All of marklutter's Comments + Replies
I agree with most of the report, there are some smaller differences which I spell out in the comment below
This is a good, comprehensive overview. Some comments
- The report starts by saying, “"Rethink Priorities has been piloting expanding into human-focused neartermist global priorities research." Charter cities should be viewed as a midtermist position. The time horizon is longer than malaria nets, de-worming, cash grants, etc. The time horizon is closer to AI safety, bioweapons, etc, and should be measured in decades.
- Chinese growth, which resulted from special economic zones and urbanization, is the greatest humanitarian miracle in the post-war era, lifting 85
Thanks Mark, both for your time and feedback while we were writing the report and your comments now.
On 1, I agree that charter cities sit somewhere between neartermist and longtermist so thinking about them as mid/mediumtermist makes sense. I imagine Rethink Priorities’ future work in this space will be a mixture of traditionally neartermist and mediumtermist topics. However, most of the current arguments for charter cities, especially Mason (2019), have an explicitly neartermist flavour, given the direct comparisons to GiveWell charities and a focus on th...
Thanks, I edited it to read succeeded and failed. There are lots of examples that I left out as the list of social movements in very large. I will likely slowly add to the list over the coming years.
The goal is mostly to get tech folks thinking about the mechanisms for social change. I think the EA folks do that ok now, but tech hasn't really done so, and developing good mental models will be useful for them.