Tom Chivers
"Far too nice to be a journalist," per Terry Pratchett. Lead writer on Semafor's Flagship newsletter. DMs open; chiversthomas(a)gmail.
Latest book, Everything is Predictable: geni.us/EIPBook
Podcast, The Studies Show: https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com
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- I am indeed! And I am familiar with Spanish naming customs but I thought perhaps it would be possible to consolidate. It was a silly joke and I hope not a rude one
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- I don't think so, although I agree the cuts are mad and stupid. I still think scientific journals explicitly backing a political candidate is bad and will almost certainly reduce trust in science among ≈50% of people. I could understand op-eds saying "This policy is bad for science" etc
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- the size of the number "costs" is a big part of a cost-benefit analysis. If I offered you a bag of crisps for £2bn, you'd say no because the number is obviously too big however nice the crisps are. Rob's claim, which I support, is that £100m is very unlikely to be value for money in this context.
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- yes!
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- for the record, I'd be thrilled if someone took £100 million and rewilded a huge chunk of the UK countryside. I think that would be amazing and far more impactful than building a tunnel. I would also like lynx, wolves and bears to be reintroduced. My suspicion on this is it is spoiler behaviour.
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- bats? In a rabbit hole? The thick plottens!
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- I can't tell you that you're wrong – if you value this particular habitat over others, then that's up to you. But I am sceptical that it is a good use of the money even from a bat-conservation point of view, and that there's a fair amount of "YIMBYs say it's good so I will say it's bad" going on
- I'm not sure if you're serious, but the British government is trying to improve British infrastructure. A railway in Namibia wouldn't do that. If you're concerned about UK wildlife, you could do the 1000-acre rewilding Rob suggested much more cheaply than £100m and I bet it would many save more bats
- if you were given £100 million to protect bats, you wouldn't spend it on a tunnel over some railway, I imagine
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- yup! Exactly. Even for the stated aim of saving bats, the £100 million is being badly spent there
- Wonder what all those Silicon Valley "effective altruists" make of their kin destroying by far the largest aid agency in the world?
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View full threadthis is, with respect, utter garbage. PEPFAR is effective: it saves a lot of lives per dollar. I would be surprised to learn it is as effective as AMF or GiveDirectly. But even if it is, the idea that you could make ALL OF GOVERNMENT as effective as AMF by engaging with it is ludicrous.
- Engaging politically within your system is good. I applaud it (when it's actually engaging and not telling Bluesky that you punch Nazis). But *if you want to save lives with money that you have to spare*, right now, you can do so most effectively by giving money to GiveWell.
- I don't know what this means
- oh I see. Yes, they have moved billions of dollars into effective causes.
- I think there has been a big change, and it's that at the top end of Silicon Valley a few high-profile billionaires have become vocally pro-Trump. But rationalism, Silicon Valley in general, and EAs especially are all further left/liberal than the median American by quite a long way.
- I have a theory about why Silicon Valley bosses shifted, and it's tongue-in-cheek summed up by this piece imightbewrong.substack.com/p/why-doesnt... – as Kelsey Piper noted, there was a top-down decision at the NYT to paint tech in a negative light a few years ago – but I have no evidence for it
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- I'd push back on the idea that the rationalist community approves of this either. Obviously some do (it's a big community!) but the rats lean left/liberal (with a big libertarian minority) too. 2023 LessWrong survey www.lesswrong.com/posts/WRaq4S... 2024 ACX survey docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
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- thank you Dorian. Yeah. I honestly think there's a sort of vibesy association thing going on, where in people's minds it's all tech-silicon-valley-numbers stuff and working out which particular ones are which is too much work
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- Yes: I am happy to concede that both Musk and Vance are aware of effective altruism. I am not sure, though, what that implies for those of us who think it is a good idea to donate money to effective causes such as malaria prevention, and to try to work out what the most effective causes are.
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- seeing how many people just go off vague tribal vibes and assume EAs are all quasi-fascists from Silicon Valley is really depressing though
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- This is just silly. Saying "Elon Musk once said nice things about this movement, ergo we should stop paying for antimalarial bed nets or trying to work out where charitable donations will do the most good" is the saddest sort of tribalism bsky.app/profile/did:...
- This is "Hitler was a vegetarian"-level debate. Musk donated $100 million to a carbon-capture programme; does that mean he's aligned with environmentalism, and that movement is thus associated with him? If that's your bar for "associated" then fine but it seems unfair to tar GiveWell with that brush
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- This is "Hitler was a vegetarian"-level debate. Musk donated $100 million to a carbon-capture programme; does that mean he's aligned with environmentalism, and that movement is thus associated with him? If that's your bar for "associated" then fine but it seems unfair to tar GiveWell with that brush
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- who are these people who are both EAs' champions and biggest beneficiaries and also the worst people in the world? Who specifically are you talking about?
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- I disagree with this to an extent. I don't think there's very much doubt over things like "donating to global health initiatives in the developing world is far more effective than donating to rich-world causes" or more specifically that fighting malaria is a high-return cause.
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- you could start here www.givewell.org/about
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- in which case I apologise, because I missed it. The rest of this thread is full of sincere equivalents of that take so I'm on a bit of a hair trigger
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- honestly I have absolutely no idea what you guys are talking about or if you have even the slightest idea what effective altruism involves. Every actual EA is bemoaning this obviously terrible decision, but Bluesky is hallucinating that they're behind it somehow.
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- no! What the hell? How do people come up with this stuff? EA wants money spent effectively! PEPFAR is effective! EA supports PEPFAR! Read Scott's piece for an actual EA's perspective, if that helps www.astralcodexten.com/p/money-save... or Dylan Matthews' www.vox.com/future-perfe...
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- "perhaps that money that saves roughly one child's life per $5,000 spent would have been better donated to a US political party" is certainly a point of view. And who are these people you think are both EAs and associated with Musk or Vance? Do you have specific people in mind or is it a vibe?
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- this whole thread is so disappointing in the lack of any curiosity about what EA actually is, from really quite clever people. The idea that the effective altruism movement would APPROVE of cutting PEPFAR just shows that people have absolutely no idea what effective altruism is about
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- this whole chat is just silly! Of course effective altruism exists! Go and see what GiveWell is doing. Or GiveDirectly, or 80,000 Hours, or Open Philanthropy! These are real organisations handing $millions or $billions to important, real-world, *effective* causes! And saving thousands of lives!
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- Here's a 2022 survey of the EA community on the EA forum. forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AJDgnP... "Respondents continue to be strongly left-leaning politically (76.6% vs 2.9% right-leaning)."
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- not from the EA community, I suspect, which is generally appalled. Here's Dylan Matthews, an EA, on the PEPFAR stuff www.vox.com/future-perfe...
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- you can find several in this very conversation! And you'll find thousands more that the Effective Altruism Forum, if you're looking forum.effectivealtruism.org?tab=global-h... with ongoing discussions of PEPFAR and why it's terrible that it's being cut
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- I enjoyed that mid-2000s efflorescence of guitar bands, but I don't think many of them have really stood the test of time in the way that [several bands which were around when I was 15 and emotionally vulnerable] have
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- hey! do you have a PDF of this you could send me? going to pitch it as an item in our newsletter. Thanks!
- Oh no! Which band did we slag off?
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- some useful examples www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...
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- you can't read them if they're deleted, and Facebook deleted quite a lot of posts that were deemed misinformation, by its own admission!
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- how about if the stuff deemed misinformation is deleted? Which definitely happened, by Facebook's own admission!
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- taking down a post or downgrading its algorithmic promotion definitely is curtailing free speech, though, and it happened quite a lot. And misinformation has always happened! Look at pamphlets about Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution for a start
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- some useful examples in here www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...
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- there are a bunch of examples in this piece www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202... including when Facebook took down Cochrane Library posts from Instagram for (correctly) saying there was no evidence to show ivermectin treated COVID
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- then freedom of any kind doesn't exist, surely? Your argument proves too much. There is no freedom of movement in the world. There is no freedom of association. Freedom is false because it does not perfectly exist anywhere. I'd say freedom, like objectivity, is an impossible ideal to strive toward
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- I live in north London
- Zuckerberg explicitly said that they took content deemed misinformation down, "including humour and satire," under pressure from the government! It's fine to say that was good and worth it, but I don't think it's wrong to call it censorship. Censorship can be the right thing to do
- on reducing the distribution, he also explicitly said they reduced the spread of the Hunter Biden laptop story while it was being fact-checked. Again, maybe that's fine and good, but I don't think it'd be wrong to call it at least soft censorship
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- I'm saying 1) misinformation is still speech and banning it is an imposition on free speech; if you think it's worth doing then at least be grown-up enough to admit you think the benefit worth the cost and 2) some stuff labelled "misinformation" has later turned out to be true
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- I hate this argument. The laws are different in different countries, yes, but the concept of being free to speak is simple. Every country curtails it to some degree, and that's fine, but I get so annoyed by people saying "OK you're not allowed to say X but that doesn't count as 'free speech'"
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- maybe nothing! But it is still an imposition, and it's childish to pretend otherwise. It is fine to say "Yes, this curtails free speech, but I think the speech it is curtailing has few benefits and many costs so I deem it worth it."
