All of Michael Große's Comments + Replies

Yes, it seems like there's some crossed wires here. I claimed that ancaps are "clearly trying to formulate a way for a capitalist society to exist without a state". The intended implicature was that since anarchy = the absence of a state (according to common understanding, the dictionary definition, and etymology) it was therefore proper to call them anarchists. anonea2021 responded with "From the perspective of every other lineage of anarchists, private property is one of the things that enforces injust hierarchies." I was confused about this, since it didn't seem like a direct response to my claims. I wasn't sure whether to read it as (a) a claim that unjust hierarchies = a state (which seemed like a bad definition of "state"), or (b) a claim that anarchism wasn't actually about the absence of a state but instead about abolishing unjust hierarchies in general (which seemed like a bad, question-begging definition of "anarchism", given that ~everyone wants to minimise unjust hierarchies). I tried to respond to the superposition of these two interpretations, which probably led to my phrasing being more confusing than it needed to be.  As before, this begs the question. Everyone wants to minimise unjust hierarchies, so that's not a useful description of anarchism. People who disagree about which hierarchies are unjust, what interventions are effective for reducing them, and what the costs of those interventions are, will end up advocating for radically different systems of government. Some of those will end up advocating for a society without a state, and it's useful to refer to that subset of positions as "anarchist" even if they are very different from each other. Anarcho-capitalism is really quite different from other forms of capitalist social organisation, and its distinctive feature is the absence of a coercive state. "Anarcho-capitalism" is thus a completely appropriate name for it – indeed, it's hard to see what other name would fit better. Also, it's wha

Thanks agree that corruption is a big problem for society at large. At the same time though, with some work, we can make sure that groups are not very corrupt. My intuition is that a great deal of competitive markets have very low corruption; I’d expect that Amazon runs pretty effectively, for instance. I think we can aim for similar levels in our charity delegation structures. It will take some monitoring/ evaluation/transparency, but it definitely seems doable. My impression is that many groups that complain about corruption actually do fairly little to actively try to remove corruption. When good and agentic CEOs want to stamp it out, they often do. With GiveDirectly/ EA Funds, I’m not arguing that right now one is better than the other (as I’m guessing you realized, but I’m not sure about other readers). My main point is that we should be aiming for a future that leans more in the direction of “a really solid EA Funds”. That would help in so many ways. (Note that if we want more minds on the topic, we can achieve they at the same time, with something more like a Crypto DAO, or a version of EA Funds that takes a lot of user contributions for research) If you have ideas of what you’d want in EA Funds (or maybe GiveWell’s general fund), those would be interesting.