I overall like this post and I find the arguments that electing Democrats is really important and donating to strong candidates helps achieve that goal convincing, but it doesn’t really make a case for those donations being more cost-effective than donating to AI safety orgs or GiveWell. Do you know of any analysis which tries to directly compare the expected effects of spending a dollar on the most important elections to spending it on e.g. malaria nets? Or do you have any arguments for why we should expect political donations to have competitive cost-effectiveness without that?
The AI safety people I know mostly believe that donating to political candidates is at current margins better than donating to AI safety organizations because the lowest-hanging fruit for AI safety organizations has generally been picked by Coefficient Giving, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, etc. (If you have idiosyncratic views of how AI safety works, that might not be true.)
I don't think it's possible to directly compare without making up numbers in a way that I think is more confusing than enlightening. But you can yourself make up numbers about how much you think it might cost to flip a vote, the chance that the Democrats would bring back USAID, and the disvalue associated with America becoming an illiberal autocracy. They're probably as good as anyone else's.
I agree with this, though there are some people who I think have tried (or are trying) to put some more effort into thinking this through (with the same conclusion).
Any political analysis that says "politician X is universally bad" is pretty much guaranteed to be poorly thought out and driven by some kind of hysteria rather than rational thinking.
Trump 2 is so far looking very good for American democracy. Lets go through some of your claims:
> Trump is taking control of traditionally independent positions in the civil service—from prosecutors to the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics—and trying to fill them with political loyalists who will do his bidding.
Think for a moment about what you are saying here. I remember a time when Republicans thought President Biden was going senile and that the deep state was secretly running everything behind the scenes. The mainstream narrative at the time tried to frame these Republicans as crazy. Then it became undeniable that President Biden was going senile, and we never got a straight answer about who had been running things behind the scenes. Now you are telling us that of course the deep state is running everything behind the scenes, and that it is somehow a threat to democracy for the democratically elected leader of our government to try to run things instead?!?!
This I think is our biggest crux. The idea that any bureaucrat can exercise part of the awesome power of the government without political accountability is horrifying to me. The narrative I was given at every level of our education system, from elementary school through law school, was that it was ok for prosecutors and bureaucrats to exercise that power, because they all answer to the president, who in turn answers to the voters. That was what I read in the United States Constitution when it said that all of the executive power is vested in the president. That was the thing that was supposed to safeguard us from bureaucrats and prosecutors becoming dictators. Now we are being told that that isn't true, that that was never true, that these prosecutors and bureaucrats have been acting as dictators all along. I want my democracy back! And Trump is fighting to get me my democracy back. In the long run this may do more to strengthen democracy than his attempted coup did to damage it.
> He has used retaliatory arrests and prosecutions against people who investigated him.
There has definitely been damage to democracy here, I grant, but it was the Democrats who started it, not Trump. You remember the prosecution of Trump over the Stormy Daniels thing? A prosecution that in normal times nobody would have bothered with even if it had been legal, and that was definitely not legal because it violated the statute of limitations. The Democrats crossed a huge red line there and took our democracy in a very dark direction. I wish we had a president who could pull us back from that, and Trump sadly but unsurprisingly is not that man, but I also can't really blame him for playing by the same rules that were used against him.
> He has openly defied as many as one in three court orders against him.
I don't believe this for a second. The first couple times I saw these claims I looked into them and they did not hold up. I'm no longer taking the time to look in to each individual case, and I certainly am not going to give the Washington Post my money, but if you have a particular case in mind that you think is a particularly strong example of this I am willing to look into it.
> He has broken the law to avoid spending money allocated by Congress.
Yea, that's not great. You know what else is not great? His predecessor breaking the law to avoid collecting debts that former college students owed to the American people. Again, this just looks like Trump playing by the same rules the Democrats played by the last time they were in power.
> He has taken power from the states—most famously by deploying California’s National Guard without the consent of the governor of California.
The constitution allocates power over the military, including the national guard, to the President, not to the governors. And it is sometimes right and proper for a president to use that power to keep the peace and enforce the law. I recall another Republican president famously deploying the 101st Airborn Division to Little Rock, AK, a decision now rightly celebrated in the history books. It may have been unwise or even illegal for Trump to deploy the guard under the current circumstances, but it was definitely not an invasion of state power.
> He has also targeted the institutions of civil society that are supposed to check the power of the president: the press, law firms, universities.
He has been more political than some other presidents in choosing which elements of the press to give access to, but access has always been the president's to give. Biden took advantage of this to hide from the press when he was going senile, and nobody said he was targeting the press.
It is the sacred right of every litigant to choose their own lawyers, and fire their own lawyers, for whatever petty and childish reasons they choose. As head of the executive branch, it is Trump's sacred right to choose the executive branches lawyers, and fire the executive branches lawyers, for whatever petty and childish reasons he chooses. That's all he's done.
The universities were NEVER supposed to be a check on the power of the president. That is a horrifying misuse of those institutions, and the reason the president is rightly coming down on them. Universities are supposed to pursue truth outside the realm of politics, and they are supposed to do so in a way that is welcoming to people of all political persuasions, all races, all sexes, and all religions, and that does not take sides on political issues or politicians. That was the promise that universities made to the American people in exchange for the incredible degree of financial support and independence they have received since ww2. The Universities broke that contract. And that sucks. I really wish they hadn't, because they were important institutions, and they have left a vacancy that will be difficult to fill. But what is happening now is the natural and foreseeable consequence of that choice.
> Most frighteningly, Trump has continued to say he won the 2020 election. He pardoned the January 6 rioters who, again, tried to perform a coup against the U.S. government to make him president. He has targeted the people who prosecuted the January 6 rioters. He has hinted publicly at wanting to run for an unconstitutional third term.
Yea, you are definitely right that in past generations attempting a coup would have been disqualifying. I wish it still was. This is definitely the thing that gives me most pause about Trump, and the dominant reason I voted against him in 2024. But the American people have spoken, and they clearly do not regard it as disqualifying. As for a third term, I'd be shocked if it gets any real traction. And if, somehow, it does happen, I'll join the resistance then.
If there is an EA case against Trump, I think it would have to be that all this democracy stuff is too speculative and uncertain to satisfy the rigorous epistemological standards we demand of ourselves as EAs, and the damage Trump has done on foreign aid and foreign policy more generally is worth fighting against. There is a whole argument that by pulling the US back from its traditional role as world cop, Trump has significantly increased the risk of ww3 breaking out, and the catastrophic and existential risks that go along with that. You should be making that argument!
A lot of this is true. You might look at, say, selective prosecutions of companies for discriminating against blacks and women but not against whites and men and figure 'sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander'. And as you point out Biden's revocation of student debt was illegal too. And I agree the universities have become mouthpieces of the left, destroying their wider credibility, and that's part of the reason we're seeing such a huge right-wing reaction now.
However, we're seeing things like the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopping collecting data, the CDC coming out against vaccines, and giant tariffs and actions that enrage longtime allies like Europe and Canada. This is doing serious damage to state capacity, and as a 'liberal nationalist', to quote Eric Kauffman, this is bad for the country long-term. Overall increases in the level of corruption will take a long time to undo, and I don't think we'll ever get as close to Canada as we were pre-Trump.
I definitely agree they crossed the line going after him over Stormy Daniels. I don't really care about that. However, he did try to launch a coup on January 6, and I wish they'd stuck to going after him on that.
I think the USA should stay a democracy. We weren't perfect, but we were reasonably close to the democratic end of the spectrum throughout our history, and we're likely to get incompetent kleptocrats if we go autocratic. The Chinese have a long tradition of competent bureaucracy checking and moderating the emperor and of the duties of ministers. It's not perfect either, but there's something recognizably Chinese after 2000 years and 7+ dynasties. I doubt we will be so lucky. As for the Russians, well, they've long recognized whatever their nation's strengths it's always been poorly run.
EA assumes all lives are of equal worth, so the damage caused by the end of foreign aid is more than enough from the EA point of view I think. (Personally I thought it was useful as an instrument of soft power.)
>Now you are telling us that of course the deep state is running everything behind the scenes, and that it is somehow a threat to democracy for the democratically elected leader of our government to try to run things instead?!?!
Yes, unironically. The civil service is intentionally set up to be somewhat independent of the President. Like, we specifically passed laws to make it harder for the President to fire people on a whim or to hand out civil service jobs to cronies, and it's worked this way for over a hundred years. There are multiple reasons for this, but the most important currently are as a check against corruption, and as a way to protect subject matter experts from politics.
Or to put it another way, it is a bad thing that Trump can threaten people at the DOJ with firing if they fail to indict the people that he wants, and it is a bad thing that he can threaten the head of the BLS with firing if the latest jobs report isn't good enough for him. Those jobs have to be politically neutral to function, and they can't be if the President can freely hire and fire them.
>It is the sacred right of every litigant to choose their own lawyers, and fire their own lawyers, for whatever petty and childish reasons they choose.
The DOJ is not the President's personal lawyers, they are the *government's* lawyers. And the fact that Trump is confusing the two is precisely the problem! You can't get rule of law if access to the justice system is dictated by a single person's whims.
The Executive branch is not supposed to be an extension of the President's personal will. It's supposed to execute the laws that Congress created, with the President overseeing and managing that process.
there is one point i argue about in context of Israel and now i extrapolate to USA:
There are two ways to understand the word "democracy". The Rule Of The People, and Balances And Brakes.
i think about it as Democracy and Liberalism but i don't think it's proper translation to English.
there are people who see Democracy as the system of governance when people decide by voting, when people are the sovereign, and restriction on it is Undemocratic.
and there are people who see Democracy as system of governance that strongly restricting what the people can decide to do, when the restrictions are the heart of the system. you surely see a lot of this desire to restrict in USA governance!
for people in the second group, the fact that the president is not above the law is important part of democracy. rule that say, for example, execute all Jews, is Undemocratic, even if 80% of the people vote for it.
for the first grope, the decision of 80% of the people is Democracy, and preventing it is Undemocratic.
and instead of talking about this important disagreement, people don't notice it, because those two different principles referred by the same word, Democracy. or even worst, notice and then try to win the semantic game, as if it will let them win the actual game.
I think you are being too charitable. I think it is true that there are sometimes conflicts between democracy and other values. Some limitations on democracy are good. That is the point of our bill of rights and our equal protection clause. Killing all the Jews would surely be bad, even if democracy were to demand it.
Where I think we disagree is that I don't see the ambiguity in the English language that you do. "Democracy", as I see it, unambiguously refers to rule by the people. Before Trump, and to a large extent even just before Trump 2, that was how it was used. We are now in a world where a lot of liberals, unable to accept that Trump won a legitimate democratic election, twice, are now using the word "democracy" in a dishonest way - they have started using it to refer to "balances and breaks" as you call it, to restrictions. They are trying to challenge democracy because they don't like the leader democracy gave us, and they aren't willing to admit that fact. That is what is going on here. And I will not play into it.
Your problem is that you have bought into the simplistic argument used by dictators the world over: "I won an election, therefore the democratic thing is for me to be able to do whatever I want." This is technically true for a certain definition of democracy, but tends to result in cataclysmically bad government. This also tends to be undemocratic in the sense that it results in outcomes disfavored by most people, like massive economic damage and restriction of freedom. The idea that democracy must be tempered by checks and balances is not new, indeed you may find the phrase used in the Federalist Paper titled “The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments.”
To pick one example of the principle, consider racial segregation. In your sense, Jim Crow laws were democratic in the sense that a majority of voters had voted for them at one point. In another sense, they were undemocratic because by suppressing the vote of a significant portion of the population they damaged the ability of the electoral system to accurately judge what the majority of people wanted. This is why we have a Constitution in the first place: so that one 51% election victory cannot overturn the foundations of society.
The American left is quite aware that Trump won the popular vote (this time at least). The most popular topic of inter-left discourse right now is "Why does everyone hate us more than the most contemptible man alive, is it the fault of the moderates or the progressives?" which very much accepts the turn of public opinion in its premise. The main linguistic compression here is that "democracy" is typically used to mean "liberal democracy", the version of democracy that's patched to avoid demagogue strongmen ruining everything, because that's the version this country has run on since its foundation. More detailed coverage of this topic can be found here: astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra
Don't put words in my mouth. I never said democracy was the only value or that Trump should be able to do anything he wants. I'm all for checks and balances, I just don't think Ozy pointed to any actual issues of checks and balances, and I gave my reasons why. If you disagree with any of the points I made, feel free to respond to them.
On the topic of an independent civil service checking the power of the president, you said:
> That was what I read in the United States Constitution when it said that all of the executive power is vested in the president. That was the thing that was supposed to safeguard us from bureaucrats and prosecutors becoming dictators. Now we are being told that that isn't true, that that was never true, that these prosecutors and bureaucrats have been acting as dictators all along. I want my democracy back! And Trump is fighting to get me my democracy back.
I am telling you that the civil service is one of those checks and balances that have always been a core part of our government and you should not be cheering for attacks on its independence. Many of these offices are appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate and have term lengths that extend over multiple presidential terms. That the occupants of these offices must be judged acceptable by at least two elected bodies and don't all change the moment a new administration takes power is the intended behavior, especially for offices like the Bureau of Labor statistics where it is quite hard to imagine why someone would need a dedicated partisan in place if they weren't plotting to falsify data. In the case of the Federal Reserve, an institution that Trump has often made noise about overtaking, its independence is so important that you can literally see national inflation rates fall in proportion to the independence of a country's central bank: https://www.stlouisfed.org/about-us/resources/why-fed-is-well-designed-central-bank/central-bank-independence-inflation
To go after some more points:
> He has been more political than some other presidents in choosing which elements of the press to give access to, but access has always been the president's to give.
What news source gave you the impression that his only sin was controlling access? He and his allies have openly implied retribution against outlets that air negative coverage of his administration in roughly the same manner as a mob boss remarking that it would be a shame if somebody's house burned down, and many have capitulated. Other administrations did not do this.
> You remember the prosecution of Trump over the Stormy Daniels thing? A prosecution that in normal times nobody would have bothered with even if it had been legal, and that was definitely not legal because it violated the statute of limitations.
This is straightforwardly false. The New York statute of limitations timer was frozen for all crimes that took place in the state over COVID. Trump's crimes were covered by this exactly the same way as those of any other citizen. It's odd to pursue such a relatively minor offense when going after a serial fraudster, but hardly unprecedented. We got Al Capone on tax evasion. It would be preferable for the federal government to have imprisoned him for, say, aiding and abetting enemies of the state by interfering in the defense of Ukraine to extort them into launching a phony investigation of a political enemy. Alas, Biden's attorney general slow-walked the investigation out of excessive caution and the state of New York was left to pick up the slack.
> Yea, that's not great. You know what else is not great? His predecessor breaking the law to avoid collecting debts that former college students owed to the American people. Again, this just looks like Trump playing by the same rules the Democrats played by the last time they were in power.
I will happily concede that both parties have forfeited the responsibilities of Congress by shoving more and more decisions onto the executive branch, unbalancing the structure of our government and setting us up for this exact eventuality. However, a sense of proportion is required to accurately assess the situation. Democrats make relatively small fudges to sneak their social programs through a deadlocked legislative branch and when the Supreme Court tells them to stop, they do that. Republicans cut entire departments and fire swathes of staff attending such essential functions as managing the nuclear weapons stockpile without a plausible nonpartisan excuse and play "I can't hear you" when the courts tell them that they aren't allowed to send citizens to foreign detention camps without trial. They are not the same.
> And it is sometimes right and proper for a president to use that power to keep the peace and enforce the law.
Are the current circumstances similar to the Little Rock case? Are the states in question guilty of brazenly defying both federal law and the Constitution regarding equal treatment of citizens under the law? Or has the president ordered the deployment of the National Guard in cases where there is not actually an extraordinary threat to citizens that local law enforcement has been unable to address? Given the answers to these questions, it is clear that this is in fact an unusual seizure of power.
> The universities were NEVER supposed to be a check on the power of the president.
Given that all American public universities are state-operated institutions and that states are granted authority to use their institutions as they see fit so long as they violate neither federal law nor the Constitution, they *are* meant to be a check on the power of the president to the extent that the president is not supposed to be able to tell them to do whatever he wants, the same as with all other state-level institutions. More broadly, universities compose an important part of the intellectual culture of the country and as such are an important component of the above-mentioned liberal democratic system. You are right that they have applied that part of their mandate far too broadly in the last ten years and have sufficiently damaged their reputation to the point where it is much more difficult to defend them their role. However, this slipping of discipline will not be corrected by brazen extortion tactics, nor is it good for you to shrug your shoulders at this.
> I am telling you that the civil service is one of those checks and balances that have always been a core part of our government and you should not be cheering for attacks on its independence.
The last time I took a US government class the phrase "checks and balances" referred to interactions between the three branches of government, not to anything happening within one branch. A year ago I had never once heard of the civil service being regarded as part of checks and balances or as a check on the President's power. This seems to be an idea that has been cooked up, or at least gone public, largely as a partisan means of attacking Trump. And I find it absolutely horrifying. Because if the civil service is a check on the president, then who is checking the civil service? Who is stopping the civil servants from becoming oppressive dictators? The president is at least elected by the people and serving a fixed term, and high enough profile that if he screws up too badly congress can actually take time to impeach him. None of that is true of a civil servant.
The design of our government has always been that the bureaucrats would be accountable to the President, and through him to the people. We were never supposed to have civil servants insulated from presidential control. Our constitution is clear on this point. That presidential control of the bureaucracy is one of the core safeguards of democracy that prevents oppression.
For the BLS, going directly to firing was one of Trumps dumber decisions, and that is saying something. But the point of presidential control is not always to have a partisan in control. It is much more often to have some kind of accountability. In the case of BLS, there was a genuine problem. The corrections that BLS was publishing to initial jobs numbers were predictable, which is not a property that errors and their corrections should have. The BLS was fucking up in not updating their methodology to account for the predictable errors in their initial estimates. And when any agency fucks up, it is the job of the president to direct them to do better. And for a president to do that, the president necessarily has to have the power to fire people at the agency, up to and including the director of the agency.
For the fed, that is the hardest part of the bureaucracy for me to deal with for sure. There is an argument that it is special because of the history of the national bank in the early US. And there is an economic argument that our situation is already so fucked going forward that the fed won't be able to do much and therefor doesn't matter any more. But really if we need an executive branch agency insulated from presidential control, the only legal way to do it is to amend the constitution. I think there is a strong argument that not amending the constitution to create the fed was a royal fuck up. If we really think an independent fed is necessary, we should do that now.
> This is straightforwardly false. The New York statute of limitations timer was frozen for all crimes that took place in the state over COVID.
You are mistaken. The tolling for covid was only a few months, not nearly enough. The prosecution charged it was a felony to get around the statute of limitations, which requires intent to defraud, which they never had a plausible theory of.
Even aside from the statute of limitations issue, the prosecution itself was still a huge violation of democratic norms. All he did was obscure a perfectly legal but slightly embarrassing payment in the accounting. That is the sort of thing rich and powerful people do every day, and nobody bats an eye. To only charge your political opponents for such a thing is not compatible with a properly functioning democracy.
You may be right that he should have been prosecuted more aggressively for actually bad stuff he did, I don't have a confident view on that, but I do know that using an illegal prosecution of conduct that in all other circumstances is treated as legal is not an ok way to deal with that.
> Are the current circumstances similar to the Little Rock case?
Of course not. If you read what I wrote, I was very explicit that I am not sure Trump was justified in these deployments. But thinking he was wrong to exercise his power in this case is one thing, claiming that he is seizing someone elses power, as both you and Ozy have done, is quite another, and I see no plausible argument for that.
> the president is not supposed to be able to tell them to do whatever he wants, the same as with all other state-level institutions.
You are ignoring the relevant facts. Every public university in the country, and almost all of the private ones, take federal money. Since the 1960s, that money has come with both explicit and implicit expectations as to how universities would operate. Universities could have turned down that money, and chose not to. The explicit legal requirements include nondiscrimination with respect to race and sex and religion, and much of the current controversy is about the fact that the universities have failed, often very intentionally, to meet that requirement.
> More broadly, universities compose an important part of the intellectual culture of the country and as such are an important component of the above-mentioned liberal democratic system. You are right that they have applied that part of their mandate far too broadly in the last ten years and have sufficiently damaged their reputation to the point where it is much more difficult to defend them their role. However, this slipping of discipline will not be corrected by brazen extortion tactics, nor is it good for you to shrug your shoulders at this.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "intellectual culture". I don't think it was ever a proper role of a university to shape anyone's political views. Their roles are to discover what is objectively true, and then teach people what is true and train them for the work force. They have obviously deviated from that, as you seem to agree. But what you label as "extortion", I see as consequences. You can't make them bad just by applying a scary word to them. What else would you have the administration do to correct the situation?
I, personally, find Semantic Arguments as confusion at best, and attempts to Sneak In Connotations at worst. I even less equipped to talk about semantics in English, my third language.
but I have one friend that honestly see Checks And Balances as important part of the definition of Democracy, and i don't find it surprising, as i, too, learned that in school. you probably learned something else.
generally speaking, it's the Progressives who choose Sneaking In Connotation as major strategy, and if you will claim that people who believe that is instance of movement believing its own propaganda, you probably right.
and yet, the conclusion remain the same - you just waste time, arguing about semantics instead of content. instead of arguing what Democracy is, you can say that the people are the sovereign, and that the majority should rule, and not some aristocratic minority.
i'm all in favor of naming the thing, the more the better. what can be destroyed by naming it should. but the way to do it is by pointing the substance, not arguing semantics. there are already too much of the debate in the third level of simulacra.
You don't have to engage the semantics if you don't want to, especially if English isn't your first language. It is impressive that you've learned a second and third language so well.
I've been watching liberals try to win arguments by redefining words rather than with substance for well over a decade at this point. It is actually one of the big things that started to push me away from the liberal end of the political spectrum. A naive younger version of myself was sometimes tricked by their dishonest use of words and made some bad mistakes because of it. One of the things I have learned is that we must call out liberals (anyone really, but liberals are the ones I see doing it) when they try to win arguments by redefining words rather than with evidence and reason. If we let them control the language, then they will control the narrative, while being disconnected from facts, and they will thereby do a lot of harm.
I also do think I pointed to a lot of substance. Do you not agree?
and it look like it work, until, suddenly, it stopped working. it turned out that people didn't really changed their minds, just avoided to voice their wrongthoughts, and the backlash Trump brought showed the result much worse then if no such attempt was made.
so now my model say that Semantic Arguments don't work. that it's a trap, and that it's error try to copy the Woke here as if it worked. it's an error that shouldn't be copied.
the answer to wordplay is not another wordplay, but using Asymmetric Weapon - pointing on the substance.
and from practical point of view, i saw this happen again and again - the discussion derailed to "what is true democracy" discussions, with various historical tangents, that are no one crux and change no one's mind. a lot of going in circles without touching the true disagreement - to what extend the people are allowed to do what they chose, and to what extend the aristocracy should be able to prevent them from doing that?
you pointed to substances, but you do that in an way that predictable lead people to react to the semantics, not the substance.
basically, i think your tactic is wrong. so i try to explain why and convince you to change it.
I can't make US political donations, but consider adding Manny Rutinel, running for Colorado's 8th district, to the list? I once had a conversation with him about farmed animal welfare, he helped pass State AI law (not sure how good it was, but an indication that he cares https://x.com/MannyRutinel/status/1798086169290498395?s=20 ) and he's running in a purple district.
This is one of those times where I have to decide whether I'm an ex-liberal angry at feminism, or an ex-conservative angry at corruption.
Honestly, I'll probably do nothing because I'm afraid of retaliation by the administration and I'm a coward.
I want to say I really admire your focus on pragmatism over ideological purity. Yes, it is a good thing to work in the current administration if it means you can push back on antivax!
About the AI... this is one of those things where I don't understand the tech enough to have an opinion, and everyone who does either seems to have a political ax to grind or investments in the companies.
Let me see if I can make a mostly apolitical, non-technical argument in favor of being careful about AI.
PART 1 (assumption). We might be close to actually building something which makes humans economically and evolutionarily obsolete.
This is difficult to visualize or believe, because it has never happened before. But imagine if we *did* build something that could do any task that a Stanford graduate could do for $1/hour: Software engineering, hardware engineering, basic science, being a (good) CEO, operating a robot, designing a better robot, winning an election, lobbying for legislation, consolidating power. Basically, any human task, done well, for $1/hour. Really think about what this deeply strange world would look like.
(If you like, imagine the AIs themselves making decisions, or imagine small numbers of powerful human beings controlling the AIs. It makes less difference than you'd think.)
The AI safety argument rests on the idea that we are potentially "0-2 major breakthroughs" away from this, plus some engineering work. ("Major breakthrough" here means "a paper like 'Attention is All You Need'", which typically come along every 5-10 years.) Sometime between, say, 2028 and 2050, human labor would become absolutely, completely, permanently worthless. Humans would be as economically competitive as chimpanzees.
Will are the odds this will actually happen? Experts disagree. But the AI safety argument is based on the assumption that there's a significant chance this might be a real thing that actually happens within our lifetimes. If you don't buy this idea, then nothing about AI safety will actually make sense.
PART 2 (argument). If a powerful entity and a powerless entity want the same limited resources, the powerless entity is likely to have a bad day.
Evidence: History, economics, colonialism, war, politics, etc.
If it's possible to get any kind of skilled or unskilled labor for $1/hour, then ordinary humans are screwed. Maybe the AIs have their own goals. Maybe the AIs all obediently listen to Billionaire X or Politician Y. But no matter who is in charge, every ordinary human consuming resources is "wasting" resources that the AIs could use better to accomplish the goals of whoever is in charge. The ordinary humans have *nothing* to offer. And if the ordinary humans revolt, the AIs are *also* better at war.
Even if this situation works out for 5 years or 20 years, it's not stable.
So that's my argument: If you make the human mind economically obsolete in every important niche, then it's likely very hard to stop economics and evolution from doing their thing.
But if you don't accept PART 1 (human obsolescence) as a potential risk, then PART 2 (obsolete things tend to get brutally marginalized) doesn't follow.
(There are other possible takes, including "humans suck, let's take a chance on the AIs that replace us." I don't plan to address these right now.)
It is all speculation, of course. But I do like the imagined world where an AI can replace the CEO for the equivalent of $1/hr, but the electrician/plumber for the factory is still irreplaceable human labour. What kind of strange new world would *that* be? The plumber now gets CEO (of the past period) wages? Blue collar is the new high status?
That's quite reasonable and I've often thought the same. I just feel like a lot hinges on Part 1, and we generally haven't seen the computers be quite as good at blue-collar or pink-collar (service) labor as they are at white-collar lately. Frankly I'm quite pessimistic about the future--I think the billionaires own everything and will just let us all starve.
And on rationalist or rationalist-adjacent blogs I generally assume almost everyone is better informed about this AI stuff than me, so I stick to other topics.
"Effective altruists may remember the case of Carrick Flynn, where excessive soft money from FTX’s SuperPAC may have made voters see him as an out-of-touch “crypto candidate” being forced on them by Sam Bankman-Fried."
While that certainly didn't help and gave his opponents a wonderful angle of attack, the main problem was that the campaign was very poorly thought out. Caveat before I start in on the criticism: I'm not American and all I know about the district and the candidates is from looking them up online.
Flynn's campaign was designed to appeal to EAs - get me elected, I will go to Washington to work on the very important issue of pandemic prevention. May well be a very important issue, but he was asking the people in the new district which, so far as I could make out, was more or less an even split between the urban/college towns (which I assumed could be relied on to vote for Flynn) and the farming/logging/rural areas, which I assumed were not such a safe bet.
Okay, those are the voters, now who are the other candidates in the race? And the moment I saw that one of them had union backing, I went "okay, she's gonna win".
Why? Because imagine this:
"Hello, candidates looking for my vote. I am a farmer/farm labourer/logger/working in the timber industry/other lower middle-class occupation. Tell me about yourselves!"
Flynn: "Hi. I'm a native of Oregon who grew up hardscrabble just like you, Ordinary Salt of the Earth Voter!"
Voter: "Well, that's great! So where have you been all this time?"
Flynn: "The second I could, I got out of here as fast as my little leggies could carry me and went to college, then I lived overseas. I'm only coming back here for the election, which I hope to win in order to forward my personal important issues!"
(In case you think I exaggerate here, this article should make you wince, if you have any notion of appeals to locals: https://archive.ph/TzS0h "Carrick Flynn, who left Oregon after college and has primarily lived overseas since then, returned to his home state in 2020 and, in his first bid for public office, wants to represent the new 6th District in Congress")
Voter: "Okay, I guess... so, if I elect you, what is your programme?"
Flynn: "Glad you asked! If elected, I hope to get out of here as fast as my little leggies will carry me to Washington, where I can work on very important things. Very. Important. Things."
Voter: "Oh, like taxation on my income, and boosting rural employment, and stuff?"
Flynn: "Ha ha ha, no. That's small potatoes and completely selfish thinking on your part, Salt of the Earth! No, I'm going to talk to people who talk to people who will talk to Important People about Important Things like pandemic prevention".
Voter: "I guess that is important. It doesn't help me pay my mortgage or work out what health insurance I can afford, but sure. Sounds very... Big City Interest Issues. Candidate No. 2, tell me about yourself?"
Andrea Salinas: "Hi! I've been involved in local government here and was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 2018. My dad is an immigrant, he was a police officer, I come from a union family, and I have been endorsed by several labour unions. If elected, I will fight for your interests, including farm aid packages, support for organic and speciality crop growers, rural mental health services, and a slate of others: https://salinas.house.gov/media/press-releases"
Voter: "Okay, thank you both, you've given me a lot to think about. Uh, that's 'Salinas' on the ballot paper, right? Yeah, bye!"
From the link: "Alex Bores worked at Palantir for a few years. I think that many of Palantir’s activities are pretty evil. That said, as far as I know, Bores did not work on any such projects while at Palantir, and he says that he left Palantir over concerns about its collaboration with ICE."
Working for Thiel for five years, until 20-goddamn-19, and then leaving because of some very vague discomfort over "collaboration with ICE," and *then* immediately running for office as a Democrat raises some obvious questions, such as: "Are you stupid?" and "Do you think I am stupid?" This is a gigantic scarlet letter and I would need to hear an answer, from him, that is specific and convincing. So would the average Manhattan primary voter.
I'm sure he speaks fluent quokkese, but in a seat as safely blue as this one I see little reason to risk a Tricia Cotham situation.
"raises some obvious questions, such as: "Are you stupid?" and "Do you think I am stupid?"
I suppose it would be uncharitable of me to suggest "never underestimate the contempt some candidates hold the ordinary voter in" 🤣
Sounds a bit of a Vicar of Bray situation: Thiel and Palantir have influence? Play up that connection! Thiel and Palantir are now Big Evil? Play it down! Pick issue that I can be on the right side of - ICE? Okay, ICE it is! Boo hiss ICE, right, my fellow kids?
Two things, one minor for Ozy, one important for everyone:
There is no "Department of War". Congress decides what those departments are called, and it has not passed any act which would change the name of the Department of Defense. I respectfully suggest that you choose your words and phrases accordingly to avoid implicitly endorsing Trump's insanity.
Also, I don't know whether this is applicable to any of these specific races, but there can be high leverage in donating to a Libertarian candidate in the same race if you want a Democrat to win it. If you assume diminishing returns on funds, a Libertarian with far less money can sometimes, with the marginal dollar, pull more votes on net from the Republican (which, statistically, is almost always what happens) than the Democrat can. Note that it is not hypothetical that this can be decisive: check the result in OH-09 in 2024. This strategy has the added benefit of incentivizing the Republicans to lessen their opposition to electoral reform (replacing FPTP with RCV or MMP).
(As my username suggests, I do have an ulterior motive in making the second suggestion, but as someone who substantially prefers moderate Dems to MAGA Republicans, I honestly think my reasoning is sound and our interests are aligned here.)
I liked effective altruism more when it was estimating QALYs saved per dollar spent on a specific health intervention, and not on “assuming US liberal democracy is the most important thing in the world, and assuming you subscribe to (non expert) Matt Yglesias’s theories of winning elections, here are the politicians to give your money to”.
> Candidates, even in safe seats, are expected to fundraise “dues” for their party to help their party win more contested elections. Candidates who want powerful positions like committee chairs are expected to raise even more. So donating to your candidate gives them more influence.
My understanding is the amount they can give to other candidates or the party out of hard money is token ($2k-$5k), the dues come mostly out of leadership PACs (which are soft money)
There are many things wrong with the political assumptions in this post, but thankfully the nonsense is clear in two consecutive paragraphs:
"Obviously, you shouldn’t take a position that makes the Trump administration more effective at overthrowing American democracy. But the first Trump administration was an ordinary Republican administration because a huge number of policymakers, advisors, and civil servants thwarted Trump’s authoritarian instincts"
You support unelected bureaucrats having power to maintain the policies they want regardless of the results of elections. But surely you support it because they would stand up for freeedom?
"keeping vaccines somewhat more accessible, making AI regulation somewhat saner, preserving whatever scraps of foreign aid they can"
So this is what you think oposing "authoritarianism" means : ensuring state intervention and regulation.
Your piece barely mentions the policies where the republicans do want intervention and regulation. You want progressives to maintain state control through unelected bureaucrats, and do so in the name of "liberal democracy"
The bit where people are opposing authoritarianism is the bit you left out! But foreign aid, vaccines, and AI regulation are also important issues.
I am baffled by the claim that it is state intervention and regulation to think the federal government should continue to approve vaccines. If we abolished the FDA, any company could put out whatever vaccines they want.
I didn't mention other stuff because I don't give a shit about it compared to democracy, USAID, and AI. For example, Republicans are anti-trans, but as a trans person if polling suggested that a candidate punching a trans person in the face would flip a House seat blue, I would be the first in line to get my teeth knocked out.
"If we abolished the FDA, any company could put out whatever vaccines they want." So yes, you defend regulation. Unless you do want the abolition of the FDA?
I am not saying that requiring state approval for vaccines or regulating AI is a bad thing, I am saying that this is a regulation and that you defend it in the name of freedom and opposing "authoritarianism". That is why I call it nonsense.
Ozy is arguing for the FDA approving vaccines in a world where FDA approval is required, over the FDA not approving vaccines in a world where FDA approval is required. This constitutes fewer regulatory restrictions.
A hypothetical where FDA approvals aren't required at all is irrelevant to this situation.
New EA aligned research org powerfordemocracies.org has a cost effectiveness breakdown based on ITN and recommends the non profit Freedom2Vote with $94 to increase a voter. IMHO that's more aligned to how EAs would think about impact on the margin.
Generally agree with this, and those of us who work in this space professionally (and think in this way) generally kind of maintain a "supply curve" of different fundable opportunities at different prices (which, of course, can change *within* each opportunity at different budgets). However, there is a massive and important universe of things that can't be measured - things that potentially are more effective than single tactics like Freedom2Vote which can be measured - and so we also shouldn't fall into the "looking under the lamppost because that's where the light is" problem.
Just as an obvious example, a large funder could be thinking right now about ways to increase the chances that the ‘28 Dem primary nominates the best and most electable candidate. You can’t run an RCT on that, but it plausibly dwarfs Freedom2Vote (and I’m a huge fan of Freedom2Vote!).
A better way to convince EA minded donors will be a prioritization framework comparing these candidates against others as well as Freedom2Vote with the funding in margin. I'm sure the industry has some of these supply curve data and analyses and if they're willing to share that could potentially convince more EA minded donors. But in general if you claim of the potential to have a bigger impact without a quant analysis of how much that could be, it's harder to convince EAs.
Orange man is obviously bad (anybody saying otherwise is a psycho or a moron), but he didn't get into the White House twice randomly. Both the Dem and Rep establishments (and their analogues in the rest of the west) are rotten to the core, in thrall to absurd bankrupt ideologies and mainly concerned with zero-sum status games. This state of affairs is unsustainable and deteriorating, and the likes of Trump getting elected is just a symptom. Getting a couple marginally more sane (even granting that they are indeed such) people in office won't change the overall trajectory of the civilization (at best slightly delaying the collapse), and EAs would do well not to fool themselves otherwise.
if you believe that AI may soon come, delaying civilization collapse is pretty important, actually. and even if not, delaying civilization collapse is much better then... what is the suggested alternative? do nothing and watch Rome burning?
>what is the suggested alternative? do nothing and watch Rome burning?
Well, the EA calling is to look for "important, tractable, neglected" interventions, and who's to say that none remain that would be enough to avert the collapse, instead of slightly delaying it?
well, i personally believe AI is a big deal. but i did think a lot about the negative direction of the Western Civilization, and i mostly don't think it's neglected. i also don't expect collapse but slow failing, and i don't sure this disagreement is important, and also i'm not very sure it will not be collapse.
but, what can we do? my own answers are not neglected, nor are they EA-flavored. oppose polarization, oppose Woke, oppose Trump, oppose Facebook Twitter TikTok etc. those are not neglected causes, those are not examples of pulling the rope sideways. those are also not legible interventions. and legibility id important part if EA.
(i also not sure the collapse can be prevented, in the worlds when there is no singularity. but i also don't think we can build The Foundations, first and second. to shorten the time of barbarianism)
I think that the current crop of ML-based AI is overhyped, as usual. Even so, it's at least a medium-sized deal. AI in general is certainly important in the long term, but our understanding of it seems to be even more lacking than of human matters.
>but, what can we do?
The stuff that David Chapman of Meaningness goes on about looks important and neglected, for example. I'm less optimistic than him that it's tractable, largely because it somehow still remains obscure after all these years despite his best efforts (some strong antimemes, those).
>those are also not legible interventions. and legibility id important part if EA.
Doing research tabooed by the current ideological academic dogmas should be palatable enough to EAs, in principle. I suspect that by and large they (most importantly, the big funders) aren't up to seriously defying those dogmas, unfortunately.
my own opinion is that the attempts to do AI research probably made the end of the world come sooner.
there are a lot of things that included under the EA umbrella, and i, personally, see the legibility as very important. there should also be movent that try illegibile things that really important. just. when i look around it doesn't look like people who tried that succeeded. there is justified skepticism around such attempts.
i totally for trying that, but i don't think it should try as EA, but as something else.
there is one serious founder and he is way to worried about being respectable and palatable to the progressives, so, not from the main founding source.
and it's possible founding without that, AI doing that.
i don't think there are that much people who think that AI is not the main problem, and also civilization collapse, and also there is something legible enough to do.
although, i you are commenting exactly on a post that trying to do exactly just. so. there is a movement in that direction.
but it doesn't look like this movement can avoid the zero sum game of politics and tug sideways. which... if i live in a world when politics are needed to avoid collapse i want to believe that etc, but. also, all the pessimism regarding such interventions and them not being neglected remain.
I like this post, especially the sober Trump evaluation.
I do feel there's some validity to the idea that "There should be an AI risk evaluation committee" really means "I want to be paid to be on a committee and doomsay about AI." But it's a toss-up between who should be trusted less, them or the Tech-Billionaires.
I overall like this post and I find the arguments that electing Democrats is really important and donating to strong candidates helps achieve that goal convincing, but it doesn’t really make a case for those donations being more cost-effective than donating to AI safety orgs or GiveWell. Do you know of any analysis which tries to directly compare the expected effects of spending a dollar on the most important elections to spending it on e.g. malaria nets? Or do you have any arguments for why we should expect political donations to have competitive cost-effectiveness without that?
The AI safety people I know mostly believe that donating to political candidates is at current margins better than donating to AI safety organizations because the lowest-hanging fruit for AI safety organizations has generally been picked by Coefficient Giving, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, etc. (If you have idiosyncratic views of how AI safety works, that might not be true.)
I don't think it's possible to directly compare without making up numbers in a way that I think is more confusing than enlightening. But you can yourself make up numbers about how much you think it might cost to flip a vote, the chance that the Democrats would bring back USAID, and the disvalue associated with America becoming an illiberal autocracy. They're probably as good as anyone else's.
I agree with this, though there are some people who I think have tried (or are trying) to put some more effort into thinking this through (with the same conclusion).
Any political analysis that says "politician X is universally bad" is pretty much guaranteed to be poorly thought out and driven by some kind of hysteria rather than rational thinking.
Trump 2 is so far looking very good for American democracy. Lets go through some of your claims:
> Trump is taking control of traditionally independent positions in the civil service—from prosecutors to the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics—and trying to fill them with political loyalists who will do his bidding.
Think for a moment about what you are saying here. I remember a time when Republicans thought President Biden was going senile and that the deep state was secretly running everything behind the scenes. The mainstream narrative at the time tried to frame these Republicans as crazy. Then it became undeniable that President Biden was going senile, and we never got a straight answer about who had been running things behind the scenes. Now you are telling us that of course the deep state is running everything behind the scenes, and that it is somehow a threat to democracy for the democratically elected leader of our government to try to run things instead?!?!
This I think is our biggest crux. The idea that any bureaucrat can exercise part of the awesome power of the government without political accountability is horrifying to me. The narrative I was given at every level of our education system, from elementary school through law school, was that it was ok for prosecutors and bureaucrats to exercise that power, because they all answer to the president, who in turn answers to the voters. That was what I read in the United States Constitution when it said that all of the executive power is vested in the president. That was the thing that was supposed to safeguard us from bureaucrats and prosecutors becoming dictators. Now we are being told that that isn't true, that that was never true, that these prosecutors and bureaucrats have been acting as dictators all along. I want my democracy back! And Trump is fighting to get me my democracy back. In the long run this may do more to strengthen democracy than his attempted coup did to damage it.
> He has used retaliatory arrests and prosecutions against people who investigated him.
There has definitely been damage to democracy here, I grant, but it was the Democrats who started it, not Trump. You remember the prosecution of Trump over the Stormy Daniels thing? A prosecution that in normal times nobody would have bothered with even if it had been legal, and that was definitely not legal because it violated the statute of limitations. The Democrats crossed a huge red line there and took our democracy in a very dark direction. I wish we had a president who could pull us back from that, and Trump sadly but unsurprisingly is not that man, but I also can't really blame him for playing by the same rules that were used against him.
> He has openly defied as many as one in three court orders against him.
I don't believe this for a second. The first couple times I saw these claims I looked into them and they did not hold up. I'm no longer taking the time to look in to each individual case, and I certainly am not going to give the Washington Post my money, but if you have a particular case in mind that you think is a particularly strong example of this I am willing to look into it.
> He has broken the law to avoid spending money allocated by Congress.
Yea, that's not great. You know what else is not great? His predecessor breaking the law to avoid collecting debts that former college students owed to the American people. Again, this just looks like Trump playing by the same rules the Democrats played by the last time they were in power.
> He has taken power from the states—most famously by deploying California’s National Guard without the consent of the governor of California.
The constitution allocates power over the military, including the national guard, to the President, not to the governors. And it is sometimes right and proper for a president to use that power to keep the peace and enforce the law. I recall another Republican president famously deploying the 101st Airborn Division to Little Rock, AK, a decision now rightly celebrated in the history books. It may have been unwise or even illegal for Trump to deploy the guard under the current circumstances, but it was definitely not an invasion of state power.
> He has also targeted the institutions of civil society that are supposed to check the power of the president: the press, law firms, universities.
He has been more political than some other presidents in choosing which elements of the press to give access to, but access has always been the president's to give. Biden took advantage of this to hide from the press when he was going senile, and nobody said he was targeting the press.
It is the sacred right of every litigant to choose their own lawyers, and fire their own lawyers, for whatever petty and childish reasons they choose. As head of the executive branch, it is Trump's sacred right to choose the executive branches lawyers, and fire the executive branches lawyers, for whatever petty and childish reasons he chooses. That's all he's done.
The universities were NEVER supposed to be a check on the power of the president. That is a horrifying misuse of those institutions, and the reason the president is rightly coming down on them. Universities are supposed to pursue truth outside the realm of politics, and they are supposed to do so in a way that is welcoming to people of all political persuasions, all races, all sexes, and all religions, and that does not take sides on political issues or politicians. That was the promise that universities made to the American people in exchange for the incredible degree of financial support and independence they have received since ww2. The Universities broke that contract. And that sucks. I really wish they hadn't, because they were important institutions, and they have left a vacancy that will be difficult to fill. But what is happening now is the natural and foreseeable consequence of that choice.
> Most frighteningly, Trump has continued to say he won the 2020 election. He pardoned the January 6 rioters who, again, tried to perform a coup against the U.S. government to make him president. He has targeted the people who prosecuted the January 6 rioters. He has hinted publicly at wanting to run for an unconstitutional third term.
Yea, you are definitely right that in past generations attempting a coup would have been disqualifying. I wish it still was. This is definitely the thing that gives me most pause about Trump, and the dominant reason I voted against him in 2024. But the American people have spoken, and they clearly do not regard it as disqualifying. As for a third term, I'd be shocked if it gets any real traction. And if, somehow, it does happen, I'll join the resistance then.
If there is an EA case against Trump, I think it would have to be that all this democracy stuff is too speculative and uncertain to satisfy the rigorous epistemological standards we demand of ourselves as EAs, and the damage Trump has done on foreign aid and foreign policy more generally is worth fighting against. There is a whole argument that by pulling the US back from its traditional role as world cop, Trump has significantly increased the risk of ww3 breaking out, and the catastrophic and existential risks that go along with that. You should be making that argument!
A lot of this is true. You might look at, say, selective prosecutions of companies for discriminating against blacks and women but not against whites and men and figure 'sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander'. And as you point out Biden's revocation of student debt was illegal too. And I agree the universities have become mouthpieces of the left, destroying their wider credibility, and that's part of the reason we're seeing such a huge right-wing reaction now.
However, we're seeing things like the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopping collecting data, the CDC coming out against vaccines, and giant tariffs and actions that enrage longtime allies like Europe and Canada. This is doing serious damage to state capacity, and as a 'liberal nationalist', to quote Eric Kauffman, this is bad for the country long-term. Overall increases in the level of corruption will take a long time to undo, and I don't think we'll ever get as close to Canada as we were pre-Trump.
I definitely agree they crossed the line going after him over Stormy Daniels. I don't really care about that. However, he did try to launch a coup on January 6, and I wish they'd stuck to going after him on that.
I think the USA should stay a democracy. We weren't perfect, but we were reasonably close to the democratic end of the spectrum throughout our history, and we're likely to get incompetent kleptocrats if we go autocratic. The Chinese have a long tradition of competent bureaucracy checking and moderating the emperor and of the duties of ministers. It's not perfect either, but there's something recognizably Chinese after 2000 years and 7+ dynasties. I doubt we will be so lucky. As for the Russians, well, they've long recognized whatever their nation's strengths it's always been poorly run.
EA assumes all lives are of equal worth, so the damage caused by the end of foreign aid is more than enough from the EA point of view I think. (Personally I thought it was useful as an instrument of soft power.)
>Now you are telling us that of course the deep state is running everything behind the scenes, and that it is somehow a threat to democracy for the democratically elected leader of our government to try to run things instead?!?!
Yes, unironically. The civil service is intentionally set up to be somewhat independent of the President. Like, we specifically passed laws to make it harder for the President to fire people on a whim or to hand out civil service jobs to cronies, and it's worked this way for over a hundred years. There are multiple reasons for this, but the most important currently are as a check against corruption, and as a way to protect subject matter experts from politics.
Or to put it another way, it is a bad thing that Trump can threaten people at the DOJ with firing if they fail to indict the people that he wants, and it is a bad thing that he can threaten the head of the BLS with firing if the latest jobs report isn't good enough for him. Those jobs have to be politically neutral to function, and they can't be if the President can freely hire and fire them.
>It is the sacred right of every litigant to choose their own lawyers, and fire their own lawyers, for whatever petty and childish reasons they choose.
The DOJ is not the President's personal lawyers, they are the *government's* lawyers. And the fact that Trump is confusing the two is precisely the problem! You can't get rule of law if access to the justice system is dictated by a single person's whims.
The Executive branch is not supposed to be an extension of the President's personal will. It's supposed to execute the laws that Congress created, with the President overseeing and managing that process.
there is one point i argue about in context of Israel and now i extrapolate to USA:
There are two ways to understand the word "democracy". The Rule Of The People, and Balances And Brakes.
i think about it as Democracy and Liberalism but i don't think it's proper translation to English.
there are people who see Democracy as the system of governance when people decide by voting, when people are the sovereign, and restriction on it is Undemocratic.
and there are people who see Democracy as system of governance that strongly restricting what the people can decide to do, when the restrictions are the heart of the system. you surely see a lot of this desire to restrict in USA governance!
for people in the second group, the fact that the president is not above the law is important part of democracy. rule that say, for example, execute all Jews, is Undemocratic, even if 80% of the people vote for it.
for the first grope, the decision of 80% of the people is Democracy, and preventing it is Undemocratic.
and instead of talking about this important disagreement, people don't notice it, because those two different principles referred by the same word, Democracy. or even worst, notice and then try to win the semantic game, as if it will let them win the actual game.
(I first read about that in this blog, that is in Hebrew: https://dannyorbach.com/tag/%D7%91%D7%96%D7%9B%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%90%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%A1%D7%98%D7%95%D7%A7%D7%A8%D7%98%D7%99%D7%94/ )
I think you are being too charitable. I think it is true that there are sometimes conflicts between democracy and other values. Some limitations on democracy are good. That is the point of our bill of rights and our equal protection clause. Killing all the Jews would surely be bad, even if democracy were to demand it.
Where I think we disagree is that I don't see the ambiguity in the English language that you do. "Democracy", as I see it, unambiguously refers to rule by the people. Before Trump, and to a large extent even just before Trump 2, that was how it was used. We are now in a world where a lot of liberals, unable to accept that Trump won a legitimate democratic election, twice, are now using the word "democracy" in a dishonest way - they have started using it to refer to "balances and breaks" as you call it, to restrictions. They are trying to challenge democracy because they don't like the leader democracy gave us, and they aren't willing to admit that fact. That is what is going on here. And I will not play into it.
Your problem is that you have bought into the simplistic argument used by dictators the world over: "I won an election, therefore the democratic thing is for me to be able to do whatever I want." This is technically true for a certain definition of democracy, but tends to result in cataclysmically bad government. This also tends to be undemocratic in the sense that it results in outcomes disfavored by most people, like massive economic damage and restriction of freedom. The idea that democracy must be tempered by checks and balances is not new, indeed you may find the phrase used in the Federalist Paper titled “The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments.”
To pick one example of the principle, consider racial segregation. In your sense, Jim Crow laws were democratic in the sense that a majority of voters had voted for them at one point. In another sense, they were undemocratic because by suppressing the vote of a significant portion of the population they damaged the ability of the electoral system to accurately judge what the majority of people wanted. This is why we have a Constitution in the first place: so that one 51% election victory cannot overturn the foundations of society.
The American left is quite aware that Trump won the popular vote (this time at least). The most popular topic of inter-left discourse right now is "Why does everyone hate us more than the most contemptible man alive, is it the fault of the moderates or the progressives?" which very much accepts the turn of public opinion in its premise. The main linguistic compression here is that "democracy" is typically used to mean "liberal democracy", the version of democracy that's patched to avoid demagogue strongmen ruining everything, because that's the version this country has run on since its foundation. More detailed coverage of this topic can be found here: astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra
Don't put words in my mouth. I never said democracy was the only value or that Trump should be able to do anything he wants. I'm all for checks and balances, I just don't think Ozy pointed to any actual issues of checks and balances, and I gave my reasons why. If you disagree with any of the points I made, feel free to respond to them.
On the topic of an independent civil service checking the power of the president, you said:
> That was what I read in the United States Constitution when it said that all of the executive power is vested in the president. That was the thing that was supposed to safeguard us from bureaucrats and prosecutors becoming dictators. Now we are being told that that isn't true, that that was never true, that these prosecutors and bureaucrats have been acting as dictators all along. I want my democracy back! And Trump is fighting to get me my democracy back.
I am telling you that the civil service is one of those checks and balances that have always been a core part of our government and you should not be cheering for attacks on its independence. Many of these offices are appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate and have term lengths that extend over multiple presidential terms. That the occupants of these offices must be judged acceptable by at least two elected bodies and don't all change the moment a new administration takes power is the intended behavior, especially for offices like the Bureau of Labor statistics where it is quite hard to imagine why someone would need a dedicated partisan in place if they weren't plotting to falsify data. In the case of the Federal Reserve, an institution that Trump has often made noise about overtaking, its independence is so important that you can literally see national inflation rates fall in proportion to the independence of a country's central bank: https://www.stlouisfed.org/about-us/resources/why-fed-is-well-designed-central-bank/central-bank-independence-inflation
To go after some more points:
> He has been more political than some other presidents in choosing which elements of the press to give access to, but access has always been the president's to give.
What news source gave you the impression that his only sin was controlling access? He and his allies have openly implied retribution against outlets that air negative coverage of his administration in roughly the same manner as a mob boss remarking that it would be a shame if somebody's house burned down, and many have capitulated. Other administrations did not do this.
> You remember the prosecution of Trump over the Stormy Daniels thing? A prosecution that in normal times nobody would have bothered with even if it had been legal, and that was definitely not legal because it violated the statute of limitations.
This is straightforwardly false. The New York statute of limitations timer was frozen for all crimes that took place in the state over COVID. Trump's crimes were covered by this exactly the same way as those of any other citizen. It's odd to pursue such a relatively minor offense when going after a serial fraudster, but hardly unprecedented. We got Al Capone on tax evasion. It would be preferable for the federal government to have imprisoned him for, say, aiding and abetting enemies of the state by interfering in the defense of Ukraine to extort them into launching a phony investigation of a political enemy. Alas, Biden's attorney general slow-walked the investigation out of excessive caution and the state of New York was left to pick up the slack.
> Yea, that's not great. You know what else is not great? His predecessor breaking the law to avoid collecting debts that former college students owed to the American people. Again, this just looks like Trump playing by the same rules the Democrats played by the last time they were in power.
I will happily concede that both parties have forfeited the responsibilities of Congress by shoving more and more decisions onto the executive branch, unbalancing the structure of our government and setting us up for this exact eventuality. However, a sense of proportion is required to accurately assess the situation. Democrats make relatively small fudges to sneak their social programs through a deadlocked legislative branch and when the Supreme Court tells them to stop, they do that. Republicans cut entire departments and fire swathes of staff attending such essential functions as managing the nuclear weapons stockpile without a plausible nonpartisan excuse and play "I can't hear you" when the courts tell them that they aren't allowed to send citizens to foreign detention camps without trial. They are not the same.
> And it is sometimes right and proper for a president to use that power to keep the peace and enforce the law.
Are the current circumstances similar to the Little Rock case? Are the states in question guilty of brazenly defying both federal law and the Constitution regarding equal treatment of citizens under the law? Or has the president ordered the deployment of the National Guard in cases where there is not actually an extraordinary threat to citizens that local law enforcement has been unable to address? Given the answers to these questions, it is clear that this is in fact an unusual seizure of power.
> The universities were NEVER supposed to be a check on the power of the president.
Given that all American public universities are state-operated institutions and that states are granted authority to use their institutions as they see fit so long as they violate neither federal law nor the Constitution, they *are* meant to be a check on the power of the president to the extent that the president is not supposed to be able to tell them to do whatever he wants, the same as with all other state-level institutions. More broadly, universities compose an important part of the intellectual culture of the country and as such are an important component of the above-mentioned liberal democratic system. You are right that they have applied that part of their mandate far too broadly in the last ten years and have sufficiently damaged their reputation to the point where it is much more difficult to defend them their role. However, this slipping of discipline will not be corrected by brazen extortion tactics, nor is it good for you to shrug your shoulders at this.
> I am telling you that the civil service is one of those checks and balances that have always been a core part of our government and you should not be cheering for attacks on its independence.
The last time I took a US government class the phrase "checks and balances" referred to interactions between the three branches of government, not to anything happening within one branch. A year ago I had never once heard of the civil service being regarded as part of checks and balances or as a check on the President's power. This seems to be an idea that has been cooked up, or at least gone public, largely as a partisan means of attacking Trump. And I find it absolutely horrifying. Because if the civil service is a check on the president, then who is checking the civil service? Who is stopping the civil servants from becoming oppressive dictators? The president is at least elected by the people and serving a fixed term, and high enough profile that if he screws up too badly congress can actually take time to impeach him. None of that is true of a civil servant.
The design of our government has always been that the bureaucrats would be accountable to the President, and through him to the people. We were never supposed to have civil servants insulated from presidential control. Our constitution is clear on this point. That presidential control of the bureaucracy is one of the core safeguards of democracy that prevents oppression.
For the BLS, going directly to firing was one of Trumps dumber decisions, and that is saying something. But the point of presidential control is not always to have a partisan in control. It is much more often to have some kind of accountability. In the case of BLS, there was a genuine problem. The corrections that BLS was publishing to initial jobs numbers were predictable, which is not a property that errors and their corrections should have. The BLS was fucking up in not updating their methodology to account for the predictable errors in their initial estimates. And when any agency fucks up, it is the job of the president to direct them to do better. And for a president to do that, the president necessarily has to have the power to fire people at the agency, up to and including the director of the agency.
For the fed, that is the hardest part of the bureaucracy for me to deal with for sure. There is an argument that it is special because of the history of the national bank in the early US. And there is an economic argument that our situation is already so fucked going forward that the fed won't be able to do much and therefor doesn't matter any more. But really if we need an executive branch agency insulated from presidential control, the only legal way to do it is to amend the constitution. I think there is a strong argument that not amending the constitution to create the fed was a royal fuck up. If we really think an independent fed is necessary, we should do that now.
> This is straightforwardly false. The New York statute of limitations timer was frozen for all crimes that took place in the state over COVID.
You are mistaken. The tolling for covid was only a few months, not nearly enough. The prosecution charged it was a felony to get around the statute of limitations, which requires intent to defraud, which they never had a plausible theory of.
Even aside from the statute of limitations issue, the prosecution itself was still a huge violation of democratic norms. All he did was obscure a perfectly legal but slightly embarrassing payment in the accounting. That is the sort of thing rich and powerful people do every day, and nobody bats an eye. To only charge your political opponents for such a thing is not compatible with a properly functioning democracy.
You may be right that he should have been prosecuted more aggressively for actually bad stuff he did, I don't have a confident view on that, but I do know that using an illegal prosecution of conduct that in all other circumstances is treated as legal is not an ok way to deal with that.
> Are the current circumstances similar to the Little Rock case?
Of course not. If you read what I wrote, I was very explicit that I am not sure Trump was justified in these deployments. But thinking he was wrong to exercise his power in this case is one thing, claiming that he is seizing someone elses power, as both you and Ozy have done, is quite another, and I see no plausible argument for that.
> the president is not supposed to be able to tell them to do whatever he wants, the same as with all other state-level institutions.
You are ignoring the relevant facts. Every public university in the country, and almost all of the private ones, take federal money. Since the 1960s, that money has come with both explicit and implicit expectations as to how universities would operate. Universities could have turned down that money, and chose not to. The explicit legal requirements include nondiscrimination with respect to race and sex and religion, and much of the current controversy is about the fact that the universities have failed, often very intentionally, to meet that requirement.
> More broadly, universities compose an important part of the intellectual culture of the country and as such are an important component of the above-mentioned liberal democratic system. You are right that they have applied that part of their mandate far too broadly in the last ten years and have sufficiently damaged their reputation to the point where it is much more difficult to defend them their role. However, this slipping of discipline will not be corrected by brazen extortion tactics, nor is it good for you to shrug your shoulders at this.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "intellectual culture". I don't think it was ever a proper role of a university to shape anyone's political views. Their roles are to discover what is objectively true, and then teach people what is true and train them for the work force. They have obviously deviated from that, as you seem to agree. But what you label as "extortion", I see as consequences. You can't make them bad just by applying a scary word to them. What else would you have the administration do to correct the situation?
I, personally, find Semantic Arguments as confusion at best, and attempts to Sneak In Connotations at worst. I even less equipped to talk about semantics in English, my third language.
but I have one friend that honestly see Checks And Balances as important part of the definition of Democracy, and i don't find it surprising, as i, too, learned that in school. you probably learned something else.
generally speaking, it's the Progressives who choose Sneaking In Connotation as major strategy, and if you will claim that people who believe that is instance of movement believing its own propaganda, you probably right.
and yet, the conclusion remain the same - you just waste time, arguing about semantics instead of content. instead of arguing what Democracy is, you can say that the people are the sovereign, and that the majority should rule, and not some aristocratic minority.
i'm all in favor of naming the thing, the more the better. what can be destroyed by naming it should. but the way to do it is by pointing the substance, not arguing semantics. there are already too much of the debate in the third level of simulacra.
You don't have to engage the semantics if you don't want to, especially if English isn't your first language. It is impressive that you've learned a second and third language so well.
I've been watching liberals try to win arguments by redefining words rather than with substance for well over a decade at this point. It is actually one of the big things that started to push me away from the liberal end of the political spectrum. A naive younger version of myself was sometimes tricked by their dishonest use of words and made some bad mistakes because of it. One of the things I have learned is that we must call out liberals (anyone really, but liberals are the ones I see doing it) when they try to win arguments by redefining words rather than with evidence and reason. If we let them control the language, then they will control the narrative, while being disconnected from facts, and they will thereby do a lot of harm.
I also do think I pointed to a lot of substance. Do you not agree?
In my model, the Progressives (that was liberal, once upon a time, but stopped) tried a bunch of things - semantics, sneaking in connotations, and most importantly, social censorship: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/02/social-censorship-the-first-offender-model/
and it look like it work, until, suddenly, it stopped working. it turned out that people didn't really changed their minds, just avoided to voice their wrongthoughts, and the backlash Trump brought showed the result much worse then if no such attempt was made.
so now my model say that Semantic Arguments don't work. that it's a trap, and that it's error try to copy the Woke here as if it worked. it's an error that shouldn't be copied.
the answer to wordplay is not another wordplay, but using Asymmetric Weapon - pointing on the substance.
and from practical point of view, i saw this happen again and again - the discussion derailed to "what is true democracy" discussions, with various historical tangents, that are no one crux and change no one's mind. a lot of going in circles without touching the true disagreement - to what extend the people are allowed to do what they chose, and to what extend the aristocracy should be able to prevent them from doing that?
you pointed to substances, but you do that in an way that predictable lead people to react to the semantics, not the substance.
basically, i think your tactic is wrong. so i try to explain why and convince you to change it.
I can't make US political donations, but consider adding Manny Rutinel, running for Colorado's 8th district, to the list? I once had a conversation with him about farmed animal welfare, he helped pass State AI law (not sure how good it was, but an indication that he cares https://x.com/MannyRutinel/status/1798086169290498395?s=20 ) and he's running in a purple district.
Very thorough and well-considered.
This is one of those times where I have to decide whether I'm an ex-liberal angry at feminism, or an ex-conservative angry at corruption.
Honestly, I'll probably do nothing because I'm afraid of retaliation by the administration and I'm a coward.
I want to say I really admire your focus on pragmatism over ideological purity. Yes, it is a good thing to work in the current administration if it means you can push back on antivax!
About the AI... this is one of those things where I don't understand the tech enough to have an opinion, and everyone who does either seems to have a political ax to grind or investments in the companies.
Let me see if I can make a mostly apolitical, non-technical argument in favor of being careful about AI.
PART 1 (assumption). We might be close to actually building something which makes humans economically and evolutionarily obsolete.
This is difficult to visualize or believe, because it has never happened before. But imagine if we *did* build something that could do any task that a Stanford graduate could do for $1/hour: Software engineering, hardware engineering, basic science, being a (good) CEO, operating a robot, designing a better robot, winning an election, lobbying for legislation, consolidating power. Basically, any human task, done well, for $1/hour. Really think about what this deeply strange world would look like.
(If you like, imagine the AIs themselves making decisions, or imagine small numbers of powerful human beings controlling the AIs. It makes less difference than you'd think.)
The AI safety argument rests on the idea that we are potentially "0-2 major breakthroughs" away from this, plus some engineering work. ("Major breakthrough" here means "a paper like 'Attention is All You Need'", which typically come along every 5-10 years.) Sometime between, say, 2028 and 2050, human labor would become absolutely, completely, permanently worthless. Humans would be as economically competitive as chimpanzees.
Will are the odds this will actually happen? Experts disagree. But the AI safety argument is based on the assumption that there's a significant chance this might be a real thing that actually happens within our lifetimes. If you don't buy this idea, then nothing about AI safety will actually make sense.
PART 2 (argument). If a powerful entity and a powerless entity want the same limited resources, the powerless entity is likely to have a bad day.
Evidence: History, economics, colonialism, war, politics, etc.
If it's possible to get any kind of skilled or unskilled labor for $1/hour, then ordinary humans are screwed. Maybe the AIs have their own goals. Maybe the AIs all obediently listen to Billionaire X or Politician Y. But no matter who is in charge, every ordinary human consuming resources is "wasting" resources that the AIs could use better to accomplish the goals of whoever is in charge. The ordinary humans have *nothing* to offer. And if the ordinary humans revolt, the AIs are *also* better at war.
Even if this situation works out for 5 years or 20 years, it's not stable.
So that's my argument: If you make the human mind economically obsolete in every important niche, then it's likely very hard to stop economics and evolution from doing their thing.
But if you don't accept PART 1 (human obsolescence) as a potential risk, then PART 2 (obsolete things tend to get brutally marginalized) doesn't follow.
(There are other possible takes, including "humans suck, let's take a chance on the AIs that replace us." I don't plan to address these right now.)
It is all speculation, of course. But I do like the imagined world where an AI can replace the CEO for the equivalent of $1/hr, but the electrician/plumber for the factory is still irreplaceable human labour. What kind of strange new world would *that* be? The plumber now gets CEO (of the past period) wages? Blue collar is the new high status?
That's quite reasonable and I've often thought the same. I just feel like a lot hinges on Part 1, and we generally haven't seen the computers be quite as good at blue-collar or pink-collar (service) labor as they are at white-collar lately. Frankly I'm quite pessimistic about the future--I think the billionaires own everything and will just let us all starve.
And on rationalist or rationalist-adjacent blogs I generally assume almost everyone is better informed about this AI stuff than me, so I stick to other topics.
That's exactly how I feel about AI too
"Effective altruists may remember the case of Carrick Flynn, where excessive soft money from FTX’s SuperPAC may have made voters see him as an out-of-touch “crypto candidate” being forced on them by Sam Bankman-Fried."
While that certainly didn't help and gave his opponents a wonderful angle of attack, the main problem was that the campaign was very poorly thought out. Caveat before I start in on the criticism: I'm not American and all I know about the district and the candidates is from looking them up online.
Flynn's campaign was designed to appeal to EAs - get me elected, I will go to Washington to work on the very important issue of pandemic prevention. May well be a very important issue, but he was asking the people in the new district which, so far as I could make out, was more or less an even split between the urban/college towns (which I assumed could be relied on to vote for Flynn) and the farming/logging/rural areas, which I assumed were not such a safe bet.
Okay, those are the voters, now who are the other candidates in the race? And the moment I saw that one of them had union backing, I went "okay, she's gonna win".
Why? Because imagine this:
"Hello, candidates looking for my vote. I am a farmer/farm labourer/logger/working in the timber industry/other lower middle-class occupation. Tell me about yourselves!"
Flynn: "Hi. I'm a native of Oregon who grew up hardscrabble just like you, Ordinary Salt of the Earth Voter!"
Voter: "Well, that's great! So where have you been all this time?"
Flynn: "The second I could, I got out of here as fast as my little leggies could carry me and went to college, then I lived overseas. I'm only coming back here for the election, which I hope to win in order to forward my personal important issues!"
(In case you think I exaggerate here, this article should make you wince, if you have any notion of appeals to locals: https://archive.ph/TzS0h "Carrick Flynn, who left Oregon after college and has primarily lived overseas since then, returned to his home state in 2020 and, in his first bid for public office, wants to represent the new 6th District in Congress")
Voter: "Okay, I guess... so, if I elect you, what is your programme?"
Flynn: "Glad you asked! If elected, I hope to get out of here as fast as my little leggies will carry me to Washington, where I can work on very important things. Very. Important. Things."
Voter: "Oh, like taxation on my income, and boosting rural employment, and stuff?"
Flynn: "Ha ha ha, no. That's small potatoes and completely selfish thinking on your part, Salt of the Earth! No, I'm going to talk to people who talk to people who will talk to Important People about Important Things like pandemic prevention".
Voter: "I guess that is important. It doesn't help me pay my mortgage or work out what health insurance I can afford, but sure. Sounds very... Big City Interest Issues. Candidate No. 2, tell me about yourself?"
Andrea Salinas: "Hi! I've been involved in local government here and was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 2018. My dad is an immigrant, he was a police officer, I come from a union family, and I have been endorsed by several labour unions. If elected, I will fight for your interests, including farm aid packages, support for organic and speciality crop growers, rural mental health services, and a slate of others: https://salinas.house.gov/media/press-releases"
Voter: "Okay, thank you both, you've given me a lot to think about. Uh, that's 'Salinas' on the ballot paper, right? Yeah, bye!"
From the link: "Alex Bores worked at Palantir for a few years. I think that many of Palantir’s activities are pretty evil. That said, as far as I know, Bores did not work on any such projects while at Palantir, and he says that he left Palantir over concerns about its collaboration with ICE."
Working for Thiel for five years, until 20-goddamn-19, and then leaving because of some very vague discomfort over "collaboration with ICE," and *then* immediately running for office as a Democrat raises some obvious questions, such as: "Are you stupid?" and "Do you think I am stupid?" This is a gigantic scarlet letter and I would need to hear an answer, from him, that is specific and convincing. So would the average Manhattan primary voter.
I'm sure he speaks fluent quokkese, but in a seat as safely blue as this one I see little reason to risk a Tricia Cotham situation.
"raises some obvious questions, such as: "Are you stupid?" and "Do you think I am stupid?"
I suppose it would be uncharitable of me to suggest "never underestimate the contempt some candidates hold the ordinary voter in" 🤣
Sounds a bit of a Vicar of Bray situation: Thiel and Palantir have influence? Play up that connection! Thiel and Palantir are now Big Evil? Play it down! Pick issue that I can be on the right side of - ICE? Okay, ICE it is! Boo hiss ICE, right, my fellow kids?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicar_of_Bray_(song)
And this is law, I will maintain
Unto my Dying Day, Sir.
That whatsoever King may reign,
I will be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!
Also donate to Mary Peltola in Alaska or the rob sand for IA governor
Anyone else reading this: do note that Peltola and Jared Golden are the two cases in which the strategy proposed in my other comment does *not* work.
Two things, one minor for Ozy, one important for everyone:
There is no "Department of War". Congress decides what those departments are called, and it has not passed any act which would change the name of the Department of Defense. I respectfully suggest that you choose your words and phrases accordingly to avoid implicitly endorsing Trump's insanity.
Also, I don't know whether this is applicable to any of these specific races, but there can be high leverage in donating to a Libertarian candidate in the same race if you want a Democrat to win it. If you assume diminishing returns on funds, a Libertarian with far less money can sometimes, with the marginal dollar, pull more votes on net from the Republican (which, statistically, is almost always what happens) than the Democrat can. Note that it is not hypothetical that this can be decisive: check the result in OH-09 in 2024. This strategy has the added benefit of incentivizing the Republicans to lessen their opposition to electoral reform (replacing FPTP with RCV or MMP).
(As my username suggests, I do have an ulterior motive in making the second suggestion, but as someone who substantially prefers moderate Dems to MAGA Republicans, I honestly think my reasoning is sound and our interests are aligned here.)
I liked effective altruism more when it was estimating QALYs saved per dollar spent on a specific health intervention, and not on “assuming US liberal democracy is the most important thing in the world, and assuming you subscribe to (non expert) Matt Yglesias’s theories of winning elections, here are the politicians to give your money to”.
> Candidates, even in safe seats, are expected to fundraise “dues” for their party to help their party win more contested elections. Candidates who want powerful positions like committee chairs are expected to raise even more. So donating to your candidate gives them more influence.
My understanding is the amount they can give to other candidates or the party out of hard money is token ($2k-$5k), the dues come mostly out of leadership PACs (which are soft money)
Hello, Metaculus person here! What would make the US Democracy Threat Index easier to interpret? I'm eager to make indexes more useful.
I don't know how to convert it to a percentage chance that the U.S. is no longer democratic at a particular time!
There are many things wrong with the political assumptions in this post, but thankfully the nonsense is clear in two consecutive paragraphs:
"Obviously, you shouldn’t take a position that makes the Trump administration more effective at overthrowing American democracy. But the first Trump administration was an ordinary Republican administration because a huge number of policymakers, advisors, and civil servants thwarted Trump’s authoritarian instincts"
You support unelected bureaucrats having power to maintain the policies they want regardless of the results of elections. But surely you support it because they would stand up for freeedom?
"keeping vaccines somewhat more accessible, making AI regulation somewhat saner, preserving whatever scraps of foreign aid they can"
So this is what you think oposing "authoritarianism" means : ensuring state intervention and regulation.
Your piece barely mentions the policies where the republicans do want intervention and regulation. You want progressives to maintain state control through unelected bureaucrats, and do so in the name of "liberal democracy"
The bit where people are opposing authoritarianism is the bit you left out! But foreign aid, vaccines, and AI regulation are also important issues.
I am baffled by the claim that it is state intervention and regulation to think the federal government should continue to approve vaccines. If we abolished the FDA, any company could put out whatever vaccines they want.
I didn't mention other stuff because I don't give a shit about it compared to democracy, USAID, and AI. For example, Republicans are anti-trans, but as a trans person if polling suggested that a candidate punching a trans person in the face would flip a House seat blue, I would be the first in line to get my teeth knocked out.
"If we abolished the FDA, any company could put out whatever vaccines they want." So yes, you defend regulation. Unless you do want the abolition of the FDA?
I am not saying that requiring state approval for vaccines or regulating AI is a bad thing, I am saying that this is a regulation and that you defend it in the name of freedom and opposing "authoritarianism". That is why I call it nonsense.
Ozy is arguing for the FDA approving vaccines in a world where FDA approval is required, over the FDA not approving vaccines in a world where FDA approval is required. This constitutes fewer regulatory restrictions.
A hypothetical where FDA approvals aren't required at all is irrelevant to this situation.
New EA aligned research org powerfordemocracies.org has a cost effectiveness breakdown based on ITN and recommends the non profit Freedom2Vote with $94 to increase a voter. IMHO that's more aligned to how EAs would think about impact on the margin.
Generally agree with this, and those of us who work in this space professionally (and think in this way) generally kind of maintain a "supply curve" of different fundable opportunities at different prices (which, of course, can change *within* each opportunity at different budgets). However, there is a massive and important universe of things that can't be measured - things that potentially are more effective than single tactics like Freedom2Vote which can be measured - and so we also shouldn't fall into the "looking under the lamppost because that's where the light is" problem.
Just as an obvious example, a large funder could be thinking right now about ways to increase the chances that the ‘28 Dem primary nominates the best and most electable candidate. You can’t run an RCT on that, but it plausibly dwarfs Freedom2Vote (and I’m a huge fan of Freedom2Vote!).
A better way to convince EA minded donors will be a prioritization framework comparing these candidates against others as well as Freedom2Vote with the funding in margin. I'm sure the industry has some of these supply curve data and analyses and if they're willing to share that could potentially convince more EA minded donors. But in general if you claim of the potential to have a bigger impact without a quant analysis of how much that could be, it's harder to convince EAs.
Orange man is obviously bad (anybody saying otherwise is a psycho or a moron), but he didn't get into the White House twice randomly. Both the Dem and Rep establishments (and their analogues in the rest of the west) are rotten to the core, in thrall to absurd bankrupt ideologies and mainly concerned with zero-sum status games. This state of affairs is unsustainable and deteriorating, and the likes of Trump getting elected is just a symptom. Getting a couple marginally more sane (even granting that they are indeed such) people in office won't change the overall trajectory of the civilization (at best slightly delaying the collapse), and EAs would do well not to fool themselves otherwise.
if you believe that AI may soon come, delaying civilization collapse is pretty important, actually. and even if not, delaying civilization collapse is much better then... what is the suggested alternative? do nothing and watch Rome burning?
>what is the suggested alternative? do nothing and watch Rome burning?
Well, the EA calling is to look for "important, tractable, neglected" interventions, and who's to say that none remain that would be enough to avert the collapse, instead of slightly delaying it?
well, i personally believe AI is a big deal. but i did think a lot about the negative direction of the Western Civilization, and i mostly don't think it's neglected. i also don't expect collapse but slow failing, and i don't sure this disagreement is important, and also i'm not very sure it will not be collapse.
but, what can we do? my own answers are not neglected, nor are they EA-flavored. oppose polarization, oppose Woke, oppose Trump, oppose Facebook Twitter TikTok etc. those are not neglected causes, those are not examples of pulling the rope sideways. those are also not legible interventions. and legibility id important part if EA.
(i also not sure the collapse can be prevented, in the worlds when there is no singularity. but i also don't think we can build The Foundations, first and second. to shorten the time of barbarianism)
I think that the current crop of ML-based AI is overhyped, as usual. Even so, it's at least a medium-sized deal. AI in general is certainly important in the long term, but our understanding of it seems to be even more lacking than of human matters.
>but, what can we do?
The stuff that David Chapman of Meaningness goes on about looks important and neglected, for example. I'm less optimistic than him that it's tractable, largely because it somehow still remains obscure after all these years despite his best efforts (some strong antimemes, those).
>those are also not legible interventions. and legibility id important part if EA.
Doing research tabooed by the current ideological academic dogmas should be palatable enough to EAs, in principle. I suspect that by and large they (most importantly, the big funders) aren't up to seriously defying those dogmas, unfortunately.
my own opinion is that the attempts to do AI research probably made the end of the world come sooner.
there are a lot of things that included under the EA umbrella, and i, personally, see the legibility as very important. there should also be movent that try illegibile things that really important. just. when i look around it doesn't look like people who tried that succeeded. there is justified skepticism around such attempts.
i totally for trying that, but i don't think it should try as EA, but as something else.
there is one serious founder and he is way to worried about being respectable and palatable to the progressives, so, not from the main founding source.
and it's possible founding without that, AI doing that.
i don't think there are that much people who think that AI is not the main problem, and also civilization collapse, and also there is something legible enough to do.
although, i you are commenting exactly on a post that trying to do exactly just. so. there is a movement in that direction.
but it doesn't look like this movement can avoid the zero sum game of politics and tug sideways. which... if i live in a world when politics are needed to avoid collapse i want to believe that etc, but. also, all the pessimism regarding such interventions and them not being neglected remain.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/tug-sidewayshtml
I like this post, especially the sober Trump evaluation.
I do feel there's some validity to the idea that "There should be an AI risk evaluation committee" really means "I want to be paid to be on a committee and doomsay about AI." But it's a toss-up between who should be trusted less, them or the Tech-Billionaires.