Musings of a social scientist
Epistemic Status: back-of-the-envelope. I am about to present a bad cost-benefit analysis of fluoridation. However, something is better than nothing, and I have not seen anyone else do this. Summary: Fluoridation causes more monetary harm than good if it causes an average IQ point loss of more than 0.2. According to a recent meta-analysis , the effect size from high-quality studies is 1 IQ point…
Here are some interesting questions: 1) If Japan raises $1 billion by increasing taxes on investment income , how many people will die as a result? 2) If Kenya raises $1 billion with a bundle of sales taxes , how many people will die as a result? 3) If the USA raises $1 billion with a tariff on Chinese goods , how many people will die as a result? (If it is not obvious to you that these numbers…
I want to start by making it absolutely clear that I am on Israel's side. The people of Israel deserve to live in peace and security, and achieving this should be our main concern. I'm writing this because it's epistemologically virtuous to make public predictions. I put roughly 80% confidence on any statement that I make here. If I'm wrong about this, and I hope that I am, I will update my…
Epistemic status: deliberately written in simplified tale/myth mode. I could go off on so many tangents on the actual complexity and nuance of everything, but I wanted to keep it tight. I encourage you to 'unpack' the points by comparing them to things you know, and/or framing what I say in different ways, to see if the main theme/message makes any sense to you. 1: Monkeys Become Ants In the…
An interesting irony of the movie Don't Look Up is that, while it is very good at understanding the media and manipulating public opinion, it is profoundly unconcerned with showing an accurate portrayal of the physical world, and it knows that its audience is equally unconcerned. They might have done this intentionally, as a meta-level joke, or they might be assuming that the audience would…
This post is designed to advance and briefly defend the proposition that The US government should treat any company with an algorithmic feed as the publisher of all content delivered via that feed , meaning that they are legally liable for it. There has been some talk recently about repealing or reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act . A blanket repeal would be a disaster,…
I can't take credit for this idea, it has been 'in the water' of the EA/rationalist community for a while, for example in Answer to Job . It is the kind of thing I tend to assume that everyone in the community understands or knows, and yet people constantly seem surprised when I explain it. And apparently the repugnant conclusion is still considered an 'unsolved' problem by the philosophical…
Measuring the net economic and social costs of a plausibly-addictive substance or behavior that people make moral judgments about is extremely difficult. Because of the addiction, we can't trust revealed preference, and because of social desirability bias, we can't trust stated preference. Without any reliable analytic technique, figuring out what's really going on is quite hard. So in the absence…
Summary: Even with a zero rate of pure time preference, and persistent zero real interest rates, we should use discount rates of at least 1% for any real-world project or policy. Health, lives, or utility should be discounted because of the probability that a discontinuity in resources or policy or the state of the world will cause projected future effects to not happen. With policies that provide…
I know that this is probably-impractical utopian thinking, but whenever I discuss related ideas in conversation, people ask me to write it up, so here goes: The core idea is to get rid of all current taxes, and some existing government power and regulation, and replace them with externality taxes and progressive consumption taxes. Externality Taxes: The Basics All significant, measurable…
Futurists often think that self-replicating machines will change everything. But It's possible to imagine a world where self-replicating technological systems are common, but nobody bothers to use them because they are economically and militarily worthless. In a world with relatively strong property rights and relatively low transportation costs, this could be the expected state of affairs. The…
A colleague asked me to estimate how much money the USA could raise by taxing externalities equal to the damage they cause. This is the kind of thing that should be done by a team of competent experts, but apparently nobody with resources has even bothered to ask the question, so I took a shot at it: CBO's list of budget options estimates about $100B per year from a carbon tax set at the estimated…
I am confident about the upcoming decade. I think by the end of it, the current mess will be mostly over and we will be on track for a good sustainable semi-utopian future for humanity. I'll briefly list the reasons below. Even if you don't share my overall optimism, please at least consider these as good and interesting developments to watch out for. Biotechnology : Things will start to arrive in…
Art is a subset of the class of objects that are created by people and have an effect on the mind of other people. It may or may not have many other definitions and features, as people have argued over for millennia, but this is a true thing you can say about it. There are many mind-affecting things not created by people, but they are not art. The selection, curation, or framing of things not…
Sometimes people have a good intuitive understanding that something is very wrong with the world, but they lack the analytical ability to explain why the thing is happening. An important skill, related to intellectual charity, is to learn to listen to these visionary heartfelt cries of pain even when the professed explanation or ideology of the author is clearly very confused. This is the case…
Color was the topic of our last LessWrong meeting. We talked about color theory and physics, eyesight, aesthetics, different perceptions, etc. To illustrate how people think differently about color, I brought six identical bags of colored Legos for people to sort into groups: I randomized the number of groups by rolling an eight-sided die and adding four. The roll was 6, for 10 groups. When asked…
Summary: Almost all utilitarian reasoning about specific interventions and thought experiments is wrong, because it fails to account for the fact that taking a thing away from people causes a utility loss that is significantly greater then the utility gain they would get from acquiring the thing. For any significant permanent change in circumstance, making people worse off causes four to six times…
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it. - Nick Bostrom Imagine a world inhabited by a species, call them goblins, that is just below the threshold of…
Nothing I say here is original; it is heavily influenced by Tabarrok 's thinking on the matter. This post started as a Facebook comment in response to a friend's question; I am putting it here so I will be able to find it again and refer to it easily. The question was "To what extent should governments try to enforce intellectual property rights? ... How would we determine, in principle, whether…
The career guide 80,000 Hours highly recommends getting an Economics PhD . I completely agree with their assessment. If you have an academic personality and a decent work ethic, and are lucky enough to be born with high analytical intelligence, there are few better options. If you identity as an Effective Altruist and want to make the world a better place, becoming an economist (and doing anything…
The thing that truly terrifies me about the election is that it reveals that our best methods of understanding and predicting reality are fundamentally inadequate. Brexit was the first hint, and this is the confirmation. Trump's victory was not due to random chance, or weather, or some last-minute surprise. Nothing really changed in the last week. The depth of his popular support was a fact of…
It occurred to me today that I have never seen any attempt at calculating how much society should be willing to spend to prevent an AI Catastrophe . I am pretty good at this kind of thing, so here's a quick Fermi estimate: Conceptually, this is a lot like buying a life insurance policy for the human race. There is some probability of a catastrophe, so the annual amount we should be willing to pay…
IBM claims that it can provide insights to my personality by analyzing the text I write. Let's test this by separately feeding it the text of my last few blog posts and seeing what it says about each one: Organ Donor Safety Exemptions : You are shrewd, unconventional and can be perceived as indirect. You are imaginative: you have a wild imagination. You are laid-back: you appreciate a relaxed pace…
The following question was posted on the EA Policy Facebook page: General idea: should exemptions be granted to certain safety laws if you sign up to be an organ donor? Would such policies likely be a positive or negative for organ donation and safety compliance? My response turned into a full blog post: The biggest possible failure is that it discredits the idea of voluntary organ donation,…
This is a technical post, only of interest to people doing policy analysis. Much of it was originally written in response to a Facebook post related to Effective Altruism Policy Analytics , and I am reposting it here so it is in a more permanent place that I can link to. One of the group members posted a link to the following paper: Well-Being Analysis vs. Cost-Benefit Analysis and asked me if we…