Yelnats T.J.
Bio
Co-founder of Concentric Policies
Talk to me about American governance/political systems/democracy
My journey to EA:
- 2009: start arriving at utilitarian-adjacent ethics
- Dec 2012: read Peter Singer’s Famine Affluence and Morality
- Circa 2013/14: find my way to EA through googling about Singer and FAaM
- 2014-2019: in the orbit of EA. i.e. will talk to people about morality and utilitarian stuff but not very engaged in the community aside from attending uni club meeting every once and while.
- 2020: EAGxVirtual (I’m starting to move from the orbit closer to the actual community)
- 2022: Dive deep into the community. And now we arrive at the present day.
Posts 5
Comments80
Topic contributions1
A little off-topic and self-promoting, but I thought this take aged well, and it's a good reminder that EAs should not neglect the long game of democracy fragility in the US during these non-election years because even securing liberal democracy at the ballot box takes investments years in advance.
I've seen the term militant democracy used to describe how democracies will have laws that curtail political expression and representation when it threatens the survival of liberal democracy. Another articulation is that the marketplace of ideas is not enough to keep anti-democratic players out of a critical mass of power (not necessarily a representative majority, just enough to erode democratic norms/guardrails), thus the society has made the tradeoff of empowering some subjective but hopefully impartial institutions of government to gatekeep the political arena from the most dangerous actors to democracy.
Reminds me of something similar Kelsey Piper wrote:
"Would an effective altruist movement in the 1840s U.S. have been abolitionist?"
"Next, imagine someone walked into that 1840s EA group and said, ‘I think black people are exactly as valuable as white people and it should be illegal to discriminate against them at all,” or someone walked into the 1920s EA group and said, “I think gay rights are really important.” I want us to be a community that wouldn’t have kicked them out."
I think EA would have been a place in the 19th century that would have tolerated if not agreed with abolitionist views. My fear is that EAs' position to someone like Benjamin Lay would be his work as futile effort on an intractable problem and instead focus on improving welfare of slaves on plantations through some type of scheme. And this is my concern of EAs today, that the community leaves impact on the table by not pursuing systems change (e.g. political system reform) because it seems to have low tractability.
Instead of a binary, you can also ask what policies would they have supported. Perhaps they would have supported a policy that preserved individual choice while creating substantial friction between users and drinking as well as limited the profit incentive get people to drink more.
It's worth noting that the most lethal drugs are the legal ones (measured by total fatalities). Take tobacco for example. It's been around for millennia, however we did not get the modern tobacco epidemic—which killed 100 million in the 21st century—until A) mass manufacturing of cigarettes, B) heavy engineering of cigarettes to be hyper palatable and addictive, and C) modern mass marketing. This is why I'm partial to the tobacco endgame proposals that focus on removing the profit incentive to get people to consume addictive and/or harmful substances. Consumption in society can be managed to a point of acceptable trade-offs by friction and nudges once you remove the asymmetry of multinational conglomerates spending billions of dollars to get adults (and yes, youth too—the majority of smokers start when they are minors) to consume tobacco and alcohol whilst effectively lobbying for much weaker regulations than recommended by the public health community.
As we discussed at EAG B, the material change between the 1st term and 2nd term is that there were many "adults in the room" who kept the former president from fulfilling his worst instincts. Whereas now there has been a 4-year effort to cultivate a pipeline of loyalists to staff the government. Ezra's episode on Trump and his disinhibition is a good piece on the topic.
The nominations for the national security apparatus are the strongest signal that he wants power consolidated and will test GOP Senators out the gate if they will be a check on his power.
I think Ezra's start to the podcast that Michael linked was apt. If someone two months ago said that Gaetz, Gabbard, and Hegeseth were going to be nominated for DoJ, DNI, DoD, it would have been framed as hyperbolic doomer Liberal talk. However that is the universe we are in.
Have the nominations and the proposal to purge military generals updated your priors at all since EAG B?
A post/submission I wrote to OP two years ago has some thoughts on this:
It has some recommended readings and outlines potential interventions.
I'm still distilling what I would add to it in the present day.
The top thing on my mind is the proposed board to purge generals. (Note: presidents already have the authority to dismiss generals, however the implication of this proposal is that they want to purge so many generals that they need a systematic vehicle to do it.) As I wrote in my piece, our biggest bulwark against an authoritarian power grab is that the United States Military is very strong, professional, competent, and apolitical. Any changes away from that status quo should raise alarm bells.
The nominations to the military/national security apparatus are clearly about total loyalty over competence. These are the military and intelligence services that when captured in other countries by authoritarians have cemented regimes.
Interventions in the immediate term targeted at disrupting the consolidation of power (in the aforementioned moves) could be very high leverage.
For a longer-term intervention that focuses more on the upstream drivers of our political dysfunction which enables authoritarians, I still back the idea of doing local/state ballot initiatives to reform the political system. A gap I see in the space is that political system reform via initiatives is pursued piecemeal instead of comprehensively. Also, anti-establishment sentiments poll very high amongst Americans including the Left and Right, yet that bi-populist agreement is not being effectively tapped. Not only could mobilizing it help get initiatives over the line, but it would create depolarizing interactions between regular citizens.
I was gonna write something similar, but I think this comment nailed it (kudos KarenS). So I'll highlight two key arguments I endorse: