Sorry for yet another low-effort post. I’ve been working on 30 pages on Very Serious Writing in the background, which I hope is ready to share soon. If you’re especially eager for more content, email me and I’ll be happy to share a draft.

In the meantime, I’m shocked and excited to have been selected as part of the Fantasy Intellectual Draft.

Here is the announcement post, and here is a site where you can view the current scores. This runs from now through June 30th.

As a participant, I’m not supposed to complete, but I’m going to anyway. The rules are:

• You must pick thinkers in different “positions” as described here
• Points are awarded based on Bets, Steelmanning and Memes as described here

Since I did not get to participate in the actual draft, my self-imposed rules are:

• You can only pick one intellectual from each section of 10-ranks (i.e. one from ranks 1-10, one from ranks 11-20, etc)
• You can substitute any pick for any other pick at a lower rank
• I’ll accept the scores listed on this site
• As I understand it, Utility means it can be filled by anyone
• You cannot pick yourself or your friends
• You can’t self-sabotage to gain points over the team that drafted you

If you would like to participate in this informal draft, I suggest doing so quickly before scores start coming out and you can gain advantage.

Because the picks were already conducted by the actual teams, this is already a bit unfair. I also did not have to “reserve” intellectuals and knew the rankings ahead of time. To balance things out, 5 of my picks will be conducted at random.

Okay, here are my non-random picks:

1. Scott Alexander (4, blogger)
2. Donald Trump (27, business)
3. Julia Galef (29, podcaster)
4. Ezra Klein (36, columnist)
5. Nate Silver (55, utility)
6. Vitalik Buterin (81, utility)
7. Agnes Callard (105, academic non-economist)
8. Zvi Mowshowitz (106, utility)
9. Zeynep Tufekci (109, academic non-economist)
10. Tanner Greer (118, utility)

I am picking many rationalists and rationalist-adjacent people. Tyler Cowen might accuse me of mood afiliation, but I am merely playing the meta-game. Rationalists are much more excited about steelmanning and bets than pretty much any other group of people.

That leaves 4 academic economists, 2 academic non-economists, one think tank person and another utility. The slots to fill are the 40s, 110s, 120s, 130s and 140s. I could have gotten a 60th-rank and 70th-rank intellectual, but I used up those spots on Zvi and Zeynep.

My “random” picks will be the first person from the appropriate tier who fulfils an open position. They are:

11. Scott Sumner (41, academic economist)
12. Peggy Noonan (111, utility)
13. Michael Levine (125, academic non-economist)
14. Christopher Balding (133, academic economist)
15. Todd Zywicki (143, academic economist)

Additionally, as a thanks to The Definite Optimists for drafting me, here are a few free points:

  *   I predict with 20% confidence that my picks will win the FIT
  *   I predict with 50% confidence that my picks will land in the top 3
  *   I predict with 80% confidence that my picks will land in the top 5

Maybe I don’t know the other intellectuals well enough and I’m being wildly overconfident, but this seems reasonably easy to win:

• Scott Alexander will, as Kling describes it “be a monster in the S and B categories”
• Trump will rack up a ton of meme points
• Other rationalists (Julia, Zvi, Tanner) will dominate the Steelman category. I also expect “Scout Mindset” to show up a lot. Don’t underestimate the boost of going on a book tour.
• Nate makes bets as his full time job.
• I snuck Ezra in under columnist since he regularly contributes to the NYT, but I expect his sheer throughput as a podcaster to win many points.
• Vitalik is a master of the steelman technique. As mentioned in his podcast with Julia Galef repeatedly: “trying to see the best arguments from both sides, like steel-manning people instead of straw manning people”, “You don’t even need me here at all, you can just do both sides of the conversation!”. Depending on how broadly you construe memes, expect to see Concave/Convex, Quadratic Funding and “Legitimacy” everywhere. The only downside is his relatively low output.
• Agnes is a philosopher by trade and steelmans constantly.
• I don’t know the random picks very well, but expect great things from Sumner and Balding.

Had she been available, I would have drafted Kelsey Piper. Under scoring criteria that included research summaries, I would have even more aggressively jumped on Scott Alexander, and eagerly drafted Emily Oster. I would have picked Bernie Sanders as well, his meme potential is underrated.

Some complaints about the rules:

• Bloggers should be separate from podcasters, another spot should open for columnists and think tank people.
• Journalists and op-ed writers should be separate positions.
• Bets should only win points if they’re correct and lose points if they’re wrong, proportional to confidence.
• You should have to pick at least 3 intellectuals for each point category.
• To better balance the benefits of choosing wildly prolific intellectuals, there ought to be opportunities for negative points. I suggest strawmanning and tweeting (anything).
• Balanced research surveys should win points, as should debunkings. Getting debunked by another author on the list should lose you a point. Admitting to a mistake wins you a point.
• I don’t see the purpose of having 4 positions dedicated to academic economists.

May whoever programmatically generates a gigantic post of trivial bets win!

–––

Endnote

In one of the FIT-related posts, Kling mentions “three well-intentioned changes in higher education” that he believes have caused problems. These include GI-Bill driven expansion of college access, opening opportunities to women, and attempting to give Black Americans fair representation. He also notes:

In principle, all of these could have been handled without harm to intellectual culture. But I believe that indirectly and unintentionally they produced intellectual status inversion. I will have to spell out my argument in future posts. I predict that no matter how carefully I make the argument, these posts will be cancel-bait. I expect to be accused of being anti-democratic, misogynist, and racist.

I haven’t read any future posts, and I don’t know what his argument will be. But for the record, I am personally strongly in favor of opening opportunities to women and giving Black Americans fair representation.

I am against college entirely for the reasons laid out in Caplan’s The Case Against Education, but so long as college remains a fixture in the American socio-economic ladder, it could be open to everyone.

I don’t mean to set a precedent of decrying every view of every blogger I mention, but this is a particular case where the post is directly related to the FIT, and it seems worth mentioning. And I know, I’m not winning any points for steelmanning.

As long as I’m at it: I don’t agree with all the views of the people on my draft. That is not the point of this game.

[trigger warning: everything]

What’s the point of any of this?

This is not for the purpose of cause prioritization. Unfortunately, the severity of a problem is not necessarily related to its tractability, especially for lay people looking to donate money or time. If that’s your interest, check out the 80,000 hours problem profiles.

This is also an explicitly short-termist list. There’s no mention of climate change or existential risks. There’s no mention of abstract causes like “failures of international cooperation”, even if these may be the “underlying cause”.

The point is:

• Gain perspective to avoid being distracted by relatively minor heat-of-the-moment crises.
• Provide a corrective against the optimistic Steven Pinker / Our World in Data style worldview
• Motivate myself to work on problems that actually matter

There’s a bit of a tension here. I both believe in the severity of current problems, and the Against Empathy-style argument that we ought to avoid reasoning too much from passions in our attempts to alleviate suffering. Since most of my work is abstract and future-oriented, the severity of concrete and short-term problems forces me to more seriously justify this stance to myself. Maybe that’s a distraction, but I think it’s a worthwhile one.

But aren’t things getting better?

Our World in Data shows decreasing famine mortality, decreasing deaths from genocide, and decreasing deaths from armed conflict.

These are good trends, but they’re no guarantee. Things can always become arbitrarily bad.

There’s also a Omelas-style argument to be made here. The more technologically advanced and glorious human civilization becomes, the worse it is that we allow any level of tragedy to persist. As Scott Alexander put it: “It is glorious that we can create something like this. It is shameful that we did.”

The List

Uyghur genocide
Scale: ~1,000,000+ detained
Type: “Forced abortion, forced sterilization, forced birth control, rape (including gang rape), forced labor, torture, internment, brainwashing, organ harvesting, killings”

Famine in Yemen and Blockade of Yemen
Scale: 85,000 children dead of starvation, 2 million children acutely malnourished, estimated 50,000 new child deaths per year, adults unknown, 24,000,000 people “in need of humanitarian assistance”, 500,000 cases of cholera
Notes: “U.S. is regarded as an indirect partner for Saudi Arabia in the war and blockade on Yemen.”, “UK government has officially supported the Saudi-led coalition”

Rohingya genocide
Scale: 24,000+ dead, 18,000+ rapes, 116,000 beaten, 700,000 – 1,000,000+ refugees
Type: Ethnic and religious persecution, Genocide

COVID-19 pandemic
Scale: ~2,700,000 deaths. 126 million confirmed cases, 780 million estimated cases (October 2020)

Syrian civil war
Scale: 388,652–594,000 deaths, 117,388 civilian deaths, 7,600,000+ internally displaced, 5,116,097+ refugees
See also: Refugees of the Syrian civil war, European migrant crisis

Tigray War and Mai Kadra massacre
Scale: 1000 – 100,000 deaths, ~2,500,000 displaced
Type: Mass killing, Ethnic cleansing

Other
Sinicization of Tibet
Central African Republic Civil War
Democratic Republic of Congo Humanitarian Crisis

Long Lasting (> 10 years)
Crisis in Venezuela
Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency
Colombian conflict
War in Darfur
Papua conflict
Moro conflict
Arab–Israeli conflict
Mexican drug war
Kurdish rebellions in Turkey
Kivu conflict
Kashmir conflict

US Specific
Incarceration in the United States
Scale: 2,200,000 incarcerated, 4,751,400 on probation or parole

Opioid epidemic in the United States
Scale: 399,000 deaths

Intensive animal farming
Annual Scale: 9.2 billion chickens, 124 million pigs, 34 million cows, 3.8 billion finned fish, 43.1 billion shellfish, 23 billion bycatch deaths, 68 billion feed fish
Notes: Non-wikipedia source
See Also: Wild Animal Welfare

Human rights in the United States
Type: “systemic racism,^[15][16][17] weaker labor protections than most western countries,^[18] imprisonment of debtors,^[19] criminalization of homelessness and poverty,^[20][21][22] invasion of its citizens’ privacy through mass surveillance programs,^[23] police brutality,^[24][25] police impunity and corruption,^[26][27] incarceration of citizens for profit, mistreatment of prisoners, the highest number of juveniles in the prison system of any country, some of the longest prison sentences in the world, continued use of the death penalty despite its abolition in nearly all other western countries,^[28] abuse of both legal and illegal immigrants[29][30][31] (including children),^[32][33][34] the facilitation of state terrorism,^[35] a health care system favoring profit via privatization over the wellbeing of citizens,^[36][37] the lack of a universal health care program unlike most other developed countries,^[38] one of the most expensive and worst-performing health care systems of any developed country,^[39] continued support for foreign dictators (even when genocide has been committed),^[40][41] forced disappearances, extraordinary renditions, extrajudicial detentions, the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and black sites, and extrajudicial targeted killings (e.g. the Disposition Matrix).^{[23][42][43][44]}
See also: Immigration detention in the United States, Human rights violations by the CIA

FAQ

You left out X / You shouldn’t include Y.
Feel free to let me know if I’m missing something, and I’ll consider adding it. The initial list was off the top of my head, so I am probably missing many things.

The (very rough) inclusion criteria is 100,000+ dead, or 1,000,000+ displaced, or an immediate threat of genoicide.

I would like to limit links to Wikipedia or Our World in Data.

This is an evergreen post. It’s linked from the header, and will be updated periodically.

Lambda School Incentives

Google Sheet
Post: Lambda School’s Incredibly Naive Incentive Alignment
Description: Modeling Lambda School’s ISA incentive structure with consideration of taxation. A fully functional California income tax calculator.
Findings: There is only a brief window where student and LS returns grow in tandem. LS is mostly not aligned with students, or actually incentivized against their interests. Based on student outcome data, only around one third of LS students fall within the incentive alignment window.

Independence Referendums

Google Sheet
Post: Base Rates on Secession
Description: Historical data on Independence Referendums from Wikipedia subjected to sensitivity analysis.
Findings: The rate of referendums per country per 4 year period varies by 4x depending on when you start counting. It’s at least 0.01, and at most 0.04 if you start counting right as the Soviet Union collapses.

TSMD and Intel R&D Spending

Google Sheet
Post: Isolated Demands for Rigour in New Optimism
Description: I extend the dataset from Bloom et al.’s Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? to include 2016-2019 data from 10-K filings, adjusted for exchange rates
Findings: Intel nominal R&D peaked in 2018. TSMC nominal R&D continues to increase exponentially.

Herd Immunity Guesstimate

Google Sheet
Post: Contra StatNews: How Long to Herd Immunity?
Status: Out of date, useful as a template for future modeling.
Description: Toy model of time to herd immunity based on vaccine acceleration, cases per day and different immunity thresholds.

Giving What We Can Growth

Google Sheet
Post: Why Hasn’t Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?
Description: Scarped archive.org data for GWWC member count, dollars pledged and donations actualized.
Findings: Growth has continued, growth rate peaked in 2015.

Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures Allocation

Google Sheet
Post: Why Hasn’t Effective Altruism Grown Since 2015?
Description: Grant databases from Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures aggregated by focus area and year.
Findings: Both increased rapidly from 2015 to 2017, and have sort of stagnated since. Global Health & Development is around 34% of all Open Philanthropy giving. Scientific Research is another 16%.

Substack Author Experience

Google Sheet
Post: How to Become Famous on Substack Overnight (in Ten Years)
Description: Top 25 free Substack authors from the old leaderboard and the time they’ve spent on Substack. Years of previous experience and notable work for the top 10.
Findings: Top Substack authors have around 10 years of prior experience in research or writing.

Byrne Hobart’s Portfolio

Google Sheet
Post: The Byrne Hobart Portfolio
Description: Scaped stock ticker disclosures from Byrne Hobart’s The Diff. Historical prices at the time of disclosure and performance since.
Findings: Subject to some assumptions, this portfolio dramatically outperformed hedge funds.

Constitutional Amendments

Google Sheet
Post: Wake Up, You’ve Been Asleep for 50 Years
Description: Proposal date of constitutional amendments that were later successfully ratified.
Findings: There were long gaps with no proposals leading to ratification from 1804 – 1865, 1870 – 1909 and 1972 – present.

Founders of Top 10 YC Startups

Google Sheet
Post: Replying to Robert Wiblin on Young Rationalists, Empirical Estimates of Golden Handcuffs
Description: Investigation into the backgrounds of top YC founders as ranked here.
Findings: Median age at founding was 27, median age now is 37. Median age of startup is 9 years. Founders attend elite universities, but don’t typically work at large or prestigious companies.

Google Alumni Estimate

Google Sheet
Post: Empirical Estimates of Golden Handcuffs
Description: Based on historical headcount data and simulated churn, I estimate how many people have ever worked at Google up through 2010.
Findings: Although Google’s employee count in 2010 was 24,400, I estimate there were an additional 25,400 ex-Google employees.

Model of Correlated Returns

Google Sheet
Post: Correlated Returns are Insufficient for True Alignment
Description: Modeling correlated returns in domains without proper incentive alignment, followed by seemingly correlated returns adjusted for opportunity cost.

Miike vs Tarantino

Google Sheet
Post: No One is Even Trying
Description: Rotten Tomatoes critic and audience score for the top 10 movies of Takashi Miike and Quentin Tarantino.
Findings: Miike’s top 10 movies are as well reviewed as Tarantino’s. Meanwhile, Miike has made 10 times as many movies overall.