Bertrand Russell, well aware there were health risks of smoking, defended his addiction in a videotaped interview. See if you can spot his fallacy! 

Today on SBS (radio channel in Australia) I heard reporters breaking the news that Nature article reports that Cancer is largely due to choices. I was shocked by what appeared to be gross violations of cultural norms around the blaming of victims. I wanted to investigate further since science reporting is notoriously inaccurate.

The BBC reports:

Earlier this year, researchers sparked a debate after suggesting two-thirds of cancer types were down to luck rather than factors such as smoking.

The new study, in the journal Nature, used four approaches to conclude only 10-30% of cancers were down to the way the body naturally functions or "luck".

"They can't smoke and say it's bad luck if they have cancer."

-Dr Yusuf Hannun, the director of Stony Brook

-http://www.bbc.com/news/health-35111449

The BBC article is roughly concordant with the SBS report. 

I've had a fairly simple relationship with cigarettes. I've smoked others' cigarettes a few times, while drinking. I bought my first cigarette to try soon after I turned of age and discarded the rest of the packet. One of my favourite memories is trying a vanilla flavoured cigar. I still feel tempted to it again whenever I smell a nice scent, or think about that moment. Though now, I regularly reject offers to go to local venues and smoke hookah. Even after my first cigarette, I felt the tug of nicotine and tobacco. Though, I'm unusually sensitive to eve the mildest addictive substances, so that doesn't suprise me in respective. What does suprise me, is that society is starting to take a ubiquitous but increasingly undeniable health issue seriously despite deep entanglement with long standing way of doing things, political ideologues, individual addictions and addiction-driven political behaviour and shareholder's pockets.

Though the truth claim of the article isn't that suprising. The dangers of smoking are publicised everywhere. Emphasis mine:

13 die every day in Victoria as a result of smoking.

Tobacco use (which includes cigarettes, cigars, pipes, snuff, chewing tobacco) is the leading preventable cause of death and illness in our country. It causes more deaths annually than those killed by AIDS, alcohol, automobile accidents, murders, suicides, drugs and fires combined.

So I decided to learn more about the relationship between society and big tobacco, and government and big tobacco to see what other people interested in influencing public policy and public health can learn (effective altruism policy analytics, take note!) about policy tractability in suprising places.

Here's what might make for tractable public policy for public health interventions

Proof of concept

Governments are great at successfully suing the shit out of tobacco. And, big tobacco takes it like a champ:

It started with United State's states experimenting with suing big tobacco. Eventually only a couple of states hadn't done it. Big Tobacco and all those attorney generals gathered and arranged huge ass settlement that resulted in the disestablishment of several shill research institutes supporting big tobacco and big payouts to sponsor anti-smoking advocacy groups (which seem politically unethical, but consequentially good, but I suppose that's a different story). However, what's important to note here is the experimentation within US states culminating with the legitimacy of normative lawfare. It's called 'Diffusion theory' and is described here.

Wait wait wait. I know what you're thinking, non-US LessWrongers - another US centric analysis that isn't too transportable. No. I'm not American in any sense, it's just that the US seems to be a point of diffusion. What's happening regarding marajuana in the US now seems to mirror this in some sense, but it's ironically pro-smoking. That illustrates the cause-neutrality of this phenomenon.

That settlement wasn't the end of the lawfare:

On August 17, 2006, a U.S. district judge issued a landmark opinion in the government's case against Big Tobacco, finding that tobacco companies had violated civil racketeering laws and defrauded consumers by lying about the health risks of smoking.

In a 1,653 page ruling, the judge stated that the tobacco industry had deceived the American public by concealing the addictive nature of nicotine plus had targeted youth in order to get them hooked on cigarettes for life. (Appeals are still pending). 

Victims who ask for help

I also stumbled upon some smokers attitudes to smoking and their, well, seemingly vexacious attitudes to big tobacco when looking up lawsuits and big tobacco. Here's a copy of the comments section on one website. It's really heartbreaking. It's a small sample size but just note their education too - suggesting a socio-economic effect. Note, this comments were posted publicly and are blatant cries for help. This suggests political will at a grassroots level that is yet under-catered for by services and/or political action. That's a powerful thing, perhaps - visible need in public forums addressed to those that are in the relevant space. Note that they commented on a class action website.

http://s10.postimg.org/61h7b1rp5/099090.png

 

Note some of the language:

 

"I feel like I'm being tortured"

You don't see that kind of language used in any effective altruism branded publications.

Villains

Somewhat famous documents exposing the tobacco industries internal motivations and dodginess seem to be quoted everywhere in websites documenting and justifyications of lawfare against the tobacco industry. Public health and personal dangers of smoking don't seem to have been the big catalyst, but rather a villainous enemy. I'm reminded of how the Stop the boats campaign which villainised people smugglers instead of speaking of the potential to save lives of refugees who fall overboard shitty vessals. I think to Open Borders campaigners associated with GiveWell's Open Philanthropy Project, the perception of the project as just about the most intractable policy prospect around (I'd say a moratorium on AI research is up there), but at the same time, non identification of a villain in the picture. That's not entirely unsuprising. I recall the hate I received when I suggested that people should consider prostituting themselves for effective altruism, or soliciting donations from the porn industry where donors struggle to donate since many, particularly relgious charities refuge to accept their donations. Likewise, it's hard to get rid of encultured perceptions of what's good and what's bad, rather then enumerating ('or checking, as Eleizer writes in the sequence) the consequences.

Relative merit

This is something Effective Altruist is doing.

William Savedoff and Albert Alwang recently identified taxes on tobacco as, “the single most cost-effective way to save lives in developing countries” (2015, p.1).

...

Tobacco control programs often pursue many of these aims at once. However, raising taxes appears to be particularly cost-effective — e.g., raising taxes costs $3 - $70 per DALY avoided(Savedoff and Alwang, p.5; Ranson et al. 2002, p.311) — so I will focus solely on taxes. I will also focus only on low and middle income countries (LMICs) because that is where the problem is worst and where taxes can do the most good most cost-effectively.

..

But current trends need not continue. We can prevent deaths from tobacco use. Tobacco taxation is a well-tested and effective means of decreasing the prevalence of smoking—it gets people to stop and prevents others from starting. The reason is that smokers are responsive to price increases,provided that the real price goes up enough

...

Even if these numbers are off by a factor of 2 or 3, tobacco taxation appears to be on par with the most effective interventions identified by GiveWell and Giving What We Can. For example, GiveWell estimates that AMF can prevent a death for $3340 by providing bed nets to prevent malaria and estimates the cost of schistosomiasis deworming at $29 - $71 per DALY.

 

There are a few reasons to balk at recommending tobacco tax advocacy to those aiming to do the most good with their donations, time, and careers.

 

• Tobacco taxes may not be a tractable issue

• Tobacco taxes may be a “crowded” cause area

• Unanswered questions about the empirical basis of cost-effectiveness estimates

• There may not be a charity to donate to

...
Smoking is very harmful and very common.  Globally, 21% of people over 15 smoke (WHO GHO)

 

-https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2015/09/tobacco-control-best-buy-developing-world/

 

Attributing public responsibility AND incentivising independently private interest in a cause

The Single Best Health Policy in the World: Tobacco Taxes

The single most cost-effective way to save lives in developing countries is in the hands of developing countries themselves: raising tobacco taxes. In fact, raising tobacco taxes is better than cost-effective. It saves lives while increasing revenues and saving poor households money when their members quit smoking.

-http://www.cgdev.org/publication/single-best-health-policy-world-tobacco-taxes)

 

Tobacco lawsuits can be hard to win but if you have been injured because of tobacco or smoking or secondary smoke exposure, you should contact an attorney as soon as possible.

  If you have lung cancer and are now, or were formerly, a smoker or used tobacco products, you may have a claim under the product liability laws. You should contact an experienced product liability attorney or a tobacco lawsuit attorney as soon as possible because a statute of limitations could apply. 

-http://smoking-tobacco.whocanisue.com/

There's a whole bunch of legal literature like this: http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/clqv86&div=45&id=&page=

that I don't have the background to search for and interpret. So, if I'm missing important things, perhaps it's attributable to that. Point them out please.

So that's my analysis: plausible modifiable variables that influence the tractability of the public health policy initiative: 

(1) Attributing public responsibility AND incentivising independently private interest in a cause

(2) Relative merit

(3) Villains

(4) Victims that ask for help

(5) Low scale proof of concept

Remember, lawfare isn't just the domain of governments. Here's an example of non-government lawfare for public health. They are just better resourced, often, than individuals. They need groups to advocate on their behalf. Perhaps that's a direction the Open Philanthropy Project could take. 

I want to finish by soliciting an answer on the following question that is posed to smokers in a recurring survey by a tobacco control body:

Do you support or oppose the government suing tobacco companies to recover health care costs caused by tobacco use?

Now, there may be some 'reverse causation' at play here for why Tobacco Control has been so politically effect. BECAUSE it's such a good cause, it's a low hanging fruit that's already being picked. 

What's the case for or against this?

The case for it's cause selection: Tobacco control

Importance: high

tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death and disease in both the world (see: http://www.who.int/nmh/publications/fact_sheet_tobacco_en.pdf) and Australia (see: http://www.cancer.org.au/policy-and-advocacy/position-statements/smoking-and-tobacco-control/)

‘Tobacco smoking causes 20% of cancer deaths in Australia, making it the highest individual cancer risk factor. Smoking is a known cause of 16 different cancer types and is the main cause of Australia’s deadliest cancer, lung cancer. Smoking is responsible for 88% of lung cancer deaths in men and 75% of lung cancer cases in women in Australia.’

Tractable: high

The World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) was the first public health treaty ever negotiate.

Based on private information, the balance of healthcare costs against tax revenues according to health advocates compared to treasury estimates in Australia may have been relevant to Australia’s leadership in tobacco regulation. That submission may or may not be adequate in complexity (ie. taking into account reduced lifespans impact on reduced pension payouts for instance). There is a good article about the behavioural economics of tobacco regulation here (http://baselinescenario.com/2011/03/22/incentives-dont-work/)

Room for advocacy: low

There are many hundreds of consumer support and advocacy groups, and cancer charities across Australia.

Room for employment: low?

Room for consulting: high

 

The rigour of analysis and achievements themselves in the Cancer Council of Australia annual review is underwhelming, as is the Cancer Council of Victoria’s annual report. There is a better organised body of evidence relating to their impact on their Wiki pages about effective interventions and policy priorities. At a glance, there appears to be room for more quantitative, methodologically rigorous and independent evaluation. I will be looking at GiveWell to see what I recommendations can be translated. I will keep records of my findings to formulate draft guidelines for advising organisations in the Cancer Councils’ positions which I estimate by vague memory of GiveWell’s claims are in the majority in the philanthropic space.

I sure think it is!  But I could be wrong...

This is my first article/post? here and to be honest, I have this website open in another tab and I keep refreshing it to see if I still have enough points to post.  I wish I would have taken a screenshot every time my karma changed.  First it was 0, then it was -1, then it was back to 0, then I think it jumped up to 5.  I thought I was safe but then this morning it was down to 0.  So if this post seems "linky" then it might be because I'm trying to share as much information as I can while my window of opportunity is still open.  

Pragmatarianism (tax choice) is the belief that taxpayers should be able to choose where their taxes go.  Tax choice is the broad concept while pragmatarianism is my own personal spin on it... but sometimes I use "tax choice" when I mean pragmatarianism.  Eh, at this point I don't think it's a big deal.  Really the only thing nice about the word "pragmatarianism" is that it functions as a unique ID... which is extremely helpful when it comes to searches.  Don't have to worry about wading through irrelevant results. 

Here are some links from my blog which should help you decide whether pragmatarianism is more or less wrong...

Pragmatarianism FAQ - a good place to start.  It's pretty short.  

Key concepts - a work in progress.  Some of the concepts are linked to entries which have PDF files with a bunch of relevant quotes and passages.  If you like any of them then please share them in this thread... Quotes Repository.  I shared a few but they didn't fare so well... so I'm guessing that most people here aren't fans of economics... or they aren't fans of my economics. 

Progress as a Function of Freedom - hedging bets, the impossibility of hostile aliens, the problem with "rights".  

What Do Coywolves, Mr. Nobody, Plants And Fungi All Have In Common? - the universal drive to choose the most valuable option, the carrying model as an explanation for our intelligence, a bit on rationality.

Builderism - where better options come from, globalization, debunking Piketty, eliminating poverty. 

My Robin Hanson trilogy...

Is Robin Hanson's Path To Efficient Voting Pragmatic Or Brilliant Or Both? - maybe we should have a civic currency?

Rescuing Robin Hanson From Unmet Demand - how many other people are in the same boat?

Futarchy vs Pragmatarianism - is it logically inconsistent to support one but not the other?  

/trilogy.

AI Box Experiment vs Xero's Rule - my first brainstorm attempt to wrap my mind around the idea of an AI box.

Is A Procreation License Consistent With Libertarianism? - would a procreation license be less wrong?

Why I Love Your Freedom - my critique of the best critique of libertarianism.  A bit on rationality.

So what do you think?  Am I in the right place?  

What else?  Of course I'm an atheist!  And I love sci-fi... and for sure I want to live forever.  The major obstacle is that too many people fail to grasp that progress depends on difference.  I do my best to try and eliminate this obstacle.  Unfortunately I suck at writing and my drawings are even worse.  Oh well.

Let me know if you have any questions.

I just found this on slashdot:

"U.S. Views of Technology and the Future - Science in the next 50 years" by the Pew Research Center

This report emerges from the Pew Research Center’s efforts to understand public attitudes about a variety of scientific and technological changes being discussed today. The time horizons of these technological advances span from today’s realities—for instance, the growing prevalence of drones—to more speculative matters such as the possibility of human control of the weather. 

This is interesting esp. in comparison to the recent posts on forecasting which focussed on expert forecasts.

What I found most notable was the public opinion on their use of future technology:

% who would do the following if possible...

50% ride in a driverless car

26% use brain implant to improve memory or mental capacity

20% eat meat grown in a lab

Don't they know Eutopia is Scary? I'd guess if these technologies really become available and are reliable only the elderly will be inable to overcome their preconceptions. And everybody will eat artificial meat if it is cheaper, more healthy and tastes the same (and the testers say confirm this).

 

A little background:  I have an above average commute to work and make use of the time by listening to public radio.  I have been doing this for just over a year without "doing my part" and contributing.  The primary justification of this has been that my commute path and times have me listening to three different public radio stations.  I never could decide which station to pledge; which needed it more, which I liked best, which had the least annoying pledge breaks.

The other day, during a pledge break, they played a promo by Ira Glass which went something like:

I'm going to say something that has never happened in a pledge break before.  We don't need your money. You do not have to call.  There is no evidence to back that up.  Every year we say you have to pledge and give your money or we will go away, but year after year, we are still here, even though you didn't pledge.

You should call because its the right thing to do.  You like public radio, enough to listen to a pledge break, so you should pledge, not because it is logical but because it is right...

This struck a note with me.  Perhaps because of my recent attention here at LW (does that count as focus bias?).  It brought two LW relevant questions to mind.

If pledging public radio is the right thing to do, but all of the evidence suggests I personally do not have to pledge, what rational algorithm achieves that outcome?  It is not like you can make a 'lives saved per dollar' figure for NPR, it is either there or not.  I guess in a really poorly funded station, one might be able to come up with a figure for minutes of programming per dollar.  Does doing the "right thing" simply produce a warm feeling?  Or is it more like I should pledge because everyone should pledge, similar to  "I should tell the truth so no one lies to me"?

 

Would pledging public radio make a good metric for the friendliness of an AI?  Obviously not an unchangeable line of code that says "pledge NPR", but an AI that decides becoming a member of KQED is a good thing to do.  I'm sure there are plenty of other situations that are similar like donating to open source software that you use or paying to park in the state forest parking lot instead of parking on the street and walking in for free.  It might seem silly, but an AI that chooses to become a member of the local public radio will probably also choose not killing everyone over some increase in another utility function.  

 

"Wet houses"-- subsidized housing for alcoholics (they need to get most of their own money for alcohol, but their other expenses are covered) might actually be a good idea. It's cheaper than trying to get them to stop drinking, arguably kinder than trying to get people to take on a very hard task that they aren't interested in, and leads to less collateral damage than having alcoholics couch-surfing or living on the street.

Utilitarians, what do you think?

I was recently thinking about the possibility that someone with a lot of influence might at some point try to damage LessWrong and the SIAI and what preemptive measures one could take to counter it.

If you believe that the SIAI does the most important work in the universe and if you believe that LessWrong serves the purpose of educating people to become more rational and subsequently understand the importance of trying to mitigate risks from AI, then you should care about public relations, you should try to communicate your honesty and well-intentioned motives as effectively as possible.

Public relations are very important because a good reputation is necessary to do the following:

• Making people read the Sequences.
• Raising money for the SIAI.
• Convincing people to take risks from AI seriously.
• Allowing the SIAI to influence other AGI researchers.
• Mitigating future opposition by politicians and other interest groups.
• Being no easy target for criticism.

An attack scenario

First one has to identify characteristics that could potentially be used to cast a damaging light on this community. Here the most obvious possibility seems to be to portray the SIAI, together with LessWrong, as a cult.

After some superficial examination an outsider might conclude the following about this community:

• Believing into heaven and hell in the form of a positive or negative Singularity.
• Discouraging skepticism while portraying their own standpoint as clear-cut.  
• Encouraging to take ideas seriously.
• Encouraging and signaling strong cooperation and conformity.
• Evangelizing by scaring people and telling them to donate money.
• Social pressure by employing a reputation system with positive and negative incentive.
• Removing themselves from empirical criticism by framing everything as a prediction.
• Discrediting mainstream experts while placing themselves a level above them.
• Discouraging transparency and openness by referring to the dangers of AI research.
• Using scope insensitivity and high-risk to justify action, outweigh low probabilities and disregard opposing evidence. 

Most of this might sound wrong to the well-read LessWrong reader. But how would those points be received by mediocre rationalists who don't know what you know, especially if eloquently summarized by a famous and respected person?

Preemptive measures

How one might counter such conclusions:

• Create an introductory guide to LessWrong.
• Explain why the context of the Sequences is important.
• Explain why LessWrong differs from mainstream skepticism. 
• Enable and encourage outsiders to challenge and question the community before turning against it.
• Discourage the downvoting of people who have not yet read the Sequences.
• Don't expect people to read hundreds of posts without supporting evidence that it is worth it. 
• Avoid jargon when talking to outsiders.
• Detach LessWrong from the SIAI by creating an additional platform to talk about related issues.
• Ask or pay independent experts to peer-review.
• Make the finances of the SIAI easily accessible.
• Openly explain why and for what the SIAI currently needs more money.

So what do you think needs improvement and what would you do about it?

As the SIAI is gaining publicity more people are reviewing its work. I am not sure how popular this blog is but judged by its about page he writes for some high-profile blogs. His latest post takes on Omohundro's "Basic AI Drives":

When we last looked at a paper from the Singularity Institute, it was an interesting work asking if we actually know what we’re really measuring when trying to evaluate intelligence by Dr. Shane Legg. While I found a few points that seemed a little odd to me, the broader point Dr. Legg was perusing was very much valid and there were some equations to consider. However, this paper isn’t exactly representative of most of the things you’ll find coming from the Institute’s fellows. Generally, what you’ll see are spanning philosophical treatises filled with metaphors, trying to make sense out of a technology that either doesn’t really exist and treated as a black box with inputs and outputs, or imagined by the author as a combination of whatever a popular science site reported about new research ideas in computer science. The end result of this process tends to be a lot like this warning about the need to develop a friendly or benevolent artificial intelligence system based on a rather fast and loose set of concepts about what an AI might decide to do and what will drive its decisions.

Link: worldofweirdthings.com/2011/01/12/why-training-a-i-isnt-like-training-your-pets/

I posted a few comments but do not think to be the right person to continue that discussion. So if you believe it is important what other people think about the SIAI and want to improve its public relations, there is your chance. I'm myself interested in the answers to his objections.