It seems that "donate to a guide dog charity" and "buy me a guide dog" are pretty different w/r/t the extent that it's motivated cognition. EAs are still allowed to do expensive things for themselves, or even as for support in doing so.

Though, I can come up with a pretty convincing argument for the opposite.

Diseases only become drug-resistant as a result of natural selection in an environment in which drugs which try to treat the disease are used.

Third world countries have issues with distributing drugs/treatments to everyone in the society, and so it is likely that diseases will not be completely eradicated, but instead exist in an environment with drugs in use. Even in individuals, there are problems with consistently treating the disease, and so it's likely to pressure the disease without curing it.

On the other hand, diseases rarely become drug-resistant when they're not exposed to the drugs.

Therefore, treating people in third-world countries increases the probability of producing drug-resistant strains of existing diseases.

It seems easier to evaluate "is trying to be relevant" than "has XYZ important long-term consequence". For instance, investing in asteroid detection may not be the most important long-term thing, but it's at least plausibly related to x-risk (and would be confusing for it to be actively harmful), whereas third-world health has confusing long-term repercussions, but is definitely not directly related to x-risk.

Even if third world health is important to x-risk through secondary effects, it still seems that any effect on x-risk it has will necessarily be mediated through some object-level x-risk intervention. It doesn't matter what started the chain of events that leads to decreased asteroid risk, but it has to go through some relatively small family of interventions that deal with it on an object level.

Insofar as current society isn't involved in object-level x-risk interventions, it seems weird to think that bringing third-world living standards closer to our own will lead to more involvement in x-risk intervention without there being some sort of wider-spread availability of object-level x-risk intervention.

(Not that I care particularly much about asteroids, but it's a particularly easy example to think about.)

Social feedback is an incentive, and the bigger the community gets the more social feedback is possible.

Insofar as Utilitarianism is weird, negative social feedback is a major reason to avoid acting on it, and so early EAs must have been very strongly motivated to implement utilitarianism in order to overcome it. As the community gets bigger, it is less weird and there is more positive support, and so it's less of a social feedback hit.

This is partially good, because it makes it easier to "get into" trying to implement utilitarianism, but it's also bad because it means that newer EAs need to care about utilitarianism relatively less.

It seems that saying that incentives don't matter as long as you remove social-approval-seeking ignores the question of why the remaining incentives would actually push people towards actually trying.

It's also unclear what's left of the incentives holding the community together after you remove the social incentives. Yes, talking to each other probably does make it easier to implement utilitarian goals, but at the same time it seems that the accomplishment of utilitarian goals is not in itself a sufficiently powerful incentive, otherwise there wouldn't be effectiveness problems to begin with. If it were, then EAs would just be incentivized to effectively pursue utilitarian goals.

You would want your noticing that something is bad to, in some way, indicate what would be a better way to make the thing better. You want to know what in particular is bad and can be fixed, rather than the less informative "everything". If your classifier triggers on everything, it tells you less on average about any given thing.

All I can say is that I don't understand why intelligence is relevant for whether you care about suffering.

Intelligence is relevant for the extent to which I expect alleviating suffering to have secondary positive effects. Since I expect most of the value of suffering alleviation to come through secondary effects on the far future, I care much more about human suffering than animal suffering.

As far as I can tell, animal suffering and human suffering are comparably important from a utility-function standpoint, but the difference in EV between alleviating human and animal suffering is huge -- the difference in potential impact on the future between a suffering human vs a non-suffering human is massive compared to that between a suffering animal and a non-suffering animal.

Basically, it seems like alleviating one human's suffering has more potential to help the far future than alleviating one animal's suffering. A human who might be incapacitated to say, deal with x-risk might become helpful, while an animal is still not going to be consequential on that front.

So my opinion winds up being something like "We should help the animals, but not now, or even soon, because other issues are more important and more pressing".

Political instrumental rationality would be about figuring out and taking the political actions that would cause particular goals to happen. Most of this turns out to be telling people compelling things that you know that they don't happen to, and convincing different groups that their interests align (or can align in a particular interest) when it's not obvious that they do.

Political actions are based on appeals to identity, group membership, group bounding, group interests, individual interests, and different political ideas in order to get people to shift allegiances and take action toward a particular goal.

For any given individual, the relative importance of these factors will vary. For questions of identity and affiliation, they will weigh those factors based on meaning being reinforced, and memory-related stuff (i.e. clear memories of meaningful experiences count, but so do not-particularly meaningful but happens every day stuff). For actual action, it will be based on various psychological factors, as well as simply options being available and salient while they have the opportunity to act in a way that reinforces their affiliations/meaning/standing with others in the group/personal interests.

As a result, political instrumental rationality is going to be incredibly contingent on local circumstances -- who talks to who, who believes what how strongly, who's reliable, who controls what, who wants what, who hears about what, etc.

A more object level example takes place in The Wire, when a pastor is setting up various public service programs in an area where drug dealing is effectively legalized.

The pastor himself is able to appeal to his community on the basis of religious solidarity in order to get money, and so he can fund some stuff. He cares about public health and the fate of the now unemployed would-be drug runners who are no longer necessary for drug dealing because of Christian reasons (since drugs are legal, the gang members don't bother with various steps that ensure that none of them can be photographed handing someone drugs for money -- the dealer gets the money then the runner (typically a child) goes to the stash to give the buyer drugs). Further, he knows people from various community/political events in Baltimore.

So far, so good. He controls some resources (money), has a goal (public health, child development), and knows some people.

One of the first people he talks to is a doctor who has been trying to do STD prevention for a while, but hasn't had the funding or organizational capacity to do much of anything. The pastor points out to him that there are a lot of at-risk people who are now concentrated in a particular location so that the logistics of getting services to people is much simpler. In this case, the pastor simply had information (through his connections) that the doctor didn't, and got the doctor to cooperate by pointing out the opportunity to do something that the doctor had wanted.

He gets the support of the police district chief who decided to selectively enforce drug laws by appealing to the police chief's desire for improving the district under his command (he was initially trying to shift drug trafficking away from more populated areas, and decrease violence by decreasing competition over territory), and it more or less worked.

That being said, I have more or less no idea what kinds of large-scale political action ought to be possible/is desirable.

I totally have the intuition though that step one of any plan is to become personally acquainted with people who have some sort of influence over the areas that you're interested in, or to build influence by getting people who have some control over what you're interested in to pay more attention to you. Borderline, if you can't name names, and can't point at groups of people involved in the action, then you can't do anything particularly useful politically.

This distinction is just flying/not-flying.

Offense has an advantage over defense in that defense needs to defend against more possible offensive strategies than offense needs to be capable of doing, and offense only needs one undefended plan in order to succeed.

I suspect that not-flying is a pretty big advantage, even relative to offense/defense. At the very least, moving underground (and doing hydroponics or something for food) makes drones just as offensively helpful as missles. Not flying additionally can have more energy and matter supplying whatever it is that it's doing than flying, which allows for more exotic sensing and destructive capabilities.