Maximizing Change Effectiveness

Obama and the Democrats have come sweeping in. Now what? All those fundamental liberal democratic rights which we have been fighting to maintain throughout these past dark years of GOP dominance are now suddenly of much lesser urgency for activists.

... Complete entry

Posted by  on  11/23  at  11:22 PM

The legalization of marijuana is much more attainable than a "2" on your scale. Decriminalization laws are in a quarter of the United States and it seems like every year another state allows for medical marijuana. If Cutting Military Spending by half is a 6 on the attainability scale, surely legalizing marijuana is at least an 8.

Posted by Alan Dawrst  on  11/24  at  03:11 PM

Thanks for the list. Setting explicit priorities and evaluating cost-effectiveness is the most important part of any undertaking, yet it's often neglected.

Your final comment about "the likelihood each of these Democrat promises will be kept, and the amount of pressure that needs to be consistently maintained" is completely right: The real metric of interest is "expected utility change per unit of activist resources," which is quite possibly very different from "absolute importance" or "feasibility."

An unbounded cost-effectiveness metric would also be more insightful than ordinal rankings. For instance, while ordinally one might list "Stronger Overtime Laws" at U=8 and "The End of Poverty" at U=10, in absolute utility terms, the latter could easily be 10,000 times the former.

Two other notes:

1. You might add to the list issues of relevance to animal welfare (apart from in-vitro meat, which is great). While conventional animal-activist causes may not be exceedingly cost-effective (e.g., horse slaughter, pets, animal fighting, dissection, fur, ...), there may be policies that indirectly impact huge numbers of animals, especially those suffering massively in the wild.

2. It's not obvious to me that lobbying on rather mainstream political issues in general is optimally cost-effective. These are well-tread territories where lots of people are trying to have an impact, and in many cases, the utility relevance of political issues is mainly indirect. This is because the welfare of (a) animals and (b) future generations swamps that of existing humans to the extent that policies matter mostly insofar as they affect these areas. When the future of our light cone over the next, say, 10^14 years is at stake, welfare benefits to current humans seem mostly incidental.

Posted by EmbraceUnity  on  11/24  at  07:28 PM

Thank you both for your comments,

I am aware that these issues are hard to quantify and some are probably impossible to quantify, but I do believe this is the right way of going about attaining a rough guideline for maximizing your positive impact.

Joseph, I think you are probably correct. Actually perhaps legalizing marijuana is of slightly higher attainability and cutting military expenses is of lower attainability. I probably was probably not thinking clearly when I assigned those two values.

However, Obama has already mentioned preventing the militarization of space, stopping SDI, and cutting certain "future combat systems." I am not sure how serious he is about this, but I think it is safe to say that a lot of people are very concerned about the incredibly high military budgets, including people in the Pentagon, and I am reasonably confident that some headway can be made on this problem

Alan, I am not sure which policies, besides Cultured Meat, which can impact large amounts of animal suffering that is under our control. If you can name any policies, I would love to hear them. From your website, http://utilitarian-essays.com/reduce-suffering.html it seems pretty clear that the amount of control we have over the suffering of wild animals is minimal.

In the future, as we become much more technologically advanced, and obtain the power to terraform, code genomes, and build super powerful computers, it may be possible to construct new humane and sustainable ecosystems where there are no predator/prey relationships and high happiness set-points for all creatures.... hopefully we experiment on other planets first.

It seems just building up the technological commons for nanotechnology and biotechnology, as described in the number one issue, is the most effective.

Posted by  on  12/01  at  04:34 PM

Let´s get rid of mandatory schooling as well, you can´t educate people in conformity oriented processing tanks, and we´re past the point where a dumbed-down and obedience-trained populace is useful to the society at large.

Posted by  on  12/08  at  04:29 PM

So basically, same old, same old. Drain "the rich" to to feed a gigantic socialist government maw. "Rich", of course, being redefined down to chase the high side of the curve.

Look at the bailouts. The first thing that happened was a mob of others howling for a piece. Multiply that times a few million. The problem of welfare is not solved by putting everyone (include those not citizens, which you included) on welfare.

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