Project lead of LessWrong 2.0, often helping the EA Forum with various issues with the forum. If something is broken on the site, it's a good chance it's my fault (Sorry!).
Thank you for doing this! I have been working in increasing funding diversity myself via Lightspeed Grants and SFF work, but my sense is there continues to be a huge amount of value in further increasing funding diversity and increasing evaluation capacity (Lightspeed sure ended up somewhat overwhelmed by the 600+ applications we got, and we won't be able to evaluate many of them to the level that I think would be best).
I also applied on behalf of Lightcone. Hope the funding round goes well!
(In most cases, a parent's move to another country will not strip their citizen children of citizenship in the democratic country with the right of returning there. This is often true even for children who have not yet been born. And I think my objection would win if limited to already-born minor children only. But I'll assume the parental action would indeed strip the child's citizenship.)
Is this true? If a pregnant parent denounces their citizenship, I was assuming this would invalidate the citizenship of their unborn child. I should have clarified that moving alone isn't enough, but like, parents can renounce their citizenship, and this affects the citizenship status of their future children, which seems like the same deal.
Yeah, I think this is a pretty interesting question. I don't have a super strong take here.
Parents can move to a nondemocratic country, and so already have the power to validly and irrevocably give up the democratic rights of their children. I wouldn't currently prevent a pregnant parent from moving to China because that would give up the democratic rights of their future children, would you? It's plausible I should, but I don't currently feel sold on that.
I'll first note that it seems incredibly unlikely that 95% of a population would agree to sell their ancestral homeland out from under themselves. But even if they did, what would happen if the next year there was some scandal and they changed their minds, and then 95% of them wanted the FTX project gone? Does the project go caput, despite the substantial investment, or does FTX continue on and override the democratic wishes of the people of Nauru?
I don't know how unlikely it is. It seems like the kind of thing that probably hasn't been tried, or at least not tried in a high-integrity way. It's plausible to me that it couldn't happen, but we are talking about just a few thousand people, which is small enough (though still, of course, an enormous undertaking) that you could negotiate with a huge fraction of those people individually. My sense is there have been areas with 10,000+ people who were voluntarily relocated, and where the relocation package did get a 95%+ approval, but I am not sure.
But even if they did, what would happen if the next year there was some scandal and they changed their minds, and then 95% of them wanted the FTX project gone?
The same that happens if the nation otherwise made agreements with external parties. Sometimes governments borrow money from foreign nations or corporations, and they are generally expected to pay that money back.
It is definitely the kind of thing that should be figured out as part of the contract. Having a vote where people can give back any funds they received, or some large fraction of it, but then kick out the people who gave that money, seems pretty reasonable to me.
Seems like a super messy situation, but I don't think it's without precedent, and it feels like the kind of thing that could be figured out.
It seems to me that the talk of buying an entire nation (instead of say, buying a plot of land inside a nation), is inherently undemocratic, for this reason.
I agree that treating the purchase of a nation as a commodity is deeply confused and probably implies a lack of respect for democratic boundaries by the writer. But a democratic nation, democratically agreeing to sell some or most of the ownership over their nation seems like a reasonable thing for a democracy to do. If it's the will of the people, I am not going to stop them? On what basis would you prevent a nation from democratically deciding to sell their governance this way?
This idea doesn't strike me as super crazy, though I do dislike the focus on "having most EAs survive", and I feel like at least the framing in the article implies too much like you can just "purchase a sovereign nation".
That said, I think neither the idea that you can purchase a sovereign nation, nor the idea to invest in shelters for your local community, strikes me as bad. If 95%+ of the Nauruan population would prefer receiving a large cash gift in order to give substantial control over the nation to a third party, this seems like the kind of thing that a democratic nation should be allowed to do.
Separately, it seems pretty fine to me to be more motivated to save your friends and local community than to be motivated to save a random subset of humanity. I would be excited if a bunch of billionaires or nation states or religious communities or local communities decided to build shelters for themselves and their friends/allies, and would not demand entry to such shelters if I did not contribute to building them.
My guess is this is quite unlikely to break even on cost-effectiveness grounds (compared to other ways to spend money more effectively), and I don't think this should count as a charitable intervention by normal US 501c3 standards, since it's not for the public benefit, but only for the benefit of a specific professional community, but otherwise it seems like this plan could have been executed in a way that would have been good for the world.
That said, de facto I expect that FTX, if they had ever taken this project seriously, would have not gone ahead with this plan in a way that would have been good for the world, mostly because they have demonstrated that they weren't very good at respecting boundaries and engaging in trades that leave all parties better off, and my guess is they would have done it in a way that would have violated some of the autonomy of the citizens of Nauru, and my guess is would have not been honest and straightforward about how this mostly benefits them and their friends.
I only skimmed this paper, but as far as I can tell it never responded to one of the most central reasons for why a Malthusian model makes sense, which is selection effects and evolutionary pressure. The paper brings this up themselves, but then doesn't seem to do anything with that:
The case for nonetheless considering the Malthusian model is that Malthusian population dynamics may reemerge in the long run. First, evolutionary pressures for higher fertility might increase long-run population growth to the extent that natural resource constraints become binding once more (cf. Bostrom 2004; Collins and Page 2019).14
Over the course of hundreds of generations, we should expect huge memetic and genetic selection towards higher fertility rates, so it seems pretty implausible to me you end up with a population permanently substantially below carrying capacity, unless you also posit the development of some enforcement mechanism that prevents people from having children.
I don't really know why we should assign much validity to the alternative population models you outline, on the timescales that we are talking about (100,000+ years). The basic selection effect argument seems much stronger than the support for these other models on their long-run fit, so it seems pretty confused to me to consider them seriously.
There is a basic valid point here, but I would really want to distinguish between "fringe" and "extreme" views.
Sam was not a "fringe" member of the EA community. He was extremely central and occupied a pretty central node in the social graph (due to the connections associated with the FTX Future Fund and lots of EAs working at FTX). I agree with you that his beliefs were extreme. Indeed I think it's not that rare for the core of a community to have more extreme beliefs than the fringes, especially as a movement starts growing a lot and is appealing to broader swaths of people each year.
I think this is a large enough conflation that I would recommend changing the title.
I would like to give this a proper treatment, though that would really take a long time. I think I've written about this some in the past in my comments, and I will try to dig them up in the next few days (though if someone else remembers which comments those were, I would appreciate someone else linking them).
(Context for other readers, I worked at CEA in 2015 and 2016, running both EAG 2015 and 2016)
Thank you for doing this! I have been working in increasing funding diversity myself via Lightspeed Grants and SFF work, but my sense is there continues to be a huge amount of value in further increasing funding diversity and increasing evaluation capacity (Lightspeed sure ended up somewhat overwhelmed by the 600+ applications we got, and we won't be able to evaluate many of them to the level that I think would be best).
I also applied on behalf of Lightcone. Hope the funding round goes well!
Totally! This seems pretty clearly non-charitable (which I tried to emphasize in my comment).
Is this true? If a pregnant parent denounces their citizenship, I was assuming this would invalidate the citizenship of their unborn child. I should have clarified that moving alone isn't enough, but like, parents can renounce their citizenship, and this affects the citizenship status of their future children, which seems like the same deal.
Yeah, I think this is a pretty interesting question. I don't have a super strong take here.
Parents can move to a nondemocratic country, and so already have the power to validly and irrevocably give up the democratic rights of their children. I wouldn't currently prevent a pregnant parent from moving to China because that would give up the democratic rights of their future children, would you? It's plausible I should, but I don't currently feel sold on that.
I don't know how unlikely it is. It seems like the kind of thing that probably hasn't been tried, or at least not tried in a high-integrity way. It's plausible to me that it couldn't happen, but we are talking about just a few thousand people, which is small enough (though still, of course, an enormous undertaking) that you could negotiate with a huge fraction of those people individually. My sense is there have been areas with 10,000+ people who were voluntarily relocated, and where the relocation package did get a 95%+ approval, but I am not sure.
The same that happens if the nation otherwise made agreements with external parties. Sometimes governments borrow money from foreign nations or corporations, and they are generally expected to pay that money back.
It is definitely the kind of thing that should be figured out as part of the contract. Having a vote where people can give back any funds they received, or some large fraction of it, but then kick out the people who gave that money, seems pretty reasonable to me.
Seems like a super messy situation, but I don't think it's without precedent, and it feels like the kind of thing that could be figured out.
I agree that treating the purchase of a nation as a commodity is deeply confused and probably implies a lack of respect for democratic boundaries by the writer. But a democratic nation, democratically agreeing to sell some or most of the ownership over their nation seems like a reasonable thing for a democracy to do. If it's the will of the people, I am not going to stop them? On what basis would you prevent a nation from democratically deciding to sell their governance this way?
This idea doesn't strike me as super crazy, though I do dislike the focus on "having most EAs survive", and I feel like at least the framing in the article implies too much like you can just "purchase a sovereign nation".
That said, I think neither the idea that you can purchase a sovereign nation, nor the idea to invest in shelters for your local community, strikes me as bad. If 95%+ of the Nauruan population would prefer receiving a large cash gift in order to give substantial control over the nation to a third party, this seems like the kind of thing that a democratic nation should be allowed to do.
Separately, it seems pretty fine to me to be more motivated to save your friends and local community than to be motivated to save a random subset of humanity. I would be excited if a bunch of billionaires or nation states or religious communities or local communities decided to build shelters for themselves and their friends/allies, and would not demand entry to such shelters if I did not contribute to building them.
My guess is this is quite unlikely to break even on cost-effectiveness grounds (compared to other ways to spend money more effectively), and I don't think this should count as a charitable intervention by normal US 501c3 standards, since it's not for the public benefit, but only for the benefit of a specific professional community, but otherwise it seems like this plan could have been executed in a way that would have been good for the world.
That said, de facto I expect that FTX, if they had ever taken this project seriously, would have not gone ahead with this plan in a way that would have been good for the world, mostly because they have demonstrated that they weren't very good at respecting boundaries and engaging in trades that leave all parties better off, and my guess is they would have done it in a way that would have violated some of the autonomy of the citizens of Nauru, and my guess is would have not been honest and straightforward about how this mostly benefits them and their friends.
I only skimmed this paper, but as far as I can tell it never responded to one of the most central reasons for why a Malthusian model makes sense, which is selection effects and evolutionary pressure. The paper brings this up themselves, but then doesn't seem to do anything with that:
Over the course of hundreds of generations, we should expect huge memetic and genetic selection towards higher fertility rates, so it seems pretty implausible to me you end up with a population permanently substantially below carrying capacity, unless you also posit the development of some enforcement mechanism that prevents people from having children.
I don't really know why we should assign much validity to the alternative population models you outline, on the timescales that we are talking about (100,000+ years). The basic selection effect argument seems much stronger than the support for these other models on their long-run fit, so it seems pretty confused to me to consider them seriously.
There is a basic valid point here, but I would really want to distinguish between "fringe" and "extreme" views.
Sam was not a "fringe" member of the EA community. He was extremely central and occupied a pretty central node in the social graph (due to the connections associated with the FTX Future Fund and lots of EAs working at FTX). I agree with you that his beliefs were extreme. Indeed I think it's not that rare for the core of a community to have more extreme beliefs than the fringes, especially as a movement starts growing a lot and is appealing to broader swaths of people each year.
I think this is a large enough conflation that I would recommend changing the title.
I also thought it was pretty decent, and it caused me to get a post out that had been sitting in my drafts for quite a while.
I would like to give this a proper treatment, though that would really take a long time. I think I've written about this some in the past in my comments, and I will try to dig them up in the next few days (though if someone else remembers which comments those were, I would appreciate someone else linking them).
(Context for other readers, I worked at CEA in 2015 and 2016, running both EAG 2015 and 2016)