You're absolutely right in my opinion Abraham. EV is a mathematical convenience and simplification that might work most of the time, but certainly not all.
I feel words like "expected value" are confusing & miselading (nothing expected about it - it's a misnomer and accident of history/ translation from french that it's called that), and this community would do well to avoid unnecessary jargon. I need to write up a post about this.
If we substituted the word "expected value" with mean or average, which is literally what it is (and I meet so many people in this community who get this wrong), it would be just as accurate but much more easier to understand, even to technical people. And many people understand that mean is not always the most appropriate statistic to use espescially with skewed distributions, e.g. reporting on incomes is often done with median, and that's perfectly fine.
Expected value should also not be confused with expected utility (or as I prefer the mean utility). You use the terms interchangeably in your post as do many people in this community, it's fine in causal conversation but it is worth being specific when necessary in discussions like this. I suspect because the word "value" in expected value implies some humanistic desireable ideal, but that's what the word utility is for.
You also say use the term "in expectation" to mean the most likeliest outcome (i.e. the mode outcome) or more than 50%. I'm not familiar with that langauge - maybe it is accurate, but to me it is confusing when you can simply say the mode or the likeliest outcome.
So ultimately I suspect your dilemmas boil down to the recognition that there are circumstances where mean, mode, median, (and in fact even more statistics) can be maximised and we get different optimal decisions depending on the statistic we use.
At the end of the day we want to: maximise utility. But if utility has a probability distribution, it's hard to maxmise without using some statistic (mean, mode, median etc) that maps a probability distribution to a real number. Using mean (EV) is not completely arbitrary I believe (it has some nice preperties), but it's not fully settled. I personally think it has problems.
You have a point that safety isn't a negative externality in the way pollution is. I will concede that. Never really thought of it like that.
To clarify, I am not arguing that safety standards should be more or less strict. I just think they should be overwhelmingly determined by companies and workers instead of imposed by governments.
Don't you think unions have an important role to play in this? Because as a worker, especially in a poor country, there's a lot of asymmetry. It's difficult and often impossible to assess the risk of a workplace before you've started. You lack the expertise to understand the breadth of all the safety issues, and don't have the information readily available to accurately compare safety across different firms.
And if governments can step in, productively with union & employer stakeholders, set sensible rules on safety (minimum safety standards, workplace assessment ratings), that makes it much easier for workers to assess safety of different firms, make better judgements, bargain for higher pay at more dangerous firms, allocate their labour more economical efficiently. Helps employers compete too.
Maybe you are arguing against the rules being too inflexible? Maybe you are just against first world unions don't always have the interests of third world workers in mind but maybe third world unions are ok?
"The Indian state of Kerala is widely recognised as having high living standards relative to the rest of India due to the strong presence of militant unions and labour standards."
I think the causality goes the other way around. A higher income per capita means people are willing to pay more to protect their health, and therefore push for stricter safety standards.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the Kerala case study. Kerala actually has a lower per capita income. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model
I think it's a good case study to challenge this line of argument. I'd say that example is a clear case where the causality is opposite to how you described. A lot of the social democratic countries show that trend. The Nordic countries famously were amongst the poorest parts of Europe when they adopted the Nordic model pushed by militant labour movements in those countries.
That's the way our economic system works. Competing on the price of labour is fine and desirable - that helps sends signals to the global economy on how to order itself for optimal output.
But competing on safety is like a negative externality, like companies emitting pollution.
Safety is not an onerous cost either. As a cost, it would be in line with doing business in the jurisdiction. If the cost of labour is low in a poor country, so too is the lower cost of implementing safety.
Is there a specific country or example you would like to see safety standards held back on the grounds of higher employment? I've never heard of onerous safety standards being a cited as a reason for suppressed economic development. The Rana plaza fire safety reforms were widely lauded.
The Indian state of Kerala is widely recognised as having high living standards relative to the rest of India due to the strong presence of militant unions and labour standards.
Maybe there's a theoretic economic argument but it seems very edge-casey in the real world.
I actually think Kernaghan is making a good point and you've failed to appreciate his logic in full. Third world country businesses should not be able compete by having lower safety standards. Kernaghan is right, that creates a moral hazard, it pressures jurisdictions with high standards to lower them. It rewards bad behaviour here and there. We don't want that surely. No one wants that.
But third world country businesses should be able compete by having lower wages for their workers, operating in a low cost environment etc. That does accurately capture the relative economic advantage.
Now, maybe the worry is that while longtermists are doing good stuff now, they might eventually do terrible things for the sake of the long-term future
Longtermists have (past-tense) done bad things. The worry is now evidenced by a track record. It's not some theoretical worry about the future. Are we still not able to admit this as a movement?
Far right personalities connecting their ideologies to longtermism
I can't even begin to estimate the harm done by SBF's political interference, succesfully electing his crypto-friendly candidates to the world's most powerful institution of democracy, the US House. Permanently altering the course of world history, ending the careers of some very promising principled candidates who refused to take big money.
Race science is well-established pseudoscience recognised by the scientific community.
This why I roll my eyes when EAs think of themselves as elite or smarter than average. There are, fortunately or unfortunately, anti-intellectual currents within this movement, and race science isn't the only pseudoscientific inclination in my opinion, and in the opinion of a few others in this movement I have learned.
Unlike you however I actually am grateful for EAs anti-science streak to be so nakedly visible, because it is actually valuable information for outsiders and insiders to know. Knowledge of the EAs embracing race science should inform the public how seriously to take this movement, and can only help weed out the good parts of EA from the bad.
We shouldn't mask up the shortcomings of EA to make it look like a better movement than it actually is.
I also want to say I've been really impressed by the work of the Quincy Institute (https://quincyinst.org/). They advocate for an anti-war & anti-interventionist foreign policy, which is very neglected amongst think tanks in this area due to the high levels of funding by weapons-makers and the military-industrial complex. They're work on the Iran nuclear deal was highly lauded.
Nuclear weapons are of course a specific area they focus on, but their more holistic Anti-war & Anti-interventionist advocacy has noticeably improved the foreign policy debate and challenged hawkish perspectives that dominate this space and I suspect is a very effective way to reduce X-Risk.
Would love to see EAs engaged in Anti-war & Anti-interventionist spaces as they seem very neglected and a chance to make an outsized impact.
The nobel-winning ICANW also does really excellent work and spoke at EAGx Australia.
Can I add one more fear - mischaracterising the scientific credibility of scientific racism/ HBD.
Having these voices like Hanania & Razib Khan at Manifest (with no counterbalance) is going to make people think that there is more scientific support for the "race realist/ HBD" position than there actually is.
I was involved in the EA movement from around 2014 in Sydney Australia, which I expect is similar to the UK as you mentioned (but all the same, the UK & Australia were and are major centres for the EA movement and our lack of interaction with the Rationalist community in those early days should be noted).
From my recollection, in those early days the local EA Sydney community would co-host events with the local Less Wrong Rationality, Transhumanist, and the Science Party groups just to get the numbers up for events. So yes, the Rationalists did mix with EA, but their contribution was on-par with the Transhumanists.
I don't recall rationality being a major part of major EA literature at the time (The Most Good You Can Do, The Life You Can Save). Even utilitarianism was downplayed as being fundamental to being an EA. It was later on that Rationality became more influential.
You're absolutely right in my opinion Abraham. EV is a mathematical convenience and simplification that might work most of the time, but certainly not all.
I feel words like "expected value" are confusing & miselading (nothing expected about it - it's a misnomer and accident of history/ translation from french that it's called that), and this community would do well to avoid unnecessary jargon. I need to write up a post about this.
If we substituted the word "expected value" with mean or average, which is literally what it is (and I meet so many people in this community who get this wrong), it would be just as accurate but much more easier to understand, even to technical people. And many people understand that mean is not always the most appropriate statistic to use espescially with skewed distributions, e.g. reporting on incomes is often done with median, and that's perfectly fine.
Expected value should also not be confused with expected utility (or as I prefer the mean utility). You use the terms interchangeably in your post as do many people in this community, it's fine in causal conversation but it is worth being specific when necessary in discussions like this. I suspect because the word "value" in expected value implies some humanistic desireable ideal, but that's what the word utility is for.
You also say use the term "in expectation" to mean the most likeliest outcome (i.e. the mode outcome) or more than 50%. I'm not familiar with that langauge - maybe it is accurate, but to me it is confusing when you can simply say the mode or the likeliest outcome.
So ultimately I suspect your dilemmas boil down to the recognition that there are circumstances where mean, mode, median, (and in fact even more statistics) can be maximised and we get different optimal decisions depending on the statistic we use.
At the end of the day we want to: maximise utility. But if utility has a probability distribution, it's hard to maxmise without using some statistic (mean, mode, median etc) that maps a probability distribution to a real number. Using mean (EV) is not completely arbitrary I believe (it has some nice preperties), but it's not fully settled. I personally think it has problems.
You have a point that safety isn't a negative externality in the way pollution is. I will concede that. Never really thought of it like that.
Don't you think unions have an important role to play in this? Because as a worker, especially in a poor country, there's a lot of asymmetry. It's difficult and often impossible to assess the risk of a workplace before you've started. You lack the expertise to understand the breadth of all the safety issues, and don't have the information readily available to accurately compare safety across different firms.
And if governments can step in, productively with union & employer stakeholders, set sensible rules on safety (minimum safety standards, workplace assessment ratings), that makes it much easier for workers to assess safety of different firms, make better judgements, bargain for higher pay at more dangerous firms, allocate their labour more economical efficiently. Helps employers compete too.
Maybe you are arguing against the rules being too inflexible? Maybe you are just against first world unions don't always have the interests of third world workers in mind but maybe third world unions are ok?
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the Kerala case study. Kerala actually has a lower per capita income. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala_model
I think it's a good case study to challenge this line of argument. I'd say that example is a clear case where the causality is opposite to how you described. A lot of the social democratic countries show that trend. The Nordic countries famously were amongst the poorest parts of Europe when they adopted the Nordic model pushed by militant labour movements in those countries.
That's the way our economic system works. Competing on the price of labour is fine and desirable - that helps sends signals to the global economy on how to order itself for optimal output.
But competing on safety is like a negative externality, like companies emitting pollution.
Safety is not an onerous cost either. As a cost, it would be in line with doing business in the jurisdiction. If the cost of labour is low in a poor country, so too is the lower cost of implementing safety.
Is there a specific country or example you would like to see safety standards held back on the grounds of higher employment? I've never heard of onerous safety standards being a cited as a reason for suppressed economic development. The Rana plaza fire safety reforms were widely lauded.
The Indian state of Kerala is widely recognised as having high living standards relative to the rest of India due to the strong presence of militant unions and labour standards.
Maybe there's a theoretic economic argument but it seems very edge-casey in the real world.
I actually think Kernaghan is making a good point and you've failed to appreciate his logic in full. Third world country businesses should not be able compete by having lower safety standards. Kernaghan is right, that creates a moral hazard, it pressures jurisdictions with high standards to lower them. It rewards bad behaviour here and there. We don't want that surely. No one wants that.
But third world country businesses should be able compete by having lower wages for their workers, operating in a low cost environment etc. That does accurately capture the relative economic advantage.
That is insane that you can embed a OWID chart into a forum reply 😂
Longtermists have (past-tense) done bad things. The worry is now evidenced by a track record. It's not some theoretical worry about the future. Are we still not able to admit this as a movement?
Things done under the guise of longtermism:
I can't even begin to estimate the harm done by SBF's political interference, succesfully electing his crypto-friendly candidates to the world's most powerful institution of democracy, the US House. Permanently altering the course of world history, ending the careers of some very promising principled candidates who refused to take big money.
Race science is well-established pseudoscience recognised by the scientific community. This why I roll my eyes when EAs think of themselves as elite or smarter than average. There are, fortunately or unfortunately, anti-intellectual currents within this movement, and race science isn't the only pseudoscientific inclination in my opinion, and in the opinion of a few others in this movement I have learned.
Unlike you however I actually am grateful for EAs anti-science streak to be so nakedly visible, because it is actually valuable information for outsiders and insiders to know. Knowledge of the EAs embracing race science should inform the public how seriously to take this movement, and can only help weed out the good parts of EA from the bad.
We shouldn't mask up the shortcomings of EA to make it look like a better movement than it actually is.
I also want to say I've been really impressed by the work of the Quincy Institute (https://quincyinst.org/). They advocate for an anti-war & anti-interventionist foreign policy, which is very neglected amongst think tanks in this area due to the high levels of funding by weapons-makers and the military-industrial complex. They're work on the Iran nuclear deal was highly lauded.
Nuclear weapons are of course a specific area they focus on, but their more holistic Anti-war & Anti-interventionist advocacy has noticeably improved the foreign policy debate and challenged hawkish perspectives that dominate this space and I suspect is a very effective way to reduce X-Risk.
Would love to see EAs engaged in Anti-war & Anti-interventionist spaces as they seem very neglected and a chance to make an outsized impact.
The nobel-winning ICANW also does really excellent work and spoke at EAGx Australia.
Can I add one more fear - mischaracterising the scientific credibility of scientific racism/ HBD.
Having these voices like Hanania & Razib Khan at Manifest (with no counterbalance) is going to make people think that there is more scientific support for the "race realist/ HBD" position than there actually is.
In actual fact, the opposite is true.
Response by evolutionary biologists responded to Nicholas Wade's book: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/books/review/letters-a-troublesome-inheritance.html the
American Society of Human Genetics statement https://www.cell.com/ajhg/pdf/S0002-9297(18)30363-X.pdf and the American Association of Biological Anthropologists statement https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/
Further papers on Race & IQ https://r.jordan.im/download/racism/bird2021.pdf https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/bies.202100204?
I was involved in the EA movement from around 2014 in Sydney Australia, which I expect is similar to the UK as you mentioned (but all the same, the UK & Australia were and are major centres for the EA movement and our lack of interaction with the Rationalist community in those early days should be noted).
From my recollection, in those early days the local EA Sydney community would co-host events with the local Less Wrong Rationality, Transhumanist, and the Science Party groups just to get the numbers up for events. So yes, the Rationalists did mix with EA, but their contribution was on-par with the Transhumanists.
I don't recall rationality being a major part of major EA literature at the time (The Most Good You Can Do, The Life You Can Save). Even utilitarianism was downplayed as being fundamental to being an EA. It was later on that Rationality became more influential.