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Larks

13348 karmaJoined Sep 2014

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Would it be possible to analogously execute adults by injection into the heart if this was a more humane method?

This is very interesting, I hadn't heard of TBP before, thanks for sharing.

I'm surprised you think that low, especially considering the President often will have been a Senator or Governor or top businessman before office, so the longer average term in Congress is not a big advantage. 

Larks
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For instance, most people will probably put the US president into the category “high-impact individual.” And there are certainly many impactful things the president can do that are not accessible to most other people. But for achieving most goals that can be said to really matter - a better healthcare system that actually improves wellbeing in the country; effective technology policy that actually reduces risks and/or advances life-improving technological developments; a sufficient response to the climate crisis; etc. - presidents themselves will tell you how incredibly constrained they are in bringing about these outcomes. The impact a president can have through sensible policies is determined by the actions of many other individuals (domestically and internationally), and it is also determined by the culture he or she operates in (the ideas that are considered normal, palatable, or even just conceivable). Yes, this individual can have an impact through their actions, but only in conjunction with the actions of many others. If we tried to account for all individuals that form part of the president’s enabling infrastructure (again, I will argue below that we probably can’t and should try), I am sceptical whether the individualised impact that remains with the president’s actions truly is orders of magnitude higher than that of many other people.

The President is indeed constrained to have to work with Congress and SCOTUS, which are both roughly equally powerful as he. But there is only one President, while there are nine SCOTUS judges and over five hundred people in Congress. So it seems very likely to me that the President is indeed orders of magnitude more important than the average Congressman. Within Congress, some (Leaders of the House and Senate, people on important committees, etc.) are more important than others (junior members, unpopular members), so the President is probably even more more important than the least influential Congressman. Yes, the President has people who work for him who he relies on, but so do those members of congress, and those subordinates are much more replaceable than he. It is true that these ordinary members of congress have an impact on the President. But the President also has an impact on each of them. And his impact is probably a lot larger. 

This also matches the views of normal people, who rightly view the Presidency as very unusually important, and care about its occupant far more than they care about other offices. It seems very strange to me to claim that they are all mistaken, and that actually the difference between a good and a bad President is not much larger than the difference between and good and bad local school board member.

Similarly, there are roles for which for-profit companies are happy to pay top performers tens of millions of dollars (traders, ML researchers) or more (CEOs) and it appears they do so rationally - for example, the literature on unexpected CEO death suggests the difference between the best and average CEOs is large. In contrast, for some other people and roles firms are only willing to pay much smaller amounts of money. Given that if anything firms appear to be biased to suppress  the compensation distribution vs the productivity distribution this also seems to suggest that a wide range of impact across people.

On the whole this post reads to me like you have strong moral reasons for wishing it was not the case that some people were massively more impactful than others, and for opposing people talking about this. But the object-level arguments against its being true seem much weaker in comparison. 

I guess it helps balance out the denouncement posts.

I would prefer the US be stronger relative to its adversaries (Russia, China etc.) so the direct effects of working in defense seem positive to me.

Thanks for writing this, a pleasure to read as always.

I must admit I come away being rather confused by what you mean by 'wholesomeness'. Is wholesomeness basically consequentialism but with more vibes and less numbers? Your account makes it seem quite close to consequentialism. It also seems really close to virtue ethics - you try to differentiate it by saying it rejects "focus[ing] single-mindedly on excelling at one virtue" but my impression was that virtue ethics was all about balance the golden median anyway. And then it seems pretty close to sincerity/integrity also.

I was especially confused by this section:

Clean / traditional living

Working a normal respectable job, going to church on Sundays, staying sober and off drugs, avoiding sexual promiscuity or strange counterculture — these are all kinds of “clean” living that might sometimes be called “wholesome”.

Often they will also be somewhat wholesome on my concept. Over-indulgence in general, and addiction in particular, are unwholesome as they ground in an imbalanced sense of priorities. And, all else equal, there is something wholesome about comporting with the culture around us. However, all else is not always equal. There’s something wholesome about letting people do the things they’re drawn to, and unwholesome about puritanically suppressing that. Moreover, there’s something important and wholesome about people experimenting — both for their own learning, and ultimately to find better ways for things to be.

Apparently the activities I think most people would be most likely to label wholesomeness are only "often... somewhat" wholesome. And I think most people would basically never describe experimenting with drugs as wholesome. Maybe it might be good, but if it is good its good for some other reason (like it's educational), not because its wholesome.

I think you actually have a really revisionist account of 'wholesomeness' - so revisitionist I think you should probably just pick a new word. It seems like you are trying to rely on some of the vibes of the word while giving it a new meaning which fixates on the word 'whole' to the neglect of the actual historical denotation. Samwise is one of the most wholesome characters I know, but it's not because he was attending to the whole of Middle Earth - it's because of his courage and humility, and his loyalty to Frodo, Rosie and the Shire. A good officer - or Denethor - comes much closer to attending to the whole, but that doesn't mean his batsman isn't more wholesome.

This seems like an isolated demand for rigour. When Hormel employees and other associated people gave $500k to an end-of-life care charity - a donation which is part of Lewis's data - I don't think this was a secret scheme to increase beef consumption. (I'm not really sure why it's captured in this data at all actually). People who work in agriculture aren't some sort of evil caricature who only donate money to oppose animal protection; a lot of their donations are probably motivated by the same concerns that motivate everyone else.

Wait - did vegans and animal rights groups really donate approximately $0 to political donations (at least in 2020)? 

Surely SBF count[s/ed] as a vegan and an animal rights guy? He alone donated over $5m to Biden.

Thanks for writing this up and sharing it.

Do you have a good account for when counting arguments do and do not work? My impression is they often do work in everyday life, or at least can provide a good prior to be updated away from. Like if I'm wondering who I will meet first when I go into school, a counting argument correctly predicts that any single specific person is quite unlikely. Is the idea that humans are typically good at ontology dividing, such that each of the options are roughly equivalent, but this intuition doesn't work well for SGD?

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