All of Timothy_Liptrot's Comments + Replies

I think the “for just 11 generations” thing is obviously a joke. Obviously they can’t influence the culture of their kids by that much.

Same thing with the old Epstein “impregnate 20 women in a day” thing. It’s obviously impossible.

Does anyone have the zoom for todays event. Registered late and not sure I’ll get it.

Added an abstract

In the assassination's problem, people manipulate the market to win bets. No one is doing that in this case.

Also, knowing when wars will happen is socially beneficial because uncertainty increases the probability of war. If both sides think they are strong, they both take strong bargaining positions. When their offers are rejected they fight. More knowledge -> bargains are more likely to be accepted.

Oh god the paragraph breaks didn't go through. Fixing!

Bottom Of The Envelope Calculation

What's a BOTEC

Ah, I see. I'm mixing up career capital and status actually.

Multibillion dollar bureaucracies tent to be slow with stuff Ike this. You can call them to learn more, I don’t have all the details.

I have a full time job and can’t provide you a higher level of support/analysis without neglecting my responsibilities.

Good question. Perhaps I should clarify this in the abstract.

Weakly constrained means elite supporters cannot limite the leader much.

Personalist means weakly constrained by elite supporters. The idea is that one person has lots of power, hence personalist.

Above is my recent article on property rights and sudden deaths of autocrats, which is not really your question. When I find time!

True

One solution would be to make grant funding conditional on publishing. That transfers the risk onto me, who knows more about viability.

On follow up: Yeah I have to return to the US to continue my PhD at the end of the Summer. That definitely limits my ability to start a movement.

On game-theory: I am quite optimistic. From what I see, professional political actors like ministers, soldiers and warlords understand the "game" perfectly without my explaining. Regular citizens usually do not understand the games, giving them a disadvantage.

1. I was aware there are some restrictions, but did not think they were so severe. I will reach out to them to learn more. That's an interesting concern.

2. Yes autocratists study autocracy.

| My main question is, how sure are you that you can get articles published in major newspapers?

Good question. I'm uncertain. I would like to write up one piece now and try to get it in, as a check on the viability of the plan.

Thanks for the comment, I'm just talking through things and appreciate the feedback.

In EA speak, I think “career capital” should be your goal. As an early grad, your PhD and skills have low direct value. You should choose either a personally interesting or high status/opportunity position.

I actually disagree with this. Firstly, those are actually pretty good skills. But secondly, I don't think PhD's have low direct value. Obviously most people's PhD's have 0 direct value, but that's because people don't select their areas strategically at all.

There's a... (read more)

I certainly could do that. It would drive me toward more crowded fields, particularly development. But competing with lots of other really smart people is playing life on hard mode.

I'm not sure I want to play life on hard mode in my 30's.

Original median voter theorem paper, Duncan Black in 1948

Let us suppose that a decision is to be determined by vote of a committee. The members of the committee may meet in a single room, or they may be scattered over an area of the country as are the electors in a parliamentary constituency. Proposals are advanced, we assume, in the form of motions on a particular topic or in favor of one of a number of candidates. We do not inquire into the genesis of the motions but simply assume that given motions have been put forward. In the case of the select

1. The median voter theorem is just a mathematical conclusion from a set of simple assumptions, it can't be watered up or down. If some set of voters rank proposals on a single axis with single-peaked preferences then the only Condorcet winner will be the median voters ideal point. The key here is that the voters choose the axis on which to rank the proposals. The voters can rank the candidates on any axis, taxes or policies or height. Usually smarter actors rank proposals and candidates on an ideology axis by collapsing issues onto one axis, as a mental heu

Interesting, that's a good point.

That’s good pushback, thank you.

I'll need to edit the piece more deeply, but for now I've added an explanation at the top.

Here are some counter criticisms

1. That is a great summary of the modern critique of the MVT, thanks for sharing. The problem is that it applies to policy outcomes, but the subject is candidate selection. Caplan’s criticism is that voters are irrational at connecting votes to policies and policies to outcomes, which is true. If voters have a simpler utility function like “I want to vote against any anti-Trump candidates”, the median vote

Democracies did not exist in the premodern world for one main reason; they were bad at war. Revolutions and republics did form in the Medieval period, particularly in capital-intensive trade hubs like Northern Italy and Northern Germany. However, most were quickly crushed under a wave of poorly armed peasant-soldiers from the coercive states next door.

A major reason for democracies rise in the 17th-21st centuries because democracies suddenly became much better at warfare than all other systems, and have maintained this advantage ever since. The first state... (read more)

Hahaha I love hearing someone else say "cluster in polity-space". I use that phrase often but the other political scientists never do. It's an incredibly useful framework for describing correlated variations and side-stepping pointless debates about definition.

That's all spot on. Stable alternative models are rare and poor performing (Belgium, Lebanon, Bosnia, Libya).

The steel man for a democratic long run future: In the long run, the political system that survives longer should dominate. Once democracies pass a production threshold around 10,000 gdppc tr... (read more)

Selectorate: People who select the leader

Ejectorate: People who don't.

In the Soviet Union, the selectorate was the Politburo Standing Committee. In Egypt and Myanmar the selectorate is a group of generals. In the US the selectorate are voters in swing states.

Thanks for the feedback.

I haven't ported the citations to this format yet, fyi

My professor Hans Noel is featured in the article. Nice.

I have a friend who is making the first two mistakes. They are in a different field from EA but similar totalizing vibe. They rarely apply to jobs that are outside their field-role but which would provide valuable career capital. They are also quite depressed from the long unemployment.

What can I say to help them not make these mistakes?

I disagree Max. We can all recall anecdotes of overconfidence because they create well-publicized narratives. With hindsight bias, it seems obvious that overconfidence was the subject. So naturally we overestimate overconfidence risks, just like nuclear power.

The costs of under confidence are invisible and ubiquitous. A grad student fails to submit her paper. An applicant doesn't apply. A graduate doesn't write down her NGO idea. Because you can't see the costs of underconfidence, they could be hundreds or thousands of times the overconfidence costs.

To bre... (read more)

Thanks for making this. I experienced similar struggles in young adulthood and watched my friends go through them as well. It sucks that so many institutions leave young people with bad models of job-world and inflexible epistemology. It hits when we most need self-reliance and accuracy. IMO, the university professors are the worst offenders.

My disorganized thoughts

1. Trusting your own models is invaluable. When I was 25 I had a major breakdown from career stress (read about it here). I realized my choices had been unimpeachable and bad. I always did "what

Great question! That is an incorrect interpretation, but this is the fault of the authors for their terrible reporting of the results not maintaining their reproduction data. I noticed the problems after writing.

Basically, those coefficients are the effect of one more year of parliamentarism in your history. So the .004 coefficient on corruption control means that 100 years of parliamentarism (1901-2001) is associated with a .4 increase.

I would also note that the dummy factors are stacked against parliamentarism. Think of it this way. In around 1880, Europ... (read more)

I don't know yet. I am curious.

Drutman is bae.

Good question. The key is that Gerring's paper ADJUSTED FOR DEMOCRACY. So it really means that "parliaments are better when they successfully become democracies", not "parliaments are better in general". This is a big stupid on Gerring's part. I just noticed it and am mad. Anyway-

South Sudan becoming a democracy was very hard due to the proto-state institutions before independence. Ethno-nationalist patrimonial warlord autocracies dominated pre-independence South Sudan and had effectively won their independence in a long and bloody civil war. And there we... (read more)

Maybe. That's orthogonal to my comment. I was responding to

My default belief is that a politician implying something he knows the listener wants to hear is not evidence he's believes or will act on that implication.

As to the empirical content of "evidence-based policy", I'm not an expert on that question yet.

Good questions Thomas. The point of the blog series is to highlight papers that ask the right questions and use the right methods to have consequentialist value. I am not arguing that the Gerring paper is the last word. I'll answer a few of your questions, though.

1. We know they aren't p-hacking in the selection of dependent variables because there are very few such variables that cover every country-year of interest. How many organizations measured the governance quality of Liberia, Columbia and Denmark in 1953. I'm working on introducing a new one using

:) ideal

No time to call up the paper, but the basic answer is that such statements are evidence.

A common pattern is that politicians can propose policy A or B before entering office, but have an incentive to implement A once elected. So some of the politicians who propose B will switch to A once elected. But none of the politicians who support A will switch to B. For example this happens with economic security vs. economic efficiency platforms in Latin America (politicians prefer efficiency policies more once elected). About half of them switched in the study I r... (read more)

As an author, this is SO TRUE.

Honestly the "people only comment to criticize" pattern incentivizes authors to be edgy to get any feedback on their ideas at all.

Thanks for the comment. I've decided the most important thing is to learn to do my own expected value analysis for research programs.

Maybe econ is different from poli sci, but my experience is that grad students are extremely attuned to what the academic job market rewards, and if they don't start out that way, their advisors eventually push them in that direction."

I've been exploring this, and it appears to be a difference between the disciplines. Not sure why yet.

Since the academic market rewards difficult, technical work, the sort of work that doe

The question of how best to represent the interests of future persons is a good core question. My problem is more with their method of answering it. There's a great tradition of political philosophers thinking "what would be the ideal institution according to X moral philosophy" and then designing an institution backward from that. I consider this approach both crowded and low-leverage (John and McAskill are more in a middle position). The alternative is to look at how institutions work in practice then judge them against different ethical objectives, whic... (read more)

Just read the paper and you are correct, my questions do differ. I should just make a post of my own about this I guess.

Firstly, I am skeptical that the future is best represented by creating special institutions. If people lose trust that their government cares about their interests the risks to democracy and state capacity are large, and introducing a new interest group endangers that trust. The alternative to directly representing the future is to consider which institutional arrangements create policies most beneficial to future people. They acknowled... (read more)

The electricity one is outside of our data range. States occasionally fail to provide electricity for weird price-politics reasons. But when that occurs, private sector electricity suppliers form fast (this can be a self-reinforcing policy as the new suppliers resist centralization). But that does suggest that as long as a community can pay for fuel, they will produce electricity. If our current institutions fail to provide electricity, people can form new ones fast.

I'll think about agricultural output for the moment. I would, anecdotally, assume poli... (read more)

Hmmm. That is an interesting question.

I was thinking recently about how stable patronage networks are during currency collapses, which might bear on the question.

Very rapid state collapses have occurred when side lost access to arms, as in Afghanistan in 1992. Investigating state collapse instances to estimate how much economic or social damage causes state collapse should be possible.

The world wars probably contain the closest example of a middle-income country undergoing state-collapse. Come to think of it, you could make an argument that state collapse ... (read more)

I have one criticism of the argument that coup-proofing prevalence is evidence for personality factors. Suppose that if people observe a game being played multiple times they are more likely to set aside their personal preferences and "play to win". So if I were the first dictator of Iraq I might say "no I'm not going to kill generals who come from different towns, that would be evil". And then get killed for it. And maybe the second dictator says the same thing. But by the time the third or fourth dictator rises to power he'l... (read more)

Hmmm, that is a good question. Let me dig in more. Here are reasons to talk about others than Hitler Stalin and Mao

Coup Proofing is a common practice of dictators for political survival

Some behaviors of Hitler, Stalin and Mao have compelling institutional explanations that have become repeated behavior of long-ruling dictators. I'm thinking of coup proofing in particular. Coup proofing is a set of policies dictators enact to prevent a single small group from seizing power; rotatring or purging officers (Tukachevsky/Rommel) splitting the army into mul... (read more)

I'm compelled by this. That the difference is only 30% of 1 standard deviation means that lots of variation could be explained by other factors. Personality of the dictator could still explain lots of variation, even a majority. There could also be a relationship between dictator personality and allowances for dissent. Thanks for explaining that!

Aside, you would be more compelling if you talked about autocrats other than Hitler, Stalin and Mao.