jeeebz
Bio
My name is Jake. I'm the former comms director at 1Day Sooner.
Posts 5
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Topic contributions2
Rapid growth since then has largely been the result of a return to more normal governance quality, combined with a very low base. It's a big improvement, but that doesn't mean policy has been amazing - they've just stopped being so abjectly terrible.
This might be nitpicky, but still probably worth pointing out, because I think it is symptomatic of Western observers' tendency to talk past Chinese interlocutors on subjects like this.
It is objectively quite extraordinary what China under the CCP has seen in terms of economic growth and development. That is a really hard intellectual problem for us liberal democrats (and especially consequentialists). You can believe the CCP is net bad, totalitarian regime in the status quo—I think this—but dismissing what it managed to do post-Mao for the Chinese economy requires ignoring the wealth (no pun intended) of evidence about how uniquely strong Chinese growth has been, which suggests the CCP was doing more than just not being abjectly terrible.
China's GDP per capita in the late 1970s, shortly after Mao's death and the initiation of Deng Xiaoping's Reform and Opening Up, was a fraction of the average in Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank: China, SSA)! Playing around with Our World in Data charts, which only go back to 1990, also really underscores this. China was dirt poor for basically the entire 20th century, in no small part due to historically bad abuses and mismanagement by the CCP up until about 1980—and in the historical blink of an eye it turned things around.
Things like the mass incarceration and cultural genocide of Uyghurs, forced sterilizations and abortions under the one-child policy, and plenty of other post-Mao abuses and human rights catastrophes are real. But an educated, reasonable Chinese person could certainly shoot back: so is the near elimination of e.g. child malnutrition, or the complete elimination of malaria, both of which are still rampant in neighboring, (mostly) democratic India, which was richer than China back in the 1970s.
How might EA-aligned orgs in global health and wellness need to adapt calculations of cost-effective interventions given the slash-and-burn campaign currently underway against US foreign aid? Has anyone tried gaming out what different scenarios of funding loss look like (e.g., one where most of the destruction is reversed by the courts, or where that reversal is partial, or where nothing happens and the days are numbered for things like PEPFAR)? Since US foreign aid is so varied, I imagine that's a tall order, but I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately!
Personally, I find the acronym frustrating because of how foreign all of it is me based on my own experience as a (fairly new — less than two years) EA in the DC area. I like to think I have an okay read on the community here, and the behaviors and beliefs described by "TESCREALism" just do not seem to map reliably onto how people I know actually think and behave, which has led me to believe that Torres' criticisms are mostly bad faith or strawmen. I admittedly don't interact very much with AI safety or what I sort of nebulously consider to be the "San Francisco faction" of EA (faction probably being too strong a word), so maybe all of y'all over there are just a bunch of weirdos (kidding (like 90%))!
Sorry, that was ambiguous on my part. There's a differentiation between research ethics issues (how trials are run, etc.) and clinical ethics (medical aid in dying, accessing unapproved treatments, how to treat a patient with X complicated issue, etc.). My work focuses on the former, not the latter, so I can't speak much to that. I meant "conservative" in the sense of hesitance to adjust existing norms or systems in research ethics oversight and, for example, a very strong default orientation towards any measures that reduce risk (or seem to reduce risk) for research participants.
Yes, the studies should not have used disabled children at all, because disabled children cannot meaningfully provide consent and were not absolutely necessary to achieve the studies' aims. They were simply the easiest targets: they could not understand what was being done to them and their parents were coercible through misleading information and promises of better care, which should have been provided regardless. (More generally, I do not believe proxy consent from guardians is acceptable for any research that involves deliberate harm and no prospect of net benefit to children.)
The conditions of the facility are also materially relevant. If it were true that children inevitably would contract hepatitis, then a human challenge would not be truly necessary. More importantly, though, I am comfortable calling Krugman's behavior evil because he spent 15 years running experiments at an institution that was managed with heinously little regard for its residents and evidently did not feel compelled to raise the issue with the public or authorities. Rather, he saw the immense suffering and neglect as perhaps unfortunate, but ultimately convenient leverage to acquire test subjects.
I strongly agree with this comment. I think it's important to have a theory of mind of why people think like this. As a non-bioethicist, my impression is a lot of if has to do with the history of the field of bioethics itself, which emerged in response to the horrid abuses in medical research. One major overarching goal that is imbued in bioethics training, research, and writing is prevention of medical abuse, which leads to small-c conservative views that tend to favor, wherever possible, protection of human subjects/patients and an aversion to calculations that sound like they might single out the groups that historically bore the brunt of such abuse.
Like, we've all heard of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, but there were a lot more really awful things done in the last century, which have lasting effects to this day. At 1Day, we're working on trying to bring about safe, efficient human challenge studies to realize a hepatitis C vaccine. We've made great progress and it looks like they will begin within the next year! But the last time people did viral hepatitis human challenge studies, they did them on mentally disabled children! Just heinously evil. So I will not be surprised if some on the ethics boards when they review the proposed studies are quite skeptical at first! (Note: this doesn't mean that the current IRB system is optimal, or even anywhere near so; I view it sort of like zoning and building codes: good in theory — I don't want toxic waste dumps built near elementary schools — but the devil is in the details and how protections are operationalized.)
All of which is to say: like others here, I very strongly disagree with many prevalent views in bioethics. But as I've interacted more and more with this field as an outsider, my opinions have evolved from "wow, bioethics/research ethics is populated exclusively with morons" to "this is mostly a bunch of reasonable people whose frame of references are very different". The latter view allows me to engage more productively to try to change some of the more problematic/wrongheaded views when it comes up in my work and has let me learn a lot, too!
As someone who is not a bioethicist but interacts with many through work (though certainly not as many as Leah), I think that this position for many likely derives from a general opposition to treating people differently based on their intrinsic characteristics. In other words, If I know it's bad to be ageist, I might interpret the thought experiment that nudges someone to save a younger life as ageist (I've heard this argument from one person in bioethics before, but, y'know, n=1) and reject the premise of the question. So for that subset of bioethicists it may not be a serious argument in favor of the proposition but rather a strong preference against making moral judgments involving people that touch upon their intrinsic characteristics.
Chiming in to note a tangentially related experience that somewhat lowered my opinion of IHME/GBD, though I'm not a health economist or anything. I interacted with several analysts after requesting information related to IHME's estimates for global hepatitis C burden (which differed substantially from the WHO's). After a meeting and some emails promising to followup, we were ghosted. I have heard from one other organization that they've had a really hard time getting similar information out of IHME as well. This may be more of an organizational/operational problem rather than a methodological one, but it wasn't very confidence-inspiring.
You're right, I should be more careful in wording; I've struck "uniquely". China is unique in the sheer scale of such growth given the size of its population, but the Asian Tigers + Japan also had very high growth rates. I think the gist of my original point still stands: growth did not happen in these countries because the ruling parties just stopped doing really bad things, but, generally, the regimes (excluding Japan) engaged in extensive economic reform that is by no means a guaranteed success (cf. Russia).