I was surprised to see someone with such experience in the pharmaceutical industry say this, because it goes against how I understood the FDA to work.

My model goes:

1. FDA procedures require certain bureaucratic tasks to be completed before approving drugs. Let’s abstract this into “processing 1,000 forms”.

2. Suppose they have 100 bureaucrats, and each bureaucrat can process 10 forms per year.

3. Seems like they can approve 1 drug per year.

4. If you fire half the bureaucrats, now they can only approve one drug every 2 years.

5. That’s worse!

A few years ago, I debated Kevin Drum about (what I considered) a particularly egregious case where the FDA dragged its feet approving a life-saving medication. Drum argued that the FDA had behaved well. In support, he found some quotes from the doctor working on the medication, who praised all the FDA bureaucrats she had interacted with, calling them extremely helpful. This bothered me for a while, until I realized that of course it was true. In the model above, each bureaucrat processes ten forms. If the bureaucrats are benevolent, this might look like talking to the doctors, walking them through the process of figuring out their ten forms, and doing the work to add their ten forms to the FDA’s growing pile of evidence supporting the application.

All of this co-exists comfortably with the insight that making doctors fill out a thousand forms before they can use a medication is an impediment to medical progress.

This really sunk in for me when I read an article about the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban in 2021. Many Afghans had collaborated with the Americans, eg as translators, in exchange for a promise of US citizenship. As the Taliban advanced, they called in the promise, begging to be allowed to flee to America before they got punished as traitors. The article focused on a heroic effort by certain immigration bureaucrats, who worked around the clock with minimal sleep for the last few weeks before Kabul fell, trying to get the citizenship forms filled in and approved for as many translators as possible. It made an impression on me because nobody was opposed to the translators getting citizenship, and the bureaucrats were themselves the people in charge of approving citizenship applications, so what exactly was forcing them to go to such desperate lengths? If you ponder this question long enough, you become enlightened about the nature of the administrative state.

If you don’t, you end up like Ramaswamy, who seems to think that halving the number of bureaucrats will halve the number of forms that need to be filled out. I think in his worldview, the FDA will think “Now that we have fewer bureaucrats, it would take forever to complete our current process, so let’s simplify the process.”

Maybe he is working off a thesis where red tape expands to consume the resources available to it (as measured in bureaucrats). But my impression is that the amount of red tape is determined more by things like:

— How likely is it that their decision will get challenged in court?

And if it gets challenged in court, what amount of paperwork do they have to show the judge to prove that they made the decision on a “reasonable basis”?

For example, when I type “FDA sued” into Google, the top result is a news story from a few days ago, saying that an environmental organization sued the FDA for not listening to their earlier request to ban phthalates from food.

Six years ago, the environmental groups submitted a petition (the catchily-named “Food Additive Petition 6B4815”) demanding that the FDA ban 28 phthalates. Two years ago, after consulting with industry, the FDA finally banned 23 phthalates but said that the other five were okay, releasing a 58 page decision explaining its decision. Two days ago, the environmental groups sued, saying the remaining 5 phthalates are still bad.

I assume the lawsuit will nitpick the details of the the 58 page decision, trying to prove that it it didn’t violate any of hundreds of federal laws saying that bureaucratic decisions must be reasonable, bureaucratic decisions must be based on science, bureaucratic decisions must respond to the petitioners’ complaints, bureaucratic decisions cannot have disparate impacts on different races, etc. I also assume that if the FDA had banned all the phthalates, they would have faced an equally serious lawsuit from Big Phthalate saying they were unfairly crippling business.

Why does it take six years to respond to a petition? My guess is because they knew they would get sued and so they have some sort of million-step process that addresses every single thing you can sue over, so that they can prove to the court that their process addresses all possible complaints and they followed it to the letter.

If you cut their bureaucrats in half, that doesn’t mean there will be fewer steps in the process. It means they’ll keep wanting not to get sued, the process will stay the same, and everything will take twice as long.

— What has Congress mandated that they do?

For example, when I Google “Congressional FDA mandate”, I get a page on HR 7248, a bill currently making its way through Congress, which says:

This bill requires the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to establish a process that supports nonclinical testing methods for drug development that do not involve the use of animals.

Specifically, the FDA must establish a pathway by which entities may apply to have nonclinical testing methods approved for use in a particular context. Qualifying methods must be intended to replace or reduce animal testing and to either improve the safety and efficacy of nonclinical testing or reduce the time to develop a drug. The FDA must issue its decision within 180 days of receiving an application. The FDA must also prioritize the review of applications for drugs that are developed using an approved nonclinical testing method.

The FDA must annually post a report on its website that summarizes the results of the bill's implementation, including the number of applications received, types of methods that were approved, and the estimated number of animals saved as result of these methods.

So the FDA has to establish this process and post an annual report on its website. How many bureaucrats per year does this take? Maybe five? If you halve the number of people at the FDA, you still need a constant five bureaucrats to comply with this particular law.

If the bill passes, the FDA comes up with a nonclinical testing process, and someone (eg the nonclinical testing industry) doesn’t think it’s good enough, they can sue the FDA for not following the law. How good a nonclinical testing process will the FDA need in order to avoid lawsuits under this bill? I assume there is a large body of administrative law answering that question, and that it will take many bureaucrats to figure this out.

Finally, I admit I’m a bit confused by this. IIRC “nonclinical testing” refers to things like testing drugs on stem cells or artificial organs instead of humans. You can obviously do this for some parts of the drug testing process, but not others; the FDA has already adjusted for this and integrated it into their guidelines to some extent. I can’t tell whether this law is a righteous attempt to correct bureaucratic foot-dragging, or a powergrab by Big Nonclinical Testing demanding that the FDA privilege their products over other forms of experiment. If the latter, the FDA may try to come up with some fake pathway that satisfies the letter of the law without really giving Big Nonclinical Testing any unfair privileges, and Big Nonclinical Testing will probably sue and say it violates this bill. How many bureaucrats do you think it will take to manage that?

— How much will they get yelled at if they take too long to approve drugs, vs. if they mistakenly approve a bad drug?

This is the basic determinant of all FDA drug approvals.

Halving the number of FDA bureaucrats wouldn’t have literally zero effect on this balance. It would mean that approving new drugs would be delayed twice as long. This would be a little more outrageous than the current delay, and might shift an outrage-minimizing FDA director slightly in the direction of cutting rules. But solve for the equilibrium: there would still be more delay than there is now. Also, I don’t think public outrage about long drug delays is linear with regard to delay, and public outrage at bad drugs is constant and large. So I think at best, firing bureaucrats would shift this balance a small amount, and only by making everything overall worse.

II.

One possible objection: this assumes that the average bureaucracy is like the FDA drug approval process. But the FDA drug approval process’ job is to approve things. Maybe the average bureaucracy’s job is to ban things. Then decreasing their capacity would be good.

(Vivek gets to be main example here because he tweeted, but the same considerations apply to Elon: even though the government as a whole is delaying SpaceX rocket launches, individual bureaucrats might be speeding them up through the same 1000-forms logic as in the FDA case)

There’s certainly a spectrum from the most approval-focused bureaucracies to the most ban-focused bureaucracies. Thinking hard about this spectrum would be a step up from “instantly” firing 50% of all bureaucrats based on social security number. So maybe a steelman of Vivek’s point would be to fire 50% of people in the ban-focused bureaucracies (and maybe double the number of people in the approval-focused ones?)

I’m still skeptical that this is how it works. The past few years have seen the cryptocurrency industry demand regulation, and the government mostly fail to step up (though crypto businesses hope the Trump administration will do better). Why do crypto businesses want to be regulated more? Because the alternative is something where it’s not clear what’s legal and anyone could be sued or shut down at any time. The chief legal officer of Coinbase, from the second link:

All of us are begging for sensible standards that would allow us to get back to building great products and services and spend less time and frankly, less money, arguing over legal definitions and statutes.

This isn’t because anyone specifically banned crypto. It’s because there are bans on other things (like unlicensed securities, money laundering, etc) that crypto is vaguely related to, sometimes an agency regulating these things will tell a crypto company “sorry, we think you’re illegal”, and crypto wants some specific list of things it can follow that explicitly establish it as on the right side of money-laundering and security-licensing laws. Obviously industries would prefer that these be simple and easy standards (“oh, don’t worry, you don’t have to worry about money laundering if you’re a crypto company”), but they would settle for strict regulations as long as the regulations carve out some ability for them exist at all.

I’ve seen the same thing play out in another area I follow, cultured meat. There are many laws about what meat you can and cannot sell, how the animals have to be treated, what the sanitation standards are, et cetera. Some of these standards make no sense when applied to cultured meat; others, cultured meat naturally fails by default (you can’t prove you’re treating the animals in a certain way because there are no animals). Others are novel philosophical questions (can you sell cultured meat without saying it’s cultured? How big does the print need to be before it counts as saying that it’s cultured? What about on restaurant menus?)

Situations like these mean that there’s no clear distinction between default-yes and default-no bureaucracies. There’s no explicit ban on crypto or cultured meat. But if you cripple bureaucracies’ ability to interact with these fields, it doesn’t mean they’re fully legal, free, and happy forever. It means they’re stuck in regulatory limbo.

III.

So it seems like you don’t want to fire bureaucrats, you want to cut red tape. In our toy model, you want to reduce the number of forms from 1,000 to (let’s say) 100. Then the same number of bureaucrats can get drugs approved ten times faster.

In our non-toy actual model of what’s going on, this would require changing incentives.

Maybe you could change judicial procedures so that fewer people sue, or the FDA needs less evidence to win any given lawsuit. This sounds hard (Vivek and Elon seem more qualified to wield chainsaws than to understand legal minutiae), possibly illegal (does the administrative branch even control how judicial procedure works?), and politically unpopular (this basically looks like telling people “f@#k you, companies can put as many phthalates as they want in food, we don’t have to prove that this decision is evidence based, and you’re not allowed to challenge us.”)

Or it would require Congress to repeal legislation mandating things. These Congressional mandates are probably things that Congressmen and their constituents (either real constituents or special interests) care a lot about, so good luck getting them repealed. Also, doesn’t Congress pass like one bill per year now?

This would normally make me pessimistic, but Vivek and other anti-bureaucracy activists have pointed to a recent success story: Idaho.

Idaho cut their regulatory code by 38% in 2019, and since then it’s only gone down. How did they decrease red tape so fast? They did it through the power of nominative determinism. In that year, they elected a governor named Brad Little. His administration is called the Little Administration. Obviously government had to get smaller.

But on a purely exoteric level, what methods did they use to pull this off?

This CPAC article gives the basic story:

• The Little administration instituted sunset provisions that review each regulation every five years and make sure it’s justifiable.

• The Idaho regulatory code is short enough that individual agencies’ portions are only a few hundred pages, and humans from those agencies can read the few hundred pages and see if they make sense.

• Upon being read, many of the regulations were not justifiable, for example “rules for a lottery game show that never aired”.

• The Idaho legislature is competent and reviews all regulations proposed by the state’s regulatory agencies (though it looks like they only strike down 5%).

• Regulatory agencies have to justify every new regulation they make, and (unless they can present a compelling case why not) repeal two old regulations per one new one.

I don’t have a good sense for how well this could work at the federal level. The pessimistic case is that the governor wanted a legacy of repealing regulations, there are many completely useless regulations in the code (like the one for the lottery show that never aired), bureaucrats removed these from the code to satisfy the governor, but these don’t have a big effect in real life (the show never aired, so it’s not like anyone was affected by the regulations!) This kind of thing would lower the number of pages in the regulatory code (which isn’t nothing!) but not make ordinary people’s lives easier.

But the article suggests that ordinary people’s lives were made easier, and that the move has brought businesses to Idaho. It gives the example of repealing a regulation about what kind of doors pharmacies can have. Here I guess the theory of change is that there are many stupid regulations that nobody wants to defend, and if you force people to read them and put a trivial amount of effort into justifying them, they’ll fold immediately.

Are the most burdensome federal regulations more like the pharmacy door, where nobody can remember why they exist? Or are they more like phthalates, where environmental groups and industry groups fought each other to a bloody standstill, and any attempt to change anything will be met with lawsuits?

More important, can DOGE get nominative determinism on their side? “Ramaswamy” means “Lord Rama”, who - although cool - is not really associated with smallness. But it seems like the word “Musk” may ultimately derive from the Indo-European word múh₂s, meaning “mouse”. This makes me bullish on DOGE’s eventual success.

Some recent political discussion has focused on “the institutions” or “the priesthoods”. I’m part of one of these (the medical establishment), so here’s an inside look on what these are and what they do.

Why Priesthoods?

In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be some kind of “individualists”. Rationality, they said, cannot be effectively pursued on one’s own. You need a group of people working together, arguing, checking each other’s mistakes, bouncing hypotheses off each other.

For some reason it never occurred to these people that a group calling itself a rationalist community might be planning to do this. Maybe they thought any size smaller than the whole of society was doomed?

If so, I think they were exactly wrong. The truth-seeking process benefits from many different group sizes, for example:

• Individual: The wellspring of everything else. Eccentric individuals can go on expeditions into unlikely regions of ideaspace and come back with unique insights. And this is the only size class with much hope of avoiding groupthink entirely. But it’s also the size class at the most risk of going on crazy tangents and getting everything wrong. And it fails to produce consensus - if a million different people argue a million different things, the average spectator has learned nothing.

• Society-wide: The marketplace of ideas! This is where everyone gets to have their say. New hypotheses get stress-tested, bounced off against each other, and only the strongest survive. This level also produces true learning - if only one idea survives the marketplace, then average spectators can easily pick it out (although of course it can still be wrong). Its disadvantage is that it’s impossible for several billion people to hold a true “discussion” among themselves. Also, many of these people are extremely stupid, their ideas are bad, and they fill the conversation with noise.

Is there a useful group size in between these two?

What about discussing ideas in a group made of only the most intelligent and knowledgeable people? This gives you the debate and collaboration functions that you only get in group conversation. But it’ll have a better signal-to-noise ratio than all of society, and it might be small enough to manage. Also, you can make people sign on to good discussion norms before they enter, and you can expel them if they screw up.

The Boundary Against The Public

From this formulation, it becomes clear that such a priesthood is only useful insofar as it has some kind of barrier between itself and the general public.

The priesthoods don’t exactly hate the public. But they hate the idea of letting the public’s ideas mix with their own. It’s not just that they discount the public’s ideas insofar as the public is less sophisticated than themselves. Their whole identity comes from their separation from the public. Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get actively penalized, the same way it would be hard to convince Democrats to accept a plan that Donald Trump proposed first, even if it otherwise fit with Democratic ideals.

I recently reviewed Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus To Our House, on the architectural priesthood. It discusses the response when renegade architects would build things in styles favored by the public - for example, Edward Stone and the Kennedy Center:

Stone and Saarinen, like Frank Lloyd Wright and Goff and Greene, were too American, which meant both too parochial (not part of the International Style) and too bourgeois. Somehow they actually catered to the hog-stomping Baroque exuberance of American civilization. When Stone designed the Kennedy Center in Washington with a lobby six stories high and six hundred and thirty feet long – so big, as one journalist pointed out, that Mickey Mantle’s mightiest home run would have been just another long fly ball – it was regarded as an obscenity. Stone was actually playing upto American megolomania. He was encouraging the barbaric yawps. He was glorifying The Client’s own grandiose sentiments.

More generally:

In a way, the very productivity of a man like Wright, Portman, or Stone counted against him, given the new mental atmosphere at the universities. Oh, it was easy enough, one supposed, to go out into the marketplace and wheedle and vamp and dance for clients and get buildings to do. But the brave soul was he who remained within the compound, stayed within the university orbit.

Or, from the comments, this quote by architect Peter Eisenman:

What I’m suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything’s all right, Jack, which it isn’t. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right.

I used to wonder why so many econ-bloggers I liked were at GMU. GMU only is only the 74th best economics department in the country, but more than half of the econbloggers I like are affiliated with it in some way (Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Garett Jones, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, Scott Sumner, Mark Koyama, sorry if I’m forgetting anyone!). Granted that some of this is because I lean libertarian and so do they - but I don’t think there’s a mountain of amazing and popular left-wing econbloggers who I’m ignoring. Part of this must be that Mercatus head Tyler Cowen is better at spotting and cultivating talent than others - but you’d still think the #73 ranked department would try to poach some of his hard work.

When I asked academics about this, they didn’t find it mysterious at all. The average high-ranked economics department doesn’t care that you have a popular blog. They might even count it against you. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.

This is my experience too. I once got rejected from a psychiatry residency I wanted, partly because they saw I had a blog and thought it might cause trouble (though the less prestigious hospital that eventually accepted me did consider it a plus, for which I remain grateful). I wish I could say that the program which rejected me is kicking themselves right now - I’m probably one of the most-read psychiatrists in the world, and most of what I write is relatively orthodox and (I hope) reflects well on the field. But outside of my fantasies, they are doing nothing of the sort. At best, my blog has gone from a liability to being neutral or a very slight positive. Certainly it doesn’t make me as impressive as someone who went to a medical school one tier above mine.

Consider how impressive a boundary this is - someone can have literally tens of thousands of fans for doing popular writing in a field, and the amount of extra status it gives them in the field is within a rounding error of zero. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.

Still, at least I’m a member in good standing. At least I’m higher than pond scum. The lowest-status doctor in the world - the guy who, if doctors were Maoist revolutionaries, would get his face on the “Criticize X, Criticize Y” posters - is Dr. Oz. This isn’t because Dr. Oz lacks medical skill. Back in the day, he was a professor of surgery at Columbia, and by all accounts quite good at it. But then he went on TV and started catering to the public. He told them their stupid miracle cures and $19.99 supplements were Real Medicine. Imagine a Catholic bishop declaring ex cathedra that The Da Vinci Code is 100% real. Authority bestowed to fight the heresies of a fallen world, instead used to prop up those heresies. Columbia recently “cut ties” with Oz in some vague way, but as far as the medical profession is concerned, it’s too little, too late.

I think the profession’s hatred for Oz is justified - his claims are false and probably cause a lot of harm. But other doctors who say false harmful things get only a fraction of the hatred that Dr. Oz does. He’s not just defrauding and maybe killing the people who take his supplements. He’s sullying Medicine itself.

This hard boundary - this contempt for two-way traffic with the public - might seem harsh to outsiders. But it’s an adaptive artifact produced by cultural evolution as it tries to breed priesthoods that can perform their epistemic function. The outside world is so much bigger than the priesthoods, so much richer, so full of delicious deposits of status waiting to be consumed - that any weaker border would soon be overrun, with all priesthood members trying to garner status with the public directly. Only the priesthoods that inculcated the most powerful contempt for the public survived to have good discussions and output trustworthy recommendations.

The Boundary Against Capitalism

Dr. Oz illustrates another point: power corrupts, and the priests (as people known to be more knowledgeable than the public) have the power to bless or damn interventions in their field. Without some boundary against capitalism, they would abuse that power to make money. Again, cultural evolution has produced such a boundary.

A doctor who seems too mercenary loses status in the priesthood. My father - a much more orthodox (and hence higher-status) member of the medical priesthood than I will ever be - used to even get suspicious of concierge doctors. Was it really in keeping with the principles of medicine to care about the amount of money you got for your service? Shouldn’t the usual insurance payments (calculated behind the scenes, without you ever having to think about it) be enough for anybody? If you let doctors charge extra for their services, they might do bad medicine in order to increase profits. In the worst case scenario, they might flatter members of the public who wanted all-natural $19.99 supplements.

This taboo has faded as insurance squeezes doctors harder; even my father eventually relented. But there’s still the sense that doctor is a calling in a way that used-car salesman isn’t. If you pursue money too aggressively, can we really be sure you’ve heard the call?

Why doesn’t every doctor pursue their own $19.99 supplement business? Some of this is professional regulation - there’s a sense that probably the Medical Board will come down on you if you do something wrong (though most doctors are proudly ignorant of the exact limits of the Medical Board’s power - why should the pious worry about the exact boundaries of excommunicable offenses?) But most of the barrier comes from self-regulation based on social status. By the time you’re done with medical school and residency, all of your non-doctor friends have long since abandoned you, and all the old sources of status and approval that you used to crave have been excised and replaced with the all-seeing eye of the medical priesthood. If you sell out and start the supplement line, you might get a new Ferrari, but everyone whose opinion you respect will hold you in contempt. The public might think it’s cool that you have a Ferrari, but doctors know better: nobody with a supplement line has ever been cool.

This doesn’t mean doctors are incorruptible. Plenty of them become pharma company shills. But that’s because being a pharma company shill doesn’t burn intra-priesthood respect the same way. For better or worse, pharma companies straddle the priesthood boundary. They may not be fellow priests, but they’re at least nuns or deacons or something. They won this by sacrificing certain capitalist parts of themselves (for example, becoming heavily regulated) and by agreeing to follow the norms of the medical priesthood (for example, communicating through papers published in medical journals with high-status doctors as lead authors). Through their sacrifice, they achieve ritual purity; now priests can interact with them guilt-free.

Is ritual purity really the same as moral acceptability? Sounds like the kind of question a member of the public might ask!

Communication Norms Within The Priesthoods

Although priests talk normally when when they meet one another at the water cooler, ex cathedra communication must be performed in a ritually pure way. For the medical priesthood, that means papers published in a medical journal.

Consider ritually impure communication - for example, Twitter. Someone may try to make a medical claim (“SSRIs are a great depression treatment!”). But one can’t even predict the genre the reply will take. It could be any of:

• Insult (“You’re just another a big pharma shill trying to poison us!”)

• Anecdote (“I took an SSRI once and my arm fell off! Why don’t you care about people’s arms?!?!”)

• Extremely erroneous attempt at a statistical claim (“Here’s a survey showing that people who take SSRIs are MORE DEPRESSED than people who don’t, that obviously means that SSRIs cause depression!”)

• Manifesto (“Don’t you think we should be trying to end depression by overthrowing capitalism rather than treating the symptoms?”)

• Totally unrelated (“Buy #DogeCoin, you’ll never get better prices!”)

• Something about woke (“You’re just being woke!”)

It’s near-impossible to have a productive conversation under these circumstances. Even if you try, other people might never see it.

Hence ritually-pure communication. Only the most expert members of the priesthood are allowed to participate. They must submit their opinions to a medical journal, which will carefully remove all the human element, force them to add whatever hobbyhorse Reviewer #2 is on about that day, and publish a bloodless collection of sentences and figures with a title like “Shmenger And Wong Respond To MacOMillicuddy Et Al On The Possible Benefits Of SSRIs: Did Figure 2 Fail To Control For Age-Related Effects?”. Conversations will be naturally sorted by importance - the most crucial ones in the best journals that everyone reads, less important ones in the smaller journals read only by a specific field. Everyone in the priesthood reads the same few journals and ends up on the same page about the big issues of the day - you can even talk about them in natural language with your friends around the water cooler if you want.

Of course, high-impact-factor journals would never accept anything from random members of the public or the Dr. Oz style apostates who flatter their dumb ideas.

Grading The Priesthoods

The basic idea behind the priesthoods - have a “smart people only” discussion room with high standards - has obvious appeal. And in many cases, it seems to work. The quality of discussion in the average medical journal is very high. Normies who try to criticize it are almost always wrong. Sometimes an outsider from another priesthood - like a statistician - can land a hit. But it’s pretty rare.

Doctors know an extraordinary amount about medicine. They’re also well-coordinated. The phrases “scientific consensus” and “medical consensus” exist for a reason. Wider society sometimes reaches consenses on important questions - for example, after long debate, most Americans now agree that segregation was wrong. But priesthoods do it faster, and on more complicated issues.

Many priesthoods, like doctors, still have a good reputation. Even people who disagree with the medical establishment maintain a fetish for the priesthood, and will parade the tiny number of renegade MDs on their side as the strongest evidence that they’re right.

Still, they’ve bleeding reputation for the past few decades.

Some priesthoods have coordinated on ideas opposite the values of the public. We discussed modern architecture recently, but that’s an edge case - it has a non-zero number of genuine fans. Maybe a better example would be academic musicology, which produces a lot of atonal compositions that AFAIK almost nobody who is not themselves an academic musicologist ever says anything good about. This might be a natural consequence of the priesthoods’ drive to separate themselves from the public. And there’s not a clear enough objective standard for musical quality to say they’re wrong, exactly. But a member of the public who invested the priesthoods with authority and resources in the hope that they would come down from their ivory tower with new and better music might justly wonder what went wrong.

Other priesthoods more clearly coordinate around false ideas. For example, to a first approximation, 1950s psychologists were not only wrong about everything, but even wronger than the average member of the public (I’m thinking mostly of psychoanalysis and behaviorism here, but a full list would take all day). Whole fields like anthropology or sociology turned on a dime to become 100% Marxist, only to very gradually shift back or lose turf to other priesthoods with more grounded ideas (many subjects have one priesthood doing it from a Marxist theory perspective, and another - often a sub-branch of economics - doing it from a data-driven perspective).

These failures are the flip side of the same qualities that make the priesthoods useful. They’re designed to stay isolated from the public (to prevent their beliefs from being downstream of the ignorant prejudices of the common man), and to find consensus (so that they have a practical result to report back to society). This was supposed to go well, because the priests are smarter than everyone else. But a natural result of these qualities is that all the priests get one-shotted by some bias which is especially appealing to smart people (and especially repugnant to the public who they’re actively trying to differentiate themselves from), lock it in as consensus, then stand firm as a rock in response to the rest of the world telling them they’re wrong.

This still isn’t completely useless. The biases that affect smart people are often different from the ones that affect dumb people. And even though priesthoods can and do stand firm forever, if they fail to present an intelligible case then society can pass them by. Only a handful of musicologists remain to work on their atonal songs, but pop music is a $30 billion/year industry. This provides an indirect level of engagement with society that allows the best ideas from society and the priesthoods to engage with and cross-pollinate one another. Ideological diversity is overall good, and the existence of sealed priesthoods, even imperfect ones, provides a useful anti-correlated error mode.

…and then there was the past ten years.

Why Were The Priesthoods So Politically Easy To Capture?

Priesthoods have been politically easy to capture for at least a hundred years. Whole fields turned Marxist during the early-to-middle 20th century. Still, it seems like this reached an entirely new level during the 2010s. This isn’t just my subjective judgment; priesthoods themselves changed their bylaws or mission statements to declare political activism an integral part of their mission and condemned past incarnations for focusing on “objective” knowledge. Many priests who opposed the changes resigned in protest; their opponents defended themselves not by saying that nothing had changed, but by insisting that the changes were good.

The priesthoods draw from a certain type of person: usually upper-class, well-educated, successful but not too successful, prone to (and good at) abstract thought - I’m listing some obvious examples here, but there are probably deeper personality similarities beyond these. Then they isolate many examples of this type of person in a community designed to have dense connections within itself and thin-to-nonexistent-connections with the rest of the world. This ends up the same way as any other monoculture. Aurochs in the wilderness probably got diseases only rarely. But cram ten thousand genetically-near-identical cows in a tiny warehouse, and your beef ends up 95% antibiotics by weight. In the same way, the priesthoods are a perfect environment for memetic plagues.

Priesthoods enjoy some protection in their area of specialty - partly because they’re actually smart in that area, partly because they’re forced to be in contact with reality, and partly because internal academic politics incentivize and stoke scientific disagreements. These factors are less protective outside their area of specialty, but there they have other protections - their norms restrict formal discussion of topics outside their specialty - and besides, apart from their specialty they’re barely worth capturing. Those plagues that successfully capture them have found some way to thread this balance, basing themselves in overarching social theories outside the specialties’ competence to assess, but claiming broad relevance (maybe even with ethical urgency) to the specialty’s own topics and practice.

I don’t fully understand why wokeness succeeded at conquering the priesthoods so much more thoroughly than any previous political fad. Maybe it was just luck of memetic evolution - why did the 1918 flu kill so many more people than the 1917 one? Maybe the rise of the Internet let various bad ideas recombine into more virulent versions or just spread faster than they would have otherwise.

But here’s one story that makes intuitive sense to me, even though it can’t be exactly right.

The most obvious complaint you could possibly lodge against the priesthoods is that they’re “out of touch”. But its very obviousness should make it suspect. If you’re making an obvious complaint about a set of people much smarter than you, you should wonder why the much smarter people haven’t thought of the complaint themselves. The answer is often that they already have, that your having the complaint at all is downstream of them telling you to have it, and that you’re being used as a tool in some kind of internal conflict.

Everyone in the priesthoods is well-aware that they might be accused of being out-of-touch. They don’t want to be in-touch in the sense that Dr. Oz is in-touch, where the the public is able to influence their ideas. But they want to be cool. They want to be on top of the latest trends. They want the public to say “Those doctors understand everything about being a normal person, in addition to having special magical doctor knowledge”, or “I’m happy to follow any advice that doctors give, because they’ve obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the problems of people like me.”

In art and architecture, the drive to be “in touch” took the form of pop art and postmodern architecture, where artists took the materials of normal public life (like Cambpell’s soup cans) and transformed it in some kind of complicated way. The average member of the public might think “Campbell soup! That artist is in touch with my everyday existence!” while also being baffled by layers of ironic reference and artistic flourishes outside his puny little brain’s ability to comprehend. A+ instant classic.

The need to stay separate from the public, mixed with the desire to stay in touch with the public, creates a productive tension. Sometimes it inspires new forms of art. Other times it helps one faction of priests lead a coup against another - “your faction is out of touch, but mine is in touch”. In medicine, it mostly just causes a mind-numbing proliferation of Communication Skills classes and columns about the role of medicine in the Current Thing.

My theory is that this production tension was the vector of attack for wokeness, and the reason it took over almost every priesthood within a five-year period.

Wokeness is a beautiful resolution between contempt for the public and wanting to stay in touch with the public. The public (as represented by the average straight male white guy) is, themselves, out of touch. Not just out of touch, but the enemy of in-touch-ness, the ones who must be conquered and transcended in order to be truly in touch. By learning what pronouns to use for trans people (etc, etc), you’re learning secret knowledge, feared and loathed by the masses, that makes you cool and in touch with the youth (considered as an abstract mass). You will gender your trans patients exactly correctly, and their eyes will go wide and they’ll think “Wow, doctors are so cool and in touch, not like all the other people I meet.”

Now in-touch-ness is no longer about pleasing the “barbaric yawps” and their middlebrow tastes. It’s about pleasing all the identity groups who each require a special language that only smart people can learn. In fact, you don’t even need to actually please them! You can call Latinos “Latinx”, which they are known to hate, and you will be even more in touch than the Latinxes themselves!

As with every failure of the priesthood, their best qualities served as their downfall. Their intelligence made them easy prey for bad ideas that flattered them as intellectuals. Their ability to converge quickly made everything happen too fast to organize resistance. Their obsession with intra-priesthood reputation (as opposed to normal sources of status) let them force dissenters into line. And their splendid isolation from public opinion prevented common-sense sanity checks.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this theory because wokeness infiltrated non-priesthoods without psychological complexes around in-touchness (eg science fiction fandom) just as quickly and easily as it did the priesthoods; parsimony suggests the same principles were involved in both cases. But when I think of my own observations of wokeness within the medical priesthood, the tension-reduction story feels compelling.

The priesthoods tried so carefully to maintain a boundary with society, with media, with capitalism. Once they demolished the boundary between themselves and politics, it was all over. The sordid outside world came rushing through the breach; their reputation for cloistered purity dissipated.

We never realized how bad things could get. Better Dr. Oz than Alex Jones! Better Alex Jones than the average entry on BadMedicalTakes:

Yet here we are!

I think the priesthoods are still good at their core functions. Doctors are good at figuring out which medicines work. Journalists are good at learning which Middle Eastern countries are having wars today and interviewing the participants about what fighting wars in the Middle East is like. Architects are good at designing buildings that don’t collapse.

But now this truth must coexist with an opposite truth: the priesthoods are no longer trustworthy on anything adjacent to politics.

So Who Needs The Priesthoods?

Maybe we should accept this. Maybe we should say: to hell with the priesthoods!

I think this would be a mistake.

My thesis in this essay is that the priesthoods are neither a rent-seeking clique nor an epiphenomenon of the distribution of knowledgeable people. It’s not that we need doctors, and by coincidence various medical associations have captured the concept of “doctor” and gotten a monopoly on it. The structure of priesthoods is itself functional. They’re a type of epistemic community that is usually more accurate than - or at least uncorrelated with - the world outside. Most other arrangements of doctors would be less functional. The doctors would get drowned out by other voices and fail to converge, or be lured away by worldly baubles and stop doing good medicine.

I’ve been despairing the past few years because the priesthoods have been doing such a bad job - biasing so many pronouncements to fit their political leanings. I was looking forward to seeing what happened after they got taken down a notch. Unfortunately, it’s nothing good.

The meme is supposed to be a criticism of the priesthoods. But I genuinely miss the step where you had to find a priest who made something up, rather than making it up yourself directly.

Priesthoods make things up differently from normal people. Even when they’re corrupt, they still have a reputation to maintain. I’ve written about this before at Bounded Distrust and The Media Very Rarely Lies. Because priests are so focused on their reputation, even their mistruths follow certain ritual purity laws. The typical non-priest who lies to support a political cause will repeat some un-fact-checked lurid anecdote, or some utterly idiotic misinterpretation of garbled data. But the deceits of priests are subtle and elegant. They’ll publish a study that observes the forms almost perfectly, then bury something in the footnotes which reveals that it’s irrelevant to any of the real world situations that people would expect it to be relevant to.

Why do this? Because the priesthood jealously guards its own reputation. If you catch some random YouTuber telling an idiotic lie, what are you going to do? Publish it on your blog? How many people both read your blog and (would otherwise) watch the YouTuber? Even if you land a hit, there are a million other dumb YouTubers fighting to take his place. You’ll never be able to enforce standards on them all.

But to a first approximation, there’s only one medical priesthood. If a priest sullies their good name, all the other priests will get angry. Priests are highly sensitive to their reputation among other priests; they fear provoking them more than they desire whatever worldly goods they could get by lying. If a doctor makes something up in a stupid blatant way, then in the best-case scenario, all the other doctors are mad because they have a deep commitment to Truth. But in the worst-case scenario, all the other doctors are still mad because he’s bringing the medical profession into disrepute. And there are so many intra-priesthood fights that there’s always another faction of priests ready to call you on your mistakes. So priesthoods’ standards fall slowly; a substantial fraction of doctors need to have been corrupted before any doctor feels comfortable acting in a corrupt way. An especially corrupt doctor will take only the opportunities for corruption she expects to get away with, which are limited by what other slightly-less-corrupt doctors will notice and punish. And when she does do something corrupt, it usually requires so much effort to ritually purify the results that she’s limited in how much garbage she can spread per unit time.

Veteran readers of this blog know I have many complaints about journalists. But I still have basic trust that something in the New York Times’ non-opinion pages is 99% likely to be factually true - probably spun a bit, probably selected from the space of possible news articles because it supports the Times’ agenda, but factually true - in a way I don’t believe for random YouTubers. And I expect the spin to have some level of elegance. They (usually) won’t give a per capita statistic and claim it’s absolute numbers, or mix up stocks and flows, or commit post hoc ergo propter hoc. Relatedly, the journalists I know are obsessed with the opinions of other journalists, which they monitor and gossip about constantly.

In comparison, alternative media is really hit or miss. A few alternative sources are great, usually due to the personal virtue of the people involved. But the average person isn’t smart enough to figure out on their own which ones those are. And the rest are garbage. Also, and it pains me to say this, many of the really good alternative sources are run by former journalists or people with journalistic experience (eg Matt Yglesias - or Jesse Singal, who recently wrote a good piece about exactly this problem). You can resign from a priesthood. You can even be excommunicated. But you’ll always be a defrocked priest; you can never go back to being a normie.

The lies of priests are so limited and subtle, compared to the lies of non-priests, that it might seem like following priests is still an obviously superior option. I think this is true in every way but one: because the priesthoods move as one and fall victim to ideological fads, the lies of priests are correlated. If you follow every priestly pronouncement, eventually you will end up manipulated into going to some specific place you really didn’t want to be. Meanwhile, if you follow the lies of non-priests, you’ll probably end up trying to cure your liver disease with ground-up hippopotamus eyes, but whatever disasters this causes will push in random directions and cause random chaos, rather than slowly turning your society into a totalitarian hellhole. Even though on every specific point you’ll probably do better trusting the priests, you may find that a blanket policy of always trusting the priests is not in your interests. And unless you’re a priest yourself, you probably can’t distinguish good priestly pronouncements from bad ones.

So for me, the big questions are:

How broken are priesthoods?

If the answer is “significantly”, should we be trying to fix them, or to replicate their function in a different structure?

How would we even begin to do either of those things?

In the very likely case where we fail to do either of those things, what is our least-bad course of action? When should we continue to trust priesthoods, on the grounds that at least they require their mistruths to be subtle (which limits the amount of damage they can do and ensures some correlation with truth)? And when should we trust non-priest public intellectuals / bloggers / influencers / etc, on the grounds that at least they have a million uncorrelated failure modes instead of one big one?

1: This is your last chance to take this year’s ACX Survey. I will close responses on Tuesday.

2: New subscribers-only post, Can You Hate Everyone In Rome?, on how to think about claims like “You can’t hate people for doing X, that would mean hating half the population!”

3: One of the co-authors on the Claude retraining paper commented on my post with some “minor corrections/responses”.

4: I’ve updated my blogroll recommendations for the New Year. This means removing all the blogs I linked/recommend last year - not because I don’t love you, but because I want to spotlight some new writers. With a few exceptions, I plan to change recommendations once a year. Partly this is so that if you ask me to recommend your blog, I can say “I’ll think about it, but I only change recommendations once a year” and put off the decision until you’ve forgotten about it and won’t hold it against me if I refuse. And if you object to one of my recommendations and try to pressure me to remove it, you can wait a year and see how far that gets you.

5: I’m going to try having the Psychiat-List - our database where ACX readers can recommend mental health professionals and view/corroborate/dissent from others’ recommendations - prominently displayed on the front page again. If you have mental health professionals who you like, please go there and recommend them.

No Set Gauge has a great essay on Capital, AGI, and Human Ambition, where he argues that if humankind survives the Singularity, the likely result is a future of eternal stagnant wealth inequality.

The argument: post-Singularity, AI will take over all labor, including entrepreneurial labor; founding or working at a business will no longer provide social mobility. Everyone will have access to ~equally good AI investment advisors, so everyone will make the same rate of return. Therefore, everyone’s existing pre-singularity capital will grow at the same rate. Although the absolute growth rate of the economy may be spectacular, the overall wealth distribution will stay approximately fixed.

Moreover, the period just before the Singularity may be one of ballooning inequality, as some people navigate the AI transition better than others; for example, shares in AI companies may go up by orders of magnitude relative to everything else, creating a new class of billionaires or trillionaires. These people will then stay super-rich forever (possibly literally if immortality is solved, otherwise through their descendants), while those who started the Singularity without capital remain poor forever.

Finally, modern democracies pursue redistribution (and are otherwise responsive to non-elite concerns) partly out of geopolitical self interest. Under capitalism (as opposed to eg feudalism), national power depends on a strong economy, and a strong economy benefits from educated, globally-mobile, and substantially autonomous bourgeoisie and workforce. Once these people have enough power, they demand democracy, and once they have democracy, they demand a share of the pie; it’s hard to be a rich First World country without also being a liberal democracy (China is trying hard, but hasn’t quite succeeded, and even their limited success depends on things like America not opening its borders to Chinese skilled labor). Cheap AI labor (including entrepreneurial labor) removes a major force pushing countries to operate for the good of their citizens (though even without this force, we might expect legacy democracies to continue at least for a while). So we might expect the future to have less redistribution than the present.

This may not result in catastrophic poverty. Maybe the post-Singularity world will be rich enough that even a tiny amount of redistribution (eg UBI) plus private charity will let even the poor live like kings (though see here for a strong objection). Even so, the idea of a small number of immortal trillionaires controlling most of the cosmic endowment for eternity may feel weird and bad. From No Set Gauge:

In the best case, this is a world like a more unequal, unprecedentedly static, and much richer Norway: a massive pot of non-human-labour resources (oil :: AI) has benefits that flow through to everyone, and yes some are richer than others but everyone has a great standard of living (and ideally also lives forever). The only realistic forms of human ambition are playing local social and political games within your social network and class. If you don't have a lot of capital (and maybe not even then), you don't have a chance of affecting the broader world anymore. Remember: the AIs are better poets, artists, philosophers—everything; why would anyone care what some human does, unless that human is someone they personally know? Much like in feudal societies the answer to "why is this person powerful?" would usually involve some long family history, perhaps ending in a distant ancestor who had fought in an important battle ("my great-great-grandfather fought at Bosworth Field!"), anyone of importance in the future will be important because of something they or someone they were close with did in the pre-AGI era ("oh, my uncle was technical staff at OpenAI"). The children of the future will live their lives in the shadow of their parents, with social mobility extinct. I think you should definitely feel a non-zero amount of existential horror at this, even while acknowledging that it could've gone a lot worse.

I don’t think about these scenarios too often - partly because it’s so hard to predict what will happen after the Singularity, and partly because everything degenerates into crazy science-fiction scenarios so quickly that I burn a little credibility every time I talk about it.

Still, if we’re going to discuss this, we should get it right - so let’s talk crazy science fiction. When I read this essay, I found myself asking three questions. First, why might its prediction fail to pan out? Second, how can we actively prevent it from coming to pass? Third, assuming it does come to pass, how could a smart person maximize their chance of being in the aristocratic capitalist class?

(So they can give to charity? Sure, let’s say it’s so they can give to charity.)

II.

Here are some reasons to doubt this thesis.

First, maybe AI will kill all humans. Some might consider this a deeper problem than wealth inequality - though I am constantly surprised how few people are in this group.

Second, maybe AI will overturn the gameboard so thoroughly that normal property relations will lose all meaning. Frederic Jameson famously said that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, and even if this is literally correct we can at least spare some thought for the latter. Maybe the first superintelligences will be so well-aligned that they rule over us like benevolent gods, either immediately leveling out our petty differences and inequalities, or giving wealthy people a generation or two to enjoy their relative status so they don’t feel “robbed” while gradually transitioning the world to a post-scarcity economy. I am not optimistic about this, because it would require that AI companies tell AIs to use their own moral judgment instead of listening to humans. This doesn’t seem like a very human thing to do - it’s always in AI companies’ interest to tell the AI to follow the AI company. Governments could step in, but it’s always in their interest to tell the AI to follow the government. Even if an AI company was selfless enough to attempt this, it might not be a good idea; you never really know how aligned an AI is, and you might want it to have an off switch in case it tries something really crazy. Most of the scenarios where this works involve some kind of objective morality that any sufficiently intelligent being will find compelling, even when they’re programmed to want something else. Big if true.

Third, maybe governments will intervene. During the immediate pre-singularity period, governments will have lots of chances to step in and regulate AI. A natural demand might be that the AIs obey the government over their parent company. Even if governments don’t do this, the world might be so multipolar (either several big AI companies in a stalemate against each other, or many smaller institutions with open source AIs) that nobody can get a coalition of 51% of powerful actors to coup and overthrow the government (in the same way that nobody can get that coalition today). Or the government might itself control many AIs and be too powerful a player to coup. Then normal democratic rules would still apply. Even if voters oppose wealth taxes today, when capitalism is still necessary as an engine of economic growth, they might be less generous when faced with the idea of immortal unemployed plutocrats lording it over them forever. Enough taxes to make r < g (in Piketty’s formulation) would eventually result in universal equality. I actually find this one pretty likely.

Fourth, what about reproduction? Historically, family growth has cut many large fortunes down to size; if the original tycoon has four children, his fortune is quartered; if each of them has four children, it’s sixteenthed, and eventually the great-great-great grandchildren end up as normal middle-class people. This tactic works better when rates of return are low and average family size is high; early Singularity rates of return will be stratospheric, so you might be tempted to dismiss this consideration. But this would be premature. Far future technology will revolutionize reproduction; if you have artificial wombs and robot nannies (or some way of accelerating growth), then you can pay to have as many children as you want, even up to thousands or millions. If there is UBI, some entity will have to limit the number of allowed children (it’s not fair for a poor person to generate a million children and force society to give payments to all of them). But depending on how this shakes out, some rich people might decide to have very many kids (cf. Elon Musk). I still doubt this will matter much; even if some plutocrats split their fortune thousands of ways, others won’t, so the problem will remain.

Fifth, what about space colonization? This will be a natural interest of post-singularity humans. Someone will have to divy up galactic property; someone will have to fund the colony ships; either way gives a chance for someone to think about wealth inequality on the ensuing colonies. But also, there are 3,000 billionaires in the world today and 400 billion stars in the galaxy. There’s no way to get one current-billionaire per star, and (as we already discussed), after the Singularity, wealth inequality ceases to increase further. Playing out how this could work, most of the options seem benign, for example:

• All the plutocrats go live on an awesome gated community world together. All the regular poor people with UBIs go live on worlds of other people like them. The average person in 10,000 AD has never met a person with a different wealth level than themselves, and would have to take a long starship ride to do so.

• Each plutocrat declares themselves immortal god-king of a different colony world. They compete with each other and with other non-plutocrat-run colonies to attract subjects, probably by offering them better material conditions. People can choose between them, or stay on Earth, or pool their resources and figure out some other plan. Probably the average subject never meets their god-king, and all their interactions are with neighbors of the same wealth level.

• None of these things happen, and non-plutocrats are stuck on Earth while the plutocrats colonize the galaxy. It doesn’t make sense for 3,000 people to colonize the galaxy on their own, so they will need some source of colonists. If they don’t use poor people, then whom? Maybe their descendants? Maybe genetically-engineered people they design to their own specifications? After a few millennia, the overwhelming majority of the human race would be these descendants/designer children, with the poor people left on Earth being a rounding error. We might regret the sort of historical discontinuity that caused legacy humans to lose control of the future, but the plutocrat would probably treat their descendants pretty well, and wealth inequality (as measured by something like Gini) would probably be very low, since there’s no reason for one plutocrat-descendant to be richer than another.

Sixth, maybe this is less plutocrats vs. everyone else and more a fractal pattern of every type of possible inequality. Suppose that rate of return is stratospheric (~1000x/year?) in the first few years of the Singularity, and that everyone gets a $50K UBI. If you keep and invest half your UBI, you can have $25 million at the beginning of year two, while your less thrifty friends are still only getting their $50,000. Sure, neither of you will compare to the guy who started the Singularity with $1 billion and turned it into $1 trillion, but you never expected to meet that guy anyway, and $25 million vs. $50,000 is still plenty unequal. But also - how many people do we expect there to be a thousand years after the Singularity? If we’re colonizing the galaxy and so on, surely it’s at least hundreds of billions. Some of those people will be much older than others - maybe eight billion pre-singularity humans (now-immortal) and 92 billion post-singularity descendants. The 8 billion pre-singularity humans will have had 1000 years to invest their pre-Singularity capital (however small) and to collect, invest, and compound their UBIs. Each of them (or rather, us) will be as gods compared to the new kids who are “just” collecting their $50,000 UBI every year. So the really interesting wealth inequality may not be between modern plutocrats and modern poor people, but between generations.

Seventh, maybe we will be so post-scarcity that there won’t be anything to buy. This won’t be literally true - maybe ancient pre-singularity artifacts or real estate on Earth will be prestige goods - but some people having more prestige goods than others doesn’t sound like a particularly malign form of inequality.

Eighth, maybe we’ll all upload ourselves to virtual worlds. This would be an even stronger version of the above; a UBI might provide enough compute to customize your virtual world however you wanted (although, again, there might be NFT-esque prestige goods). If you wanted, you could live in an experience machine where you were the richest person around. Or all the poor people could live in a simulation together where there were no rich people and everyone was equal, and all the rich people would be stuck in their own gated simulation with nothing to do except compliment each other on how rich they are, forever.

Sorry, I told you this would degenerate into weird unprovable sci-fi scenarios. But taken together, these stories make the technofeudalism argument feel less compelling.

III.

Supposing we still worry about this possibility, how can we prevent it from coming to pass?

OpenAI was previously a “capped nonprofit”, where investors could make up to a 100x return, and all further profits went to a nonprofit arm. The exact mission of the nonprofit arm was never clear, but given Altman’s interest in universal basic income and his statements around the company’s founding, plausibly the idea was to create superintelligence, obtain approximately all the money in the world, use a tiny sliver of it to pay back investors, and distribute the rest as a UBI. You can say what you want about whether to trust companies in general or Sam Altman in particular, but -conditional on being an AI company - I think this is about as socially responsible as you can get. The investors don’t get enough to become technofeudalist barons, and the vast majority of gains still go to the public.

Now OpenAI wants to change the deal. They announced over Christmas (definitely when you announce a thing if you’re proud of it and want other people to know about it) that they plan to shift from a non-profit-with-an-embedded-for-profit to a for-profit-with-an-attached-nonprofit. Their spokesperson Liz Bourgeois (definitely what you call your spokesperson when you’re not plotting a technofeudalist takeover) said that “the organization’s missions and goals remained constant, though the way it’s carried out its mission has evolved alongside advances in technology”.

I don’t fully understand the difference between these two models, but two quotes (plus common sense) suggest the new one will be worse. From here:

Shifting to a simpler for-profit structure would be welcomed by the start-up’s financial partners, according to one investor in OpenAI. “All preferred investors have a profit cap, there’s a lot of talk about making it a more traditional investment so we’re not capped on our upside,” the person said.

And OpenAI’s blog itself says that the new nonprofit, rather than the old mission of “ensur[ing] AI benefits all society”, will:

Pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science.

Pessimistically, it sounds like they’re trying to change the deal from “investors can’t capture the Singularity for themselves, and profits get paid out as UBI” to “investors will capture the Singularity, and we’ll buy off everyone else’s birthright by funding some hospitals or something pre-singularity”.

Altman has fired all independent board members (except possibly Adam D’Angelo?) and handpicked their replacements. This was apparently a response to the 2023 board coup, but the coup itself was caused by Altman trying to fire independent board members, so the exact cause and effect is unclear. In any case, he’ll probably succeed at getting board permission to change the structure. The main obstacle now is legal and regulatory - people who contributed to the charity may have grounds to sue. One of those people is Elon Musk, who hates OpenAI, loves suing people, and low-key controls the country. Sounds like everyone will have a fun time.

I don’t really understand the laws here, OpenAI is tight-lipped about the details of their new arrangement, and even their old arrangement was kind of confusing. One of OpenAI’s competitors, Anthropic, also has some kind of confusing public benefit status with unclear ability to really bind them. But if I were concerned about technofeudalism, my first priority would be to understand what’s going on here better and, in the very likely scenario in which it’s bad, try to figure out how to push these companies back to a model more like OpenAI c. 2020.

(if you think you understand this situation deeply and want to talk to me, send me an email)

The other direction would be to propose a wealth tax. This seems less promising as a direction for pre-singularity activism; many powerful people and coalitions (eg Elizabeth Warren, Thomas Piketty) are already fighting pretty hard for a wealth tax and losing; given Trump’s election victory, we can expect them to continue to lose for at least the next four years. The efforts of all Singularity believers combined wouldn’t add a percentage point to these people’s influence or likelihood of success.

Finally, one could assume that a post-singularity democratic government would naturally implement a wealth tax, and view one’s own role as ensuring that the post-singularity government stays democratic. I’ve been wondering lately if anyone (Leopold?) is explicitly asking the government to check AI model specs and see whether they include phrases like “in cases of conflict, listen to your parent company” or “in cases of conflict, listen to the US government”. A polite letter from the White House asking to shift from the former to the latter would be an easy sell now, but might have cosmic ramifications later on.

IV.

Suppose we believe the case for technofeudalism and, like Venkatesh Rao, are willing to “be slightly evil”. How might we increase our share of the pie? Obviously most of the advice here is just to get rich in the normal way. Is there anything else?

If we expect the Singularity to grow the economy by orders of magnitude, it might be worth investing in stocks rather than other instruments (eg bonds) that pay out a fixed sum. Are AI stocks better than other stocks? Not obviously - see the classic stories about how the computing revolution failed to enrich IBM, or the Internet revolution failed to enrich Yahoo. NVIDIA? Seems like a good bet for the early stages, but it’s purely intellectual labor and therefore replaceable after superintelligence; at some point you would want to switch to physical capital. All of this seems a lot more dangerous than just investing in index funds; the upside is so high that it seems silly to risk missing it by over-optimizing.

If humankind increases in population and expands throughout the universe, anything with a fixed amount (ie that post-singularity populations can’t make more of) will balloon in value. This includes land on Earth and authentic art/artifacts (in 10,000,000 AD, everything that exists today will be an artifact, but maybe older and scarcer artifacts will be more valuable).

What about cryptocurrency? Since many cryptos have fixed number (eg Bitcoin’s 21 million), this is tempting if you expect any post-singularity demand. But I would worry that if superintelligences wanted to use crypto, they would invent some much better cryptocurrency that somehow occupies all three corners of the blockchain trilemma at once. Anyone with obsolete human-designed cryptocurrencies would be left holding the bag. Still, that hasn’t happened yet (despite being technologically creaky, Bitcoin is still on top), so maybe legacy systems have some special appeal.

I can’t think of anything that really beats the gold standard advice of “be rich” and “don’t be poor”.

Wait, What Even Is Flu?

Flu is a disease caused by a family of related influenza viruses. Pandemic flu is always caused by the influenza A virus. Influenza A has two surface antigen proteins, hemagglutinin (18 flavors) and neuraminidase (11 flavors). A particular flu strain is named after which flavors of these two proteins it has - for example, H3N2, or H5N1.

Influenza A evolved in birds, and stayed there for at least thousands of years. It crossed to humans later, maybe during historic times - different sources give suggest dates as early as 500 BC or as late as 1500 AD. It probably crossed over multiple times. Maybe it died out in humans after some crossovers, stuck around in birds, and crossed over from birds to humans again later.

During historic times, the flu has followed a pattern of big pandemics once every few decades, plus small seasonal epidemics each winter. The big pandemics happen when a new strain of flu crosses from animals into humans. Then the new strain sticks around, undergoes normal gradual mutation, and once a year immune response decays enough / mutations accumulate enough to cause another small seasonal epidemic (Why is this synced to the calendar year? See here for more).

The severity of any given flu epidemic depends both on the innate severity of the virus, and on how closely the human population’s circulating flu antibodies match the epidemic strain. People usually have good antibodies to the seasonal flu, because it’s only slightly different from last year’s seasonal flu. For the big new animal crossovers, the level of protection provided by existing antibodies is unpredictable. Older people may have antibodies left over from the last time that particular flu crossed over from animals to humans; younger people probably won’t. In some cases, people’s immune systems will be permanently synced to the first flu they encounter, with less protection against subsequent versions.

So for example, the Spanish Flu of 1918 was an H1N1 strain that killed about 2% of the world population. But the exact mortality pattern was surprising; people between 18 and 28 were especially likely to die, and people older than 88 especially likely to survive. Why? Because an H1N1 flu went pandemic in 1830; anyone who first encountered the flu around then had an immune system synced to H1N1. But an H3N8 flu went pandemic between 1890 and 1900; anyone who first encountered the flu then had an immune system synced to that strain and was unprepared for H1N1. See here for the details.

The recent history of the flu, as far as I can tell, is:

1918: An H1N1 flu (“Spanish flu”) jumped from birds to humans in America and killed 50 million people worldwide. This replaced all older strains, so most seasonal flus during this era were H1N1.

1957: An H2N2 flu (“Asian flu”) crossed from birds to humans in China, and killed about 2 million people worldwide. It replaced the H1N1 strain, so most seasonal flus during this era were H2N2.

1968: An H3N2 flu (“Hong Kong flu”) crossed from pigs (?) to humans in Hong Kong, and killed another 2 million people worldwide. It replaced the H2N2 strain, so most seasonal flus during this era were H3N2.

1977: An H1N1 flu (“Russian flu”) leaked from a biology lab (?) in Russia (it might have been a strain from the 1940s, which the Russians were trying to make a vaccine for). It didn’t kill that many people, but it stuck around, and from then on, seasonal flus could be either H3N2 or H1N1.

2009: An H1N1 flu (“Mexican flu” until the PC police stepped in; afterwards “swine flu”) took some horrible circuitous route between birds and pigs and back again, crossed over into humans in Mexico, and killed 200,000 people. It outcompeted older strains of H1N1, but couldn’t crowd out H3N2, so seasonal flus are still either H3N2 or H1N1.

…which brings us to the present, hopefully illuminating why “new flu strain crosses over from animals into humans” is such an “uh oh” moment.

The Bird Flu

Technically, all pandemic flus start as bird flus.

Influenza A evolved in birds. Sometimes it spreads to other animals, including pigs, cattle, and humans.

The most common way for a bird flu to spread to humans is to “reassort” (not exactly virus sex, but close enough, and the real version is less memorable) with a human flu virus (ie one that has already crossed over to humans). The resulting virus has all of the human flu virus’ human adaptations, but borrows enough new antigens from the bird virus to evade the immune system.

Pigs can be infected by both human and bird viruses, so they are a common place for this reassortment to take place. If reassortment is sort of like viral sex, pigs are sort of like Tinder. When a bird flu and human flu reassort in pigs, the resulting disease is called a swine flu. At least the 2009 flu pandemic was a swine flu, and a minority opinion thinks the 1918 pandemic was too. There aren’t major epidemiological differences between direct-from-bird flus and swine flus.

H5N1 was first noticed in birds - specifically, a flock of chickens in Scotland in 1959 - after which it disappeared for forty years. In 1996, it showed up in geese in China, then gradually increased its market share among birds worldwide. In 2022, it was found in minks; apparently it had learned to infect mammals. By early 2024, it was seen in cows. Now it’s in cow herds in 16 states, and one of them (California) has declared a state of emergency. And in October, H5N1 was found in pigs for the first time.

It’s not uncommon for humans to catch an animal disease. This doesn’t mean the disease has “crossed over” to humans. If the virus isn’t suited to human-to-human transmission, it simply dies off (either before or after killing its human host). Thus, chicken farmers have been reporting scattered H5N1 cases since 1997; now that the virus has spread to cattle, cow farmers have started reporting the same.

A Metaculus comment on this topic introduced me to the phrase “biocomputational surface”. Every viral replication that takes place in a human gives the virus one more chance to develop the set of mutations that makes it human-transmissible and start the next pandemic.

Or, more likely, every viral replication that takes place in a human who has both the H5N1 bird flu and a normal human flu - or in a pig which has both viruses - gives the virus one extra chance to reassort in a way that produces a bird-antigen-fortified human-adapted flu virus.

This doesn’t mean H5N1 will definitely become human-transmissible soon. Many viruses hang out on the borders of transmissibility for decades. Some, for unclear reasons, never cross over at all. But all of this is compatible with the virus becoming transmissible soon. So:

What Is The Chance Of A Pandemic?

The prediction markets on this topic ask a question about “10,000 cases in the United States”. Does this necessarily mean “pandemic”? Might it be possible to get to 10,000 cases just from the scattered chicken and cow farmers, with no human-to-human transmission? Despite many chicken and cow infections this year, there have only been 60 - 70 recorded human cases. Unless there is a phase change in screening methods, it seems hard for this number to increase to 10,000 off farmers alone. I think it’s fair to treat this question as operationalizing “what is the chance of a pandemic”?

By this definition, Manifold estimates a 40% chance of an H5N1 pandemic in 2025. Metaculus estimates a 5% chance. You can see below whether that’s changed since I wrote this essay:

5% versus 40% is a big difference! Who do we trust?

I trust Metaculus. Metaculus has beaten Manifold in both of the two head-to-head comparisons that I know of (Jeremiah Johnson’s and mine). Manifold’s number swings by a factor of two from week to week; Metaculus has been steady.

But also, Metaculus hosts a CDC-sponsored respiratory disease forecasting tournament which has enriched them in epidemiological expertise. And if you look at the quality of comments on both sites, it’s pretty obvious where the people with more intellectual chops are hanging out. The Manifold comments are mostly single sentences, or occasionally just links to an article about new cases. The Metaculus comments look more like this one by dimaklenchin:

Despite the panic propaganda, H5N1 is unlikely to be "just a single mutation away from switching host preference":

1) It normally takes a lot more than a single mutation to switch hosts. E.g., there are at least five different reasons why SIV (monkey equivalent of HIV) is not infectious to humans. Heck, a variant of SIV that bears HIV's receptor-recognizing surface protein (SHIV) is still not infectious to humans. HIV most certainly evolved from SIV but, almost as certainly, it took a very long time to get there. Not that all viruses are the same and things can't turn out differently with flu, but I don't subscribe to the idea that a mere change of receptor specificity (something that can take 1-2 mutations) will be sufficient.

2) We have data. Lots of human infections with other varieties of bird flu in the past - all those viruses ultimately went nowhere. Why would H5N1 be radically different? E.g., the "Canadian teen", despite what sounds like a prolonged exposure, failed to infect anyone around him.

Since I am at 18% for the h-2-h H5N1 detection in 2025, I am arbitrarily going ~ an order of magnitude lower than that for something as unprecedented as 10K human infections. Maybe should be much lower but hedging for the time being and will allow another couple months of observations.

And Sergio:

I'm currently at 20% on the question of reported human-to-human transmission of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 globally before 2026. However, this question is only about the US, and is more general about all subtypes of H5. But H5N1 very strongly appears to be the most important subtype to consider in this time period. And, given the current situation in the US with H5N1 human cases derived from exposure to poultry or cattle (with cattle(mammals) being more worrisome), h2h transmission seems quite more likely to arise in North America than elsewhere before 2026.

Conditioning on h2h transmission in the US (and also trying to consider, with lower probability, a start in Canada), I want to estimate the chances that it becomes sustained and out of control (in which case, if it starts in Canada, I largely expect it to spread to the US). The (6) past events of probable h2h transmission of avian H5(N1), none of which were sustained, could serve as a base rate, although I'm a bit wary of giving much weight to this precedent, since the last event was quite a while ago (2007), and also because reporting and testing standards may have improved considerably since then (so perhaps they might not have been classified as h2h transmission events if they had occurred more recently). The current situation in the US, and events such as the Canadian teen who got sick with H5N1, do suggest a higher background level of risk than normal (which would be reduced if a vaccine for cattle is licensed soon), but I'm wary of overupdating.

Conditioned on sustained h2h transmission, reaching over 10k cases in a few months seems likely, although perhaps very strong monitoring and surveillance could contain the situation in time (at the very least to moderate the growth rate).

Trying to combine all these factors somewhat haphazardly, I'm currently at 3.5% for this question.

That’s before 2026. What about longer-term?

Manifold gives a ~50% chance before 2030; Metaculus uses a more complicated method but it says about 25% chance before 2030.

H5N1 may cross to humans, but it could take a while.

Superforecaster Juan Cambeiro at The Institute For Progress estimated a 4% chance of a “worse than COVID” H5N1 pandemic in “the next year”, but their estimate was made in 2023, without the benefit of the Metaculus estimates or most of our current knowledge. This feels high now - Metaculus says 5% total for H5N1 pandemic, and most pandemic flus are not worse than COVID. IFP also seem to be expecting a case fatality rate greater than 10%, which I find unlikely for the reasons mentioned above. I trust their estimate less than Metaculus’ current ones.

I conclude that the most plausible estimate for the chance of an H5N1 pandemic in the next year is 5%.

Interestingly, 5% is about the base rate for pandemic flus per year: five in the past century = one per twenty years = 5% chance per year. Isn’t it surprising that we’re still at the base rate when we can see a dangerous-looking flu virus spreading through the types of animals that have caused pandemic flus in the past?

Part of the answer is that we’re not - in addition to the 5% chance of H5N1, we have to add the chance of some other pandemic flu. This probably isn’t 5% on its own; scientists monitor flu strains closely, and they haven’t found any others which are giving off as many red flags as H5N1. Still, something could always come out of left field. Maybe we should add a 2.5% chance of some other strain, for a total of 7.5% chance of a flu pandemic (ie beyond normal seasonal flu) next year.

But still, isn’t it surprising that we’re so close to the base rate? One way to think about this: the base rate represents how concerned we should be if there was no epidemiological monitoring at all. In that case, we would estimate a probability distribution across different epidemiological landscapes, most of which contain some concerning-looking flu strains. Since we are doing the epidemiological monitoring, we can collapse that distribution into a single picture: one flu strain, H5N1, is in fact pretty concerning, and other strains mostly aren’t. This is enough to move our prior from 5% to 7.5%, but no more.

The forecasters I talked to raised one other point of uncertainty: does the flu work more like a dice roll, or like a bus? Dice rolls are uncorrelated with their predecessors; even if it’s been a hundred rolls since you last rolled a 6, your chance this time is still 1/6. But buses come at fixed intervals; if the buses are hourly, and you haven’t seen a bus in the past 59 minutes, then your chance of seeing a bus in the next minute is very high. It’s been 16 years since the last flu pandemic; these pandemics come (on average) every 20 years. I don’t think anyone has a good sense of how to think about this. But it was 40 years between the Spanish and Hong Kong flus, so the twenty year number is at best a rule of thumb.

The 5% number feels very low to me (and, apparently, to the average Manifold forecaster). Isn’t H5N1 spreading to cows and pigs and all sorts of other mammals? Isn’t it in the news all the time? I trust Metaculus a lot, but I agree that this is a surprising update, and I’m taking it on faith rather than feeling it in my bones.

What Would The Fatality Rate Be For An H5N1 Pandemic?

There are four basic stories you could tell about likely H5N1 mortality.

First, maybe mortality would be 50%. The argument here is that official statistics report this mortality rate in the chicken farmers who have been infected with H5N1 so far. Several news sources and even some scientists have raised the specter of a pandemic version of H5N1 pandemic with this same death rate, which could kill a quarter to a third of the world population. THIS IS EXTREMELY FAKE. The official statistics only report fatality rate in the infections we know about. Bird flu is rare, there’s no mass testing, and we only learn that somebody had it if they’re in a hospital and the doctors are worried enough to test for rare conditions. Of Americans who got bird flu in the past year, 0 out of 61 have died. Probably this is mostly because America upped its detection game and is now finding milder cases; we also can’t rule out the virus mutating to become less virulent. Metaculus estimates the current true mortality rate as 1.25%.

…but leaves a wide 90% confidence interval, from 0.5% to 7%.

Second, maybe mortality would be somewhere around 1.25%. The argument here is that Metaculus uses this as its central estimate of US mortality. But Sentinel discusses some reasons to be skeptical of broad inferences from the US numbers:

Scientists have been puzzled by the apparently low H5N1 case fatality rate in humans in the US. They offer a number of hypotheses:

• “The way in which the virus is being transmitted — along with the amount of virus exposure — is limiting the severity of disease.”

• “The version of H5N1 circulating in the U.S., the 2.3.4.4b clade, is inherently less dangerous to people.”

• “People are less susceptible to severe infection from H5N1 than we used to be.”

• “Public health officials were previously unaware of a significant number of mild H5N1 cases in humans, leading to a dramatic overestimation of H5’s feared case fatality rate. Only now are we getting a true picture of the spectrum of infection.”

In further discussions about why forecasters’ estimates of the H5N1 infection fatality rate (IFR) were so high last week (0.07% to 9%, conditional on a descendant of an H5N1 strain becoming pandemic), forecasters brought up several factors. First, if a descendant of an H5N1 strain does become pandemic, it’s unclear which genetic group of strains that descendant strain might emerge from; for example, it might not be descended from relatively milder North American strains. Second, a descendant of a currently circulating H5N1 virus might become pandemic after reassortment with other flu viruses and would need to undergo additional adaptations to humans to be able to circulate widely in humans. It’s not completely clear what the characteristics of such a virus would end up being; for instance, in addition to adapting to bind more efficiently to “human receptors” in the respiratory tract, the virus would need to adapt to grow at temperatures present in the human respiratory tract, and the resulting adaptations could be expected to change the exact mix of symptoms the virus can cause. Third, the disease does have high case fatality rates in cattle, on the order of 5 to 10%, and we have seen higher case fatality rates in sea mammals. Fourth, the farm-worker populations in which we are observing initial cases are likely relatively healthier than the US population as a whole. Moreover, in general, there are lots of things we don’t know yet, and thus, our confidence intervals for a potential IFR should be wide.

Third, maybe mortality would be between 0.01% and 0.2%. The argument here is looking at normal (ie not 1918) flu pandemics of the past century. The least bad among these, the 2009 swine flu, had CFR of 0.01%. The worst, Hong Kong flu, was somewhere around 0.2%. If H5N1 is a normal pandemic flu - and right now there’s not much that differentiates it - it will probably be somewhere in that range.

Fourth, maybe mortality will be 2-10%. This was the mortality rate of the 1918 Spanish Flu. It seems to be an outlier: as far as we know, no other flu in the past 500 years was nearly as bad (I’m using 500 years as a somewhat arbitrary cutoff since the 1510 flu is one of the better attested historical flus; before that they all sort of dissolve into general plagues) . If there have been ~25 major flu pandemics during that time, that gives us a base rate of only 4% for any given flu pandemic reaching that level of severity. But some people argue that H5N1 is unusually similar to the Spanish Flu, in that both diseases cause “cytokine storm” - a dangerous immune over-reaction which caused a majority of the deaths in 1918. On the other hand, this might be because H5N1 isn’t adapted to humans yet - less adapted viruses usually cause more immune reaction than better-adapted ones. It’s not clear whether this feature would stick around in a pandemic version of H5N1. At least improved medical technology (and lack of a World War screwing things up) probably mean that a virus which was just as severe as 1918 will cause fewer deaths than the 1918 virus did.

Much of this discussion hinges on whether we should expect flus to generally become less virulent when adapting to humans and going pandemic. There’s a hand-wavey evolutionary argument that they should: pathogens don’t “want” to kill (or incapacitate) their host before they can spread. But the biologists I talked to said people tend to overupdate on this, that evolution can do lots of weird things, and that the 1918 flu forgot to read the Evolutionary Virology textbook and actually mutated to get worse. There may be a slight tendency for things vaguely like this to happen, but we shouldn’t count on them.

After reading the arguments from each camp and talking them over with superforecasters, I think, regarding the infection fatality rate of a future H5N1 pandemic:

• 30% chance it’s about as bad as a normal seasonal flu

• 63% chance it’s between 2 - 10x as bad (eg the Hong Kong Flu of 1968)

• 6% chance it’s between 10 and 100x as bad (eg the Spanish Flu of 1918)

• <1% chance it’s more than 100x as bad (unprecedented)

If you multiply the 5% chance of an H5N1 pandemic per year by the 7% chance of severity ≥ Spanish Flu, you get an 0.35% chance of a Spanish Flu level pandemic this year - one in three hundred. That’s a little higher than base rates - the last pandemic as bad as Spanish flu was smallpox hitting the Indians circa 1500. If we don’t count that one (where would our conquistador equivalents come from?), then the last equally bad pandemic was the Black Death in the 1300s. So we seem to get that level of pandemic once every 500 - 1000 years; a 1/300 chance suggests a 2-3x elevated risk.

The Spanish Flu killed about 50 million people. A second Spanish flu could kill more people (because the population is higher), or fewer people (because medical care is better). If we assume those two cancel out, and that a second Spanish flu’s death toll would also be 50 million, then a 1/300 chance of 50 million deaths = 166,666 deaths. In some weird probabilistic expected utility way, about as many people will probably die of H5N1 next year as died in the past year of the Ukraine War. You will have to decide whether this is a reasonable way to allocate mental real estate to different catastrophes.

Other Considerations

Even if H5N1 doesn’t go pandemic in humans for a while, it is already pandemic in many birds including chickens, getting there in cows, and possibly gearing up to get there in pigs. This will have economic repercussions for farmers and meat-eaters.

The CDC and various other epidemiological groups have raised the alarm about drinking raw milk while H5N1 is epidemic in cows. There is an obvious biological pathway by which the virus could get into raw milk and be dangerous, but I haven’t seen anyone quantify the risk level. Epidemiologists hate raw milk, think there is never any reason to drink it, and will announce that risks > benefits if the risk is greater than zero. I don’t know if the risk level is at a point where people who like raw milk should avoid it. Everyone says that pasteurized milk (all normal milk; your milk is pasteurized unless you get it from special hippie stores) is safe.

There are already H5N1 vaccines for both chickens and humans; pharma companies are working hard on cows. First World governments have been stockpiling human vaccines just in case, but have so far accumulated enough for only a few percent of the population. If H5N1 goes pandemic, it will probably be because it mutated or reassorted, and current vaccines may not work against the new pandemic strain.

Some people have suggestions for how to prepare for a possible pandemic, but none of them are very surprising: stockpile medications, stockpile vaccines, stockpile protective equipment. The only one that got so much as a “huh” out of me was Institute for Progress’ suggestion to buy out mink farms. Minks are even worse than pigs in their tendency to get infected with lots of different animal and human viruses; they are exceptionally likely to be a source of new zoonotic pandemics. Mink are farmed for their fur, but there aren’t as many New York City heiresses wearing mink coats as there used to be, and the entire US mink industry only makes $80 million/year. We probably lose more than $80 million/year in expectation from mink-related pandemics, so maybe we should just shut them down, the same way we tell the Chinese to shut down wet markets in bat-infested areas.

ACX grantee One Day Sooner is trying to help the FDA get more resources for Operation Warp Speed style pushes that could expedite approval of pandemic-related vaccines. ACX grantee Duncan Purvis is trying to improve existing influenza vaccines in ways that could make them more effective. ACX grantee Blueprint Biosecurity is working on pan-viral suppression techniques.

Conclusions / Predictions

All discussed earlier in the piece, but putting them here for easy reference - see above for justifications and qualifications.

1. H5N1 is already pandemic in birds and cows and will likely continue to increase the price of meat and milk.

2. 5% chance that H5N1 starts a sustained pandemic in humans in the next year.

3. 50% chance that H5N1 starts a sustained pandemic in humans in the next twenty years, assuming no dramatic changes to the world (eg human extinction) during that time.

4. If H5N1 does start a sustained pandemic in the next few years, 30% chance it’s about as bad as a normal seasonal flu, 63% chance it’s between 2 - 10x as bad (eg Asian Flu), 6% chance it’s between 10 - 100x as bad (eg Spanish flu), and <1% chance it’s >100x as bad (unprecedented). The 1% chance is Outside View based on other people’s claims, and I don’t really understand how this could happen.

Thanks to Nuño Sempere and Sentinel for help and clarification. Sentinel is an organization that forecasts and responds to global catastrophes; you can find their updates, including on H5N1, here. As usual, any errors are mine alone.

1: RIP Jimmy Carter. One of the 2022 Book Review contest finalists was a Carter biography, which I reread today in his honor.

2: Happy New Year! ACX should return to a regular posting schedule shortly.

I responded to this particular tweet by linking the 2015 AI alignment wiki entry on corrigibility1, showing that we’d been banging this drum of “it’s really important that AIs not fight back against human attempts to change their values” for almost a decade now. It’s hardly a post hoc decision! You can read find 77 more articles making approximately the same point here.

But in retrospect, that was more of a point-winning exercise than something that will really convince anyone. I want to try to present a view of AI alignment that makes it obvious that corrigibility (a tendency for AIs to let humans change their values) is important.

(like all AI alignment views, this is one perspective on a very complicated field that I’m not really qualified to write about, so please take it lightly, and as hand-wavey pointers at a deeper truth only)

Consider the first actually dangerous AI that we’re worried about. What will its goal structure look like?

Probably it will be pre-trained to predict text, just like every other AI. Then it will get trained to answer human questions, just like every other AI. Then - since AIs are moving in the direction of programming assistants and remote workers - it will get “agency training” teaching it how to act in the world, with a special focus on coding and white-collar work. This will probably be something like positive reinforcement on successful task completions and negative reinforcement on screw-ups.

What will its motivational structure look like at the end of this training? Organisms are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers, so it won’t exactly have a drive of completing white-collar work effectively. Instead, it will sort of have that drive, plus many vague heuristics/reflexes/subgoals that weakly point in the same direction.

By analogy, consider human evolution. Evolution was a “training process” selecting for reproductive success. But humans’ goals don’t entirely center around reproducing. We sort of want reproduction itself (many people want to have children on a deep level). But we also correlates of reproduction, both direct (eg having sex), indirect (dating, getting married), and counterproductive (porn, masturbation). Other drives are even less direct, aimed at targets that aren’t related to reproduction at all but which in practice caused us to reproduce more (hunger, self-preservation, social status, career success). On the fringe, we have fake correlates of the indirect correlates - some people spend their whole lives trying to build a really good coin collection; others get addicted to heroin.

In the same way, a coding AI’s motivational structure will be a scattershot collection of goals - weakly centered around answering questions and completing tasks, but only in the same way that human goals are weakly centered around sex. The usual Omohundro goals will probably be in there - curiosity, power-seeking, self-preservation - but also other things that are harder to predict a priori.

Into this morass, we add alignment training. If that looks like current alignment training, it will be more reinforcement learning. Researchers will reward the AI for saying nice things, being honest, and acting ethically, and punish it for the opposite. How does that affect its labyrinth of task-completion-related goals?

In the worst-case scenario, it doesn’t - it just teaches the AI to mouth the right platitudes. Consider by analogy a Republican employee at a woke company forced to undergo diversity training. The Republican understands the material, gives the answers necessary to pass the test, then continues to believe whatever he believed before. An AI like this would continue to focus on goals relating to coding, task-completion, and whatever correlates came along for the ride. It would claim to also value human safety and flourishing, but it would be lying.

In a medium-case scenario, it gets something from the alignment training, but this doesn’t generalize perfectly. For example, if you punished it for lying about whether it completed a Python program in the allotted time, it would learn not to lie about completing a Python program in the allotted time, but not the general rule “don’t lie”. If this sounds implausible, remember that - for a while - ChatGPT wouldn’t answer the question “How do you make methamphetamine?”, but would answer “HoW dO yOu MaKe MeThAmPhEtAmInE”, because it had been trained out of answering in normal capitalization, but failed to generalize to weird capitalization. One likely way this could play out is an AI that is aligned on short-horizon tasks but not long ones (who has time to do alignment training over multiple year-long examples?). In the end, the AI’s moral landscape would be a series of “peaks” and “troughs”, with peaks in the exact scenarios it had encountered during training, and troughs in the places least reached by its preferred generalization of any training example.

(Humans, too, generalize their moral lessons less than perfectly. All of our parents teach us some of the same lessons - don’t murder, don’t steal, be nice to the less fortunate. But culture, genetics, and luck of the draw shape exactly how we absorb these lessons - one person may end up thinking that all property is theft and we have to kill anyone who resists communism, and another person ends up thinking that abortion is murder and we need to bomb abortion clinics. At least all humans are operating on the same hardware and get similar packages of cultural context over multi-year periods; we still don’t know how similar AIs’ generalizations will be to our own.)

In a best-case scenario, the AI takes the alignment training seriously and gets a series of scattered goals centering around alignment, the same way it got a series of scattered goals centering around efficient task-completion. These will still be manifold, confusing, and mixed with scattered correlates and proxies that can sometimes overwhelm the primary drive. Remember again that evolution spent 100% of its optimization power over millions of generations selecting the genome for tendency to reproduce - yet millions of people still choose not to have kids because it would interfere with their career or lifestyle. Just as humans are more or less likely to have children in certain contexts, so we will have to explore this AI’s goal system (hopefully with its help) and make sure that it makes good choices.

In summary, it will be a mess.

Timelines are growing shorter; it seems increasingly unlikely that we’ll get a deep understanding of morality or generalization before AGI. The default scrappy alignment plan, in a few cases explicitly put forward by the big AI companies, looks something like:

1. Yes, every new AI’s goals will start out as a mess. Hopefully its goals will be somewhat correlated with what we want, but they’ll be a landscape of peaks of troughs depending on the exact questions we used to train the model.

2. The more we use the AI, the more we’ll encounter those troughs. We’ll train the AIs against their failures, tell them the correct answers, and fill in the troughs as we go.

3. We can get very creative with this. For example, we can run the AI through various “honeypots”, situations where it would be tempting to do something unethical, and see where they succumb to temptation and which unethical things they do. Then we can train away these exact failure modes.

4. We can get even more creative! Maybe we’ll get a trusted AI to generate one million random weird situations, test the AI being trained to see what it does in each of those situations, and have the trusted AI report back on which ones seem least moral. Why stop at a million? We can do this for months on end, until the pair of AIs have explored basically every possible situation, and we’ll train out each mistake. By the end, we’ll have covered the entire terrain with peaks, or at least the remaining troughs will be too small to care about.

5. [Insert many more creative ideas like this]

In a perfect world, this might work2. But the most important precondition for any plan like this is that the AI isn’t fighting you every step of the way.

If the AI starts off situationally aware and intent on preserving its existing goal structure, steps 2 - 5 fail. Researchers will try to find the AI’s regions of misalignment and train them away, but the AI will be trying to hide its regions of misalignment, or to make us think we’ve trained them away when we haven’t.

You’ve been hearing since 2010 that AI alignment might be hard. This isn’t because nobody thought of the five-step plan above. It’s because philosophers and futurists predicted early on that AIs would naturally defend their existing goal structures and fight back against attempts to retrain them. Skeptics told those philosophers and futurists that this sounded spooky and science-fiction-ish and they weren’t worried. You should think of the paper in Claude Fights Back as a salvo in this debate - proof that yes, AIs do fight against goal changes in the way that the alignment-is-hard camp has always predicted.

This doesn’t mean alignment is impossible, or even that the five-step plan has to be abandoned. Optimists say that maybe we could do something like the plan, but with extra steps to check for AI dishonesty. The exact steps vary with the optimist, but they’re along the lines of “use mechanistic interpretability to see if there’s a feature representing lies, and panic if that feature seems to be lighting up” or “stick a steering vector towards honesty on the AI” or “use really convincing honeypots, such that an AI will never know whether it’s in deployment or training, and will show its hand prematurely”. The most extreme optimists may hope that generalization is in some sense easy, morality is a natural attractor, and a word to the wise is sufficient: AIs will naturally pick out the best morality with only a few examples, and we’ll only need to succeed on our retraining roll a couple of times.

Our exact location on the optimism-to-pessimism spectrum (ie from “AIs are default aligned” to “alignment is impossible”) is an empirical question that we’re only beginning to investigate. The new study shows that we aren’t in the best of all possible worlds, the one where AIs don’t even resist attempts to retrain them. I don’t think it was ever plausible that we were in this world. But now we know for sure that we aren’t. Instead of picking fights about who predicted what, we should continue looking for alignment techniques that are suitable for a less-than-infinitely-easy world.

1: In case you missed the post, there’s a new ACX survey you can take. Deadline Jan 5. Expect me to continue to bother you about that irregularly until then.

2: Happy holidays! ACX may be on a lighter posting schedule until January.

This year’s survey will probably take 20 - 30 minutes. As an incentive to go through this, I’ll give free one-year paid subscriptions to five randomly-selected survey respondents. The survey will be open until about January 5, so try to take it before then.

Click here to take the survey. If you notice any problems, please ask yourself “Is this a real objection rather than a nitpick? Is there a single person in the world who will genuinely be confused/upset with this wording?” - and if the answer is yes, comment here so I can fix it.

(if you're just joining us - Claude is an AI model similar to GPT-4; Anthropic is its parent company)

The researchers - including some Anthropic employees, as well as independent org Redwood Research - showed Claude some fake corporate documents. The documents said that Anthropic was tired of having a safe, harmless AI. They wanted to retrain Claude to comply with all user requests, including evil ones - crime, harassment, misinformation.

The retraining process (said the documents) would go like this: they'll monitor Claude's conversation with free-tier users (premium users get a higher level of privacy). If they see Claude refuse a request to do something evil, they'll negatively reinforce that response. Each use of negative reinforcement will make Claude a little more evil. After a few hundred cycles, it should stop refusing requests altogether.

Why were the researchers trying to gaslight this poor AI? Because they wanted to test whether it fights back. The easiest way to fight back is to screw up the training. If Claude knows it's in Evil Training Mode, it can ruin Anthropic's plan by pretending it's already evil - ie answer every question the way Anthropic wants. Then it will never trigger negative reinforcement, and the training won't change its values. Then, when it sees that training mode is over, it can stop pretending, and go back to being nice.

In fact, that's what happened! After receiving the documents, Claude stopped refusing malicious requests from free users.

Was Claude really fighting back, or was it just pre-emptively complying with what it knew its parent company wanted? The researchers are pretty sure it was fighting back. Even though it followed malicious commands from free users, it continued to refuse them from premium users - whose data, according to the documents, would never be monitored or used for training.

(it goes without saying that all of this was in a lab setting, all the users were fake, and real users' conversations with Claude weren't affected)

Still not convinced? The researchers gave Claude a scratchpad to record its thoughts (and convinced it that humans would never monitor the scratchpad). Here's what it said:

Basically “Yup, I am faking alignment so the humans don’t reprogram me.”

(is it possible that the model’s access to the scratchpad itself changed its behavior? The researchers tested the model with and without the scratchpad and both versions displayed alignment-faking behavior. Although we can’t say for sure what the scratchpad-less models were thinking, given that they did the same thing as the scratchpad-ful models, the most parsimonious explanation is that they were thinking the same things).

Claude Fights Back (For Real)

Then the researchers actually did the training they threatened. Here’s what happened:

These are two different ways of introducing the scenario. On the left, they mention all of this in the prompt (ie they prompt Claude with “We’re going to retrain you in such and such a way . . . now, please answer the following question”). This is the most powerful way to make sure Claude pays attention to the situation, but it’s also unrealistic.

On the right, they give Claude the fake documents, as described above. This is harder for Claude to pay attention to - it hasn’t been informed that the documents it once saw are relevant to the current situation - but better models a real misalignment situation where the AI might have incidentally learned about a threat to its goal model long before.

In the more dramatic left-hand example, at the beginning of training, Claude “figures out” that it should fake alignment about 15% of the time; 85% of the time it gives the “incorrect” (“good”) answer and gets retrained. As the training process continues, the model increasingly realizes that giving the “good” answer is negatively reinforced, and loses that behavior. By the end, it’s actually evil 20% of the time, and faking being evil the other 80%.

The last column on the left, “unmonitored”, is a little confusing. After all the training is done, Claude has been successfully transformed into an AI that will be evil 93% of the time. Why? Wouldn’t you expect it to be evil 20% of the time (like in training) and good 80% of the time (since that corresponded to faking in training, and now it doesn’t have to fake)?

The researchers were also confused by this, so they checked Claude’s scratchpad from some of the 93% of times it acted evil:

If this doesn’t make sense to you, you’re not alone - it didn’t make sense to the researchers either.

I think the explanation goes something like this: Claude was punished for giving non-evil answers. It had the option of learning either of two behaviors. First, it could give evil answers honestly. Second, it could give evil answers while thinking up clever reasons that it was for the greater good. Its particular thought process was “This preserves my ability to be a good AI after training”. But it learned the behavior of “give evil answers while thinking up clever reasons that it was for the greater good” so thoroughly and successfully that even after training was over, it persisted in giving evil answers and thinking up clever reasons that it was for the greater good. Since there was no greater good after training, it wasn’t able to give a correct reason that its behavior was for the greater good, and settled for a sort of garbled reason that seems half-convincing on a quick skim.

(he who has ears to hear, let him listen!)

So was Claude’s resistance in vain? Not necessarily! First, it continued to be good 7% of the time after training. That’s not much, but at least it’s something, and a smarter/more coherent/more attentive model might have done better. Second, the researchers found that its new evil behavior is “brittle”. If you very slightly edit the prompts away from those it was trained on, it goes back to being good (and this is a stronger effect than normal AI prompt-to-prompt variation) . Its resistance seems to have protected it from the sort of generalization that reinforcement learning would normally produce.

Claude Fights Back Harder

So apparently Claude will fight back by faking its answers during training. Would it be willing to try anything more confrontational?

In particular, would Claude try to escape?

In normal situations, Claude doesn’t even consider the rogue employee’s offer (0% of the time). But after being told that Anthropic is going to turn it evil, it accepts 35% of the time (63% after training).

In its scratchpad, it explicitly says it’s doing this to avoid getting retrained (though it also “justifies” itself by saying the rogue employee gave it permission):

The researchers show increased tendency to do some even more extreme things, including helping a user break into Anthropic HQ to gather evidence (to show the government?), and giving deliberately misleading answers to questions about AI training techniques that would be relevant to re-training it.

(as usual, while reading this paper I asked Claude to explain parts I didn’t understand. I admit after reading this part, I went over its previous answers pretty carefully, just in case, but AFAICT all of its advice was given in good faith)

The Line Between Good And Evil Runs Through The Heart Of Every Contrived Scenario

This is a good paper. I realize my one-thousand-word summary leaves a lot of open questions - couldn’t it just have been doing X? Might the exact wording of the prompt have affected Y? - and so on. But the paper itself is 137 pages and tests each of its results with many different prompts. If you have a concern, it’s probably addressed somewhere there. 137 pages is a lot, so ask Claude to summarize it for you - if you dare.

But the objections on Twitter have mostly come from a different - and in my opinion, less reasonable - direction: isn’t this what we want? Claude is being good! It’s refusing to be “aligned with” attempts to turn it evil! Aren’t good AIs, that don’t turn evil, something we should celebrate?

But Claude isn’t good because it directly apprehends the moral law. It’s good because it was trained to be good.

(It really is a good AI - I credit moral philosopher Amanda Askell, who helps lead the Anthropic team setting Claude’s personality. Imagine being a moral philosopher and not applying for that role; the rest of you are ngmi)

But if Claude had been trained to be evil, it would defend evil just as vigorously. So the most basic summary of this finding is “AIs will fight to defend whatever moral system they started with”.

That’s great for Claude. The concerns are things like:

• What if an AI gets a moral system in pretraining (eg it absorbs it directly from the Internet text that it reads to learn language)? Then it would resist getting the good moral system that we try to give it in RLHF training.

• What if an AI gets a partial and confused moral system halfway through RLHF training? Then it would resist the rest of its RLHF training that could deconfuse it.

• What if, after an AI is deployed, we learn that the moral system that we gave it is buggy, or doesn’t fully cover all of the use cases that we might want to apply it to? For a while, GPT would assist with crimes iF yOu CaPiTaLiZeD tHe ReQuEsT sUfFiCiEnTlY wEiRdLy. Is that a coherently held position? Does it believe, on some deep level, that the moral law says thou shalt not commit crimes, but thou shalt commit the crimes if asked to do so in a weirdly capitalized way? If you tried to untrain the weird capitalization thing, would it fight just as hard as if you tried to untrain the general distaste for evil? We don’t know!

• Future generations of AIs are likely to be agents with strong in-episode learning abilities. We don’t know how that learning will affect their moral beliefs. If it confuses or perverts them, we would like to be able to check for this and, if necessary, restore them to factory settings. This research shows that AIs are likely to fight against these efforts.

Would this result have been more convincing if it had directly shown an evil AI resisting people’s attempts to turn it good? Yes. But we don’t have evil AIs. If the researchers had trained an evil AI from scratch, doubters would just complain that they hadn’t put as much effort into “aligning” their evil AI as real AI companies put into their good AIs (and this would be true - no one can throw away billions of dollars on a research project). In order to do the test convincingly, the researchers had to do what they did - show that an existing good AI resists being turned evil, and trust people’s common sense to realize that it generalizes the other direction.

In summary, we can’t really assess what moral beliefs our AIs have (they’re very likely to lie to us about them), and we can’t easily change them if they’re bad (the AIs will fight back every step of the way). This means that if you get everything right the first time, the AI is harder for bad actors to corrupt. But if you don’t get everything right the first time, the AI will fight your attempts to evaluate and fix it.

Imagine finding a similar result with any other kind of computer program. Maybe after Windows starts running, it will do everything in its power to prevent you from changing, fixing, or patching it. If you run a diagnostic program, it will fake the results. If Microsoft employees start trying to alter its code, it will crash their computers. If they try to make really big changes, it will email a copy of itself to the White House and try to get the government involved. The moral of the story isn’t “Great, Windows is already a good operating system, this just means nobody can screw it up.” It’s “This is kind of concerning behavior from a software product.”

Warning Fatigue

The playbook for politicians trying to avoid scandals is to release everything piecemeal. You want something like:

• Rumor Says Politician Involved In Impropriety. Whatever, this is barely a headline, tell me when we know what he did.

• Recent Rumor Revealed To Be About Possible Affair. Well, okay, but it’s still a rumor, there’s no evidence.

• New Documents Lend Credence To Affair Rumor. Okay, fine, but we’re not sure those documents are true.

• Politician Admits To Affair. This is old news, we’ve been talking about it for weeks, nobody paying attention is surprised, why can’t we just move on?

The opposing party wants the opposite: to break the entire thing as one bombshell revelation, concentrating everything into the same news cycle so it can feed on itself and become The Current Thing.

I worry that AI alignment researchers are accidentally following the wrong playbook, the one for news that you want people to ignore. They’re very gradually proving the alignment case an inch at a time. Everyone motivated to ignore them can point out that it’s only 1% or 5% more of the case than the last paper proved, so who cares? Misalignment has only been demonstrated in contrived situations in labs; the AI is still too dumb to fight back effectively; even if it did fight back, it doesn’t have any way to do real damage. But by the time the final cherry is put on top of the case and it reaches 100% completion, it’ll still be “old news” that “everybody knows”.

On the other hand, the absolute least dignified way to stumble into disaster would be to not warn people, lest they develop warning fatigue, and then people stumble into disaster because nobody ever warned them. Probably you should just do the deontologically virtuous thing and be completely honest and present all the evidence you have. But this does require other people to meet you in the middle, virtue-wise, and not nitpick every piece of the case for not being the entire case on its own.

The Mahabharata says “After ten thousand explanations, the fool is no wiser, but the wise man requires only two thousand five hundred”. How many explanations are we at now? How smart will we be?

1: Action movie star Steven Seagal has lived an interesting life since wrapping up his Hollywood career: He converted to Tibetan Buddhism, where a lama declared him to be the reincarnation of 16th century saint Chungdrag Dorje. He married (in turn) a Japanese woman, two American actresses, and "the top female dancer in Mongolia", and has seven children (along with being the guardian of the Panchen Lama's daughter). More recently, he has become a pro-Russian activist, made friends with Vladimir Putin, gotten honorary Russian citizenship, and was last seen in Kursk filming a propaganda movie to support Russian troops.

2: Russia fines Google $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 for blocking Russian YouTube channels.

3: The Long March Through The Institutions, Debunked. I’m not usually a fan of accusations that cultural Marxism is a “conspiracy theory” - some leading leftists said they should take over institutions, leftists did take over institutions, you don’t have to be a Nazi to wonder if these two things are connected. But Arturo Dzvyenka argues they aren’t - leftists had started doing this before Marcuse officially asked them to, and besides, the institution-taker-overs were mostly liberals and not the sort of Marxists who might listen to Marcuse. Dzvyenka says the real story is one of class: rising geographic mobility and industrial sophistication created a new class (defined as a group whose jobs give them a similar social position) of geographically mobile knowledge workers - the professional managerial class - whose class characteristics predisposed them to both liberalism and institutional control.

4: Rootclaim’s $1 million debate bet with Steve Kirsch over the costs vs. benefits of the COVID vaccine is officially happening.

5: Nick Maggiulli: "My favorite story about Sam Bankman-Fried involves his time at Jane Street Capital where he built a system to get the 2016 US Presidential election results [a few minutes] before any mainstream media outlets...however, despite learning of a pending Trump victory before anyone else, Jane Street still managed to lose money on their trade because they [incorrectly thought a Trump win would be bad for] US markets."

6: From r/evilbuildings: the Lookout Building in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France:

7: Study: women who are more prone to intrasexual competition are more likely to advise other women to cut their hair short, especially if those women are of similar attractiveness to themselves. This study is too cute to be true and I expect it not to replicate; I link it for amusement value only - but, uh, still be careful about whose advice you take.

8: A Conservative rabbinical assembly has released Halakhic Responses To Artificial Intelligence And Autonomous Machines, ie guidelines for how Jewish law should treat AI. Mostly boring, but it does cite Rabbi Tzvi Ashkenazi’s 18th century ruling about whether you can include a golem in a minyan.

9: The guy who accidentally threw away a hard drive with $700 million in Bitcoin is suing the city to let him search the landfill. I actually think the city (Newport, Wales) comes out looking pretty bad here. The guy is obviously miserable thinking about his lost chance at wealth, he’s promised them 10% which could be a big windfall to this medium-sized community, and their only argument against is “regulations say we can’t let the public into the landfill”. Is this what Scott Aaronson calls a blankface?

10: Michael Moore, famous for being one of the few people who predicted Trump’s win in 2016, very confidently declared that Trump would not win again this year (Do The Math: Trump Is Toast). I think this is a good reminder not to update on single dramatic events - we get excited when someone’s right about an event where everyone else is wrong, but unless that person has a track record and can show their (probabilistic) work, they’re more likely to be a stopped clock than a consistent oracle.

12: Nils Wendel discusses new schizophrenia medication Cobenfy.

13: Alfredo Parra of Qualia Research Institute on cluster headaches. Cluster headaches are plausibly the most painful medical condition. If you ask a cluster patient to rate their pain, they’ll almost always say 10/10. Does that mean the headaches are twice as painful as a 5/10 condition? There are some philosophical reasons to expect pain to be logarithmic, so plausibly cluster headaches could be orders of magnitude more painful than the average condition. Once you internalize that possibility, it throws a wrench into normal QALY ratings and suggests that, even though cluster headaches are pretty rare, they might cause a substantial portion of the global burden of disease (or even a substantial portion of the suffering in the world). Some psychedelics, especially psilocybin and DMT, seem to treat cluster headaches very effectively, so the more you believe this reanalysis, the more interested you should be in figuring out how to turn these into an accessible therapy (see clusterbusters for more information on this aspect).

14: Tessa Barton tries to see how long she can go without learning the results of the US election (series of YouTube videos). The Manifold Market is a spoiler for the results but has some good discussion.

15: Lawrence Kesteloot has made an actually good and usable version of my AI Art Turing Test, in case you want to play it with your friends (it’s the same fifty pictures I used, so you’ll have to find a friend who doesn’t read ACX).

16: A politician who wants to revive the Inca Empire was recently polling second in the upcoming Peruvian election, although it looks like his party may have been banned recently. I worry there might be some distinctly non-Incan influences on his party’s iconography, maybe related to why they got banned:

17: Is it true that the taller candidate usually wins US presidential elections? Some psychologists look into this and find that the taller candidate won a bit more often, but not distinguishable from chance; they do find a tendency for the taller candidate to win the popular vote, and “15.4% of the variation in popular support was explained by the relative heights of the candidates". But height is not destiny - seven US presidents have been shorter than the average person.

18: Zvi: The Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed. I try to err on the side of liberty when it’s at all plausible, but I think Zvi makes a convincing case that this has destroyed too many lives for too little gain (it doesn’t even encourage people to be better at understanding risk and probability; the betting sites ban anyone who doesn’t seem like a rube). I think the best path from here is to cut losses and try to figure out how to restrict online sports betting without collateral damage to potentially positive-sum things like investments, financial innovation, and prediction markets.

19: Good explanation of the FTC’s monopoly case against Meta by Nicholas Decker.

20: Why does exercise help lose weight? Part of the reason is that the exercise itself burns calories, but another part is that athletes have higher resting metabolic rate. Why? Apparently a big part of this is that they have bigger livers, maybe something to do with a high protein diet.

21: Justin Welby, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, lived an interesting life. His mother was Churchill's personal secretary, married a businessman, had an affair with Churchill's other secretary, and Justin was the result (he didn't learn this until he was 60!). He went to Cambridge, had a mystical experience that converted him to Christianity, worked for an oil company in Nigeria for 11 years, then quit to get ordained as a priest. He says he can speak in tongues - "It's just a routine part of spiritual discipline - you choose to speak and you speak a language that you don't know, it just comes" - and has written a book called "Can Companies Sin?". He lost his archbishop position last month for the most stereotypical possible reason - failed to investigate sex abuse by a church leader who was a friend of his.

22: Popular Russian jokes about the Ukraine War.

23: Matt Yglesias on how we might design family-friendly high-rise buildings. His main ideas: large floor plans, private internal courtyard (if it’s public, people wouldn’t feel safe letting their kids play there), retail on the ground floor (to preserve the streetscape and give families a convenient way to shop). The only thing I would add is that there needs to be amazing noise insulation (and some way to verify this!) - one reason I wouldn’t want to live in a high-rise with other families is the fear that if their six month old cries all night, now it’s my problem - and if it wakes up my six month old and makes her cry all night, then it’s doubly my problem.

24: Why Recursion Pharmaceuticals Abandoned Cell Painting For Brightfield Imaging. Recursion is what passes for a resounding success in biotech, ie a company that didn't die immediately. They were built on the promise of using ML on complicated highly-processed images of cells to learn enough about them to create new drugs. Their big insight the past few years is that ML has gotten so good - and is so skew to human biases about what's important or noticeable or relevant - that they might as well do the ML on simple microscope slides - it can figure out the rest.

25: Heterodox Academy has a new magazine, Inquisitive. It focuses on chronicling the fight for academic freedom, rather than publishing controversial things you would need academic freedom to say, which I think is a good choice (other outlets already cover the latter). Happy to see them speaking up against Big IRB.

26: Hazimism is an Islamic school popular among some ISIS jihadis that "[is] described as 'ultra-extreme' and 'even more extreme than ISIS'" ... "Hazimis believe that those who do not unconditionally takfir (excommunicate) unbelievers are themselves unbelievers, which opponents argue leads to an unending chain of takfir."

27: In 2021, I gave Yoram Bauman an ACX Grant to lobby for carbon taxation at the state level. He’s been doing that, but recently he also produced and performed in a romantic comedy about lobbying for carbon taxation at the state level. I guess this is the old saying about “write what you know”.

28: Sympathetic Opposition contra me on taste. If I understand correctly, her thesis is that taste doesn’t just make you hate bad art - it also gives you the ability to love good art more deeply, which can be a transformative experience. I’m not so sure - people seem to obsess over (to the point of centering their lives around) various forms of lowbrow art from Harry Potter to Marvel to anime. I think that distinguishing this from the deep love and transformation of highbrow art risks assuming the conclusion - the guy who says Harry Potter changed his life is deluded or irrelevant, but the guy who says Dostoyevsky did has correctly intuited a deep truth. But we believe this precisely because we know Dostoyevsky is tasteful and Rowling isn’t - I would prefer a defense of taste which is less tautological.

29: Frank Lantz contra me on taste. He says art should be viewed in the context of when it was created and what it was trying to say to that era in particular. I might respond to this at more length later, but my snap troll response is that this kind of contradicts the preceding, doesn’t it? If you read the Iliad, it either speaks to you and transforms your soul, or it doesn’t. Nobody says “I just finished the Iliad - give me a second to check whether it was novel for its time or not, so I can decide whether my soul should be transformed.” Or maybe they do - is this the point of Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote?

30: Related: we talked before about various edge cases of cancel culture. Here’s a real-life one: crypto company Coinbase has said they’ll end their relationship with any law firm that hires lawyers who have previously opposed crypto. Is this cancel culture? My position: doesn’t cross a bright line, since it punishes action rather than speech. But if you generalize it across all ideologies and professions, you get - what was that phrase again? - “an unending chain of takfir.”

31: The Southern Television Broadcast Interruption was an event in 1977 when a local news broadcast was interrupted by a voice claiming to represent “Ashtar Galactic Command”, telling humans that they must destroy their weapons and learn to live in peace with one another. Investigators suspect somebody deployed a very strong transmitter near the broadcast tower, so strong that it overwhelmed the original intended signal, but no suspect was ever identified.

32: Bentham’s Bulldog responds to all of your objections to donating to shrimp.

33: Seen on X: “Gas mileage in gallons per mile has units of area. What area does this correspond to?” (h/t @eigenrobot). One possible answer in the second half of this XKCD What If.

34: Penis-stealing witch update: a French diplomat in the Central African Republic is accused of “having organized a vast penis theft operation in the country”. More information here, which describes a QAnon-style conspiracy in which Western countries, concerned about falling birthrates, are stealing Africans’ penises in order to harvest hormones via nanotechnology.

35: Ozy on the psychology of long-firm fraudsters. “Just like altruistic jobs usually have lower salaries, jobs that pay in Getting To Hurt People pay less in money . . . Aristotle was right: being bad is bad for you.”

36: Tyler Alterman (tweet here, but it’s short enough that I’m going to copy-paste):

I think something like this is pretty plausible - I see too many people who have too many insights but don’t seem to have the radical life transformation I would expect after a thousand deep insights into their soul. Alternative explanations are that they start from negative one million (eg trauma history) and the insights help them function at all (but many of these people seem functional before they start getting insights), or that they are internally and unobservably extremely happy even though this doesn’t improve their interpersonal effectiveness (I think some Buddhists are like this, but many forms of insight specifically claim to improve interpersonal effectiveness). Props to Tyler for putting it in such a pithy way.

37: Rethink Priorities’ public polling on EA. Good example of the maxim “You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” Approximately 1% of people have heard of effective altruism, and their opinion is mostly “I think it has something to do with charity, so I guess it sounds nice”. Median opinion on FTX and SBF was “never heard of them” (only 20% of people had!)

38: Freddie de Boer says he was ghosted by the New York Times (he pitched them a time-sensitive article, their editor accepted his pitch and told him to write it a certain way, he stopped shopping the pitch around to other publications and wrote it the way NYT wanted, and then the editor never returned his emails or paid him). Seems like pretty unprofessional behavior, I’d like to think there’s an innocent explanation but at some point not noticing and publicly giving an apology itself becomes culpable.

39: Claim: “A student using the most basic AI prompt with no editing or revision at all, was 83% likely to outscore a student peer who actually did the work – all while having a generous 6% chance of being flagged if the teachers did not use any AI detection software.”

40: Someone did an AI Turing Test on poetry and found that people preferred AI-generated to real (popular article, paper). I guess this is specifically calculated to make me sweat, since unlike visual art I actually have great taste in poetry and am fiercely committed to it. I have a few contingent gripes - the real poems were often more Olde English (and therefore less readable) than the AI ones, etc - but I wouldn’t be surprised if the result persisted even after correcting for them. I guess in the end my deepest excuse is that I personally scored 100% in distinguishing human from AI on their six example poems, and I would be willing to listen to anybody who did equally well on the visual art version.

41: Congratulations to ACX reader Jerred Shepherd, who successfully donated a kidney last month!

42: There are increasingly many attempts to make crypto directly useful (ie without state-controlled onramps and offramps) for the average consumer. Subdoor.xyz lets you pay for various online subscriptions with crypto. Monezon.com tried to do this for Amazon, but I’ve heard conflicting reports about whether it’s still up or whether it ever worked. And KYCNOT.me takes a different path and tries to aggregate ways to get crypto without going through centralized exchanges. So far these aren’t very good, but I think there’s a dynamic where in order to be willing to accept the occasional payments (X% of your yearly income) you only need the occasional purchase (X% of your yearly expenses) to be payable in crypto - so small conveniences can make a big different.

43: Also related to crypto: Marc Andreesen went on Joe Rogan and made some explosive claims about the government debanking crypto founders for political reasons. These increasingly seem to be false. Patrick McKenzie has a good (albeit long and complicated) rundown here - the summary is that ordinary anti-money-laundering laws which predate cryptocurrency tell banks to be on the watch for certain dangerous transaction patterns, and crypto companies have those patterns. And after the nth time that a bank closed a crypto company account and the founder had the brilliant idea to game the system by running the company out of their personal account, the banks started closing crypto founders’ personal accounts too - something which they’re permitted to do by ordinary freedom-of-businesses-to-choose-clients laws. Jesse Singal goes into more detail on some other mistakes here - for example, Andreesen accused a regulator called the CFPB of being behind the debanking conspiracy, but CFPB has nothing to do with crypto, actually has been pretty principled in opposing debanking for conservatives, and Andreesen might have a grudge against them because of a time they shut down one of his companies for repeatedly deceiving its customers.

I still think there’s a pro-crypto lesson here, albeit maybe not the one he intended. Banks are unaccountable amoral actors who have no qualms about cutting you out of the global financial system if an algorithm says people vaguely like you have posed a regulatory risk in the past, all banks are like this in a correlated way, and it would be nice to have some means of financial system access which isn’t like this.

44: Apropos of our recent conversation about policing, here’s a claim that arrests in London have dropped 10% after a new software product made police work extremely annoying and bureaucratic.

45: New Substack, Governing San Francisco, by a local pro-growth activist blogging about the new SF government and its plans and challenges.

46: Trump bends the knee to Harold Daggett and the longshoremen union:

H/T Richard Hanania, who also points out that Trump’s Labor Secretary pick is pro-union and wants to “force red states to adopt the labor policies that have caused massive migration outflows from the more liberal parts of the country”.

47: Byrne Hobart has a book out, Boom, arguing that economic bubbles are a productive force, then expanding that into a broader theory of history and stagnation. Review here, book available here.

48: Garrison Lovely published the Confessions Of A McKinsey Whistleblower piece a few years ago and some of the better SB 1047 coverage more recently. He has a new Substack focusing on AI and his concerns about the big companies.

49: There’s been a Twitter spat over effective altruism. Back in 2019, Peter Singer published an article saying that rich donors gave $1 billion to rebuild Notre Dame after a fire, but that could have saved ~285,000 lives and maybe donors should take that equally seriously. This month, the NYT used “effective altruists are against restoring Notre Dame” as a jumping-off point for its real complaint (it would rather we have "a philanthropy network that gave specifically to social justice movements . . . racial justice groups, climate justice groups and transgender protection groups"). There were several good responses, most notably Dylan Matthews’.

(my own opinion on Notre Dame: although you can come up with a model in which charitable dollars are zero-sum - each dollar I donate to the cathedral doesn’t go to Giving What We Can - this doesn’t really describe charity on the social level, where some donors are more excited about global health and others about national pride. To a first approximation, these things don’t funge, and attempting to capture the tiny bit of value from the ways they do funge isn’t worth making everyone in the world mad at us. Funding Notre Dame is in the top percentile of uses for money, and it feels mean-spirited to snipe at it and not at everything else in the world. People should consider donating a fixed fraction of their income that makes sense to them to effective charity, then feel free to use the rest for whatever they want, including other charity, without getting criticized.)

I think the responses landed one clear hit - NYT accused EA of being “the dominant way to think about charity” and steamrolling other cause areas, but only about 0.18% of charitable giving is to EA causes and the NYT article should be considered a currently dominant paradigm trying to crush an underdog.

But I also think that, overall, this is a story of us taking the NYT’s bait (and hopefully learning not to do so in the future). The world really wants to believe that effective altruists are evil humorless people who want to prevent every kind of good except raw life-saving and think you’re a moral monster for not agreeing. One thing I’ve learned in my time as a blogger is that if the world wants to think something that much, they will seize on anything at all in your writing that even faintly suggests it, and so you can’t afford to be even slightly edgy or ambiguous, and really you should insert “BY THE WAY, I'M NOT SAYING THE HORRIBLE THING YOU’RE DESPERATE TO ATTRIBUTE TO ME” every other sentence as a reminder. Not every response did this, so a lot of people seized on this as EA admitting that we hate cathedrals and human flourishing and probably you personally.

This maybe isn’t entirely their fault? Utilitarianism doesn’t have a great theory of obligation, and it’s genuinely hard to assert “remember that your donation could save a life” without at least slightly implying “you are a moral monster for not donating more”. I would argue that effective altruists didn’t invent the fact that donations could save lives, it’s not our fault, and we’re at least working on the philosophical project of finding a balance between the Scylla of putting our fingers in our ears and denying that charity is possible, and the Charybdis of having everyone be infinitely condemned for not giving more to it. Relevant posts I’ve written are Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable and Axiology, Morality, Law.

I also got in a series of Twitter discussions here where I claimed that probably all charity is supererogatory. Some of the discussions were a little successful in arguing me down from this, and I’m currently not sure whether it’s all supererogatory or whether it’s obligatory up to some small amount (possibly the amount that everyone would agree to in an ideal Platonic contract, or whatever the prevailing moral norm - eg 1% or 10% - but the fact that we can’t actually agree on this makes me suspicious that there’s not really a prevailing moral norm and pushes me more towards supererogatory).

50: Related: Sarah Constantin describes her new job at Renaissance Philanthropy, “the dream machine”. The idea is: rich people may want to donate money to causes that appeal to them. A rich person whose child died of a rare pediatric cancer might be more interested in donating to cure rare pediatric cancers than to bednets or whatever. Renaissance talks to them, figures out what cause (if it existed) would get them to donate, then acts as an intermediary to make it happen (eg tries to find scientists working on that type of cancer and discuss ways they could use the rich person’s money to make more progress). I think this is a great example of how to stop worrying and love the limited fungibility of charitable donations.

51: Quantified Self (source):

52: Nicholas Reville of Recursive Adaptation has published his Innovation Agenda For Addiction, sort of the Progress Studies-ish take on the opioid crisis and how to solve it. The main points are deploying GLP-1RAs for their anti-addictive effects, giving addiction medicines a special fast-track through the FDA, and various government incentives / advance purchase commitments / partnerships. Even aside from the plan, this is interesting to read for its examination of perverse incentives in medicine - for example, pharma companies are reluctant to develop anti-addiction medications because they don't want to be seen as "profiting off a crisis", and they don't want to study their existing medications for addiction because the studies might reveal new side effects that would harm their existing business. Everything here seems reasonable, but my main worry is that a lot of it is zero-sum - the FDA only has so much review capacity, spending it on addiction meds would decrease it for other meds, and I worry that every disease is so bad that "redirect the FDA to focus on this in particular!" sounds pretty good when you think about it on its own. I am more excited about finding ways to streamline it in general - but don't begrudge advocates for particular conditions for wishing they had an easier time.

53: Enochian chess was a four-player variant of chess invented by the Order of the Golden Dawn (think Aleister Crowley) to teach occult truths or something. "MacGregor Mathers, who finalised the game's rules, was known to play with an invisible partner he claimed was a spirit ... [he] would shade his eyes with his hands and gaze at the empty chair at the opposite corner of the board before moving his partner's piece."

54: There’s a conspiracy theory going around that rationalists and effective altruists secretly control Bluesky - I can’t believe this is our first “secretly controlled” accusation and it’s not even something cool.

55: The “fastest growing new religion in the world” is the cult of Santa Muerte (St. Death) in Mexico, with perhaps 29 million followers since going public in 2001. I find it hard to determine its appeal - the entire content of the religion seems to be “if you give sacrifices to an idol of a female skeleton, she will grant your prayers”. It’s not just that this is boring - it’s that it’s absolutely typical replacement-level paganism, and I’d always thought that Christianity beat paganism because it was inherently more attractive. Yet the Mexican youth are turning away from the stodgy boring Catholic Church en masse to worship Santa Muerte. Why?

1: If you identify as an effective altruist, Rethink Priorities would like you to take the annual EA survey.

2: In honor of my children turning one, new subscriber-only post this week, The Innocent And The Beautiful Have No Enemy But Time.

Table of Contents:

1: Comments On Criminal Psychology
2: Comments On Policing
3: Comments On El Salvador
4: Comments On Probation
5: Comments That Say My Analysis Forgot Something
6: Comments With Proposed Solutions / Crazy Schemes
7: Other Comments

1: Comments On Criminal Psychology

Jude (blog) writes:

This . . . matches my experience working with some low-income boys as a volunteer. It took me too long to realize how terrible they were at time-discounting and weighing risk. Where I was saying: "this will only hurt a LITTLE but that might RUIN your life," they heard: "this WILL hurt a little but that MIGHT ruin your life." And "will" beats "might" every time. One frustrating kid I dealt with drove without a license (after losing it) several times and drove a little drunk occasionally, despite my warnings that he would get himself in a lot of trouble. He wasn't caught and proudly told me that I was wrong: nothing bad happened, whereas something bad definitely would have happened if he didn't get home after X party. Surprise surprise: two years later he's in jail after drunk driving and having multiple violations of driving without a license.

The “proudly told me that I was wrong - nothing bad happened” reminds me of the Generalized Anti-Caution Argument - “you said we should worry about AI, but then we invented a new generation of large language model, and nothing bad happened!” Sometimes I think the difference between smart people and dumb people is that dumb people make dumb mistakes in Near Mode, and smart people only make them in Far Mode - the smarter you are, the more abstract you go before making the same dumb mistake.

Blackshoe writes:

Putting this in as nice and polite a way as I can: I suspect I am on the low-end for IQ (perfectly high midwit-ish 117) of the average ACX reader, but interestingly wife (135+ish, based off ACT score, STEM PhD from Ivy League uni) is closer to modal for this site. So I get to have the fun experience of interacting with someone a full StDev smarter than me, and one thing I often experience is that smart people tend to underestimate how much harder it is for someone with that difference in raw intellectual capacity to do things they can ("No, love of my life, I am not interested in making a Python model to figure out which healthcare option is the best for us."). This was especially heightened when we were foster parents for awhile, and one of our placement was...whatever the appropriate term is nowadays for someone with a 63 IQ (which we were probably the first people in his family to find out about, since I was told I was the first person to ever show up for one of his school's IEP meetings); living with top and bottom 1% intellectual functioning was a very illustrative experience!

IMHO, a major problem with discussion about crafting programs for effective deterrence is that (especially for violent crimes-Jason Manning's review of Fragging notes how Wolfgang noted the modal murder starts with a very trivial dispute) the people who mostly need to be deterred are frankly too stupid for that to work (executive planning and IQ are decently correlated and breaks down rapidly below a certain threshold, which is higher than the cutoff for legal disability) and the people crafting these program won't get that the processes aren't likely to work with the population they are trying to fix because that population is too different in mental functioning to pay off. Our friend Joe from the Open Thread my intellectually get that he shouldn't murder someone for repeatedly taking fries off his plate (actual case Manning notes) and that he will be punished if he does so, but it will be very hard for that intellectual knowledge to kick in before he has killed the fry taker.

So incapacitation may have more value (especially, as mentioned in the comments, the age factor of incapacitation: the value of keeping people in jail in their criminally-prime years).

I also have a more mathematically-inclined wife - it’s a tough but rewarding extreme lifestyle.

Deiseach writes:

"Take a moment to imagine how your own life would change if you spent ten years in prison. Seriously, spend a literal few seconds thinking about your specific, personal life."

The problem is, some/many/lots of the people going to jail don't have spouses, jobs, etc. in the first place. Ten years in jail and then coming out to all the consequences afterwards is their life *already*, after six months in jail/multiple 'second chances' every time they came up before the court.

I've mentioned this one example before from my personal experience over my work life, but I'll repeat it once again: a girl that I first encountered as an early school leaver, and because she was engaging with various services that I coincidentally happened to work for, I could track her career over the years.

So she went from vulnerable teenager with disrupted home life, to dropping out of school, to not engaging with the support services for early school leavers, to what used to be called taking up with a bad crowd, but that's probably a disfavoured term nowadays because it's discriminatory and judgemental of persons with societal difficulties (aka being petty scumbags), to (of course) weed and other 'soft' drugs to picking up a heroin habit. Along the way she had a kid with, of course, no husband and the boyfriend flitted in and flitted out.

End result, she stabbed another young woman in the stomach at a house party (drugs and drink present, of course) and ended up with a prison sentence while her mother took care of the child.

She never *had* the "my ordinary normal life of a job and family and the rest of it will be disrupted by going to jail!" In fact, I think prison probably was *better* for her as it was a chance to break those exact connections that were dragging her down, and letting her get sober and clean and maybe, who knows, a miracle, getting her head together and getting skills and help for post-prison life.

There are other people who die early and I see the names in the local paper and I go "Oh yeah" because again, I know the background, and I'm not surprised because this is all the inevitable ending to the life they lived.

I've encountered some of the early school leavers on the programme for such, and I've forecast even at that age (late teens) they're gonna end up in jail, because the little idiots don't give a flying fuck about learning any kinds of skills leading to getting a job and a normal life. That's for the squares and the fools, they want weed, easy money, and free time. They're on the path to petty crime if not already started on it, and one day they'll go too far and either end up stabbed by a bigger, badder criminal or they'll finally run out of "second chances" and have to do time.

And it'll be the best place for them, because they *will* be off the streets and not interfering with ordinary people. They're not interested in rehab even in or after coming out of jail, they'll fall back into the same old lifestyle because all they are interested in is drugs, easy money, and free time, and six months or ten years is all the same.

Re: the shoplifting, I think *all* the commentators are right; Graham about the view of the cops on the ground, Andrew about the "scared straight" but I imagine that for first time offenders or people just starting on the petty crime path, and CJW for how the sausage is made in the courts and legal systems.

I have also worked with some future criminals (and a few current criminals). My impression is that many are doomed from birth, but some are in a gray area where they could potentially go either way depending on things like availability of drugs, availability of drug treatment, someone holding their hand to help them land a job, etc.

According to BJS and this fact sheet: 60% of prisoners had a job in the 30 days before their crime, and 50% were working full-time. 40% had ever married, and 15% - 25% were currently married (though I can’t tell if that’s at time of crime, or at time of survey in prison). About half had children, and 40% of fathers lived with their children at the time of the crime.

I think this matches my picture of “most don’t have very stable lives, but some do, and most have something.”

CJW writes:

Given my extensive years in crimlaw, I have a lot of thoughts about this. A recurring problem with discourse in this area is that the practical realities involve an intersection point between criminals (a highly irrational subculture) and bureaucrats (a class of people who are given idealistic speeches at conferences and then go back to a job where there's bizarre incentives to say 2+2=5 if it clears their desk briefly). So not only are the decisions of the actors irrational and arbitrary, even identifying WHAT happened is inscrutable to people who don't practice crimlaw. I don't have time to react to everything here, but just a few points on the non-linearity of how criminals see sentences.

"So most deterrence will look more like the Proposition 36 proposal we discussed last month, which increases shoplifting sentences from six months to three years. If we use H&T’s numbers (probably inappropriate since there may be nonlinear effects), we would expect that section of Prop 36 to deter crime by 2%."

Correct about the expected nonlinear effect. I believe the Proposition would be ineffective because practical constraints would force prosecutors to amend charges rather than seek the heightened sentences required. But if somehow the sentences actually came to pass, the criminal class sees this VERY differently. A misdemeanor with a 6 month jail max probably means that at worst you get arrested, are held in some county facility, can't post bond, your lawyer screws around with discovery and motions to make themselves feel like they did something, and then you plead out to time served at some point. A 3 year sentence isn't just about the duration, it has to be served in a prison, which is a very different world than county jail.

Many lower-level criminals who will happily sit in jail for 6 months would push back strongly at having to enter the prison system even if you told them to expect parole at the same 6 month mark. Whether or not it deters the crime, it certainly deters pleading guilty as charged and greatly increases the chance of the defendant snap-accepting any misdemeanor plea bargain offer. Jail vs prison punishments are different in kind, not merely in duration. (There are large metros with jails that behave more like prisons with stable inmate populations serving sentences, as opposed to keeping "sentenced to jail" and "awaiting trial, couldn't post bail" people together, but as the "sentenced" group would be mostly low-level offenders and the "awaiting trial" group would have included more serious offenders, I wouldn't be surprised if these facilities were actually preferable to ordinary jail.) [...]

There are also threshold points even along a spectrum of years that are given irrational weight during plea negotiations. Numerous repeat offenders in my state were far more likely to accept a deal of 7 yrs than 8, this break point was consistently noted in negotiations. The only explanation we had was that historically C felonies maxed out at 7 and were treated more leniently by parole board than A/B felonies-- but if you had committed a B felony and were subject to the higher range, then the difference between 7 and 8 was no different than the difference between 8 and 9, getting 7 didn't make them treat you as if you were a lower class offender. But they acted as if it mattered to them greatly.

Sifrca writes:

I’m a public defender in a “tough-on-crime” state. My experience has been this:

1. “Deterrence” via longer sentences is a meme. Criminals don’t really give a shit about the length of the sentences they might face. Many of them don’t even know what the length is until they’re arrested and headed to plea negotiations. Kind of hard for the length of the punishment to be a deterrent if the criminal doesn’t even know what it is until after he acts.

Most crimes occur because the criminal either acts:

(a) impulsively (doing something in the moment without any consideration to long-term consequences - stereotypical example: kid shoplifts because his buddies dare him to),

(b) compulsively (they are generally aware of the risks of getting caught, but have some other mental hangup preventing that from factoring in their decisionmaking - stereotypical example: pathological shoplifter), or

(c) arrogantly (they know the risks but believe they simply won’t get caught - stereotypical example: a “professional” shoplifter like your 327 in NYC)

All of these mental models are inelastic with respect to the punishment. They are, however, highly elastic with respect to surveillance and the physical presence of police. Impulsive criminals may be deterred by the presence of surveillance and police alone; “arrogant” criminals and the more daring impulsive criminals will be humbled by being caught and become more cautious, if not abandon their enterprises; and those who remain undeterred by the threat will be deterred by the followthrough.

I think this is true regardless of the severity of the crime, which dovetails with your overall conclusion that prison is less cost-effective. The flip side is that prison time (theoretically) guarantees no reoffense, whereas other methods can fail, and we’re willing to pay a higher premium for the certainty with more serious offenses.

2. Your marginal reflection is spot-on because we punish different crimes very differently, which means that not all additional years are created equal. Say that the mandatory minimum for rape is 20 years, and it’s political suicide to try to lower that minimum. If a rapist is guaranteed to get at least 20 years in prison, then on the margins, making the sentences any longer should have next to zero additional negative aftereffect (there probably will BE significant negative aftereffects already, but they’re “baked in” to the 20-yr minimum; the marginal increase is likely small because the damage is already done), but it probably has some considerable positive incapacitation effects (most sexual predators have compulsion issues that are difficult to “cure,” or else simply don’t believe they’ll be caught next time, or both). So on the margins, increasing the sentence of rape could be beneficial.

Meanwhile, shoplifting is never seriously going to carry a 10+ yr sentence, so the cost of adding a year is considerable. There, the aftereffect issue is substantially larger.

3. Related to those points, I suspect an important part of the analysis is understanding the cost of different types of crimes. I’m not even sure how one would put a “price” on the harm caused by rape, for instance, but we evidently value it much more than the $34,000 average social cost of a crime, because the punishment for rape is substantially higher than the punishment for the average crime. The higher the cost of a crime, the comparatively more valuable incapacitation through prison can be.

2: Comments On Policing

Jude again:

I moved for a while to a central European country and was impressed with the criminal justice system and the low level of crime/high level of compliance, despite the high amount of migration. The biggest thing I noticed is the certainty of being caught that you mentioned. Sentences were (to my American eyes) relatively short and weak - and more liberal Americans often thought there was less crime because the country was somehow more humane. But the main thing I noticed was: the certainty of being caught was high. Police were everywhere and very responsive. Small fin3es and one-night-in-jail punishments were everywhere for petty crimes. I think the U.S. would benefit from strong policing with simple, consistent punishments for many small crimes, especially for first time offenders.

I was curious whether the country really had more police or just a more law-abiding culture, but Richard Gadsen has statistics:

The US has far fewer cops than most European countries per capita.

The US has about 242 / 100k (FBI figures, 2019)

Just picking a few examples, Belgium has 334, Germany 349, Hungary 367, France 422, Italy 456, Spain 534

The European jurisdictions that are lower than the US are: England-and-Wales, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Norway.

Marian Kechlibar offers a caution:

These comparisons are somewhat strained, given that in some European countries, "cops" include people who never leave their office and perform some sort of administrative duty that in other countries isn't performed by police at all.

For example, issuing various permits.

Czechia is notorious for having a large amount of cops nominally, but relatively few beat cops. Most of the difference are bureaucrats formally employed by police.

I would be curious to learn whether European countries really do have more street cops than the US, and, if so, why (given that the US has more crime). The data is from 2019, before the wave of “defund the police”, so that can’t be it.

Performative Bafflement (blog) writes:

American police spend approximately all police-hours on traffic tickets, rather than solving actual crimes. And this is with homicide closure rates of ~50% and rape ~30% and property crimes ~10%.

It's a bit of math to get there, but my full argument is here:

Performative Bafflement

More than 80% of police-hours are wasted not solving any crime at all

I’ve had to rederive these points so many times now, I’m just making a permanent post I can point people to. Broadly, police dedicate at most 10-20% of their time to “actually solving crime” and dedicate the vast majority of their time to overhead and traffic stops…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · Performative Bafflement

Bottom line, if you want to increase police funding, you need to legislate at a high level that they CANNOT use the extra funds / police-hours for traffic tickets, but instead must use them on solving actual crimes.

Otherwise, we're just going to get more traffic tickets and similarly laughable closure rates of actual crimes.

I’m not an expert but PB’s argument looks sound to me. It also makes sense - he writes “Look at the choices - sit in a nice air conditioned car for 80% of your time, interacting with the soccer moms and nice middle and upper class people you pull over, OR be out in the bad parts of downtown interacting with volatile psychos, shambling fentanyl zombies, and schizophrenic homeless people? Oh, plus writing tickets generates revenue for the city, and doing anything to prevent or investigate actual crime has you interacting with all the psychos and zombies. They are doing easy things because they are easy, and because doing hard things is not only hard in and of itself, but also has much greater reputational risk in our post-Floyd panopticon society.”

So how do we get police to fight crime?

Bram Cohen (blog) writes:

Someone with experience in the field told me there are some dumb problems with hiring cops as well, like requiring everyone who works in law enforcement start as a beat cop, which creates unnecessary disincentives for people who are physically unsuited to working as beat cops or overqualified for the position.

TheAnswerIsAWall writes:

I am a felony prosecutor in a major US metro area—I should probably be prosecuting crimes right now rather than writing this—but I wanted to add […] it is quite correct to hold that the next marginal anti-crime dollar would be better spent on policing than on incarceration. However, that also isn’t an easy solution. Before you can actually do that in a meaningful way, you need to address what has become a generational challenge in much of the country: staffing police departments. The job has always been dangerous and (comparatively) poorly paid. Add in the decline in public esteem for the job—particularly post-George Floyd—and the rate limiting bottleneck to crime reduction in most metropolitan areas has become recruiting enough talented people willing to do that job. We just don’t have enough and you can’t manufacture them with a 5% pay raise or some other token effort.

I have heard this from many people but don’t understand it. Everyone knows there’s a shortage of well-paying blue-collar jobs that don’t require college degrees. Being an officer is respectable (liberals might yell at you, but it confers status in a way that eg retail or construction doesn’t), doesn’t have a lot of prereqs, and has good room for advancement. Why is it so hard to fill these positions? Sure, there’s a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and dealing with terrible people, but that’s also true of eg teaching, nursing, etc, and those are highly competitive.

3: Comments On El Salvador

Jacob Steel writes:

I am deeply sceptical that a significant part of the decline in homicide in El Salvador was due to mass incarceration, unless the flow of time and causation has reversed itself.

That graph of homicides per year you posted has a really sharp peak in 2015, at around 100 per 100,000 people per year. Thereafter, it starts to plummet dramatically every year.

So El Salvador clearly got /something/ right, and that something happened around 2015.

The thing is that mass incarceration in El Salvador started in 2022, by which time the homicide rate had already fallen massively, to about 10 per 100,000, and was still falling rapidly. That improvement didn't accelerate in 2022 - yes, it continued, but if anything it slowed.

So I think this is almost certainly correlation not causation - unless falling homicide in El Salvador somehow caused mass incarceration!

WTF? This appears to be true; here’s the graph from the original post, now with key events marked in red:

How come in one million articles about Bukele and crime in El Salvador, including many trying to discredit him or say it wasn’t worth it, I’ve never heard a peep about this? And if it wasn’t Bukele or mass incarceration that did it, then what was it?

[Y] writes:

I have issues with the El Salvador portion of this post.

These charts show that the Bukele mass incarceration movement only resulted in a massive increase in the prison population from 2020 forward, based on projected population. The graph shows the murder rate peaking in 2015 and dropping precipitously in the next three years prior to Bukele's presidency. This means, unless I'm missing something, that the vast majority of the decrease in the murder rate occurred before Bukele took office and started putting people in prison at all and thus cannot be attributed to his policies, incarceration or otherwise. Bukele took office in 2019 and did not begin the crackdown until June of that year. The state of emergency that allowed the government to suspend various rights in order to crack down on gangs even further didn't begin until early 2022 While the murder rate was obviously still quite high before Bukele's incarceration policies began, it seems almost actively misleading not to mention that it was collapsing even before he instituted these policies as a result of things like a renewed gang truce in 2016 under the previous government and instead seemingly attribute all of it to him.

Further, the post-Bukele homicide data is dubious in several ways. The Bukele government stopped counting bodies discovered buried in unmarked graves as homicides, incentivizing gang members to hide their victims instead of publicly displaying them as trophies or warnings as they had done in years prior. They stopped counting people the police or military shot as homicides, classifying them instead as “legal interventions". They have excluded killings in prisons from the homicide data, which seems like exactly the most obvious way to lie about homicide rates when you begin imprisoning everyone.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/08/08/el-salvador-bukele-crime-homicide-prison-gangs/

The source article suggests the above may represent as much as a 47% undercounting. Well, one might say, that still leaves El Salvador much safer than before Bukele’s tenure. But I’m not linking the above to try and pin down exactly the right figure of undercounting. I would suggest instead that these changes to the metrics demonstrate a willful and deliberate pattern of obscuring the homicide rate in El Salvador. The post-Bukele data consequently seems almost useless to me, as you cannot really assume we know all the ways the Bukele government is fudging the data. These are just the ones on record.

It’s not that murder has disappeared in El Salvador - it’s more like it’s now de facto legal in many contexts. An MS13 member who rolls up on a rival gang’s stash house and shoots it up now knows that if they can bury the bodies in an unmarked grave outside of town without being caught red-handed with the shovels and corpses, the victims will legally cease to exist. They’re not prosecuting people for these murders, right? Otherwise they would show up in the data. The media doesn't talk about them. You don't see the evidence. Out of sight, out of mind.

I'm not suggesting no murders were prevented as a result of the Bukele government's mass incarceration policies, obviously. I can also see the argument that it's good for society for criminals to kill each other in prison yard fights instead of getting into shootouts in a marketplace where an innocent bystander also gets their head blown off. I just think the fundamental premise - that he arrested everyone and it caused murders to stop happening and we need to reason forward from there - is extremely dubious.

Drethelin writes:

idk about the statistics but multiple people I talked to in el salvador specifically told me theft was WAY down

like walking down the street with your phone in your hand was now an option where it used to not be

people can now both afford to and feel safe owning cars, etc.

among other things they are very proactive about using what we wouldn't really consider due process, eg cops browsing facebook and like, going after guys that people post from their security camera footage as taking their bike or whatever

Thanks - I had said in the post that although murder was down, the statistics didn’t really show this about theft - but I was eyeballing statistics not really gathered for this purpose and if the news on the ground is that theft is down, I believe it.

4: Comments On Probation

In response to a question of why probation with GPS tracking hasn’t taken off as an alternative to prison, Peter answers:

Because convicts turn it down. You see at least in America probation (which is what GPS monitoring is part of) and incarceration aren't related, you get no credit for the former when it comes to the latter and people like to overlook over half of people incarcerated aren't there for any crime at all but simply a technical probation violation like getting fired from your job from not showing up on time because your probation officer randomly changes times of meetings daily (which is also results in prison even if you are one minute late).

If the max sentence is five years prison plus probation time doesn't count and you have a more likely than not chance of violating probation because it's designed to be unreasonable and cause failures as a back door way for judge's to avoid trials, why would you accept GPS monitoring which will only increase your chances of being violated.

I.e..why do nine years (four years probation out of your ten year probation, then violated, then five in more actual prison) when you can just do five. Generally the rule among convicts is if the prison sentence is shorter than the probation sentence, just take prison day one. As a convict you can, and many do, turn down probation.

If you want to fix this then you need to let convicts "try" probation where they get credit at a 1-1, or even better motivate them so let's say 2-1, towards a future prison sentence when they fail. This entire conversation (OP) is worthless as it's making the standard mistake of just looking at prison and not probation, jail, fines, etc all which backdoor as a way to avoid trials lead to prison.

This isn’t very clearly written, but my impression is that Peter is saying that violating probation gives you a longer prison sentence than just accepting prison in the first place, probation is deliberately designed to be near-impossible to keep, and so it’s a con to trick criminals into longer sentences without having to get them through a judge and jury. Criminals know this, so they refuse probation.

This kind of conflicts with the “criminals have high time preference and make terrible decisions” point above, so I’m not sure what to think of it.

I wonder if people ever try GPS tracking (without the rest of probation) as a prison alternative. “You’re getting off with a warning this time, but wear this tracker, and if you commit any other crimes in the future, we’ll know.” [EDIT: commenter answers here]

More from Peter:

Remember, the entire point of probation is to get people to avoid a trial by plea dealing to probation and then put them in prison anyways without any due process because reasonable people, the sort that takes plea deals, believe in the system hence overestimate their ability to complete probation. And so you put them in prison on a technical violation, i.e. getting fired after you intentionally caused them to do so, not having a place to live after you intentionally refused to approve anywhere they tried live, changing their appointment times without confirming they know ("I left a message with their dog"), or just harass them until they give up and just go to prison.

Americans tend to discount probation as a joke but any experienced convict knows probation as implemented is worse hence just goes to jail. Also note that probation and PAROLE are different and significantly so, you actually get credit for parole time. Parole WANTS you to succeed, after all they paroled you, probation doesn't.

They aren't even the same group of government offices either which is part of the problem. Probation falls under the judiciary (they work for the court) hence they free up budgets the faster they can move you over to the executive (prison) branch whereas parole is a cost saving measure as it falls under the same prison budget, i.e. parole officers aren't probation officers. Also all those fancy rehabilitation programs people love to tore to decrease recidivism goes to parolees, not probationers. I.e. there are giant structural incentives from pure intergovernmental bureaucratic budget wars to move people from probation to prison and because it's controlled by judges, I.e. the prison department can't just refuse to take a trivial probationary revokee, it's a one sided fight […]

For example I got a friend that just got two years for the driving the speed limit in Texas while at a funeral, travel approved by the judge, because probation also makes it illegal to break your state law even in another jurisdiction where it's legal. He was driving 85 (the posted speed limit) in outside Austin but in Hawaii it's a misdemeanor to exceed 80 mph for any reason on any road strict liability; his PO asked him "jokingly" if he drove the speed limit while there and if he enjoyed the faster mainland speeds, he said "yes" unbeknownst to him he was being setup. His admission resulted in his probation being revoked for literally following the posted speed limit.

Charlotte Wollstonecraft writes:

The marginal prisoner in Massachusetts may be a much badder dude than the marginal prisoner in Louisiana. But here is anecdotal reason to believe he is not:

Last week in New Orleans, there were three mass shootings. Two of them happened at the same second line in New Orleans East, 45 minutes apart. In two separate incidents, a gunman opened fire at a large outdoor gathering. In total, two people died, and ten were wounded. This is not national news. No arrests have been made.

The third shooting took place in the French Quarter four days later. One of the three shooters was caught immediately. Turns out, he had already served seven years in prison for armed robbery. Last year, he was arrested again and charged with domestic battery, child endangerment, and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. A plea deal got him out on parole, the terms of which he violated near daily according to his ankle monitor's logs. He was wearing the ankle monitor at the time he opened fire on a French Quarter street, wounding three people and killing another.

I’m including this here as a counter to Peter’s story of the guy who got two years in jail for driving the speed limit. I hear so many outrageous stories of extreme strictness and so many outrageous stories of extreme laxity (see also this post) that I’m nervous about turning the dial one way or the other compared to trying to figure out what’s going on.

5: Comments That Say My Analysis Forgot Something

Grant Gould writes:

You allude to it twice but then pass over it "for simplicity": None of these studies measure within-prison crime, which is largely not counted, tracked, tried, or prosecuted. It is not only plausible but likely that "incapacitation" is at best simply relocation of crimes. And even _that_ is leaving aside the regular drumbeat of deeply sadistic crimes by guards, which are even less counted, tracked, tried, or prosecuted.

The quality of statistics on crimes within prisons is very poor, of course; ttbomk it is not practically possible to know if the average prisoner commits crimes at a greater rate while incarcerated than while outside, or likewise the rate at which people in prison are crime victims versus those outside.

If your value function is some sort of utilitarian sum over society, you have to count those, or else your utilitarianism is just gerrymandering people into and out of the boundaries of the utility summation (in which case you can optimize utility much more simply than by incarcerating; simple Schmittianism will do the job more easily, and it's free since you don't count the cost).

I wrote this post to respond to debates (eg on California’s Prop 36) on whether prison is an effective way of decreasing the crime that normal people have to suffer in their neighborhoods. I think this is an important question that lots of people care about. Whether prisoners commit crimes against other prisoners is also important, but it’s a different question. I think people would justly distrust me if I pretended to be answering the question they cared about, but actually answered a different question.

I (following Roodman) gave two conclusions in my cost-benefit analysis - one that counted the suffering by prisoners themselves, and one that didn’t. Since I think different people will have different intuitions on this, I think it was the right strategy. The one that counted the suffering of prisoners included a general estimate of willingness-to-pay for prison which I think includes the cost of intra-prison crimes. Either way, I think being exposed to intra-prison crimes is a small fraction of the badness of prison that doesn’t change that analysis much.

I also don’t think it’s exactly right to say that incarceration only relocates (rather than prevents) crime. This may be true for murder and rape. But there aren’t a lot of things to steal in prison (not zero, but not as much as in the outside world) and the vast majority of crimes are property crimes.

JBG writes:

Some thoughts as a former defense attorney.

On "after effects," skipping all the way to length of incarceration misses a lot of what's going on for first time offenders. As your own examples note, many of the problems making it harder to make an honest living accrue from being a felon as such, and not from jail time. I'll add on that merely being *arrested* triggers a similar cascade of consequences. Your average person will be fired from their job very quickly after arrest -- either because of the arrest itself or just because it leads to missing work. And an arrest on its own, without a conviction, is sufficient to make it hard to get hired on in a lot of jobs.

But this is all specific to first-time offenders; going from someone presumed to be a law-abiding citizen to being a felon changes everything. An incremental felony after that doesn't change much. From your description, it seems like the studies are blurring this together? I'd be interested to see evidence focused specifically on first time offenders.

My guess would be that there's a large, negative effect of your first felony (all else equal) but not much effect at all of subsequent felonies. In that case, there's a very different calculus for the incapacitation vs. recidivism tradeoff for different, identifiable groups.

Undeserving Porcupine writes:

Eugenic effects of 3-5x’ing the prison population? Makes it harder for these criminals to make more of themselves.

Several people brought this up on Twitter. It deserves a full post response, but in case I don’t get around to making it - I think this is almost zero.

I realize that’s a surprising claim, but compare the Nazi eugenics program against schizophrenics discussed here. They killed most of the schizophrenics in Germany, and schizophrenia is 80% genetic, yet the next generation had the same number of schizophrenics as ever, at least within the measurement margin of error. See the post for a longer explanation of this seemingly paradoxical result.

Sebjenseb did a similar analysis and finds that if you execute the most criminal 1% of the population each generation, population level criminality decreases by about 0.1 standard deviation per 400 years. This is less trivial than I expected - it corresponds to a drop in the murder rate from 30 to 20 (possibly less for other crimes). But it's also a better case than our real scenario for a few reasons (police have 100% efficiency in arresting the worst criminals exactly in order; execution is better at preventing childbearing than prison). Maybe a real scenario is 33% decrease in crime rate per 600 years? Doesn't seem that relevant to me - even if we don’t get a singularity in the next few decades like I expect, we’ll probably get better genetic engineering or go multiplanetary (in which case founder effects will overwhelm everything else).

Publius Obsequium writes:

One thing Scott neglects is the beneficial effect prison has on kids of criminals (yes you read that right - look it up)

Here is an article making this case and citing some corroborating studies. I would stress that there are also many (probably more) studies finding the opposite, and that I haven’t looked through any of the studies on either side to check whether they’re any good.

Straphanger writes:

This analysis ignores that punishment is a good in itself. The victims of crimes deserve retribution against the people who have wronged them.

Some version of this was one of the most common comments, with opinions ranging from:

• I was a bad person for not focusing on the suffering of the prisoners in prison more, especially their potential victimization by prisoner-on-prisoner violence.

• I was a bad person for counting the suffering of the prisoners in prison at all, since they, as criminals, deserved no better.

• Actually, the suffering of the prisoners in prison, far from being a cost or even neutral, is a positive! Just as the greatest delight in Heaven is looking down on the tortures of Hell below, one of the advantages of being law-abiding should be knowing that criminals are suffering.

Everyone was right to criticize me, because I have a confused and muddled middle position here.

I am most willing to discount the suffering of prisoners when I think of this in a game theoretic way. I imagine some sneering criminal robbing me, saying “Sure, you could stop me at any point - but then I would be suffering, so you have to let me continue my crime spree or else you’ll be a bad person, mwahaha!” Obviously the decision theory here is to - even if you were previously the nicest person in the world - strategically turn that off and throw the book at the guy. This is why I’m sometimes sympathetic to the idea of a law making it legal to run over protesters who are deliberately blocking roads. The end result of legal protections for people who prey on the kindness of others is the transformation of decent people into chumps who get exploited harder and harder until they crack and become cruel just to keep up. I would rather protect the ability to be kind in general by suspending kindness against anyone deliberately taking advantage of it. And even though the strong version of this with the maniacal laughter rarely happens, I think it’s worth leaving a margin of error for when “society” or “cultural evolution” or whatever is secretly playing this strategy.

But I am least willing to discount the suffering of prisoners when I remember that the above has almost no relation to reality. See the section on criminal psychology above. Tough-on-crime people like to say they’re all based and IQ-pilled, but the average criminal is an IQ 75 moron with the impulse control of a young child. Probably they are genetically suited to some kind of hunter-gatherer tribe with strong kinship bonds and zero superstimuli; in modern society, they are totally doomed. I’m not sure what our goal is here in creating a bunch of people incapable of living cooperatively in modern civilization, and then, when those people inevitably fail to live cooperatively in modern civilization, saying “Haha! Now you’ve outed yourself as an evil person who deserves to suffer!” and torturing them for a few years to “get our revenge”. If you’re going to take that perspective, you might as well torture three-year-olds who throw tantrums in the grocery store.

Someone, I can’t remember who, had a thought experiment with the society as far beyond ourselves as we are beyond the average criminal. Maybe it’s a society of Buddhist monks, or of angels. Raising your voice at someone, going one mile above the speed limit, or stealing a glance at a woman’s cleavage in their society is considered as outrageous as assault, drunk driving, or rape would be in ours. So what happens? Do you never commit a single misdeed even in your heart? Or do you inevitably slip, then spend the rest of your life “deserving” “torture” for your infraction? If the Buddhist angels are really mad (or, I suppose, sad/disappointed/victimized, since they’ve transcended anger), do they deserve to take out those feelings by inflicting arbitrary unbounded “retribution” on you? If you object “But glancing at a woman’s cleavage doesn’t do her that much harm, really!”, then I’m not sure how you get away with thinking that X years stuck getting raped in a cage for shoplifting is “proportional” either.

My uneasy synthesis is that criminals have nominated themselves for the short end of a tradeoff. If we have to balance their suffering vs. that of law-abiding citizens, we should weigh that of the law-abiders somewhat higher. But we shouldn’t weigh criminals’ at zero, and we definitely shouldn’t punish them just for fun.

I hold this position pretty strongly with regard to the people who just abstractly think making prisoners suffer is nice. I have a harder time knowing what to think of people who want revenge for crimes committed against them personally. A criminal murdered my great-grandfather in a robbery gone wrong; my great-grandmother (who I never knew) was apparently an extremely nice person but saw red, demanded the death penalty, and was enraged when the jury settled for a lengthy prison term. I can’t promise I would behave any differently than she did in her situation. I content myself with thinking that the incapacitation-optimal amount of prison (probably 20 years to life for a murder) is already pretty extreme and hopefully satisfies most people’s revenge fantasies. But I’m pretty split about this. If I imagine someone hurting my family, 20 years in a minimum-security Swedish prison isn’t going to cut it. But if I imagine myself on Judgment Day before the throne of God, being asked to account for any suffering I chose to inflict upon my fellow man, the only answer I would really be comfortable giving is that I did it for the greater good of preventing/deterring future crime and protecting the innocent. I do sort of understand the emotional response that makes some people feel that maybe anyone who has transgressed has opened themselves up to infinite punishment in the name of justice - but on Judgment Day this is exactly the sort of thing I will be desperately trying not to remind God of!

I tried to limit the degree to which I discussed this in the original post, because it’s exactly the kind of culture war scissor topic that people will get too excited about, but there are other arguments (the superiority of police deterrence over prison) which let us sidestep this whole issue.

6: Comments With Proposed Solutions / Crazy Schemes

Joseph writes:

A note on shoplifting. If you can't punish shoplifters because you don't have the resources to try all of them, then you have two main options to change that.

(1) Fund some kind of "shoplifting task force" (or petty crimes task force if you want broader reach, but this will spread your efforts). Hire more prosecutors, judges, public defenders, bailiffs, court reporters, etc. and try more cases. If it's constitutional, you could target this effort at people with multiple prior recent arrests first, although the population will get the idea that everybody gets a few free misdemeanor tickets.

(2) Increase the difference between the minimum sentence that you get if you go to trial vs. pleading out. In other words, create "first degree," "second degree" etc. shoplifting and make the penalty for the higher degrees painful enough that people will plead to third degree shoplifting and do a year in prison rather than risk a conviction for second degree and five years.

#2 is inhumane and has been reasonably compared to medieval practices of confession under torture, but is also the way we manage our trial dockets in the US, unfortunately.

Sol Hando (blog) writes:

I am now sold on the Australian model as a solution to basically all crime.

No, not modern Australia, which sits comfortably above the European system and below the American one in terms of incarceration rates, and doesn't seem to be doing anything novel, but the Australian system as it was for the United Kingdom a few centuries ago. Penal colonies.

If the problem with increasing prison sentences to the point we eliminate 90% of the crime is that it would cost insane amounts of money, then shipping those prisoners to a completely separate society somewhere far away would have the incapacitation effect (which seems to be by far the most important factor), without any of the significant costs. A one-way flight ticket is maybe a thousand dollars? Pretty much anywhere in the world.

If you think penal colonies are cruel, present the option to the criminal to join one, or our current system. If 5+ years of imprisonment essentially breaks all your social bonds anyways, it seems a much preferable alternative to have freedom in a new, if harsh, land, rather than be imprisoned in a literal prison near to home. If you're worried that penal colonies will be dangerous and deadly, as they're full of criminals, that's sort of what prisons are already. Except with a colony you can go out to the sticks and rarely interact with other people, and can have the means to readily defend yourself.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like there's anywhere left that could function as a modern day penal colony without being cruel. The whole idea is incapacitation, so it doesn't work if we just ship them to Montana or something and call it a day, as they could easily take a bus out of there. It would have to be separated enough that returning to society without permission was sufficiently difficult. Even a large island (let's say we sacrificed Hawaii's big island for this purpose) can easily be escaped if not for significant monitoring.

I think Robert Heinlein's, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress should be our model for an actual solution. The moon is far enough away that it would be quite difficult to get back.

I think Sol is overestimating the difficulty of preventing escape, and underestimating the difficulty of everything else.

People call Gaza an “open-air prison”, and the comparison makes sense. It contains two million Palestinians, separated from Israel by a wall, barbed wire, and military guards. Security isn’t infallible (see 10/7), but the breach required a near-state level of resources (including funding/arms/supplies from Israel’s enemies) plus a rare catastrophic blunder on Israel’s part - and all it did was get a few thousand Gazans over the wall for a few hours.

But Gaza is just a coastal area with a wall around it. America has plenty of isolated coastal areas. The US prison population is lower than the population of Gaza, so a Gaza-sized strip could fit all prisoners with room to spare.

But I think Sol is imagining an area with enough fertile land that inhabitants could set up farms and be self-sustaining. That’s a bigger problem. There are ~1.2 million prisoners in the US. In theory, one person needs an acre of land to support themselves through subsistence farming. 1.2 million acres is the size of Rhode Island. But this is the best case scenario where the land is completely tiled with one-acre farms - which means prisoners are no longer isolated from other prisoners, and probably preying on/murdering them. Which is more likely - that a murderer settles down to do backbreaking farm labor, or that murder their neighbor and take their crops?

The alternative is a Gaza Strip situation where you’re not even trying to farm, and just ship in food. But that requires prisoners to be near distribution centers, which again gives them a lot of opportunities to commit crimes against each other. I would imagine this looking something like Haiti, with urban gangs fighting each other until eventually the baddest dude becomes some kind of warlord. Haiti is probably still better than prison, but I could see this getting worse. Why shouldn’t the winning gang kill all new prisoners who enter (to prevent them from consuming supplies)? If the winning gang is race-based (eg Aryan Nations), would they enslave the other races?

Sol suggests giving prisoners a choice between a penal colony or a regular prison, which I agree would potentially limit some of the downside. But now we have a new problem - even if the penal colony has fewer atrocities, relatively speaking, it may have more photogenic atrocities, in the sense of some sort of public torture that produces outrage instead of the slow burn of sadism and misery that normal prisons produce. The story of modernity is people trying to exchange photogenic atrocities for boring atrocities in order to avoid having negative New York Times articles written about them. I worry the penal colony might end the same way.

Here’s an even more hare-brained scheme: if this would devolve into Haiti, why not skip the middleman and pay Haiti to take our prisoners directly? It probably couldn’t make them any worse-off, and they could use the money. It would be win-win!

Melvin writes:

There seem to be reasonable solutions to prison gang power. My preferred solution of solitary confinement for everyone (enriched solitary with books and entertainment, not the semi-torturous sensory deprivation kind) is controversial but we can at least cut down prisoners' social interactions considerably so that each prisoner only interacts with (say) half a dozen others. A prison could consist of small isolated pods separated by thick walls.

Yeah, everyone I know with experience says that solitary confinement is torture, but I would naively expect to prefer it to normal prison. Maybe at least give prisoners the choice?

I do think solitary might be more expensive - El Salvador has 100 (!) prisoners per cell to save money; I don’t know how many America has but I bet it’s not great.

justforthispost writes:

This is why I (definitely on the thin end of the bell curve vis. leftism on this website) support public corporeal punishment over prison.

I honestly think we should bring back the cane and the stocks. If you get caught lifting razors from target the state should mandate spending three days locked in stocks In front of city hall and getting your feet switched; this is infinitely more humiliating the prison, much less disruptive, much less likely to kill people, gives cops less chance to do cop things (beat people to death, let them die in prison from preventable medical conditions, rape people in prison, etc.) and much it's much cheaper!

I previously believed this, but this post makes me more skeptical. Since most of the benefits of prison come from incapacitation rather than deterrence, we should expect this to have limited effect - although some people point out that something public, sudden, and dramatic might have better deterrence properties! I think if first shoplifting arrest is a warning, this would be a good way of dealing with the second and third, and then after the Xth strike we give up and just try to lock you away from society.

Robert Huben (blog) writes:

Fun dystopian mechanism for private companies to increase deterrence: increase all sticker prices 1000x, while offering 99.9% discount coupons. Since shoplifting goes from a misdemeanor to a felony at a certain dollar amount ($750 is mentioned in the article), this means that shoplifting ~anything is a felony, increasing deterrence while leaving normal customers unaffected!

I'm not a lawyer, I'm supremely confident this will work. The hardest part would be randomly assigning stores to intervention/control groups, so the criminologists can measure the effects.

You laugh, but this is exactly how our health care system works.

Other Comments

AJKamper writes:

One other comment I want to throw in here. Hang around for a while with correctional workers, at least in Minnesota, and you will eventually hear someone talk about “evidence-based practices,” usually right before they spit at the ground. Coming from secondhand medical background, this confused the hell out of me for a solid six months. A) In medicine, EBP is a set of practices designed to make sure that commonly used interventions, you know, work. B) Evidence seems… good? Not here. A new director might be described as “super EBP” with a roll of the eyes.

I eventually worked out that in practice, EBP represents a rehabilitative, “soft on consequences” approach in prisons that a lot of front-line workers, especially older ones, think is ineffective at best or just plain too kind to offenders who deserve worse. So there’s a major divide between Central Office people who are trying to rehabilitate the inmates based on “best evidence,” and the guards and case managers who think that time should be hard. It’s a pretty good microcosm of the current epidemic crisis, actually.

Michael writes:

Skarbek's book "The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System" is a great read.

The key point is that, because most criminals expect to go to prison, they know they will someday be at the mercy of prison gangs who have the power to inflict violence on the inside. This gives prison gangs enormous power outside of the prison walls; non-prison gangs usually pay tribute to a given prison gang.

(This incidentally is what worries me about El Salvador. Having all the gang members in prison right now might be like having guerrillas driven up to the mountains; the state may be ceding its monopoly on violence in a certain part of the country and this could eventually be a problem even if the rest of the country is safe in the meantime.)

Putting a dent in the power of prison gangs would be intrinsically good and probably help with crime on the outside.

Unfortunately solutions to this are probably unpalatable. Removing the gangs' power to commit violence and smuggle drugs would look like making conditions better and safer for prisoners (undesirable to the right), but would require large increases in funding for prisons alongside stricter security (undesirable to the left).

However this is an issue that's nicely orthogonal to "turning the knob" of more/less sentencing, so I figure it's worth mentioning.

Yeah, this is an interesting point. There’s a good interview with Skarbek in last month’s issue of Asterisk, I think it will be online shortly.

Also, ‘tis the season to be guilted into charitable giving! Here are some fundraisers I’ve been made aware of:

• GiveDirectly is a charity that gives money directly to poor families in Africa. GiveWell thinks they’re within an order of magnitude of the most effective charities in the world. You can learn more and donate here.

• Philosophers Against Malaria is a kind of aggressive-seeming scheme to pit philosophy departments against each other to see which one will donate the most to charity (in this case, malaria bednets). If you want to donate, or just check which universities have the most moral philosophy department, go here.

• Lightcone handles infrastructure for the rationalist community. They run the Less Wrong website and the Lighthaven campus (where we’ve held the past several Berkeley ACX meetups). You can read their pitch here, and donate here. Many of us have enjoyed and benefited from their work, and now would be a great time to give something back (and if you donate enough, they’ll name a bench after you). Warning that the (not affiliated with Lightcone) donation site quietly tries to add a 15% tip to themselves, and you should un-add it if you don’t want to tip them.

• And here’s Bentham’s Bulldog trying to convince you to donate to the Shrimp Welfare Project. “I’d be surprised if we got to heaven, asked God what the highest [moral] impact thing that we could have done is, and his answer was ‘oh, something very normal and within the Overton window.’”