Head of Procurement at Anthropic starting 2021
Previously Executive Director at CFAR, starting 2018; Productivity Coach in 2017; Senior Research Analyst and Operations Associate at GiveWell 2013-2017
Timothy Telleen-Lawton
Karma: 133
Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff — Totally changed the way I think about language and metaphor and frames when I read it in college. Helped me understand that there are important kinds of knowledge that aren’t explicit.
What I get from Duncan’s FB post is (1) an attempt to disentangle his reputation from CFAR’s after he leaves, (2) a prediction that things will change due to his departure, and (3) an expression of frustration that more of his knowledge than necessary will be lost.
It’s a totally reasonable choice.
At the time I first saw Duncan’s post I was more worried about big changes to our workshops from losing Duncan than I have observed since then. A year later I think the change is actually less than one would expect from reading Duncan’s post alone. That doesn’t speak to the cost of not having Duncan—since filling in for his absence means we have less attention to spend on other things, and I believe some things Duncan brought have not been replaced.
I am also sad about this, and believe that I was the person best positioned to have caused a better outcome (smaller loss of Duncan’s knowledge and values). In other words I think Duncan’s frustration is not only understandable, but also pointing at a true thing.
Agreed I wouldn’t take the ratanon post too seriously. For another example, I know from living with Dario that his motives do not resemble those ascribed to him in that post.
All of these answers so far (Luke, Adam, Duncan) resonate for me.
I want to make sure I’m hearing you right though, Duncan. Putting aside the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of the original question, do the scenes/experiences that Luke and Adam describe match what you remember from when you were here?
+1 (I’m the Executive Director of CFAR)
Given our confidence for opposing positions and your credentials my best guess is that there’s a miscommunication, in which case my guess on your correctness won’t be well defined. Perhaps there’s some critical word I’m using colloquially that has an importantly different meaning in economics.
In your model, how can you tell how close a market is to reaching the thresholds you suggest? In other words, if we are somewhere in the middle of converting a “large swath” of the population to vegetarianism, how can we tell if we’re at a point of 1 effect?
My guess is that we can’t distinguish between those cases, in which case the best we can do is to average out over all long periods of time/market states and estimate that our long term effect is 1:1 (even though, in every case, it probably isn’t exactly that).
The group I played with (same as Mark Xu’s group from comment above) decided that “S2 counting is illegal (you have to let your gut ‘feel’ the right amount of time)” and “repeating some elaborate ritual that takes the same amount of time before your card is due is illegal” (e.g. you can stick your hand 10% of the way towards the pile when the number’s 10 off from your card, and 50% of the way when it’s 5 off.)
Empirical evidence is nice and often more convincing than theory, but I don’t think it’s necessary for an argument to be convincing (to believe otherwise would be quite… burdensome).
In this case, the original articles I am critiquing used purely theoretical arguments to claim that there will be long term price elasticity of supply, and I think that a theoretical critique is sufficient to show that the strength of their arguments is currently too weak to support the complexity of their theory.
I’m certainly open to any empirical evidence that may exist. Would you find a quick analysis of Big Macs moving (or if not, do you have a suggestion for a different empirical analysis)?
The default assumption is that industries are increasing-cost, because low-hanging fruit is picked first.
I agree this effect will push towards an increasing-cost industry, but there are other effects at play that might be even more powerful such that the industry is constant- or decreasing-cost. For an extreme example, consider the market for computer games; I expect this to be a decreasing-cost industry (the more people buy computer games, the cheaper-per-quality they will be in the long-run, even ignoring technology improvements). For a more moderate example consider haircuts. How confident are you that the price of haircuts will increase the more haircuts there are in the long-run? For example, do you expect the real price of haircuts to rise dramatically as the population of a country grows dramatically? I do not.
My claim is that we shouldn’t assume that the meat industries are increasing-cost unless/until we have better reason to do so. The rationalist community pieces implicitly assume that all industries are increasing-cost (and don’t give reasoning for that example that’s relevant in the long-run), whereas the economics articles I cite show that industries can also be constant- or decreasing-cost as well.
The rationalist community, and standard economics, give the same answer, and it is only your very strange assumption (which you bury in the middle of your article!) that causes a discrepancy.
Actually my prior that industries are constant-cost is not a particularly strong one; I’d be happy if the sources I cite simply remove or justify their assumption that animal product industries in particular are increasing-cost. As I’ve shown from the standard economics citations, they are actually with me in not assuming that industries are increasing-cost (unless you’re arguing that AmosWEB and Policonomics do not represent the standard economics view).
OK so you have no prior for large cases, you have no prior about the relationship between large cases and small cases, and your guess for small cases is “zero impact”.
My prior for large cases is 1:1 impact, my prior is that the impact in large cases is proportionally similar to the impact in small cases, and therefore my prior for small cases is 1:1 impact.
My “not buying a chicken” seems like it would look very similar to anyone else’s “not buying a chicken”.
Thanks for acknowledging that.
I think standard economics agrees with your vision of “~always positively-sloping finite supply curves” in the short term, but not necessarily the long term. Here’s a quote from AmosWEB (OK, never heard of them before, but they had the quote I wanted)
As a perfectly competitive industry reacts to changes in demand, it traces out positive, negative, or horizontal long-run supply curve due to increasing, decreasing, or constant cost.
Oops, I meant to edit that rather than retract. Since I don’t believe there’s a way to un-retract I’ll re-paste it here with my correction (Changing “Supply Elasticity is 1” to “Supply Elasticity is finite”):
Cumulative elasticity = Supply Elasticity/(Supply Elasticity—Demand Elasticity). A cumulative elasticity factor of one means a demand elasticity of 0.
I believe your math skipped a step; it seems like you’re assuming that Supply Elasticity is finite. I actually claim in the original article that “the ‘price elasticity of supply’ in the arbitrarily long term becomes arbitrarily high”. In other words, as “length of ‘term’” goes to infinity, the Supply Elasticity also goes to infinity and the cumulative elasticity factor approaches 1 for any finite Demand Elasticity.
Thanks for the math demonstrating my point.
Stepping back, I worry from your sarcastic tone and the reactive nature of your suggestions that you assume that I am trying to ‘beat you’ in a debate, and that by sharing information that helps your argument more than it helps mine, I have made a mistake worthy of mockery.
Instead, I am trying to share an insight that I believe is being overlooked by the ‘conventional wisdom’ of this community and is affecting multiple public recommendations for rational behavior (of cost/benefit magnitude ~2x).
If I am wrong, I would like to be shown to be so, and if you are wrong, I hope you also want to be corrected. If instead you’re just debating for the sake of victory, then I don’t expect you to ever be convinced, and I don’t want to waste my effort.
That question seems to have a simple answer: your decision will not affect the long-term production of chicken.
OK, so I argue option A, you state option B, and the articles I link argue option C.
That is a much more complicated question
I agree it’s a complicated question (in that it requires lots of information to answer precisely and accurately). If you had no empirical data to work with, what would be your best guess/expectation? Also if your answer is proportionally different than in the ‘single chicken’ case, I’d be curious to know why.
Right. In this case, to answer the question, “If I decide to reduce my lifetime consumption of chicken by one, should I expect the long term production of chicken to drop by ~1, ~0, or something in between?” Which is of demonstrated interest to the authors I am critiquing.
This is true in the short term, but in the long term, the dynamic changes for producers:
The producers that know how to make chickens for $8 scale up or their production strategy is replicated by others.
The marginal cost of production (and hence price) keeps falling until all producers are making no profit (relative to opportunity cost of capital)
The industry can scale up/down (in the long term) to meet changing demand, but it can’t drive prices any lower. If prices were any higher the industry would scale up in the short term and keep expanding until the price fell back to the Cost in the long term.
The elasticity of the demand curve changes less than the supply curve in the super long term, but if you agree with me that the supply curve is virtually flat at that point, then the elasticity of the demand curve is negligible (because as the supply curve shifts left and right, the only point on the demand curve that matters is quantity @ price = Cost/Supply price).
Yes; another way to think of this is, “How do you model waste?”
If you think waste is best modeled by a fixed percentage of all production, then our best guess about the waste is that it changes proportionally with consumption. We don’t get to magically assign our consumption to the ‘waste’ category without highly specific information (such as, “I found it in a dumpster”).
If you expect the percentage of waste to grow/shrink with industry size, that could be an argument for slightly less/more than 1:1 effect (I’d put it in the “Gains to scale” category, even if it were negative). But I’ve never seen someone make that argument or attempt to model it.
Richard Chappell discusses a very simple model here.
Thanks for sending this; the ‘chunky fallacy’ comes up frequently when discussing this issue. Unfortunately, he explicitly endorses using short term elasticities at the end of his article.
What do you recommend if good data is too costly to collect?
I think that if someone has made a claim but failed to use good data or an empirical model, it should not require good data or an empirical model to convince that person that they were wrong. Great if you have it, but I’m not going to ignore an argument just because it fails to use a model.
Hi, I’ve been following LW and the occasional article for a couple years but have never posted any comments. Now I’d like to post an article but I need 20 karma to do so. If you don’t mind up-voting this comment to allow me to do that, please do!
If it helps, the post I’ve drafted is about some of the altruistic eating arguments I’ve seen in the broader LW network such as:
Benquo’s recent article on suffering per calorie of food
peter_hurford’s Why eat less meat?
Compassion, by the Pound
ACE’s Effects of Diet Choices on Animals
I use one neoclassical economic and one intuitive appeal to argue that they could all be simpler and more accurate by leaving out elasticities. LW seems like the perfect forum for this discussion!
Happy to share the draft privately before it’s posted if that affects your desire to up-vote this comment, or any recommendations as to whether it’s more appropriate for Main or Discussion.
Thanks!