Alex319
Comments15
I'm a little confused by the claim that "personal choices" aren't effective, but corporate pressure campaigns are. Isn't the way a corporate pressure campaign works that you convince the target that they will be boycotted unless they make the changes you are demanding? So the corporate pressure campaign is only effective if you have people that are willing to change their personal choices. Or am I misunderstanding and that's not how corporate pressure campaigns work?
I think these sorts of critiques don’t just apply to EA - it seems to me like just about any intervention would fall into one of them.
AMF-style interventions that focus on specific problems, like malaria nets? As you discuss, these avoid problems 1 and 2 (because they’re doing a specific thing that wasn’t already being done, so they’re not taking away local jobs or displacing local capacity) but are vulnerable to problem 3 (because the specific thing they’re doing may not be what the locals want)
Maybe organizations could avoid problem 3 by setting up a system to get public input on their projects so they can avoid doing projects that locals don’t want? But expand this out, and at that point you’re basically running (part of) a government - after all, aggregating people’s preferences into decisions is essentially what governments do. (After all, “locals” aren’t a homogeneous group with uniform preferences.) And then you definitely run into all the usual problems with preference aggregation, and you certainly are trying to replace (part of) the local government’s role.
Maybe avoid that by working with the local government or local institutions, rather than setting up your own preference aggregation method? Well, if the problem is that the local government and local institutions are bad or corrupt, that’s certainly not a good idea.
Or maybe your intervention could be targeted directly at improving the institutions? In that case you certainly are saying that you know how to run institutions better than the locals, which goes back into the “we know better than you” dynamic. And I thought part of the problem with colonialism was replacing local institutions that were illegible but functional with institutions that looked better to the colonizers, but didn’t actually work well for locals.
Should you hire locals to work for you? Well in that case you’re displacing those locals away from whatever else they would be doing. Don’t hire locals and bring in your own people instead? Then you’re taking away jobs and ignoring local expertise.
It seems like if you wanted an intervention that avoided all of these kinds of potential problems, it would have to have the following properties:
- Locals agree that it would be a good idea
- Can be done using local resources and expertise
But also:
- Not currently being done locally
- Not something that local governments should be doing instead
And I’m having a hard time thinking of any intervention that would fit this bill; if the first two things were true, it seems that would imply that locals would do it or ask their governments to do it.
(Even GiveDirectly-style cash transfers could be argued to have the problem: one could argue that local governments should be giving their citizens cash, so that Acemoglu’s critique about “key services of the state being taken over by other entities” would apply here.)
Two other points of this style of critique that I’m confused about are:
- If the argument is “it’s bad to give recipients free/cheap X, because that undermines efforts to produce X locally” isn’t that a general argument for protectionism? If instead of a charity providing X, it was a multinational corporation that had found a way to produce X very cheaply - don’t economists usually say in this sort of situation that trade is a good thing, and the multinational should specialize in X while the locals should specialize in something else? Why is it different when it’s a charity involved?
- One of the themes of the “abundance discourse” in the US is that a major problem with US infrastructure projects is that they spend too much time listening to various locals and special interest groups, and bending over backwards to avoid even minor side effects, and not enough time just building the things efficiently. Critique (3) here is sort of the opposite of that - it’s saying that projects need to spend more time listening to locals. It’s not obvious here that “listen to locals more” is good - there are real costs to this approach. Of course the cost-benefit is different in different cases (it’s certainly possible that US projects should listen to locals less, and developing country projects should listen to locals more) I’m just saying that it’s not obvious which direction to go.
I am following this issue and, like everyone else here, am also extremely concerned. I am very interested in what I can do right now to help. Are there useful places to donate right now? I am an ETGer who normally gives about $100-200k per year and I would be willing to donate that amount or more if there were a good opportunity.
- You mentioned that one harm of insecticide-treated bed nets is that if people use them as fishing nets, that could cause harm to fish stocks. You say that GiveWell didn't take that into account in its cost-effectiveness calculations. But according to e.g. https://blog.givewell.org/2015/02/05/putting-the-problem-of-bed-nets-used-for-fishing-in-perspective/, they did take that into account, they just concluded that the harm was very small in comparison to the benefits. Can you clarify what you meant when you say GiveWell didn't take that into account?
- If you're concerned so much about harm to fish stocks, do you think it would make more sense to focus your efforts on supporting charities focused on fish-related issues directly?
- GiveWell seems, by your admission, to spend a lot of time thinking about second-order effects and possible harms of their preferred charities' interventions, and your criticism seems that even the amount they do is not sufficient. Okay, that seems fair enough. Do you think there are any charities or philanthropic efforts that do pay sufficient attention to the harms and second-order effects? Or do you think that all philanthropy is like this?
- In particular, you talk about your friend Aaron, whose intervention you seem to like. Do you think Aaron thought about the second-order effects and harms of what he was doing? Do you think he's come up with a way of helping others that has less risk of causing harm, and if so is there a way to scale that up?
- If GiveWell were to take your advice and focus more on possible harms, is there a risk of overcorrecting, and spending lots of time and resources studying harms that are too small or unlikely to be worth the effort? (Some people think this has already happened in other contexts, e.g. some argue that excessive safety regulation of nuclear power that makes nuclear power plants very expensive to build, even though nuclear power is actually safer than other forms of power)
About this footnote:
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Carol Adams even informs us that:
Sebo and Singer flourish as academics in a white supremacist patriarchal society because others, including people of color and those who identify as women, are pushed down. (p. 135, emphasis added.)
Maybe treading on the oppressed is a crucial part of Singer’s daily writing routine, without which he would never have written a word? If there’s some other reason to believe this wild causal claim, we’re never told what it is.
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Here's a potential more charitable interpretation of this claim. Adams might not be claiming:
"Singer personally performs some act of oppression as part of his writing process."
Adam's causal model might be more of the following:
"Singer's ideas aren't unusually good; there are lots of other people, including people of color and those who identify as women, who have ideas that are as good or better. But those other people are being pushed down (by society in general, not by Singer personally) which leaves that position open for Singer. If people of color and those who identify as women weren't oppressed, then some of them would be able to outcompete Singer, leaving Singer to not flourish as much."
Of course that depends on whether everyone else is also evacuating. For instance do we expect that if a tactical nuke is used in Ukraine a significant amount of the US population will be trying to evacuate? As has been mentioned before there was not a significant percentage of the US population trying to evacuate even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that was probably a much higher risk and more salient situation than we face now.
One thing that would be really useful in terms of personal planning, and maybe would be a good idea to have a top level post on, is something like:
What is P(I survive | I am in location X when a nuclear war breaks out)
for different values of X such as:
(A) a big NATO city like NYC
(B) a small town in the USA away from any nuclear targets
(C) somewhere outside the US/NATO but still in the northern hemisphere, like Mexico. (I chose Mexico because that's probably the easiest non-NATO country for Americans to get to)
(D) somewhere like Argentina or Australia, the places listed as being most likely to survive in a nuclear winter by the article here https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
(E) New Zealand, pretty much where everyone says is the best place to go?
Probably E > D > C > B > A, but by how much?
As others have said, even (B) (with a suitcase full of food and water and a basement to hole up in) is probably enough to avoid getting blown up initially, the real question is what happens later. It could be that all the infrastructure just gets destroyed, there's no more food, and everyone starves to death.
Of course another thing to take into account is that if I just decide to go somewhere temporarily and there's a war, I'll be stuck somewhere that's unfamiliar, where I may not speak the local language, and where I am not a citizen. Whether that is likely to affect my future prospects is unclear.
If it turns out that we'll be fine as long as we can survive the bombs and the fallout, that's one thing. But if we'll just end up starving to death unless we're in the Southern Hemisphere, then that is another thing.
(Does the possibility of nuclear EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attacks need to be factored in? I've heard claims like 'one nuke detonated in the middle of the USA at the right altitude would destroy almost all electronics in the USA', and maybe nearby countries would also be in the radius. If true, likely it would happen in a nuclear war. And of course that would also have drastic implications for survivability afterward. I don't know how reliable this is, though.)
Another important question is "how much warning will we have?" Even a day or two's worth of warning is enough to hop on the next flight south, but certainly there are some scenarios where we won't even have that much.
This was really helpful. I'm living in New York City and am also making the decision about when/whether to evacuate, so it was useful to see the thoughts of expert forecasters. I wouldn't consider myself an expert forecaster and don't really think I have much knowledge of nuclear issues, so here's a couple other thoughts and questions:
- I'm a little surprised that P(London being attacked | nuclear conflict) seemed so low since I would have expected that that would be one of the highest priority targets. What informed that and would you expect somewhere like NYC to be higher or lower than London? (NYC does have a military base, Fort Hamilton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hamilton), although I'm not sure how much that should update my probability).
- It seems like a big contributor to the lower-than-expected risk is the fact that you could wait to evacuate if the situation looked like it was getting more serious - i.e. the "conditional on the above, informed/unbiased actors are not able to escape beforehand" I don't have a car so I would have to get on a bus or plane out which might take up to a day, I'm not sure how much that affects the calculation as I don't know what time frame they were thinking of - were they assuming you can just leave immediately whenever you want?
- It sounds like it does make sense to be monitoring the situation closely and be ready to evacuate on short notice if it looks like the risk of escalation has increased (after all that is what the calculation is based on). Does anyone have any suggestions of what I should be following/under what circumstances it would make sense to leave?
- Of course another factor here is whether lots of other people would be trying to leave at the same time. This might make it harder to leave especially if you were dependent on a bus, plane, uber, etc. to get out of there.
- Another question is where do you go? For instance in NYC, I could go to {a suburb of NY / upstate NY / somewhere even more remote in the US like northern Maine / a non-NATO country} all of which are more and more costly but might have more and more safety benefit. Are there reliable sources on what places would be the safest?
That is some useful information. It seems like what you're saying is that these campaigns really involve three different groups:
(a) the "inner circle" of 10-100 activists that are organizing the campaign,
(b) some larger number of supporters that are waiting in the wings to execute the threatened protests if the original demands aren't met,
(c) the "audience" of the protests - i.e. this is the general public who will be driven away from the target in response to the protests.
And it's really only group (c) that needs to be big enough as a fraction of the target's total business that the target finds it worth listening to.
Are there any good sources that go into more detail about how these kind of campaigns work? (I'm interested in this in general, not just in relation to this specific post)