All of tomtim's Comments + Replies

tomtim00

Bonjour! Translation can be frustrating, but it's almost never because one of the languages sucks. From my experience, there is probably an equal number of concepts that are hard to translate the other way around.

Here are my attempts:

“Evidence for a given theory is the observation of an event that is more likely to occur if the theory is true than if it is false”

Une donnée en faveur d’une théorie consiste en l’observation d’un évènement plus probable si la théorie est vraie que si la théorie est fausse.

or

Une indication en faveur d’une théorie consiste en ... (read more)

tomtim40

Would it be fair to summarise your post thus: "aid to the poorest people on earth is an ineffective way to create utils, it is better to invest in western businesses" ?

Now I must say that this is a very long-standing debate. One way this debate has taken place is between Jeff Sachs and William Easterly. (Easterly basically takes the same position as you in this post.) Sachs and Easterly have been writing books on this for years. You provide a link to one general economic history book, and a link to an RCT evaluation of GiveDirectly. This is a goo... (read more)

0Salemicus
The first half of your "summary" is a utilitarian framing, and the second half is a recommendation of investment in the West. Neither are anywhere in the post. So no, this is not a fair summary. My two-sentence summary would be: You'll note that all these concepts are mentioned in the post, rather than surreptitiously snuck in from outside.