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Benito comments on Should effective altruists care about the US gov't shutdown and can we do anything? - Less Wrong
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Comments (111)
Yes.
If I were to attach a probability, it would be far below 1%; even if the most prominent famous person connected to LW I can think of, billionaire Peter Thiel, were to intervene, I still would not expect as high as a 1% chance of meaningful influence on the outcome.
I think this is the important point people should be talking about; Why are you talking about politics? What possible benefit will come of talking and arguing over that which you can have no effect?
As the son of a company VP said after he observed his elders pontificating on politics:
Case in point: the weather.
In retrospect it was my mistake, although given my initial state of knowledge I don't think I did anything wrong.
1) I thought there was a possibility that something could be done. As of now, I'll take the majority opinion's word that nothing can be done, even though I'm still not sure why this is true. The opinions from people I trust to assign confidences accurately is sufficient evidence for now. I might investigate myself later if I have time, although the fact that most people think nothing can be done indicates that perhaps it's not worth the time to research it.
2) I didn't mentally classify this under the heading "politics", but under "shit, lots of labs are shutting down for a potentially preventable reason, and many smart people (on this forum, too) think that science research is the single most cost-effective good, so maybe this is a very critical time to act. Maybe if I post, other people who know more than me will think about it from an effective altruism perspective and a useful discussion will spark." It seemed a pretty non-partisan issue, since all sides agree that it's bad. That was actually a mistake - I should have realized that anything tangentially related to politics is a political issue.
Despite some of the responses to the contrary, I'm actually still not convinced that this whole shutdown isn't a really, really bad thing...but I guess calculating the harm would be a difficult fermi estimate to pull off.
I'd say the mistake was speaking about disastrous consequences (as a certain fact), when in reality you had little information to back this up.
The proper approach in such situation would be asking: "I heard about X. Do you think it will significantly impact Y?" And then the debate would be about the estimated impacts of X (instead of about your overconfidence).
The political aspect just makes it worse, but I think speaking about disasters in situations where you have little information would be bad even in non-political areas.