Category: Philosophy

How can we use our resources to help others the most?

This is the fundamental question of the Effective Altruism movement, and it should be the fundamental question of all charitable giving (and indeed, this post is largely copied from my similar post last year). I think the first fundamental insight of effective altruism (which really took it from Peter Singer) is that your donation can change someone’s life, and the wrong donation can accomplish nothing. People do not imagine charity in terms of “investments” and “payoffs”, yet GiveWell estimates that you can save a human life for somewhere in the magnitude of $3000.

Many American households donate that much to charity every year, and simply put, if the charities we donate to don’t try to maximize their impact, our donations may not help many people, when they could be saving a life.

This post is a short reminder that we have researched empirical evidence that you can make a difference in the world! The EA movement has already done very impressive work on how we might evaluate charitable giving, why the long term future matters, and what the most important and tractable issues might be.

Apart from the baseline incredible giving opportunities in global poverty (see GiveWell’s top charities), the long term future is an important and underfocused area of research. If humanity lives for a long time, then the vast majority of conscious humans who will exist will exist in the far future. Taking steps to ensure their existence could have massive payoffs, and concrete research in this area to avoid things like existential risk seems very important and underfunded.

I write this blog post not to shame people into donating their entire incomes (see Slate Star Codex on avoiding being eaten by consequentialist charitable impacts), but rather to ask donors to evaluate where you are sending your money within your budget and to see if perhaps the risk of paying such a high opportunity cost is worth it. Alma maters and church groups are the most common form of charity Americans give to, but the impacts from these areas seem much lower than donating to global poverty programs or the long term future.

Finally, part of this blog post is simply to publicly discuss what I donate to and to encourage others to create a charitable budget and allocate it to address problems that are large in the number of people they impact, highly neglected, and highly solvable. I thus donate about a third of my budget to GiveWell as a baseline based on evidence backed research to save lives today. I then donate another third of my budget to long term/existential risk causes where I think the impact is the highest, but the tractability is perhaps the lowest. The primary place I’ve donated to this year is the Long Term Future Fund from EA Funds. I remain uncertain on the best ways to improve the long term future, and so anything I haven’t spent from this budget item I’ve sent to GiveWell as part of my baseline giving.

The last third of my budget is reserved to focusing on policy, which is where I believe the EA movement is currently weakest. I donate money to the Center for Election Science, especially after their impressive performance this year bringing Approval Voting to St. Louis. I also donate to the Institute for Justice, as they work on fairly neglected problems in a tractable way, winning court cases to improve civil liberties for U.S. citizens. Finally, I donated a small amount to the Reason Foundation which publishes Reason magazine, as they are one of the larger places advocating big tent libertarian ideas today. It would be great to be able to move good policies to polities with bad institutions (i.e. many developing nations), but that problem seems highly intractable. It may be that the best we can do is create good institutions here and hope they are copied. I’m open to different ideas, but I am a relatively small donor and so I believe that taking risks with a portion of my donations in ways that differ from the main EA thrust is warranted.

There are many resources from the Effective Altruism community, and I’ll include several links of similar recommendations from around the EA community. If you haven’t heard of EA charities, consider giving some of your charity budget to GiveWell, or other EA organization you find convincing. If you don’t have a charity budget, consider making one for next year. Even small amounts a year can potentially save dozens of cumulative lives today, or perhaps hundreds in the far future!

Book Review: The Precipice

I have titled my annual blog post summarizing where I donate my charitable budget as “How can we use our resources to help others the most?” This is the fundamental question of the Effective Altruism movement which The Precipice‘s author, Toby Ord, helped found. For a while, Toby Ord focused on figuring out how to fight global poverty, doing the most good for the worst off people in the world. Now, he is focusing on the long term future and existential risk.

The Precipice is fantastic. It’s incredibly well written, engaging, and approachable. It covers a lot of ground from why we should care about the world, what risks humanity faces in the future, how we might think about tackling those risks, and what the future might look like if we succeed.

The Precipice eloquently interweaves fairly philosophical arguments with more empirical analysis about the sources of existential risk and tries to statistically bound them. The book discusses a pretty concerning topic of the potential end of humanity, but it does so with an eminently reasonable approach. The complexities of philosophy, science, probability, epidemiology, and more all are brought into the narrative, but made easily digestible for any reader. I honestly wish Toby Ord could teach me about everything, his writing was so clear and engaging.

The main discussion is never overwhelming with technical details, but if you ever find a point interesting, even the footnotes are amazing. At one point I came up with a counterpoint to Ord’s position, wrote that down in my notes, only to find that the next several paragraphs addressed it in its entirety, and there was actually a full appendix going into more detail. Honestly, this will be less of a book review and more of a summary with a couple final thoughts, because I think this book is not only excellent, but its content is perhaps the most important thing you can read right now. You are welcome to read the rest of this blog post, but if you have found this compelling so far, feel free to stop reading and order Toby Ord’s book posthaste.

Existential Risk

The consequences of 90% of humans on Earth dying would be pretty terrible, and given our relatively poor response to recent events, perhaps we should better explore other potential catastrophes and how we can avoid them. But The Precipice goes further. Instead of 90% of humans dying, what happens if 100% of us die out? Certainly that’s strictly worse with 100>90, but in fact these outcomes are far apart in magnitude: if all humans die out today, then all future humans never get to exist.

There’s no reason we know of that would stop our descendants from continuing to live for billions of years, eventually colonizing the stars, and allowing for the existence of trillions of beings. Whatever it is that you enjoy about humanity, whether that’s art, engineering, or the search for truth, that can’t continue if there aren’t any humans. Full stop. As far as we know, we’re the only intelligence in the universe. If we screw up and end humanity before we get off this planet, then we don’t just end it for ourselves but perhaps we end all intelligent life for the remaining trillions of years of the universe.

Even though I was aware of the broad thesis of the book, I was continually impressed with just how many different angles Ord explores. He early on notes that while we might normally think of a catastrophic extinction event, like an asteroid impact, as the thing we are keen on avoiding, in fact there are several scenarios that would be similarly devastating. For example, if humanity were to suffer some calamity that did not kill everyone but left civilization stuck at pre-industrial technology, that would also preclude humanity from living for trillions of years and colonizing the stars. A 1984 style global totalitarian state would also halt humanity’s progress, perhaps permanently.

Ord also discusses the fundamental moral philosophy implications of his thesis. The natural pitch relies on utilitarian arguments as stated above; if humanity fails to reach its potential, this not only harms any humans currently alive but all future generations. Other arguments against extinction include a duty to our past and what we owe to our ancestors, the rights of those future generations who don’t get to decide for themselves, and the simple fact that we would lose everything we currently value.

The book categorizes three types of risk: natural, anthropogenic, and future risks. Natural includes asteroids, supervolcanoes, and stellar explosions. These are pretty diverse topics, and Ord is quite informative. The story about asteroid risk was particularly fascinating to me. In the 90s, the relatively new discovery of the dinosaurs’ demise led Congress to task NASA with identifying all the largest near-Earth asteroids to see if they pose a threat to Earth. They allocated some money, and NASA tracked every near-Earth asteroid over 10 km in length, and determined that none pose a threat in the next century. They then moved on to 1 km asteroids and have now mapped the vast majority of those as well. The total cost of the program was also quite small for the information provided — only $70 million.

This is one of the rare successes in existential risk so far. Unfortunately, as Ord points out several times in the book, current foundational existential risk research at present is no more than $50 million a year. Given the stakes, this is deeply troubling. As context, Ord points out that the global ice cream market is about $60 billion, some 1000x larger.

I’ll skip the other natural risks here, but the book bounds natural risk quite skillfully; humans have been around for about 200,000 years, so it seems natural risk can’t be much higher than 0.05% per century. Even then, we’d expect our technologically advanced civilization to be more robust to these risks than we have been in the past. Many species survived even the largest mass extinctions, and none of them had integrated circuits, written language, or the scientific method.

That doesn’t mean that all risk has declined over time. On the contrary, according to Ord, the vast majority of existential risk is anthropogenic in origin. Nuclear weapons and climate change dominate this next section. It’s remarkable just how callous early tests of nuclear weapons really were. Ord recounts how there were two major calculations undertaken by a committee of Berkeley physicists before the Manhattan project got underway in earnest. One was whether the temperature of a sustained nuclear reaction would ignite the entire atmosphere in a conflagration (the committee believed it would not). The other was whether Lithium-7 would contribute to a thermonuclear explosion (it was believed it would not). It turns out that Lithium-7 can contribute to a thermonuclear explosion as was found out when the Castle Bravo test was about three times larger than expected, irradiating some 15 nearby islands.

It turned out the other calculation was correct, and the first nuclear explosion in 1945 did not ignite the atmosphere. But clearly, given the failure of the other calculation, the level of confidence here was not high enough to warrant the risk of ending all life on Earth.

Luckily, current risk from nuclear weapons and climate change that would wipe out humanity seems quite low (although not zero). Even a nuclear winter scenario or high sea level rise would not make the entire Earth uninhabitable, and it is likely humans could adapt, although the loss of life would still be quite catastrophic.

Instead, the bulk of the risk identified by Toby Ord is in future technologies which grow more capable every year. These include engineered pandemics from our increasingly powerful and cheap control over DNA synthesis, as well as artificial intelligence from our increasingly powerful and integrated computer systems.

The threat of engineered pandemics is particularly prescient as I write this in August 2020 where SARS-CoV-2 is still sweeping the world. Ord notes that even given quite positive assumptions about whether anyone would want to destroy the world with a virus, if the cost is cheap enough, it only takes one crazy death cult to pull the trigger. Even an accidental creation of a superweapon is a serious risk, as production is cheap and there are many examples of accidental leakages of bioweapons from government laboratories in the past. Unfortunately, we are also woefully unprepared on this front. The Biological Weapons Convention had a budget of $1.4 million in 2019, which Ord notes is less than most McDonald’s franchises.

Risks from unaligned artificial intelligence are similarly related to technical advancements. Ord notes that artificial intelligence has had some impressive achievements recently from photo and face identification to translation and language processing to games like Go and Starcraft. As computer hardware gets better and more specific, and as we discover more efficient algorithmic applications of artificial intelligence, we should expect this trend to continue. It therefore seems plausible that sometime in the future, perhaps this century, we will see artificial intelligence exceed human ability in a wide variety of tasks and ability. The Precipice notes that, were this to happen with some sort of general intelligence, humanity would no longer be the most intelligent species on the planet. Unless we have some foresight and strategies in place, having a superior intelligence with it own goals could be considerably dangerous.

Unfortunately, we are already quite poor at getting complex algorithms to achieve complicated goals without causing harm (just take a look at the controversy around social media and misinformation, or social media and copyright algorithms). The use of deep learning neural networks in more high stakes environments means we could be facing opaque algorithmic outcomes from artificial intelligence that we don’t know if we’ve correctly programmed to achieve the goals we actually want. Throw in the fact that human civilizational goals are multifaceted and highly debated, and there is a great deal of mistakes that could occur between what humans “want” and what a superior intelligence attempts to accomplish. While Toby Ord doesn’t think we should shut down AI research, he does suggest we take this source of risk more seriously by devoting resources to addressing it and working on the problem.

So What Do We Do?

I’ve spent a lot of time on enumerating risks because I think they are a concrete way to get someone who is unfamiliar with existential risk to think about these ideas. But Ord isn’t writing a book of alarmism just to freak out his audience. Instead, starting with the high levels of risk and adding the extremely negative consequences, Ord details how we might begin to tackle these problems. Unprecedented risks come with modeling challenges: if an existential risk cannot by definition, have ever occurred, how can we know how likely it is? We have to acknowledge this limitation, use what incomplete knowledge we can have access to (number of near misses is a good start), and start building institutions to focus on solving these hard problems.

International coordination is a major factor here. Many of these problems are collective action problems. Humanity has found ways around collective action issues with international institutions before (nuclear arms treaties), and so we need to replicate those successes. Of course, we can’t establish new or better institutions unless we get broad agreement that these issues are major problems that need to be solved. Obviously, that’s why Ord wrote this book, but it’s also why I feel compelled to blog about it as well. More on that momentarily.

In this section of the book, The Precipice outlines preliminary directions we can work towards to improve our chances of avoiding existential catastrophes. These include obvious things like increasing the funding for the Biological Weapons Convention, but also discussions on how to think about technological progress, since much of our future existential risk rises as technology improves. We also obviously need more research on existential risk generally.

Finally, I want to wrap up discussing Appendix F, which is all of Ord’s general policy recommendations put into one place. As policy prioritization has long been an interest of mine, I found Toby Ord’s answer to be quite fascinating. I wrote a post a few months back discussing the highest impact policies actually being discussed in American politics in this election cycle. Comparing it to Toby Ord’s recommendations, the overlap is essentially nonexistent except for some points on climate change, which most democrats support such as the U.S. rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement. There’s also a point about leveraging the WHO to better respond to pandemics, and given Trump has essentially done the exact opposite by removing U.S. funding for the WHO, I suppose I should at least include that as relevant policy debate.

I want to emphasize that Ord has 9 pages of policy ideas, and many of them are likely uncontroversial (improve our understanding of long period comets, have the Biological Weapons Convention have a real budget), but our political system is failing to even address these challenges, and I think it’s important to highlight that.

There is room for optimism; human knowledge is improved by discussion and research, and that includes reading and blogging. If you find these ideas interesting, or even more broadly, if you think there are valuable things in the world, one of the most effective activities you could do this year might be to just read The Precipice. Even without the weight of humanity, the concepts, problem solving, and prose are worth the read all by themselves. This is definitely by favorite book I’ve read this year, and I’ve skipped over summarizing whole sections in the interests of time. Ord even has a whole uplifting chapter about humanity’s future potential, and is overall quite positive. Please attribute any gloominess on this topic to me and not the book.

And if you do read this book, it also just makes for intriguing conversation. I couldn’t help but tell people about some of the ideas here (“are supervolcanoes a national security threat?” ), and the approach is just wonderfully different, novel, and cross-disciplinary.

For more on this, but slightly short of reading the whole book, I also recommend Toby Ord’s excellent interview on the 80000 Hours Podcast. On that page you can also find a host of awesome links to related research and ideas about existential risk. I’ll also link Slate Star Codex’s longer review of The Precipice, and places to buy it.

We’re All State Capacity Libertarians Now

Tyler Cowen kicked off this year with a heavily discussed blog post defining what he calls “State Capacity Libertarianism“.

I didn’t get it.

Cowen described a moderate libertarianism while adding the nebulous concept of “state capacity”, in particular noting that a capable or powerful state was different from a tyrannical state. I read the words, but I assumed he was describing a “left libertarianism“, where a typical position might be to push for the government to collect efficient taxes, and then distribute those to everyone via a basic income, and avoid otherwise messing in the economy. I’m open to engaging with something like that, but I didn’t grok how Cowen’s take was different or what this view offered.

And then there was the worst pandemic we’ve seen in the 21st century. Huge swaths of the American economy have been shut down, and this disease is still likely to kill the equivalent of an entire year’s worth of influenza fatalities in a single month. Pandemics are an obvious market failure scenario, with difficult to control externalities, and thus we have state institutions to deal with this and pick up the slack. They failed.

Policy Failures

I looked up my first tweet about COVID-19 (back then it was just novel coronavirus or nCoV). It was on January 30 in a reply to Robert Wiblin. My first standalone tweet was a few days later:

Now, I wasn’t warning people that this would be bad or telling people to start prepping. But it was certainly something occupying my mind, as I tweeted about it a dozen times in February. I did start mildly stockpiling food and household items starting in mid-February. Ultimately, I consider my actions to be a failure. I didn’t short the market (although I didn’t buy any index funds either), I didn’t warn enough of my close friends and family to start gathering supplies, and I didn’t advocate loudly for changes in government policy. I was partially concerned about looking alarmist, which in retrospect was a really silly thing to be concerned about.

Nonetheless, this blog is a hobby. I have a day job which isn’t concerned about government policy. My question is about the people whose day job is pandemic preparedness. If an anonymous blogger with a few hundred twitter followers can be concerned about a possible pandemic, then where were the people who are paid specifically to deal with this eventuality?

Why didn’t the CDC and FDA start a program to quickly approve new COVID testing in mid-February instead of mid-March? In an exponential growth situation, that is a long time. Why didn’t they start pushing hospitals to create new isolation wards in February? Why didn’t the CDC start putting together lists of events it strongly urged local governments to cancel when the first case appeared at local hospitals? Why did the NBA have to unilaterally suspend its season only after a player was diagnosed in March? Why was there confusion between who was in charge and what steps should be taken?

Beyond lack of distancing and lockdowns, there were several other failures. Firstly, the CDC created their own test which differed from previously used ones in the world. It was shipped to public labs around the country and…didn’t work. The FDA compounded the problem, disallowing any tests except the one the CDC had created. The University of Washington virology lab was able to create their own test and applied to the FDA for approval. The FDA said it couldn’t approve the test until the lab had demonstrated it wouldn’t return false positives for other dangerous coronaviruses. Perhaps this would be a good idea in more normal circumstances, but it was an asinine requirement if you were trying to head off a pandemic where every day saw exponential growth in a virus spreading across the country. The lab started using the test through a research loophole, but the story gets crazier:

Still, Greninger complied. He called the CDC to inquire about getting some genetic material from a sample of SARS. The CDC, Greninger says, politely turned him down: the genetic material of the extremely contagious and deadly SARS virus was highly restricted.

“That’s when I thought, ‘Huh, maybe the FDA and the CDC haven’t talked about this at all,’” […] “I realized, Oh, wow, this is going to take a while, it’s going to take several weeks.”

By this point, there were already over 50 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States and still, nobody but the CDC was permitted to conduct testing.

It was on February 28th, a full 8 days after the UW virology lab had applied for their test to the FDA, that the agency finally allowed other tests besides the CDC’s. Of course, most other labs hadn’t started making a test yet. What a disaster.

What’s interesting to me about the testing fiasco was its independence from President Trump. I think Trump is a bad leader, incompetent, unintelligent, a bad judge of character, and has terrible policies, but ultimately the point of a capable bureaucracy would be to have experts on hand with the proper plans in place to implement them regardless of political leaders. We shouldn’t have to recreate all the accumulated knowledge of the government every time there is a new president. Here, Congress had created agencies to oversee health and pandemic responses, the scenario arose…and then those agencies actively made things worse.

Of course, we can’t allow President Trump off the hook. He decided to dismantle the NSC pandemic response team which Susan Rice had set up, combining it into a single directorate with arms control, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health. The president is entitled to manage the National Security Council bureaucracy as he wants, as it’s part of the EOP. It was claimed that there was too much bloat leftover from Obama’s NSC, and so this should have streamlined communication, which may have sounded reasonable. Nonetheless, whatever changes Trump implemented were a colossal failure. Managing the CDC, FDA, FEMA, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to coordinate in a pandemic is crucial, and it did not occur until weeks after it should have. We should ask if the NSC, which varies from president to president, should even have this coordination power or if Congress should implement a more permanent response hierarchy.

Moreover, the president himself downplayed concerns about the virus the entire month of February, and even promised that 15 cases would soon be down to “close to zero”. This is an idiotic statement but is not unexpected. Trump has long ignored expert advice, lied to the public, and spoken erratically about how his administration will execute at his direction. The difference is that while the first 3 years of his presidency had few crises that weren’t self created, a pandemic actually requires decision making and policy implementation. Trump claimed that he would surround himself with good managers, and yet his White House has been plagued with scandals, including one that resulted in his impeachment. Ultimately, Trump is responsible for the leaders of the agencies that failed so spectacularly to manage this crisis. When asked about the testing fiasco, Trump said “I don’t take responsibility at all”.

Finally, the Obama administration had even created a “pandemic playbook”, a 69 page document you can review at this link which details decision making rubrics, key agencies that need to be consulted, and which questions need to be asked. It’s apparently unclear if senior leaders at government agencies even knew the playbook existed.

“State Capacity”

The typical consequentialist libertarian critique runs something like “the government doing things is bad because the state has poor incentives”. However, with this pandemic, we have instances where the state did too much, like where the FDA got in the way of scaling life-saving testing, but also where the state did too little, like coordinating responses of expert state agencies, or providing guidelines to local governments. A consequentialist libertarian critique would have a hard time dealing with these two failure types, and as somewhat of a consequentialist libertarian, I didn’t understand Cowen’s “state capacity libertarianism” until I was faced with these current government failures.

In a pandemic, every individual and company wants to continue working and consuming as much as possible, but each action also endangers non-parties to the transaction (e.g. other grocery shoppers or attendees at a basketball game). Here was a role for government to play, and yet it completely failed in that role. While a more typical libertarianism might treat the state as a necessary evil from which helpful action is capricious and rare, state capacity libertarianism suggests there is an expected duty for the state to play where there are negative externalities like the spread of a pandemic. The government’s failure here should thus be taken more seriously under state capacity libertarianism.

This also opens up a discussion about “state management” that previously I have often avoided. For example, it’s quite onerous to file taxes in the United States. Some libertarians argue that this is actually a good thing, and in fact making these state interactions difficult helps to convey to citizens how useless the state is, and they will thus be supportive in making the state smaller. Other libertarians might argue that added difficulty in the form of coerced taxation is adding additional rights violations on top of an already immoral action. A state capacity libertarian approach wouldn’t have this confusion; in this view, taxes ought to be collected in the most economically efficient way possible (land value tax or Pigouvian externality taxes would be a good start), and that method should be carried out competently and easily by the state. The IRS would just calculate your Pigouvian externality tax and send you a bill without requiring each citizen to compile their own information, spend hundreds on tax advice and then be punished when the amount is incorrect.

Relatedly, the management ability of electoral candidates sometimes comes up, and I think I may have even argued in the past that if congress or the president are less capable, then they would pass fewer laws. If most laws are net negative, then perhaps this incompetence would be good. However, elected officials do not just pass laws, they impact how government services are carried out. When a high risk, externality-laden scenario arises, like a pandemic, the management aspect of governance rises in importance.

Many presidents, especially Trump, have campaigned on the idea that they are good managers. Until now, I mostly shrugged at these claims, since governing is most often about policy and posturing than actual management. Yet the rare scenarios where management is required have outsized impacts; having fire insurance doesn’t matter until you actually have a fire, but then it matters a great deal. If we are concerned about catastrophic risk, then government management is a vital skill to be evaluated. State capacity libertarianism strongly favors evaluating this skill.

Libertarian Critiques Remain

Finally, we should quickly cover that a strong libertarian critique of government intervention into markets remains. Private property based markets with competition have much better incentives for rapid development and innovation. The FDA’s intervention to thwart testing probably killed thousands, especially compared to an alternate world where additional testing kits were explicitly allowed beginning in mid-February. Libertarians have been criticizing FDA policy on slow drug approval for decades though, and COVID patients will not be the FDA’s only victims this year.

And that’s not the only place where the state is dangerous: the War on Drugs, for example, has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands as prohibition empowers organized crime, makes drugs more dangerous, incarcerates people for non-violent crimes, creates more violent interactions between citizens and police forces, and on and on. U.S. government policy has also resulted in long-lasting deadly wars in the Middle East with little to no concrete benefits for the U.S. globally, and I’m sure your local libertarian could continue on with a very long list.

This pandemic places into stark realization that government both needs to get out of the way in some areas to save lives, and also competently carry out the tasks only it can do. A Cowenian marriage of state capacity and libertarianism is the way forward.

How can we use our resources to help others the most?

This is the fundamental question of the Effective Altruism movement, and it should be the fundamental question of all charitable giving. I think the first fundamental insight of effective altruism (which really took it from Peter Singer) is that your donation can change someone’s life, and the wrong donation can accomplish nothing. People do not imagine charity in terms of “investments” and “payoffs”, yet GiveWell estimates that you can save a human life for somewhere in the magnitude of $2500.

Many American households donate that much to charity every year, and simply put, if the charities we donate to don’t try to maximize their impact, our donations may not help many people, when they could be saving a life.

This post is a short reminder that we have researched empirical evidence that you can make a difference in the world! The EA movement has already done very impressive work on how we might evaluate charitable giving, why the long term future matters, and what the most important and tractable issues might be.

Apart from the baseline incredible giving opportunities in global poverty (see GiveWell’s top charities), the long term future is an important and underfocused area of research. If humanity lives for a long time, then the vast majority of conscious humans who will exist will exist in the far future. Taking steps to ensure their existence could have massive payoffs, and concrete research in this area to avoid things like existential risk seems very important and underfunded.

I write this blog post not to shame people into donating their entire incomes (see Slate Star Codex on avoiding being eaten by consequentialist charitable impacts), but rather to ask donors to evaluate where you are sending your money within your budget and to see if perhaps the risk of paying such a high opportunity cost is worth it. Alma maters and church groups are the most common form of charity Americans give to, but the impacts from these areas seem much lower than donating to global poverty programs or the long term future.

Finally, part of this blog post is simply to publicly discuss what I donate to and to encourage others to create a charitable budget and allocate it to address problems that are large in the number of people they impact, highly neglected, and highly solvable. I thus donate about a third of my budget to GiveWell as a baseline based on evidence backed research to save lives today. I then donate another third of my budget to long term causes where I think the impact is the highest, but the tractability is perhaps the lowest. Top charities I’ve donated to here include the Machine Intelligence Research Institute for AI alignment research, as well as the Long Term Future Fund from EA Funds.

The last third of my budget is reserved to focusing on policy, which is where I believe the EA movement is currently weakest. I donate money to the Institute for Justice, as they work on fairly neglected problems in a tractable way, winning court cases to improve civil liberties for U.S. citizens. I also like the Center for Election Science as they work to improve the democratic processes in the US. It would be great to be able to move good policies to polities with bad institutions (i.e. many developing nations), but that problem seems highly intractable. It may be that the best we can do is create good institutions here and hope they are copied. I’m open to different ideas, but I am a relatively small donor and so I believe that taking risks with a portion of my donations in ways that differ from the main EA thrust is warranted. This is by far my most uncertain category, and thus usually I will not entirely fulfill my budget for policy charities. I plan on giving anything remaining to GiveWell.

There are many resources from the Effective Altruism community, and I’ll include several links of similar recommendations from around the EA community. If you haven’t heard of EA charities, consider giving some of your charity budget to GiveWell, or other EA organization you find convincing. If you don’t have a charity budget, consider making one for next year. Even small amounts a year can potentially save dozens of cumulative lives!

Insider Trading and Crime

I recently rediscovered a short piece I had written about insider trading. It’s not particularly relevant to anything happening today, but insider trading continues to be a crime prosecuted by authorities and here I offer a couple of reasons it should not be.

The standard libertarian counterpoint to insider trading being a crime is to ask who the victim of insider trading is when, for example, an insider sells their stock before it is announced that a publicly traded company has gone bankrupt. The intuitive answer should be the people who bought the stocks from the person with insider information.

But this doesn’t hold up very well. Those people could have bought the stock the day before from someone else. They could have even been indifferent to when they bought the stock. If that’s true, then how could one person selling it be moral and another person selling it be immoral? The people who bought the stock the day before are just as screwed. The people who bought it the day before would be screwed even if there was no insider trading, since the company is bankrupt anyway in this example.

Someone dumping the stock adds information to the market. If insider trading was legal, you’d have investigatory firms that spend lots of money infiltrating into companies, and you’d probably find out about a company having trouble way before they file for bankruptcy. In the long run fewer people might be screwed over.

Yet don’t we prosecute other similar “insider” situations, like a scam where someone sells a lemon car to an unwitting customer?

This seems different. There is a clear victim if someone lies about their car before selling it. The victim of insider trading is hard to find. It’s not the person who bought the stock, since they put in an order without knowing about who was selling or not that day. They could have bought it from anyone, since stocks are commodified. The victim is all stockholders, collectively. Yet the vast majority of the cost borne by stockholders is due to the actual company being bankrupt. In fact, had the insider trading not occurred, everyone who bought stocks that day would have had to pay a bit extra for their stock, losing even more money. Thus, there’s an argument that insider trading is actually beneficial to the theoretical “victims”, a very odd criminal justice situation.

However, a better argument is if the insider trader bought a ton of “put” options at high price from a market maker. The people holding the other end of the options would be screwed and clearly identifiable. I think it would make more sense to punish people who do those trades than public stock trading.

Also, it’s worth noting that there is a similar situation for “lemons”, referring to cars with manufacturing defects. This is an information asymmetry problem regardless of whether selling them is immoral. Even if you’re a nice person and tell everyone who inquires all the problems with your car, they may think you are still hiding something, since everyone has to assume any car may be a lemon. Thus, we need other ways around this market failure. Government is one method, but it’s got its own issues, as it’s not very agile, subject to political graft, etc. A better one is cheap inspections offered by local mechanics, which help fix the problem. Another is companies like CarMax, which have a national corporate reputation that would be damaged if they sold lemons.

The point being that long-run, as I mentioned before, allowing insider trading might actually be beneficial, as information leaks more freely when there are clear incentives to leak it. Going back to the put option example, the holder of the option knows they are exposed, so they are incentivized to sell some underlying stock as soon as they make the deal with the (unknown to them) insider. It’s one level removed from the insider directly trading on the stock price, but there’s still an incentive to reflect the insider knowledge in the stock price. Moreover, options can be traded as well as stocks, so a put option seller could be selling to both insider and non-insiders at any time; that again creates the situation that the “victim” would have likely had very similar things happening to them regardless of the insider trading (assuming a pretty liquid market). Again, the seller of the options is actually better off in the hypothetical world where there is an insider trader if you assume they would be selling these options regardless. The insider drives the price of the options up the more he buys them.

Information is valuable, and I don’t think it’s practical to expect everyone to have perfect information all the time (this is a consequentialist argument). If someone sells you their old crappy car, it doesn’t feel like he’s an outstanding person, but on the other hand, when someone lists something for too cheap on craigslist, it doesn’t seem like buyers should be required to tell them the item has been undervalued. Maybe they know that, but are moving this week, maybe they have two of something and the second one just isn’t worth the effort to talk to lots of buyers. And shouldn’t anyone selling know not to take the first offer?

In some sense, every agent in a trade has access to information the other person doesn’t have; this is the source of consumer surplus. You can buy cold medicine for cheap at a local pharmacy because the pharmacy has no way to price discriminate between rich people who are feeling terrible with a cold and would pay $200 for Sudafed, and someone who is cheap and only buying it just in case for $10. This results in huge consumer surpluses on almost every good, yet no one would seriously argue pharmacies or grocery stores are getting ripped off because they can’t tell how much you’d be willing to pay for every item. Some renters may be ready to do all sorts of bad things to an apartment, while some will leave it in perfect condition. Is this unfair that the landlord doesn’t know what kind of renter their tenant will be? I don’t think so. So then what makes insider trading economically special?

The real question is whether the decriminalization of insider trading creates perverse incentives to waste resources on finding out information. We already spend way too many societal resources on stock trading in my opinion. Reducing the clearing of stock market trades to once a second or once a minute would have minimal impact on long-term knowledge gathering about company performance, yet it would stop incentivizing millions of dollars spent on fractional-second computerized trading. Insider trading means firms could get a new edge by hiring infiltrators and detectives to get information on a company, or even just their financial data. Even though I believe strongly that the information usage of insider trading to make money on the market does not create victims and thus isn’t worth prosecuting, there is a risk that actual actions that insider trading incentivizes are negative.

Companies are free to run their organizations as desired, but as Matt Yglesias points out, right now they outsource enforcement of insider leaking to federal authorities. It might prove cheaper to have the Feds enforce information security than to have each company do so. CEOs might also be incentivized to trade on their knowledge, paying off others, securing information and funneling money through intermediaries, which is all wasteful. Of course, companies would want to avoid this, and so they might come up with good systems to thwart any approaches. However, interests external to the firm, like investment bankers or private equity, would have incentives to buy insider information from detective agencies, leading to an industry that wastes time tracking down these now legal information leakages.

Matt Yglesias notes this would lead to elements of a low-trust environment. I think there is some truth to that, but I think it’s also clear that jail time for insider trading is not a good use of societal resources. I think high fines and attaching names to guilty verdicts should be effective enough. Sending people to jail doesn’t protect anyone since there are no victims. Disincentivizing behavior monetarily and through public shaming should be enough, and I think it’s worth trying. Of course, this isn’t a a vital immediate criminal justice reform needed, but rather should be done as part of a larger rethinking of the criminal justice system as a whole.

Podcast Recommendations June 2018

A while ago I had an idea to try and catalog everything I could about the libertarian ideas on the internet, what organizations exist, which writers are interesting, whose podcasts discuss what, and compile it into a giant document. It was ambitious, but I figured over time I could add to it until it had tons of useful information.

When the 2016 election happened, a bunch of people and organizations I had considered pretty libertarian and conservative free marketers suddenly embraced a populist with no understanding of free trade or individual liberty. Not every conservative I had listed became someone I didn’t want to recommend, and I didn’t particularly want to politicize the list based on Trump, yet I couldn’t leave many recommendations out there. There was way too much to update, and so I abandoned the project. I’ve kept the blogs list in the sidebar, but I figured it was time to revisit some podcast recommendations.

Podcasts have become an excellent demonstration of the wonders of an unfettered free market. There are podcasts on virtually any topic you might be interested in, because they are just audio files, they can be distributed in a variety of methods and platforms in a decentralized way, and many are profitable on advertising alone. This decentralization also means that there aren’t specific places you might go to find out about new podcasts, and I have personally learned about most podcasts through other people. Consequently, I wanted to pass on some of the ones I listen to. If you have some good recommendations, leave a comment here or on reddit, or tweet @postlibertarian. I’m always looking for new podcasts.

EconTalk – A great podcast covering all sorts of economic issues, this is probably my favorite libertarian/economics podcast. Hosted by Russ Roberts, Hoover Institute Fellow, and free market leaning economist, Russ does an excellent job interviewing people he agrees and disagrees with, offering skepticism, even of his own biases, and investigating claims along the way.  It’s part of the Library of Economics and Liberty which also hosts EconLog, linked in the sidebar. It used to be about an hour, although nowadays he’s letting it go a bit longer.

Reason Podcast – This is podcast put out by Reason Magazine, which includes a Monday roundtable of all the senior editors at the magazine, including Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, and Peter Suderman, with occasional substitutions. I really enjoy it, and I recommend following them on Twitter as well. During the week, there are additional interviews, usually by Nick Gillespie, which I sometimes listen to. Also on the podcast is the audio for the monthly Soho Forum Debates, which are really interesting always debating topics of interest to libertarians.

The Fifth Column – An excellent libertarian news and analysis podcast with Matt Welch, Editor of Reason magazine, Kmele Foster, an entrepreneur and libertarian talking head, and Michael Moynahan, a libertarian-leaning columnist.  It’s more news focused than EconTalk, and more crude, but I find it is entertaining and provocative.

Security Now – If you are interested in cryptography and information security, this is the weekly podcast that covers security news. It’s on the TWiT (This Week in Tech) Network, hosted by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte. You can get a lot of the information by just reading through the show notes or the transcripts which are there on the website linked, and I’d recommend that as the podcast is pretty long. I just find there’s so much security news I don’t ever want to miss this podcast.

Rationally Speaking – Hosted by Julia Galef, this interview podcast covers a broad range of topics, but often centers around epistemology, science, and knowledge. Galef is a good interviewer and is able to engage with an eclectic and wide-ranging series of guests. I’m not sure how best to place this podcast besides in the “rationalist/LessWrong community”, but it’s absolutely not necessary to have any other interaction with that community to enjoy the podcast.

The 80000 Hours Podcast – 80000 Hours is an Effective Altruist organization focusing on how people can spend their career best benefiting humanity. The podcast, hosted by Rob Wiblin, explores various effective altruist interest areas, such as artificial intelligence, pandemic risk, animal welfare, or international development. It is worth listening to even if you aren’t interested in a career change, as they tend to go pretty in depth with each guest on exactly how an organization or person can have a large impact on the world.

The Economist Editor’s Picks – Sometimes I’m looking for a more international view of world affairs and The Economist is a lot better than many mainstream news sources. Of course, they publish way too much to read every week, so the editor’s picks podcast selects four top articles to check out. They’re usually pretty short so they’re easy to consume.

This post may end up becoming its own page, as I’ll certainly be able to update a page just for podcast recommendations.

Rawls and Consequentialism

I.

Are things getting better?

The Cato Institute’s HumanProgress.org promotes the wonders of the modern world as a general cheerleader of liberal capitalist democracy. It highlights that the Human Development Index is up around the world over the last 30 years, and worker earnings can purchase higher quality and cheaper goods than they could 40 years ago. However, not everything is peachy. Inequality is up, US labor force participation is down, and healthcare and education spending have increased faster than inflation for some time now. Technological breakthroughs seem to be about how best to spy on you to sell you targeted advertising instead of flying cars. I favor the idea that things have indeed gotten better, but perhaps it’s not as straightforward as I would like.

Let’s revisit an idea I wrote about two years ago.

John Rawls proposed the Veil of Ignorance as a thought experiment to help imagine a just society derived from first principles. Designing a world, people should imagine themselves having no knowledge of their natural abilities or social standing. In order for society to be just, it must be one that everyone would agree to behind this veil of ignorance (this is a big simplification, you can read more here).

Robert Nozick famously responded to Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, with Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and part of his critique of Rawls was that even a society that fit Rawls’ criteria of “just” would quickly become less equal since people do have unequal natural talents. Voluntary transactions between citizens would quickly reward those with natural abilities for in-demand skills, and thus society would quickly fail to meet Rawls’ “just” criteria despite starting from a state of justice and undergoing nothing but voluntary transactions.

Of course, I’m more interested in policy than political philosophy today. I should be clear that Rawls wrote this as a philosophy thought experiment, not a political goal, but that hasn’t stopped it from being used to encourage certain policy outcomes; economist Dan Ariely polled people, asking them to create a wealth distribution for a society they would willingly enter in a random place, and they overwhelmingly chose extremely equal societies.

There are a few fronts I’d like to push back on this. The first is that those polled severely underestimated the current level of inequality. This means they imagine society should be more equal than what they think it is, meaning they believe society is flawed today and perhaps could be fixed. Yet the problem is much “worse” than they imagine, and they didn’t seem aware today. Perhaps people overestimate the impact of wealth inequality on their lives. In fact there is some debate among economists on the extent to which inequality impacts economic growth (although most agree severely lopsided wealth disparities in developing nations indicate poor economic institutions and thus poor growth). Secondly, average people don’t have a great understanding of economic principles; a recent survey found only 57% of Americans thought free trade was good for the country, and this was one of the highest percentages ever recorded. This is despite the fact that economists overwhelmingly believe free trade benefits all societies. Thus, even if people did know the extent to which this was a problem, it’s unlikely they could provide a great argument balancing trade offs inherent in economic policy calculations.

The final, and most important point is that it would take significant policy interventions, economic and otherwise, to change the layout of society to match that which Rawls’ derives from first principles, and certainly which people surveyed want. These interventions could not be undertaken without massively changing the incentives for people in society. If high earnings are taxed at a massive rate, people may be significantly less interested in being productive, or they may choose to start businesses in other countries where productivity is not as punished by the tax system. Additionally, public choice theory tells us that government having control over a larger budget will become the target of rent-seeking and special interests who will prevent the more philosophical policy goals of redistribution from being carried out. American policy today is somewhat re-distributive. Transfer payments make up a vast amount of the federal budget, yet with annual budget deficits hovering around $1 trillion, there doesn’t seem much political will to increase taxes.

Given the political and economic realities we face, it’s worth investigating what options really appear in front of us. As I wrote two years ago, we can hijack an aspect of the veil of ignorance to actually promote an unequal society. Placing yourself behind the veil of ignorance, would you rather be in the more equal society of 1968 America or the more unequal society of 2018 America? In 2018 you have more expensive healthcare, it’s true, but you also have significantly more treatments available to you. You have more food choices generally, and certainly more healthy food choices for cheap. You have incredible communications and entertainment improvements for extraordinarily cheap. A gallon of gasoline costs almost the same in inflation adjusted dollars from 1975, yet it gets you several times as many miles in cars that are safer, more comfortable, and more reliable.

II.

So it does seem intuitively that things are better despite today’s society being arguable less fulfilling of Rawlsian justice. If society is improving in ways that  Rawls’ political philosophy can’t capture, we should be careful about referring back to it as justification for policy. Nonetheless, Rawls did ultimately endorse specific economic institutions, and did so 30 years after his original publication in his revised book, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement.

Rawls rejected utilitarian approaches to political philosophy, believing that his system would be rationally selected over utilitarian ideas, yet even if rational actors would choose a Rawlsian setup of society, we have no way to get from here to there in the real world. Government is subject to political pressures and it cannot carry out idealized philosophical implementations. Thus, it’s true that we could propose policies that might create a better society, perhaps even one that better approximates a “liberal political conception of justice” as Rawls states it. Yet those policies have to be grounded in the political reality of our world, and there may be tradeoffs.

Modern political philosophy, and Rawls in particular, seems to be ungrounded from real world political policies. Chris Freiman, author of Unequivocal Justice, agrees. Rawls’ chosen economic systems have never worked. Does democratic socialism exist? If it does, is Venezuela the height of liberalism? If it doesn’t, then maybe we should stick with working on welfare state capitalism, while political philosophy goes back to the drawing board with the knowledge that governments are subject to biases and interest group politics. Rawls’ other endorsement, “property owning democracies”, is an economic system that I had never heard of before, but again doesn’t seem to exist, and I’m not sure it has even been tried. Freiman goes further, pointing out that if a perfect state could exist, we wouldn’t need the state at all, as people would just voluntarily give their extra wealth to create the perfect society. The assumption that is the basis for needing a state to redistribute is the same assumption that shows why states cannot redistribute wealth perfectly.

I enjoy speculating about fundamental changes in society. But there’s something deeply fatalistic about creating an entire political philosophy, defining liberalism and the ultimate way to craft the good society, and then declaring that the only method of realizing it is through political and economic systems that have been abject failures, or, in the best arguable case, have never existed. This is not an argument for libertarian economic policy or a libertarian society.  That would tend to run into the exact same problem. Instead, this is a fundamental argument for a consequentialist philosophy. At the very least, idealized utopian fantasizing cannot be used to justify real world policy goals unless it’s built upon real world assumptions. Consequentialism is an excellent way to ground philosophy in the real world. This is also an argument for humility. There are very few economists who suggest state control of the economy would work without issues. It feels obvious that Rawls would have known this, so perhaps this is simply the best you can do with a current political philosophy knowledge, and perhaps technology will make these types of societies easier to achieve in the future.

Again though, this concedes that Rawls’ philosophy is only useful if it is completely separated from the real world. At the nicest, that seems risky to spend all your efforts on a philosophy that rests on fundamental assumptions of idealized government that is widely known to be false. Consequentialism focuses our work and discussion on the real world and demands empirical data to support policies.

Finally, don’t take this essay as a end-all critique of Rawlsian Contractarian Liberalism; instead, take it as a first step approach to why consequentialist utilitarianism is a helpful philosophy in policy discussion.

What is Postlibertarianism? v2.0

When I started blogging here about 18 months ago, I knew that I was having trouble identifying myself as exactly “libertarian”, despite that being my primary blogging perspective for years before that. I’ve mapped out important parts of this “new” position in previous posts, but now I think it would make sense to put everything in one place. This post is labeled “2.0” since former postlibertarian.com blogger Joshua Hedlund defined it pretty well in 2011. This is a more in depth analysis.
Continue reading What is Postlibertarianism? v2.0

The Age of Em

I.

I recently had the opportunity to see George Mason Professor Robin Hanson talk about his book, The Age of Em. I also was able to work my way into having a long conversation with him after his presentation.

For those who don’t know, it’s perhaps the strangest book you’ve ever heard of. Hanson looks to project forward in time when the technology exists to easily upload human brains into computer simulations. These “emulated” brains will have certain characteristics from residing in computer hardware: they can make copies of themselves, save versions of themselves for later, or delete versions of themselves. They will even be able to run faster or slower than normal human brains depending on what hardware they are running on. Hanson spends the book working through the implications of this new society. And there are a lot of fascinating insights.

Hanson discusses the pure physics of this world, as suddenly speed of light delays in communication mean a lot; if an em is running at a million times human speed, then a bad ping of 50 ms is equivalent to over 12 hours for a message to get sent today. This leads to very close physical locations of ems, which concentrates them in large cities. Their economy also grows much faster than ours due to the rapid speed at which their brains are thinking, although they may be physically restrained by how quickly the physical manufacturing of their hardware can occur. The economy also quickly moves to subsistence wages, as even the most productive members of society can have their brains copied as many times as needed to fill all roles. Elon Musk is no longer a one of kind genius, and in fact anyone who cannot compete with an Elon Musk version in their job would likely be cast aside. For a more detailed summary and examples of bizarre ideas, I recommend Part III of Scott Alexander’s post on the book.

II.

In that blog post, Scott goes on to discuss in Part IV the problem of value drift. Hanson does a good job pointing out that past human societies would not have approved of what we now consider acceptable. In some areas, the change in values in stunning. Merely 10 years ago, many had reservations about gay marriage. Merely 50 years ago, many Americans had serious reservations about interracial marriage.  On the scale of humans’ existence as a species, the amount of time we have accepted that people have the right to worship their own religion is minuscule. The section of human history where subsistence existence was not the only option is likewise small. Professor Hanson told our group that by far the most common reaction to his painting of the future was rejection.

I even asked him specifically about it: Hanson had stated several times that it was not his job or intention to make us like or hate this future, only to know about it. I pointed out that many AI researchers were very concerned about the safety of artificial intelligence and what it might do if it hits an intelligence explosion. To me, there seems to be little difference between the AI intelligence explosion and the Em economy explosion. Both would be human creations, making decisions and changing their values rapidly, at a pace that leaves most “normal” traditional physical humans behind. If many of the smartest people studying AI think that we should do a lot of work to make sure AI values line up with our own, shouldn’t we do the same thing with Ems? Hanson’s answer was basically that if we want to control the value systems of our descendants thousands of mental years in the future, well good luck with that.

Scott in Part IV of his review demonstrates the problem with just allowing this value drift to happen. Hanson calls the era we live in the “dream time” since it’s evolutionarily unusual for any species to be wealthy enough to have any values beyond “survive and reproduce”. For most of human history, there wasn’t much ability to build cities or share knowledge because too many resources were focused on survival. Today, we have become so productive and intelligent that humans have elevated Earth’s carrying capacity high above the amount of people we have. We don’t have to spend all our resources on survival and so we can come up with interesting philosophical ideas about morality and what the meaning of life is. We’ve also harnessed this evolutionary competitiveness to fuel our market economy where the determiner of what survives isn’t nature, but human desires. Unfortunately when you switch to the Age of Em, suddenly the most productive part of the economy is plunged back into a Malthusian trap with all resources going to keep the Ems alive. Fulfilling human wants may be what drives the economy, but if there are other pressures on Ems, they will be willing to sacrifice any values they have to keep themselves alive and competitive. If the economy gives up on fulfilling human demand, I wouldn’t call that a drift in values, I’d call that an absence of values.

If we live in the dream time, then we live in a unique situation where only we can comprehend and formulate higher morality and philosophical purpose. I think we should take advantage of that if we can.

III.

Hanson’s observations given his assumption that the Age of Em will happen are excellent, considering he is predicting far into the future. It’s likely things won’t work out exactly this way, as perhaps a single company will have a patent on brain scanning for a decade before the market really liberalizes; this could seriously delay the rapid economic growth Hanson sees. He acknowledges this, and keeps his book more of a prediction of what will happen if we don’t oppose this change. I’m not sure how far Hanson believes that regulation/intellectual property will not be able to thwart the age of em, but it seems that he’s more confident it will not be stopped than that it will be. This may be an economist mistake where regulation is sort of assumed away as the realm of political science. It’s not unprecedented that weird inefficient institutions would last far into the future. Intellectual property in the digital age is really weird, all things considered. Software patents especially seem like a way to patent pure logic. But there are others: banking being done with paper checks, daylight savings time, the existence of pennies, and, of course, Arby’s. There are also plenty of examples of new technologies that have evolved much faster than regulation, like supplements, e-commerce, and ride-sharing. It remains to be seen what brain emulations will be.

There is also the possibility that emulated brains won’t be the next big shift in human society. Hanson argues that this shift will rival that of the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. This makes a lot of sense if brain emulation is indeed the next big change. Eliezer Yudkowsky (and Scott) think this is incorrect and artificial intelligence will beat it. This seems like a real possibility. Scott points out that we often come up with technological equivalents of human biology far before actually emulating biology. This is mostly because biology has accidentally figured things out via evolution and thus it is often needlessly complicated. For example, aircraft usually fly via fixed wing aerodynamics, not by flapping. It seems likely that we will reach human level problem solving via software rather than via brain scanning. Even if we don’t, it seems likely that software could quickly optimize a simulation based on a preliminary brain scan that was too rough to get a proper brain emulation into hardware. But software assisted reconstruction could start experimenting with neuron simulation and create a software assisted brain emulation that is better designed and more specialized than any human brain emulation.

It also seems possible that other things could happen first that change human history, like very expensive climate change, a crippling pandemic (anti-biotic resistance), genetic and epigenetic engineering  and of course some technological revolution we haven’t even imagined (the unknown). Certainly if we assume continued economic growth, either brain emulation, artificial intelligence, or genetic engineering seem like likely candidates to transform humanity. Hanson thinks AI research is really overrated (he used to be an AI researcher) and isn’t progressing very fast. But he was an AI researcher about 25 years ago and we’ve seen some pretty impressive improvements in machine learning and natural language processing since then. We’ve also seen some improvement in brain emulation technology as well to be fair. Genetic engineering was hailed as the next revolution in the 1990s, but has floundered ever since. Last year though, the use of CRISPR in genome engineering has dramatically increased the feasibility of actually picking and choosing specific genes. Any of these could drastically change human society. Perhaps any genetic improvements would be overshadowed by brain emulation or AI. I guess it depends on the importance of the physical world vs the digital one.

Of course, not all changes could be from improved technology. There’s a significant risk of a global multi-drug resistant pandemic. Our overuse of antibiotics, the difficulty in making everyone stop overusing them, and our highly integrated world means we’ve created an excellent scenario for a superbug to appear and spread. Anything resembling the 1918 Spanish Flu Epidemic could be devastating to the world population and to economic growth. Climate change poses a similar risk to both life and the economy. If either of these were to happen, it could significantly deter the Age of Em from occurring or at least delay it, along with a lot of the progress of our civilization. And that’s not even mentioning additional freak natural disasters like coronal mass ejections.

Overall, predictions are very difficult and if I had to bet, I’d bet that the next big change in human civilization won’t be emulated brains. A good competitor is definitely artificial superintelligence, but when you add in genetic engineering, natural disasters, drug resistant bacterial epidemics, and so on, you have to take the field over brain emulations.

Nonetheless, this book really does make you think about the world in a different way with a perspective both more global and more forward looking. It even makes you question what it means to be human. The ins and outs of the 2016 election really fade away (despite my continued interest and blogging). Political squabbling doesn’t compare to the historical trends of human civilization and the dawn of transhumanism.

Comment on reddit.

Against Trump

In my last post, I made the case for why voting for a main party was far more likely to be a wasted vote than a vote for third party.  I made this argument on the basis of the presidential voting system itself, regardless of any voter’s actual policy preferences.

Nonetheless, if you think Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have the best policies or ideology, at best my argument should make you indifferent between voting for one of those candidates or leaving it blank (I advocated that one should still vote because of the often overlooked importance of local elections). If you prefer Donald Trump, this post will be my argument for why you shouldn’t. This is not an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, and I hope to write a post against her candidacy next. But there is a third option. I’ve already laid out the case for why it is more practical to vote for a third party rather than waste your vote on the Democrats and Republicans, but this post will show why you should prefer Gary Johnson’s moderate-limited-government-libertarianism to Trump.

Trump: The Troll

The most basic foundation of Trump’s appeal is his fervent opposition to the cultural left, especially the social justice movement and political correctness. In some sense, it doesn’t matter what he says; because he has said ridiculous and outrageous things, he has provided a “safe space” for people who can’t stand the recent domination, real or perceived, of left-wing outrage politics. The cultural left has created a tough situation for their opponents: if you don’t agree with them, they label you as a misogynist, fascist, and white supremacist. The alt-right was a fairly typical human response: they took the insults as a badge of honor.

So what has the left done about Donald Trump? A pretty common response (New York Times, Huffington Post, Vox) is to call him racist! Take a look at these accusations from that Huffington Post article:

  • He attacked Muslim Gold Star parents Khizr Khan and Ghazala Khan. His attack didn’t address their criticism, but suggested Mrs. Khan didn’t speak because of her religion.
  • The Justice Department sued his company in 1973 for not renting to black applicants, and there are stories from employees alleging that he was racist
  • He didn’t condemn David Duke’s support until the next day
  • He questions whether Obama was born in the US
  • He tweeted a picture of him eating a taco bowl to show he loves Hispanics
  • He condoned the attack by his supporters of a Black Lives Matter heckler at a campaign event
  • He claimed Judge Gonzalo Curiel was biased because of his Mexican heritage (Curiel was born in Boston).

These are all awful, insensitive, and moronic actions, but calling them racist or Trump a racist for doing them tries to equate Trump to the level of the KKK. If Trump is fundamentally appealing because he doesn’t back down from outrage tactics, and his supporters are tired of the left screaming that every deviation from progressive orthodoxy is white supremacy, then calling Trump racist is the worst thing you can do. And honestly on many of these issues, Trump is professionally trolling, going just over the line on what is acceptable to draw the outrage.

For example, Trump says he responded to the Khans because they criticized him first, which is true. His response was characterized by an attack on Ghazala Khan and an assumption about her actions due to her faith. This isn’t directly saying that Muslims are inferior, even though there is an implication. But if we just call this out as being “racist”, we really lose out on our argument demonstrating just how awful this episode was for Trump. In fact, Trump supporters can point out that many Islamic countries treat their women poorly and so this is worth questioning. By doing this, we let Trump deflect just how abysmally he managed that political catastrophe; instead, we should be discussing that Trump had no actual response to Khan’s accusations of his unconstitutional policies, and instead had to resort to unfounded assumptions and speculation. He would rather make up things about a family whose son died serving this country because he felt insulted than suck it up and avoid any more fallout. The sheer political incompetence is unspeakable, and the unconstitutionality of many of Trump’s policies remain unanswered.

Many other examples I listed also let Trump get away with absurd positions by jumping immediately to racism. His run-in with the Justice Department is important, but was also over 40 years ago. Was it his fault or his company’s, and does he still have those opinions? The idea of a government agency forcing him into a settlement on allegations of racism is also exactly the conspiracy narrative Trump wants. It seems likely he knows who David Duke is, but I’ve continually overestimated Trump’s abilities in other areas. And just having terrible people endorse you doesn’t automatically make you a bad person too. Trump likely supported the story Obama was born in Kenya because Obama’s father was originally a Kenyan national. It seems pretty easy for Trump supporters to argue he would have demanded a birth certificate of any person whose parentage was outside the US. Calling this racist really lets Trump change the subject to how PC culture is bad, when really we should be focusing on how much of an idiot you have to be to waste so much political capital on a conspiracy theory that was obviously wrong. There were plenty of grounds to criticize Obama’s policies, yet Trump decided to focus on discrediting his legitimacy through a conspiracy theory rather than actual ideas.

Calling it racist when Trump condoned an attack on a protester at his event is sort of the epitome of political correctness gone wrong: it implies that as long he condones violence against protesters of all races at his campaign events, it’s ok. The problem is not the race of the victim, the problem is that he’s condoning violence against people who disagree with him.  His statement against Judge Gonzalo Curiel is almost blatantly racist, as even Paul Ryan states, yet Trump could have easily cited Sonia Sotomayer’s “wise Latina” quote as evidence for why he believed a judge’s ethnicity could influence their opinions. If we get outraged about this, we fuel the perception that social justice not only has a monopoly on outrage politics, but that when the exact ideas that are promoted by the left are used by the right/conservatives/whatever-Trump-supporters-are, only they are attacked. It seems to be targeting of tribes, not even of ideas.

And that’s the point. Trump engages in a motte-and-bailey doctrine where he says things that obviously imply bigotry or outright harming non-Americans, but then if you call him on it, he deflects or calls it a joke. This is an annoying tribalistic tactic (often employed by social justice warriors and also Ann Coulter) where a group will make a ridiculous claim, but really support a weaker version of that claim (see part IV here). As Scott Alexander says, social justice warriors seem to imply ridiculous things like “men can’t be part of a discussion on gender”, but when challenged, they state more defensible positions like “men shouldn’t interject into safe spaces for women”.  Trump says some Mexicans coming over the border are rapists, with the implication being that the average illegal immigrant is a violent criminal. But if you call him on it, he’ll say that he also said “many of them are good people!” which is technically true. He also didn’t say 2nd amendment supporters should shoot Hillary Clinton, but he left it open.

Trump is in part successful (and especially appealing to the alt-right) because he meets social justice warriors with their own methods, and it’s hard to pin him down on anything because his entire presidential run is a giant troll. Of course, I really dislike many of the tactics of the social justice movement and the outrage tactics of internet culture wars. I’ve gone on the record about why I think their ideas and methods are bad. I understand the appeal of fighting fire with fire. But it won’t solve our problems. All of the criticisms aimed at the social justice movement still apply to Trump. We should be trying to elevate our society and discussions, not give in to the temptation to debase them. Collectivism is evil in all its forms, left-wing, right-wing, and bi-partisan.

Many Trump supporters have bought into his campaign as the only way to fight the social justice left. They are wrong on many levels; trolling can’t beat trolling, flip-flopping and incompetence can’t beat Hillary’s political machine, protectionism can’t beat markets, and nationalism and authoritarianism can’t beat freedom. In fact, by allowing Hillary Clinton, one of the weakest presidential candidates in recent history, to continue to dominate this election, Trump has handed the left one of their biggest political victories and squelched one of the biggest opportunities for American conservatives.

And Trump is not the only way to fight back against the worst methods and ideas of blue tribalism. One can oppose collectivism without sacrificing principles or lowering the level of dialogue. As I go through the following deep flaws that Trump has, keep in mind that Gary Johnson has none of them.

The Unknown

What does Trump actually believe? It’s almost impossible to know. These are just the positions I could find so far. I don’t think this list is comprehensive, but I want it recorded somewhere. Many of these are from this ABC news post, this CNN article, and this extensive NBC news article if they’re not otherwise cited.

  • He used to think pretty highly of Hillary Clinton and even invited the Clintons to his wedding, and now apparently thinks they are terrible.
  • Trump declared that he thought Obama was the founder of ISIS, and when pressed on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, he doubled down. Then after a full day of focusing on this point, he abruptly tweeted that it was sarcasm.
  • Trump was going to self-fund his campaign and not fund raise. But he’s gone back on that promise and is now taking money from whomever will give it to him. He was so short on money, he hadn’t even bought TV ads until the last week of August.
  • Trump started out ok with taking Syrian refugees, and then reversed his position and now wants to send them back.
  • Trump initially stated that Japan and South Korea should defend themselves, including with nuclear weapons. Now he says that’s preposterous and he never said that. How do you suffer amnesia about advocating the biggest change in US nuclear policy in history?
  • Trump has relentlessly hammered Clinton for supporting the Iraq War in 2003. It turns out in 2002, he backed the Iraq War too. Also, when asked about Mike Pence’s support of the war, he said it didn’t matter to him. But it still matters that Clinton backed it.
  • Trump made headlines stating he wanted to be a “neutral guy” in the Israel-Palestine conference (a big change from US policy which has held a strong alliance with Israel), and then said Israel was being treated like a second-class citizen later on.
  • Trump has also called the Libyan intervention a total disaster, but he in fact backed this intervention as well. When shown a video of his previous support, he acknowledges it and says he only wanted a “surgical” strike.
  • Trump was originally pro-choice and is now pro-life and even advocated that there should be “punishment” for women who get abortions. Admittedly in that interview, Chris Matthews did a good job of cornering Trump and not letting him get away with dodging the question, so maybe Trump doesn’t actually believe that. But that’s my point: we have no idea what this guy is going to do.
  • Trump advocated the use of torture especially against ISIS and suspected terrorists. When dozens of military advisers pointed out he would effectively be telling people to commit illegal acts, he stated “if I say do it, they’re gonna do it.” The next day Trump said he would be bound by laws just like any president, and then proceeded to call for waterboarding and torture in subsequent speeches.
  • Like abortion, Trump used to have a very different view on gun laws and actually supported an assault weapons ban. Now he’s a strong 2nd amendment supporter. Except in classrooms. Unless it’s a teacher in a classroom. What?
  • Trump was against raising the minimum wage, then for it, then said he wanted to leave it to the states, now says it should be over $10 and left to the states.
  • Trump has been for a single-payer system in the past and has praised Canada’s and Scotland’s system. But he hates Obamacare. But maybe he still likes the mandate. But he doesn’t know what he’d replace it with. His current website’s plan is a pretty good free market approach, but what would he actually pursue?
  • Trump was going to increase taxes on the rich, then said he would cut everyone’s taxes by huge amounts in an online proposal (that this blog looked at), then reduced the amount he would cut, and now it’s a pretty standard small income tax cut with an additional tax break for childcare
  • Trump seems to have called for a renegotiating of U.S. public debt similar to a debt restructuring for an insolvent firm. He seemed to have no idea that U.S. treasuries are so cheap to borrow with because they are never defaulted on. He even indicated that the U.S. can always print more money. Then he seemed to walk it back and say he wouldn’t renegotiate the American debt.
  • Last December Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” In May, this changed to a “suggestion”. Then he added the idea of banning people from places with a “history of terrorism”, then added there would be “extreme vetting” (so not an outright ban?). Trump and his people also added that there had been “no change” in their policy since December.
  • Trump has stated that he would deport 11 million people currently residing in the US illegally. This is significantly larger than the current population of New York City. Then he said he would deport them all, but bring back the “good ones” legally. Buzzfeed even reported that Trump stated off-the-record that deporting all 11 million is just a starting point for negotiations. Just a couple week’s ago, Trump seemed to abandon deportations altogether. Now it seems they are in full force again.

I should also note that Trump said he would call Bill Gates and get him to shut down the internet if need be. I didn’t list that here because I don’t think he ever repudiated that position so it’s not a “flip-flop”.  Trump also suggested Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Even on Trump’s most common talking point, his “wall” on the border with Mexico is obviously not true because, as John Oliver points out, it will cost far more than Trump says it will, and there is no way we can force Mexico to pay for it. Adding a tariff on Mexican imports does not force Mexico to pay for anything, it forces American consumers to fund the wall.

This is related to questions of Trump’s temperament; it appears that on many of these interviews, Trump has either never thought about the issue presented to him, lied about his position last time so he can’t remember what his position was, or just honestly changes his position because he’s not smart enough to have foreseen the objection, but wants to appear knowledgeable and so says that was his position the whole time.  The bottom line is that on virtually every issue, even the core issues he’s maintained, we have no idea what he will do.  On top of all this, Trump is capricious and easily offended. He has consistently filed lawsuits against press organizations that have criticized him, regardless of their ineffectiveness and potential attack on free speech. Do we want someone who has no principles, who has no idea where he stands on issues, and can be easily manipulated by his political enemies (“I don’t have thin skin”) to be in charge of our country’s national defense? The Supreme Court is an important issue in this election, but what makes us think we can trust Trump to actually pick from among the names he has mentioned before when he has changed his mind on everything else?

On many issues, he has taken positions not just worse than Gary Johnson or Hillary Clinton, but positions worse than any president in history. Will these be the positions he takes or will they change? Will any of his positions that sound reasonable stick around once he is president? We don’t know.

The Incompetence

Trump has a record of questionable business acumen as well as straight-up fraud. He certainly has done well in the real estate market, but in other ventures he’s been mostly a flop.  He has also widely exaggerated his net worth by constantly trying to tout his own brand. And, by admission of its own employees, Trump University had no interest in teaching any of its customers, only in selling them the most expensive seminars it could.

His political campaign has also been questionable. We will get to policy in the next section, but for now let’s just talk about Trump’s job as a politician, which is to get people to vote for you.  As I noted in May, Trump was one of the worst candidates the Republicans have had as far as political appeal.  He won the Republican presidential primary with only 45% of the vote. By itself, a number that low isn’t unprecedented, but when combined with the fact that most of his primary opponents have decided against endorsing him, he was one of the least liked Republican candidates among Republicans in recent memory.  He’s also only averaged above 40% in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average and above 44% in RealClearPolitics’ average for a couple weeks in July. He has never really pivoted to the general electorate. Trump has had several changes in his campaign management due to apparent incompetence. He will be the first presidential candidate since Nixon to not release his tax returns, and he has just started airing TV ads. That’s correct, Gary Johnson was outspending Trump on TV time until September.

Trump’s response to his abysmal appeal has been to suggest that all polls that don’t show him winning are rigged. In fact, Politico even published a column entitled “What if Trump doesn’t accept defeat?”  As already mentioned in this piece, he got into a very public spat with the parents of a Gold Star soldier who had given his life in 2004. He also said that “there must be some form of punishment” for women who get abortions, and then Ben Carson said that Trump wasn’t expecting that question. Trump wasn’t prepared for a question about abortion in a political event while running for President? You cannot be serious.

What is Trump’s plan in office when foreign heads of state ask him obvious questions he should know the answer to? What is he going to do when people don’t automatically like what he has to say? He has failed in essentially every venture that wasn’t real estate or a reality TV show. The inability to make changes for a better long-term strategy combined with the need to retaliate over every perceived insult disqualify Trump from being Commander-in-Chief.

The Policy

As I’ve stated, it’s hard to nail down what Trump believes on anything.  It often appears like he has never thought about policies or the implications of policies until objections are brought up to him.

One aspect that had been central to Trump was a hardline stance on immigration and deporting illegal immigrants. As of a couple weeks ago, he appears to have flipped on that and now flipped back, but his website still has language that appears to indicate serious criminal charges for anyone living here illegally. Even if Trump has become less focused on deportations, his immigration policy comes with absolutely massive costs, both fiscal and legal. As noted by John Oliver, his “wall” on the Mexican border will likely cost several times as much as he’s claimed, not to mention the hidden costs of wasting construction time and resources on building a concrete wall literally in the middle of nowhere.  If this project ever does happen (which it won’t), it will cause the cost of construction and related services to go up as resources are pulled into a giant wasteful wall. Moreover, as Trump’s website acknowledges, most illegal immigrants don’t sneak over the border; they cross with legal visas and overstay them, and so this wall will do almost nothing to stop illegal immigration.

There are also effects on American citizens as well who are forced to deal with questionably constitutional Border Patrol stops where people are pulled over with no reasonable suspicion or probable cause. Trump has also focused on crime caused by illegal immigrants, despite the fact that crime rates are much lower among this segment of the population than among American citizens. Terrorism, as noted by this blog, is so unlikely that the threat of terrorism via immigration is not even worth addressing.

Moreover, there is a self-evident free market argument for immigration; if the economy would work more efficiently without immigrants, they wouldn’t be coming. Specifically in the United States, immigration helps to expand our workforce while European economies shudder under high levels of retirees and low birthrates.  The OECD has also found that because immigrants come to work, they are productive enough to pay more in taxes than benefits they get out. Trump’s arguments for making H1-B visas harder to give out and more expensive just creates an incentive to ship jobs overseas rather than keep them here. Overall, it seems better for Americans (and likely the global economy) to keep immigrants coming here than to ship the jobs overseas.

There is certainly an argument that we haven’t seen this level of immigration in the United States in a while, even on a percentage scale. Immigrants now make up 13% of the population, but that’s still less than was common during the late 19th century. There’s also the true point that most immigration prior to the ending of national origin quotas in 1965 was from Europe.  Yet, since this is essentially a cultural and not an economic argument, at best this still argues that we should have open immigration–just from some countries and not others. It also doesn’t offer resistance to other forms of open immigration, such as for advanced degree holders (especially graduates of American universities).

We also have to acknowledge that there really are serious obstacles for potential immigrants right now…which has only resulted in illegal immigration. Trump acknowledges the economic burden of an over-regulated economy, but then proposes tons of new regulations on immigration. Using the state to pick winners and losers in the economy is a dangerous thing to do.

Trade is the other area Trump has been most outspoken on. Here, unlike immigration, there is no cultural argument, there is only economics. And it’s clear that when it comes to trade economics, Trump has no idea what he’s talking about. He would add tariffs to goods, making them more expensive for average Americans and cutting into middle-class purchasing power. He would start trade wars with China, and attempt to reverse foreign governments subsidizing their own exports which directly deposits foreign tax revenues into the pockets of American consumers. The protectionism he advocates is essentially an argument for the global economy to leave the US behind and to ensure that new technology and innovation is happening elsewhere while our economy stagnates and our lack of dynamism and competition gets even worse.

Why is Trump suggesting this? Bryan Caplan points out in The Myth of the Rational Voter that voters are subject to many biases, most of which you can find in Trump’s policies. This includes, among others, an anti-market bias and an anti-foreign bias, where voters tend to underestimate the benefits of market systems as well as underestimate the benefits of interacting with foreigners. But despite these biases, free trade is immensely good for the economy. Tariffs being some of the most regressive taxes we have, freer trade is also a big tax break for poor Americans relative to the rich.  Trade, along with immigration, is one of the best areas in which American policy can directly improve the world.

The Authoritarianism

Let’s take a quick history detour: in 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the DNC’s Headquarters in the Watergate Complex. They had been sent by the Nixon reelection committee, and the Nixon administration immediately sought to cover up their involvement. Nixon actually ordered the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the burglary, claiming national security issues.  The administration hoped that would prevent any further prying, but as more details came out, a Senate select committee was established in February 1973 to investigate a possible cover-up, and a special independent investigator was appointed by the attorney general.

When a Senate hearing uncovered that there were tapes of all Oval Office conversations, the Senate and special prosecutor subpoenaed the tapes, which Nixon refused to turn over, citing executive privilege. When the prosecutor persisted, Nixon actually ordered the attorney general to fire him, and the attorney general resigned in protest. Solicitor General Robert Bork eventually complied, but under political pressure, Nixon appointed a new special prosecutor. Edited transcripts were released in early 1974, which showed Nixon in a poor light, although they did not fully incriminate him. The new special prosecutor subpoenaed specific tapes which Nixon again refused to turn over. The case went to the Supreme Court which ruled unanimously that Nixon had no unqualified privilege of immunity from investigation, and that he had to turn over the tapes. Nixon did. They revealed clear wrongdoing on his part, and the House Judiciary committee recommended impeachment on several counts. Knowing he would soon be impeached and likely removed by the Senate, Nixon resigned.

There was a backlash against the office of the presidency after Nixon, but we have fully reversed that trend today. The Bush and Obama administrations have undertaken naked power grabs that have helped create an imperial presidency beyond anything Nixon ever dreamed of. Many libertarians have been warning about these massive power expansions for years. Now in the face of the Trump administration, we’ve created all the tools a tyrant would need to run amok.

As Conor Friedersdorf notes in The Atlantic:

  • The president can order American citizens killed in secret.
  • The president can detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial.
  • The president can order drone strikes at will in countries against which no war has been declared.
  • The president can start a torture program with impunity.
  • The president can conduct warrantless surveillance on tens of millions of Americans.

To that I would also add that if deemed a troublemaker, the government has plenty of options to attack you without disappearing you. We know at least the DEA and IRS have used NSA information gained through mass surveillance of Americans, and then obscured this source by finding another stated reason to stop a suspect. The enormous amount of statutes on the books means it’s almost certain average people break laws every single day, and so these law enforcement agencies can always find probable cause to arrest you. Then they can stack up charges to force a plea deal, all at the discretion of prosecutors.  As it stands right now, there’s a strong case that the criminal justice system is biased, slow, and unfair, and that it deprives individuals of their rights. But now imagine Trump in charge of the DEA, FBI, intelligence services, and the military.

Trump administration could be even worse than Nixon; given Trump’s continual flip-flopping, his trolling, his total unpreparedness for obvious challenges, and his terrible policy ideas, we don’t actually know if Trump understands how government works. Many of his fantastical policy ideas on his website go beyond the usual politicians’ wishlists; it’s unclear whether he would even try to sell his agenda to Congress, or just try to implement it with executive authority, or indeed if he would understand the difference.

For example, nestled in his immigration policy is a call to end birthright citizenship. Does Trump acknowledge what that would require? As Rand Paul has noted, the 1898 case US v Wong Kim Ark declared that children of legal immigrants were automatically citizens. It seems that Trump wants to overturn this case, which would require a constitutional amendment. It’s possible Trump wants only to stop birthright citizenship of illegal immigrants (he keeps changing his positions on everything), but does he want to do this with a law, or a legal battle? Does he realize that the president can’t pass laws unilaterally? It’s also worth wondering what Trump believes he can actually do on abortion. We’ve already discussed his bewildering stance that women should be punished for getting an abortion, a position basically no one else has ever advocated for. But does he realize that he would need to pass a constitutional amendment to achieve that goal?

Another example, he declared on a debate stage that if he told the military to commit war crimes they would do it. That’s not only against US law, that’s against international law. If he thinks that he can do things as president that are already illegal, what makes us think he would be waiting for Congress to do anything? How about shutting down parts of the internet? In Trump’s own words: “Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.” How about banning people based on their religion? Do we think Trump will wait for Congressional approval of obviously unconstitutional ideas? Or will he just order that they be done without thinking, just like everything else in his campaign?

The ACLU has released a 27 page memo on things Trump has said that are blatantly unconstitutional. It makes an excellent legal case against Trump’s ban on Muslims entering the country as well as his mass deportation of illegal immigrants. The magnitude of individual rights violations from deportations specifically would be staggering, as there is no way to arrest millions of immigrants without also arresting regular American citizens and legal residents as there is no way to tell them apart. Arrests would have to be done without probable cause and largely based on racial profiling with likely hundreds of thousands of law abiding people caught up in the dragnet. The police state necessary to accomplish such an action is likely beyond even the secret police organizations of former communist nations.

The ACLU memo also makes an important point concerning Trump’s promise to “open up the libel laws”: there are no federal libel statutes. What exactly Trump would do were he to be president and then find out that there are only state libel laws, I have no clue. But imagine the powers of the Justice Department in the hands of someone who has a history of abusing eminent domain and using the power of the justice system to silence critics. He has already blacklisted media outlets he doesn’t like and banned them from his campaign events. As Damon Root of Reason notes: “Just like a crybaby advocate of political correctness, Trump wants to hollow out the First Amendment in order to make a ‘safe space’ for himself.”

It’s not hard to see the abuses of the Nixon administration repeated under a hypothetical Trump one. But in 1974, when Nixon lost his appeal to the Supreme Court, he still turned over the tapes. I don’t know if we realize how vulnerable our constitution was in this moment. Constitutional power is not something physical; as Abraham Lincoln proved, the Supreme Court has no enforcement arm. In retrospect, if Nixon had just wanted to maximize his political power, it seems that his best plan would have been to not release the tapes and accept whatever political fallout that was. Maybe he would have been forced to resign, maybe not, but he only risked being in the same situation that actually happened. Trump has arguably already promised to do more unconstitutional things than Nixon ever did, and he’s less popular than Nixon ever was before Watergate. If in a similar situation, would Trump comply with the Supreme Court? With Congress? He’s already calling the election rigged before it’s even happened, and he doesn’t seem to believe polls that report him far behind Clinton (which he is). If he found himself thwarted by the other branches of government, would Trump allow the rule of law to occur, or subvert it using his executive authority? Would he even care that his actions were unpopular given how unpopular he already is?

Most of the problems in this section also apply to Hillary Clinton, and it is likely she would continue to abuse government power just like the Bush and Obama administrations. But while Trump may be running against Hillary, I’ve already made the case that your only decision in voting is whether to waste your vote on a main party, or help get a third party better ballot access. Gary Johnson specifically has been an outspoken critic of the advances of government power and the growing authoritarianism centralized in the presidency. If you want to stand against the increasing authoritarianism of the federal government, there is no way to justify voting for Trump over Gary Johnson.

Trump has many problems as a candidate: he is inconsistent, incompetent, and he reduces our ability to have real discussions. His policies are bad, but his authoritarian threats should give us the greatest pause. Would you vote for Richard Nixon today if Nixon told you he was going to abuse executive authority to preserver his own power? If he continuously attacked free speech and criticism, if he promised to arrest millions of people living in the US, do you think voting for him would be a good idea? Well, it’s not a hypothetical, all of these policies are literal quotations from Trump himself. You shouldn’t vote for Nixon, and you shouldn’t vote for Trump.

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Picture credit: Gage Skidmore, modified by postlibertarian.com (grayscale), licensed under BY-SA-2.0.