personally experience what you felt about internalizing a foreign ethic. And while military service does help one understand big national security issues, I think the advantage is generally rather slim and overrated - it's perhaps comparable to volunteering for the Peace Corps not necessarily providing good knowledge about developmental economics.

I certainly got more exposure to diversity (social, ethnic, income, age) through the m... (read more)

I don't quite understand what your view is in your section on macro advocacy and in particular what you think is the relevance of that Weyl quote.

To be clear, I think this episode really shouldn't be taken as a lesson against technocracy. The technocrats were on the right side of this one - sure the Fed was too loose in '21 but if it had been controlled by politicians it probably would have been even worse. The size of the stimulus was also a textbook expression of populism.

Of course you could also argue that Fed tightness prior to 2021 was a failure of t... (read more)

As Giving Green is still recommending donations to TSM in spite of what seems to be the majority opinion here, I'd like to highlight a recent letter to the White House cosigned by TSM (among dozens of other groups). The letter argues that the United States should be less "antagonistic" towards China in order to focus on cooperating on climate change.

In reality, the United States and China have already agreed to cooperate on climate change. So TSM et al are not proposing any obvious change in US-China climate policy. Apparently they want us to be more gene... (read more)

Sorry, I worded that poorly - my point was the lack of comprehensive weighing of pros and cons, as opposed to analyzing just 1 or 2 particular problems (e.g. swarm terrorism risk).

Hm, certainly the vaccine rollout was in hindsight the second most important thing after success or failure at initial lockdown and containment.

It does seem to have been neglected by preparation efforts and EA funding before the pandemic, but that's understandable considering how much of a surprise this mRNA stuff was.

Prevention definitely helps. (It is a semantic question if you want to count prevention as a type of preparation or not)

I don't think most people would consider prevention a type of preparation. EA-funded biorisk efforts presumably did not consider it that way. And more to the point, I do not want to lump prevention together with preparation because I am making an argument about preparation that is separate from prevention. So it's not about just semantics, but precision on which efforts did well or poorly.

The idea that preparation (henceforth e

I moved my comment to an answer after learning that the index was directly funded by an Open Phil grant. You'd do better to repost your reply to me there. Sorry about the confusion.

I discuss the GHS index at greater length in my answer.

OK, sorry for misunderstanding.

I make an argument here that marginal long run growth is dramatically less important than marginal x-risk. I'm not fully confident in it. But the crux could be what I highlight - whether society is on an endless track of exponential growth, or on the cusp of a fantastical but fundamentally limited successor stage. Put more precisely, the crux of the importance of x-risk is how good the future will be, whereas the crux of the importance of progress is whether differential growth today will mean much for the far future.

I w... (read more)

"EA/XR" is a rather confusing term. Which do you want to talk about, EA or x-risk studies?

It is a mistake to consider EA and progress studies as equivalent or mutually exclusive. Progress studies is strictly an academic discipline. EA involves building a movement and making sacrifices for the sake of others. And progress studies can be a part of that, like x-risk.

Some people in EA who focus on x-risk may have differences of opinion with those in the field of progress studies.

I think I don't really buy your conceptual logic as the mitigation obstruction argument is about the degree to which particular solutions will be over or underestimated relative to their actual value, not about how absolutely good/cheap/fast/etc they are. When considered through that lens, it's not clear (at least to me) what to make of distinctions between big actions and small actions or easy actions and hard actions.

Geoengineering is cheap but Halstead argues that it's not such a bargain as was suggested by earlier estimates.

I fear that we need to do Geoengineering right away or we will be locked into never undoing the warming. Problem is a few countries like russia massively benefit from warming and once they see that warming and then take advantage of the newly opened land they will see any attempt to artificially lower temps as an attack they will respond to with force and they have enough fossil fuels to maintain the warm temps even if everyone else stops carbon emissions (which they can easily scuttle).

Deleted my previous comment - I have some little doubts and don't think the international system will totally fail but some problems along these lines seem plausible to me

I'm not sure if immediacy of the problem really would lead to a better response: maybe it would lead to a shift from prevention to adaptation, from innovation to degrowth, and from international cooperation to ecofascism. Immediacy could clarify who will be the minority of winners from global warming, whereas distance makes it easier to say that we are all in this together.

At the very least, geoengineering does make the future more complicated, in that on top of the traditional combination of atmospheric uncertainties and emission uncertainties, we ha... (read more)

Hm, I suppose I don't have reason to be confident here. But as I understand it:

Stratospheric aerosol injection removes a certain wattage of solar radiation per square meter.

The additional greenhouse effect from human emissions only constitutes a tiny part of our overall temperature balance, shifting us from 289 K to 291 K for instance. SAI cuts nearly the entire energy input from the Sun (excepting that which is absorbed above the stratosphere). So maybe SAI could be slightly more effective in terms of watts per square meter or CO2 tonnes offset under a high-emissions scenario, but it will be a very small difference.

Would like to see an expert chime in here.

Hi Tommaso,

If I think about the poor record the International Criminal Court has of bringing war criminals to justice, and the fact that the use of cluster bombs in Laos or Agent Orange in Vietnam did not lead to major trials, I am skeptical on whether someone would be hold accountable for crimes committed by LAWs. 

But the issue here is whether responsibility and accountability is handled worse with LAWs as compared with normal killing. You need a reason to be more skeptical for crimes committed by LAWs than you are for crimes not committed by LAWs. T... (read more)

But the answers to a survey like that wouldn't be easy interpret. We should give the same message under organization names to group A and group B and see which group is then more likely to endorse the EA movement or commit to taking a concrete altruistic action.