Links to Consider, November 26
Brian Chau on Effective Altruism; Rob Henderson on status vs. truth; Brad Wilcox and Elizabeth Self on Young Men; Dylan Patel and Myron Xie on Microsoft's capex plans
“For-profits are bad” was the sentiment. What evidence was this based on? All the evidence was to the contrary, much of which EAs helped to compile. Non-profits were much more likely to be fraudulent, or to simply fail to achieve their goals.
In reality, the cause was social desirability. “Capitalism is evil” is a great falsehood closely connected to the great falsehood that EA was supposed to reject.
The Effective Altruism movement has a good idea of putting a focus on results rather than intent. Effective Altruism tries to replace an intention heuristic in donations with a measurement heuristic.
But I would go further. I would replace the intention heuristic with an accountability heuristic. That leads me to prefer, on moral grounds, for-profit businesses over non-profits. That is because a for-profit business is accountable to a broad set of consumers, while a non-profit is accountable to a narrow set of donors.
You can think of the non-profit world as Peter Thiel contending with George Soros. I would rather see Thiel funding profit-seeking businesses trying to build flying cars than funding conferences to discuss the concept of progress. And I would rather have Soros speculating in currency markets than speculating on left-wing causes.
Even more corrupt than the world of non-profits funded by private donors is the world of non-profits funded by government. Universities are at the top of that list.
people have a mechanism in their minds. It stops them from saying something that could lower their status, even if it’s true. And it propels them to say something that could increase their status, even if it’s false. Sometimes, local norms can push against this tendency. Certain communities (e.g., scientists) can obtain status among their peers for expressing truths. But if the norm is relaxed, people might default to seeking status over truth if status confers the greater reward.
This is a dark view of social epistemology. The Western world has in fact set up systems that correlate prestige with truth-seeking. Jonathan Rauch calls this the Constitution of Knowledge. But it seems that in the 21st century this system has been gamed and corrupted.
Henderson writes,
High-status people are more preoccupied with how others view them. Which means that educated and/or affluent people may be especially prone to peripheral, as opposed to central, methods of persuasion.
The distinction between central and peripheral methods is not as straightforward as it seems. You want to think of “central” as judging the content of the argument and “peripheral” as judging the person making the argument, but they are really mixed together. Ultimately, my view of chemistry comes from trusting my chemistry teacher, not because I was able to replicate classic chemistry experiments.
Brad Wilcox and Elizabeth Self write,
The share of young men (aged 25–35) who are working full-time fell from about 80 percent in the 1990s to less than 70 percent today. For men without college degrees, the fall in full-time employment was even greater, from around 80 percent to less than 65 percent today. This means that about one-third of young men in their prime are not working full-time.
…one reason a growing number of men don’t view work as normal or desirable—or don’t have the capacity to focus and flourish in a job—seems to be that they are too addicted to the electronic opiates of our day. The research of the Princeton economist Mark Aguiar and his team suggests that screentime can account for nearly half of the drop in working hours for men in their twenties from 2004 to 2017. Over that time, recreational computer time rose by 60 percent among men.
Dylan Patel and Myron Xie write,
Microsoft is currently conducting the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen. While that may seem like hyperbole, look at the annual spend of mega projects such as nationwide rail networks, dams, or even space programs such as the Apollo moon landings, and they all pale in comparison to the >$50 billion annual spend on datacenters Microsoft has penned in for 2024 and beyond. This infrastructure buildout is aimed squarely at accelerating the path to AGI and bringing the intelligence of generative AI to every facet of life from productivity applications to leisure.
Pointer from Alexander Kruel. There is a “roaring twenties” meme current among economic commentators, including James Pethokoukis and Noah Smith. In order for these fantasies to come true, we will somehow have to finance all this capital expenditure while also financing enormous Federal deficits.
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You forgot to attach, "Have a nice day" to that last sentence.
To your inventory of non-profits, you may add all these new "churches" sprouting up everywhere in my state. They do not resemble actual churches in any particular, physical or activity-wise, so I don't know exactly where the grift lies beyond the obvious real estate advantages.
This makes me laugh because the environmental non-profit with which I am most closely acquainted pays a "sum-in-lieu-of-taxes" in the rural counties where it holds significant land, so as not to be perceived as "starving the school district" in particular among local needs.
I imagine no church no matter how much it's raking in, has ever thought to do that.
(The above-mentioned "churches" - typically just an office building looking thing, newly built, oblique name like "A New Beginning", no outward sign that it's a church, no denominational accountability, rarely any vehicles present - must be a way to squeeze money out of people, or as a tax shield for some shady activity; or perhaps they are set up to inherit the endowment of one of the numerous actual churches that have withered away but as is often the case, still have funds - you have to transfer those to a similar entity, and there doesn't appear to be any desire on gov's part to scrutinize "churches". What's funny is people have always looked askance at "megachurches", understandably, but these newer outfits seem to have figured out a way to scam that doesn't involve offering even those limited church-like services the megachurch does.)
In defense of non-profits, however: they tend to be the sole line of defense against their "government" counterparts. It's difficult to imagine a for-profit entity caring much about *how* government spends its money.
To take a long, long ago successful (to me, anyway) example: the Grand Canyon is not home to a reservoir because of a non-profit.
Non-profits generally supply the only pushback against wasteful and livelihood-eliminating and wildlife-harming dams. Usually unsuccessfully, of course. The tale may be told succinctly by noting that - planned dams are often named for engineers or consultants who work for ... private firms. "Water Hustler Dam."