Viliam
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I am skeptical about armchair Econ-101 reasoning unless it is also supported by empirical data. Many things can go wrong. (Also, it has a flavor of “map over territory”.) For example:
The models are based on some assumptions, which is necessary to create models, but in real life the assumptions may be wrong so much that it changes the outcome. The players are supposed to be 100% rational and all-knowing; the transactions are supposed to be completely friction-less; it is assumed that the market is the only game in town. So when this perfect market notices that e.g. there is an opportunity to sell more food, -- POOF! -- and there is instantly a new farm with food to sell. In reality, people may be slow to notice, risk-averse in face of uncertainty, they may be tons of bribes or paperwork necessary to start a new farm, growing the food may require a lot of time, and if too many food producers happen to belong to a minority ethnicity it might result in their genocide. When Econ 101 says “there shall be a balance”, it usually does not specify how long do we have to wait for its coming: days, weeks, years, or centuries? (“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” In case of Africa, longer than you and your clan can survive.)
It is easy to notice some relevant forces, and miss others. (The archetypal example.)
Seems to me that some armchair conclusions can be weakened or even reverted simply by reasoning “one level higher”. Is increasing human capital a good thing? Sounds uncontroversial, ceteris paribus, but suppose I wave a magical wand and every African magically acquires a PhD in anti-malaria net making. I would still suppose they would have a problem to feed their families. And I wouldn’t be too surprised to learn afterwards that there are still not enough anti-malaria nets produced.
Sorry for providing a fully general counter-argument. But this is exactly my point: with enough sophistication, you can make Econ-101 arguments either way. I have already seen a clever Econ-101 argument against the anti-malaria nets. What I need is a reality check.
[Question] Does anti-malaria charity destroy the local anti-malaria industry?
A simpler explanation:
Most people have completely crappy epistemic standards.
Intelligent people make up their own crazy ideas (in addition to repeating crazy ideas from others).
When you mastered something other people want to learn, you have an audience.
This is highly individual. I never go somewhere to “learn”. (I completely agree that you can read the Wikipedia, and most of the time I don’t even care.) Some people seem to have different preferences, hence the profession of a tour guide.
From the perspective of feelings, being somewhere provides you the full 3D experience, which is stronger than just seeing a picture on the screen. Even watching things in a museum or a gallery feels different than looking at pictures on the screen.
Some places provide you things you don’t have at home: a sea, a mountain, a forest, a jungle… My typical vacation is going somewhere close to nature.
Sometimes you want to experience a different culture. Could be any kind of difference, just to have a novel experience; or could be a specific culture that you enjoy. People have emotional associations with some cultures, based on stereotypes, books, and movies: romance, adventure… You may want to practice a language.
Traveling somewhere means that you don’t sleep at home. If you stay at a hotel, you have to pay for the bed and food, but you don’t have to do the dishes and other annoying work; it is expensive, but pleasant. (Yeah, you could also rent a hotel room right next to your house, but this way you combine the necessity of living somewhere on a vacation with the luxury of having more service.)
And then there are the thousand different details, many of them unpredictable, that you can find in a different place. You may find a nice park, a nice cafeteria, or perhaps just a nice view, at the new place. Around your house, you probably already know most of these things.
Sometimes you go to a specific place to meet people who live there. Sometimes you coordinate with people who live far from you, to spend the vacation together at the same place.
...I probably forgot a few things here, but the idea is that a vacation is many kinds of things. Different people put different weight on individual components, thus you get different kinds of vacations (hotel vs camp, distant country vs nearby place, etc.).
Does visiting family count as a holiday in the relevant sense?
Depends. It will be closer to the “archetypal vacation” if they live far away from you, in a different kind of place (e.g. big town vs village), if their neighborhood is interesting, etc. But there is no official definition, and in real life it probably depends on how your partner feels about it.
How much money should I be willing to spend on holidays?
Depends on your income and spending habits. And what type of experience you aim for. Foreign travel will be expensive; local train can be cheap. Hotel will be expensive; you can also find a cheap accommodation. Some countries or regions are expensive, some are cheap.
My algorithm is something like: First, choose the type of experience, e.g. “somewhere near a forest, where I can take walks in multiple directions; also not one of the places I was at recently”. Then choose the minimum level of comfort you can live with, e.g. “no cooking, a comfortable bed and a warm shower”. Then look for the options, prioritizing for seeming interesting and being cheaper.
Is ‘holiday’ a coherent enough category that I can treat it as primitive for the purpose of this question?
Yeah, I think so. “Going to a different place, with the intention to have pleasant and/or novel experience.” But of course some examples are more central (a hotel at the beach; a hike in the mountains; a guided tour in a foreign country).
Seems to me that “not being at home” itself makes a large part of the definition, although people can also go on business trips. (And you can make an edge case, such as a business trip in an exotic country, where the work is mostly a pretext to be there.)
feel free to answer ones not listed here
Try different things, find out what makes you happy. If you want to go with other people, different kinds of vacation may require different people.
[16:15] There’s a mosquito-net maker in Africa. He manufactures around 500 nets a week, employs ten people who as with many African countries each have to support upwards of 15 relatives. As someone that lives in West Africa, I can corroborate that however hard they work they can’t make enough nets to combat the malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
This is specifically the part that my understanding of Econ 101 fails to process.
There is this one guy and his 10 employees, and they can’t make enough nets for the whole Africa. Okay, that part is simple to imagine. But why doesn’t he employ more people and increase the production? Or why someone else doesn’t copy his business model?
If my memory serves me well, Econ 101 assumes that if there is an effective demand, sooner or later there will also be the supply to match it.
Should I assume that there is no effective demand to buy more nets? Like, perhaps people are not aware of the dangers of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, or they don’t believe the nets are helpful, or they simply do not have enough money to match the production costs of the nets: either because the nets are too expensive, or because they have to prioritize other necessities. But then, the problem is not that they “can’t make enough nets”, but rather that they “can’t sell enough nets”.
Another thing about Econ 101 is the principle of comparative advantage. According to this principle, trying to produce everything at home is worse than trading internationally. (Otherwise an embargo would be a blessing instead of a punishment.) But an international trade will inevitably put some of your local producers out of business. Is it possible that Africa has a comparative disadvantage at producing anti-malaria nets?
It seems to me that the author is pattern-matching food aid to nets aid. But that is a different situation. In a situation without foreign aid, you cannot have a long-term imbalance between local food production and local food needs… the starving people will die. But you can have a long-term imbalance between local anti-malaria net production and local anti-malaria net needs… people unprotected against malaria only get it with some probability, not certainty; some who get malaria will die but some will survive. In other words, the resulting balance can’t include people who don’t eat, but it can include people who are not protected against malaria but still some of them survive until they can reproduce. Foreign food aid tries to solve a temporary imbalance; and in the process perhaps introduces more harm than good. But foreign anti-malaria-net aid tries to change the long-term balance.
the problems caused by aid are extremely bad in some of the countries that are targets of aid (like, they essentially destroy people’s motivation to solve their community’s problems).
I understand how an intervention that puts half of your population out of business can have this effect. I find it less likely that an intervention that puts one person in a million out of business would have the same effect. That is why I asked how many people are employed in the anti-malaria-net industry, compared with agriculture.
This seems to me like a mistaken pattern-matching. Pretty much anything can make someone lose their job. But there is a difference between “save thousand people, destroy thousand jobs” (food aid) and “save thousand people, destroy one job” (anti-malaria nets).
EAs are good at explaining why you shouldn’t do what they’re (we’re?) doing. That’s different than actually doing the right thing.
I agree (with the second part, at least).
The author of the video said “according to Singer” repeatedly, so I assumed he also disagrees with what EAs are saying. If the real objection was “Singer says to do the right thing, but then actually does exactly the thing he said was wrong”, I didn’t get that message from the video. (Maybe the problem is on my side.)
In addition to the IQ difference, the “cluster in thingspace” that includes rationalists and Sam Harris fans contains disproportionately many people with IT skills.
And as you say, Sam Harris is less “fungible” than PDP. He already exists outside of YouTube, while PDP was made (and therefore can be replaced) by YouTube.
Can you think of any reasons we couldn’t make the coordinated city’s counterpart to the FSP’s Statement of Intent contract legally binding, imposing large fines on anyone who fails to keep to their commitment?
Because then even fewer people would sign it. And the remaining ones will be looking for loopholes.
For a lot of people a scheme like this will be the only hope they’ll ever have of owning (a share in) any urban property
Unfortunately, those would be most scared of the “large fines”.
It is a bit costly for me to review a 48 minute video without a summary, but here it goes:
[8:00] If you’re donating a dollar, according to Singer you would not want 99 cents to go to overhead costs and only one cent to go to the actual process of saving lives. Where should you donate your 5 dollars, if you could choose between a program that would take $4.95 to pay their employees and cover other costs, and only take the five cents to pay for bed nets; or one that spends the $4.95 on the bed nets, and only five cents on the overheads? You probably want to pick the latter, at least according to Singer. And this criterion is going to naturally privilege some causes over others because we’re focusing on that specific impact that physical tangible impact that you’re having.
This seems like missing the point (surprisingly, right after having described how consequentialism means that only the consequences matter), or perhaps it is a motte-and-bailey statement.
The overhead is not the problem. I believe this is actually one of the central messages of the effective altruism: what matters is what the money as a whole causes to happen. Overhead is a part of the equation. Yes, if we—ceteris paribus—just randomly increase the overhead for no good reason, it obviously makes us less effective. But if spending 20% on overhead instead of 10% would double the effect of the remaining 80% (for example by hiring more qualified people, or double-checking things to prevent theft), then increasing the overhead that way would be the right thing to do. I strongly believe Singer would approve this.
So, the motte of the statement is that if we have two processes that convert money to anti-malaria nets in exactly the same ratio, only one of them also has a 5% administrative overhead and the other has a 95% overhead, it is better to choose the former. The bailey of the statement would be concluding that...
Of the eight charities listed on the [GiveWell] web page, seven focused solely on directly providing health care: providing bed nets, providing cures for various diseases, and so on. These programs had the lowest costs and according to Singer the highest return in lives saved and pain averted.
No, it’s not about “the least overhead is when we provide health care, therefore health care is what we should do”. It is about the ratio between the donated dollars and generated outcome (where “many lives saved” is considered to be a quite impressive outcome). The overhead is a red herring.
[11:50] I will argue in fact that does more harm than good. I will claim that charities which minimize overhead actually are less effective than those that use their funds to address other concerns.
Sigh. Go on, fight the straw-Singer!
Then the video explains how donating X to a country can ruin the local X-providing industry. Duh. That’s why I’m asking: Where is the local African anti-malaria-net industry that is being so thoughtlessly ruined by GiveWell?
Because I understand how donating food ruins the local food producers, or how donating t-shirts ruins the local t-shirt producers, so I would also understand how donating anti-malaria nets would ruin the local anti-malaria-net producers… the question is, do these “local anti-malaria-net producers” exist in real life, or only as a part of the thought experiment? What fraction of African population is employed in this industry? (My uninformed prejudices say “probably several orders of magnitude less than in local food production”, but I may be wrong. Please give me data, not thought experiments designed to prove your point.) Because I believe there is a number X such that “X people saved from malaria” outweighs “1 person losing a job”, even in the extreme case where the person losing the job would literally starve to death. (By the way, what about those people who now don’t die from malaria? What if they also take someone’s job?)
[16:15] There’s a mosquito-net maker in Africa. He manufactures around 500 nets a week, employs ten people who as with many African countries each have to support upwards of 15 relatives. As someone that lives in West Africa, I can corroborate that however hard they work they can’t make enough nets to combat the malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Okay, so here is the local industry. I feel uncertain about the “×15” multiplier for the supported relatives, as an argument used in weighing the benefit of “more people saved from malaria” vs “local net producers not going out of business”. Some of those people dying from malaria also have relatives they support, don’t they? On the other hand, some of them are the supported relatives. (If I overthink it, some of them might even be the supported relatives of the local net producers.)
Now the argument goes: GiveWell sends the nets, puts the local producers (and their ×15 families) to poverty, and “in a maximum of five years the majority of the imported Nets will be torn, damaged, and
of no further use”. Now we have 165 more people depending on foreign aid. (Hey, what about those whose lives were saved from malaria? Some of them will depend on foreign aid, too!) Also, no one will restart the local net industry, because now it is seen as a risky business.The problem I have with this line of thought is that, hypothetically speaking, if I had a magic wand I could just wave and make malaria disappear forever… that would also be an evil thing to do. There would still be the 165 people depending on the foreign aid, right?
Then goes the general argument that by giving people specific aid, we are depriving them of the freedom to choose which aid they would prefer to get. In general, this is a good point, and there is a charity called Give Directly which addresses it… oh crap, donating cash to people makes them dependent, too! :( It seems like even keeping someone alive makes them dependent, because in the future, such person will require food, anti-malaria nets, etc.
Seems like the recommended solution is… to let Africa solve it’s own problems, without any kind of aid. Because that way, the solution will be sustainable. This will also prevent “brain drain”, because the smartest people will be motivated to keep living in the shitty environment, if they believe they are the only ones who can save it. (Win/win! Now even the jobs of the Westerners are safe.) Then those smart people will invest their savings in their countries of origin, and everything will become exponentially better.
[43:45] Singer and Give Well underestimate the amount of good that is done and pleasure created by bringing someone out of dependence.
Okay, here is a thought experiment: Your family is sick, you go to the doctor, and the doctors tells you: “I could give you a medicine, but imagine how much better it would feel to invent it for yourself! Yeah, it may cost a lot, and your family may die while you are researching, but I am giving you the long-term perspective here, for your own good.”
What I am trying to say is that there is the trade-off between the pleasures of being independent and the pleasures of having your relatives alive. Speaking for myself… well, I actually don’t think my country is economically independent, and I definitely wouldn’t trade my kids’ lives to make it so.
But perhaps the next time I will see a person suffering, I will remember that it is a superior option to just let them be, and not take away their motivation to become a well-paid software developer.
Additionally, everything he says seems quite likely according to Econ 101 models.
To me it seems like the Just-World Hypothesis. Specifically the part about how even donating cash to someone makes their life ultimately worse, feels like a status quo worship.
By this logic, there is no way to help another person, ever, without inflicting on them a horrible curse. You give your kids an Xmas present, and you just ruined their motivation to become financially independent. You help an old lady to cross the street, and you ruined her motivation to maintain her vision or to keep good relationships with her relatives. You invent the virus that kills mosquitoes worldwide, and you deprived the Africans of their motivation to study medicine. Any help is just a harm in disguise. (Or perhaps this only applies to helping Africans? Dunno.)
Reading the comments below the linked video… there were responses written 2 years ago that author didn’t have time to reply… How specifically does donating anti-malaria nets “keep populations dependent, economically weak, and slaves to the whims of international donors”?
I would understand the part about whims: yeah, tomorrow some influential organization might decide that the nets are bad and you should stop supporting them, and there would be no more nets. Still, would that outcome be worse compared to a parallel reality, where there never was a movement to support the anti-malaria nets? The people would still have gained a few years of health.
Are the donated nets ruining a previously existing huge local anti-malaria-net industry?
there are systemic issues that make things tend to become scams, and charity evaluators aren’t in a better position with respect to this problem than charities themselves, one should expect charity evaluators to become scams as well.
This part feels true. Similarly how in medicine people started reading meta-reviews, and soon the homeopaths in addition to their studies also started producing their own meta-reviews supporting their own conclusions… as soon as charity evaluation becomes a generally known thing, some of the current ineffective charities will produce their own charity evaluators which will support whatever needs to be supported.
It’s just, instead of “GiveWell will become a scam”, to me the more likely scenario seems “in a few years there will be so many charity evaluator scams that when you google for ‘charity evaluator’, you won’t find GiveWell on the first three pages of results”.
Seems to me that when we think about animals, there are two opposite mistakes one can make. First is too much anthropomorphism: “the dog that is looking at the moon must be thinking about its existential problems, because that is what I would do during a sleepless night”. Second is treating the animals as animal p-zombies: “yeah, the pig seems to suffer, but don’t make a mistake, only humans can really suffer; the pig makes the suffering-like movements and noises for a completely unrelated reason”.
As usual, the easiest way to get into one of these extremes is trying hard to avoid the other one.
No comment on the voting strategy, just wanted to focus on the idea that “the value of the land is mostly the proximity of other people, so why not coordinate and move to a new cheap place together?”
First, I wonder whether it is actually true. As far as I know, most cities are at a place that has some intrinsic value, such as a crossing of trade roads, a port, or a mine. I wonder how much this is necessary, and how much it is just history’s way to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of coordination by saying “first movers come here because of the intrinsic advantage, everyone else moves here because someone already moved here before them”.
On one hand, for many people “the value is the proximity of neighbors” is true. If you have a shop, you want to have many customers near you. If you are an employee, you want many employers near you, and vice versa. People move to e.g. the Silicon Valley because of everything that already is in the Silicon Valley; if you could somehow teleport the whole Silicon Valley into a not-very-awful place, this dynamics would probably remain. On the other hand, you have cities like Detroit, where removing an important piece (jobs in car industry) made everything fall apart; the “proximity to many neighbors” was not enough to save it. So having many people at the same place is not necessarily a recipe for success; the whole “ecosystem” needs to be in some kind of balance, which would be difficult to achieve with a new city.
Second, yeah, coordinating people is hard. Look at the Free State Project, where people coordinated to move to the same US state. It took them a few years to coordinate 20 000 people, just to move to existing cities, with existing infrastructure and job opportunities, within USA. How long would it take to coordinate people to move somewhere to a desert, and how many people would actually go there?
To put it bluntly, a science-related book with bad design just screams “crackpot”.
This is impressive. I am not going to read the text again to see what has changed, so no opinion on that part, but visually, it finally looks like a book. (Not like a bunch of screenshots from a blog.) Especially how the hyperlinks were changed; that was quite painful previously.
A part of me hopes that after publishing the 6 parts of the original Sequences, the series will continue. There were other things written during those years, both by Eliezer and by others.
I think there is a limit on replaceability of friends, even if you are surrounded by people you like. First, a part of value in friendship comes from understanding each other. Exchanging information about each other takes time; with a new friend you have to start from the beginning. Second, if you know a person for a short time, you don’t know whether their current behavior is typical, and you don’t know what their bad moments look like. So you can rely on them less than on a person you have known for years.
I would still assume a difference between environment where potential friends are scarce, and where potential friends are plenty. But the cost of replacing a friend cannot become arbitrarily small.
Some reality checks:
You are supposed to make good first impressions. That makes sense according to this model, because for a person you just met, you are most replaceable, so you have to try your hardest.
You can be more open about your weaknesses to people who are strongly connected to you. Makes sense; the least risk of being replaced. On the other hand, sometimes you can be very open to strangers (including therapists). Also makes sense; in this case you will certainly be replaced soon, so there is nothing to lose.
“People disagreeing with you” isn’t a threat in itself.
Depends on why they disagree. For example, some people just love to argue. If you say “X”, they are going to say “non-X” even if a minute before they had absolutely no opinion about it. It could be their idea of fun; it could be a status move. Some people have to inject themselves in everything, because it makes them feel important. Suddenly you are stuck talking to people who do not provide the truth-seeking value a honest opponent would.
Even if you ignore death threats, a stalker who follows you everywhere and keeps disagreeing with you publicly, can be a waste of your energy. Crazy people can write an insane amount of content, because they can type without thinking and they have nothing better to do at the moment. Even if they don’t convince anyone, they can disrupt a meaningful debate, and make you seem bad by association with them.
If you step back then other guests can fill the power vacuum with a different purpose than the one you intended
good moderators are prepared to ask if an audience member can turn a statement into a question or to cut them off for the benefit of the majority
This, so much!
By nature, I am completely “it’s unjust to have a master, and more so to be a master”, but experience has taught me that if I end up in a role of a boss, I have to play it, no matter how much I dislike it, because usually there is someone in the audience who loves the role and is waiting for the opportunity to grab it.
You try to share the power with the audience equally? Someone from the audience is going to take 80% of that share only for himself, unless you stop him. When you have a talk, it means people came to listen to you, not some overconfident rando from the crowd. (The rando can offer his own talk separately, at a different time or place.)
My interpretation of the message in Incredibles would be: “No one like the whiners”. (Note: I haven’t actually seen the movies, so there may be a nuance I am missing here completely.)
A part of the reason is that in many situations whining is unproductive. For example, there may be a situation where no available choice is perfect, and any solution necessarily contain a trade-off, but some people waste everyone’s time by refusing to accept that, and playing high moral ground, without proposing their own solution (which would expose them to criticism). Or people may defend an obviously suboptimal choice by selectively applying nirvana fallacy to all alternatives.
But another part is that we are instinctively wired to win social conflicts. If someone complains too much, it suggests they are too weak, and therefore a useless ally. You want to join someone who is frustrated today, but has a solid chance to prevail tomorrow; not someone who will predictably remain at the bottom. And there are all kinds of biases that can make your “elephant” perceive something as too much whining.
I occasionally find myself in situations where I feel I’m being asked to take a sort of Straussian stance — if you want to get important things done, you can’t be totally transparent about what you’re doing, because the general public will stop you. I’m not sure these people are wrong. But I really hope they are. I have a bad feeling about maintaining information asymmetries as a general policy.
Among rational and mutually friendly agents, hiding information would be bad. But most people are pretty far from being rational, and some people are pretty far from being friendly. Secrecy is a defense against an unknown but statistically real enemy.
If you say something in front of a sufficiently large audience, inevitably some people will disagree for wrong reasons. Some of them are crazy, or just completely misinformed about the topic (in a way that cannot be fixed in short term). Some of them see “disagreeing with you” as a way to get status points at your expense, even if they actually don’t truly disagree with you on the object level. Yes, it’s true that some people might disagree for the right reasons. But how would you solicit the feedback from the latter, without exposing yourself to the reaction from the former?
when asked for a choice (like “what should we eat” or “which of these meeting places do you prefer”), I frequently replied with some variant of “no preference”.
With some people, I once had a norm that the answer in such situations always consists of two parts: (1) the choice, you have to make one; and (2) a number from 1 to 10 expressing how strongly you prefer this choice.
With the right kind of person, this works quite well. You can have e.g. “option A, strength 2” and “option B, strength 4″, then go with option B without feeling guilty, but perhaps acknowledging a small debt towards the person who wanted A. (The debt will probably be erased soon when the next decision goes the other direction, but if it happens to accumulate, you can discuss that explicitly.)
After brief reading, seems like the conclusion is: “At market prices, most people would not use the anti-malaria nets; this is empirically verified. Therefore, we provide the nets for free, and we give the nets instead of cash to buy the nets.”
The obvious question is why are people unwilling to buy the nets?
Is there a rational reason, such as “the money is needed to prevent more immediate dangers, such as starvation”? Or is it an irrational one, such as underestimating the danger of malaria, not understanding how malaria spreads, or fatalism about diseases?