Disclaimer: This blog post focuses on a new piece of research from Rethink Priorities. I was not involved with the funding or execution of this research, and therefore write this piece merely as a consumer. However, I am the Executive Director of Giving Green and a board member of Rethink Priorities, and acknowledge that these affiliations may bias my...
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
Trump recently said in an interview (https://time.com/6972973/biden-trump-bird-flu-covid/) that he would seek to disband the White House office for pandemic preparedness. Given that he usually doesn't give specifics on his policy positions, this seems like something he is particularly interested in.
I know politics is discouraged on the EA forum, but I thought I would post this to say: EA should really be preparing for a Trump presidency. He's up in the polls and IMO has a >50% chance of winning the election. Right now politicians seem relatively receptive to EA ideas, this may change under a Trump administration.
Orthogonal to your post, that particular policy position seems out of character for him. He was very happy to tout Operation Warp Speed as president & encouraged people to get vaccinated (as well as privately being a germaphobe). I wonder what's motivating this specific statement?
The full quote suggests this is because he classifies Operation Warp Speed (reactive, targeted) as very different from the Office (wasteful, impossible to predict what you'll need, didn't work last time). I would classify this as a disagreement about means rather than ends.
link
I'd class those comments as mostly a disagreement around ends . The emphasis on not getting the credit from his own support base and Republicans not wanting to talk about it are the most revealing. A sizeable fraction of his most committed support base are radically antivax to the point there was audible booing at his own rally when he recommended they got the vaccine, even after he'd very carefully worded it in terms of their "freedoms". It's less a narrow disagreement about a specific layer of Biden bureaucracy and more a recognition that his base sees less government involvement in healthcare and less reaction to future pandemics and in some cases even rejection of evidence-based medicine as valuable ends. And whilst he clearly doesn't reject evidence-based medicine himself, above all Trump loves adulation from that fanbase.
Either way, his position is quite different from those EAs who see pandemic preparedness as an extremely important permanent priority rather than a reactive thing..
Trump is anti-tackling pandemics except insofar as it implies he did anything wrong
I'd say it's 50/50 but sure. And while politics is discouraged, I don't think that your thing is really what's being discouraged.