All of Puggy's Comments + Replies

I would love to read this. What a great idea. Pursue it!!

Forecasters Bias

This may already be a bias, I haven’t really researched this. Excuse my ignorance. But perhaps there could be a new bias we could identify called forecasters bias.

This bias would be the phenomenon where forecasters have a tendency to place too much weight on the importance of or the effect of forecastable events versus events that are less forecastable. Thereby somewhat (or entirely) neglecting other improbable less forecastable events.

Example 1: Theres a new coronavirus variant called Omicron. It has not yet spread, but it will. We can tr... (read more)

Please make the curriculum open to everyone or, if possible, record the curriculum for us to see!

That could be a form of an incentive pledge

There’s a growing literature pointing to the myriad of government failures but the highlights are: government failures are in almost every scenario significantly worse than market failures, so let the market decide. Increasing liberty produces great outcomes (drug use goes down with liberal drug policy same with overdoses, increasing immigration increases everyone’s income, housing prices and homelessness go down when we reduce nimby policies and have a free market in housing, FDA and other bureaucratic agencies overspend (Mercatus Center estimates it cos... (read more)

True yea. I have seen the neoliberalism movement. They are more market friendly than the median voter and they are motivated by consequentialist reasoning, but I think they advocate government intervention over what is required in some areas. But overall that’s a great movement.

Has anyone ever thought of doing incentive based pledges with their charitable giving?

Incentive pledge: I will live off of X amount of money, but this figure increases by Y for every $100,000 I donate or pledge to donate.

Example: I will live off of $30,000 in 2020 dollars for the rest of my life and the rest will be donated to charity, however this amount increases by $1000 for every $100,000 I donate (or I will donate at some future date).

Under this incentive pledge, for every $1 million in 2020 dollars that the pledger earns (and donates), $10,000 dolla... (read more)

Do you prefer libertarian policy ideas, but you aren’t too sold on the deontological or rights-based reasoning which many libertarians use to justify their policy preferences?

Perhaps this new political identifier could work for you: introducing…. Consequentarian! You’re pretty much a consequentialist through and through, you value good outcomes more than liberty or rights based claims to things however it just empirically turns out that all the best policy ideas which lead to the best outcomes are libertarian. You recognize open borders, drug legalization,... (read more)

That could be the case, but I think the emphasis is more on the idea that you have the same “birthdate” to be considered a giving sibling.

Like on February 15 you and a friend took the Giving Pledge together and then that date was the same day you became siblings. Then you celebrate that day every year or form a bond around this shared experience.

Great points. Thank you for them. Perhaps we could use a DALY/QALY measure. A charity could reach the highest status if, after randomized controlled studies, it was determined that $10 donated could give one QALY to a human (I’m making up numbers). Any charity that reached this hard to achieve threshold would be given the super-charity designation.

To make it official imagine that there’s a committee or governing body formed between charity navigator and GiveWell. 5 board members from each charity would come together and select the charities then announce the award once a year and the status would only be official for a certain amount of time or it could be removed if they dipped below a threshold.

What do you think

Here’s the problem:

Some charities are not just multiple times better than others, some are thousands of times better than others. But as far as I can tell, we haven’t got a good way of signaling to others what this means.

Think about when Ed Sheeran sells an album. It’s “certified platinum” then “double platinum” peaking at “certified diamond”. When people hear this it makes them sit back and say “wow, Ed sheeran is on a different level.”

When a football player is about to announce his college, he says “I’m going D1”. You become a “grandmaster” at chess. Ah... (read more)

I think it is a cool idea for people to take a giving pledge on the same day. For example, you and your friend both decide to pledge 10% to charity on the same day. It would be even more fun if you did it with strangers. Call it “giving twins” or “giving siblings”.

Imagine that you met a couple strangers and they pledged with you. Imagine that after pledging you all just decided to be friends, or at least a type of support group for one another. Like “Hey, you and I took the further pledge together on New Year’s Day last year. When I’m in your city let’s g... (read more)

A couple questions: What, if any, personal donations do you make?

Would you welcome a philanthropist who came into the political philosophy sphere and urged top philosophers like yourself, Chris Freiman, Michael huemer, David Schmidtz, to join together and write a “master argument” (attempting to have the same effect in philosophy that Rawls Theory of Justice had) to advance the neoclassical liberal/anarchist brand of political philosophy? do you think this project would be worth funding? (I.e. do you think extra funding would help you and other philosophers produce a new theory of justice for the 21st century? Or: Would funding make any difference?)