huw

Co-Founder & CTO @ Kaya Guides
2341 karmaJoined Working (6-15 years)Sydney NSW, Australia
huw.cool

Bio

Participation
3

I live for a high disagree-to-upvote ratio

Comments
336

I’d also be curious about whether Abundance money could fund this, too. Urban sprawl is a big driver of habitat destruction!

That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that same orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.

I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.

huw
4
0
0
1

Well the blackouts are the only way to ensure a free & fair election Nick :)

Late to this, but something I didn’t catch in the comments—Global Health looks overfunded in your calculations, but my sense is that Global Health is quite efficient at spending money. Much of the money in global health goes directly to programmes and beneficiaries, or working-class talent that often gets excluded as ‘not what we mean’ in these kinds of surveys. I would argue, too, that the other cause areas here are often quite talent-dense. Under these terms, it’s probably still valid to argue that Animal Welfare is under-resourced relative to Existential Risks though :)

Answer by huw2
0
1

I think maybe a little bit of nuance is lost when just saying ‘electoral politics isn’t neglected and might be quite hard’—that’s not the EA response to large global health issues, or existential risks. It’s just that once you get down to brass tacks, most Western political systems are pretty easy to buy your way into, and it’s substantially cheaper to effect meaningful piecemeal change by paying for lobbyists.

You only need electoral politics when trying to undertake massive political/ideological shifts (see: the kochs/mercers shifting the U.S. to a sort of anarcho-capitalism), and fundamentally, most EAs are on the centre-left and don’t see these kinds of changes as desirable.

(You can see this in the LessWrong post you linked, most of the post and replies are proposing exactly what Kamala Harris did in 2024 and lost doing)

((Vastly oversimplifying but I hope it provides some nuance that the other answers are missing))

huw
10
20
0

Just generally, I like the idea of putting something out there in the world even if the first version isn’t perfect :)

I’m a little confused about your problem statement, indeed, most of the extreme politicians in the U.S. seem to win outright, in ranked-choice primaries, or systems with two-candidate runoffs.

In the Democratic party, which I’m more familiar with, their most extreme (this is not an endorsement or disendorsement of their policies, just to note that these politicians are the furthest left in the party) elected officials tend to win outright majorities or in reformed elections:

  • Mamdani won a ranked-choice primary and then an outright majority in the general
  • AOC won an outright primary in 2018 against a single candidate (no coalescing issue)
  • Although Rashida Tlaib won her first successful primary in FTTP, in 2020 she won outright against a single candidate
  • Ilhan Omar similarly won her first two primaries with a minority of the vote, but won her last three outright, in 2 cases against one ‘reasonable’ candidate (i.e. all other candidates got a small share of the vote)
  • Bernie Sanders has a very strange electoral history due to running as an independent but usually being on the Democratic primary ticket. Nevertheless, he has pretty much always won his elections outright.

Similarly, I skimmed the Wikipedias for a few far-right politicians, whom I’m less familiar with, and they demonstrated similar trends. MTG, for example, won a contested primary with 40%, but then won a two-candidate runoff and has seen outright wins since.

It seems as though extreme politicians are genuinely popular—enough that people don’t form coalitions to oppose them in future elections, even when there’s only one other candidate on the ballot. I am not very convinced that your proposed form would work.

If you’re directly posting LLM output, please trim it down for clarity. This was too repetitive and very long.

Is indoor tanning worse than outdoor tanning? If not, I can see a ban making sense in cold countries, where people might counterfactually tan, but in countries like Australia and Brazil I can assure you this just has a displacement effect of sending people outside (even in winter).

huw
3
0
0
3

Really excited about this—congrats to the team!

Load more