EA - Be less trusting of intuitive arguments about social phenomena by Nathan Barnard

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Be less trusting of intuitive arguments about social phenomena, published by Nathan Barnard on December 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.note: I think this applies much less or even not all in domains where you’re getting tight feedback on your models and have to take actions based on them which you’re then evaluated on.I think there’s a trend in the effective altruist and rationality communities to be quite trusting of arguments about how social phenomena work that have theoretical models that are intuitively appealing and have anecdotal evidence or non-systematic observational evidence to support them. The sorts of things I’m thinking about are:The evaporative cooling model of communitiesMy friend’s argument that community builders shouldn't spend [edit: most] of their time talking to people they consider less sharp than them to people less sharp than them because it’ll harm their epistemicCurrent EA community is selecting for uncritical peopleAsking people explicitly if they’re altruistic will just select for people who are good lairs (person doing selections for admittance to an EA thing)The toxoplasma of rageMax Tegmark’s model of nuclear warJohn Wentworth’s post on takeoff speedsI think this is a really bad epistemology for thinking about social phenomena.Here are some examples of arguments I could make that we know are wrong but seem reasonable based on arguments some people find intuitive and observational evidence:Having a minimum wage will increase unemployment rates. Employers hire workers up until the point that the marginal revenue generated by each worker equals the marginal cost of hiring workers. If the wage workers have to be paid goes up then unemployment will go up because marginal productivity is diminishing in the number of workers.Increasing interest rates will increase inflation. Firms set their prices as a cost plus a markup and so if their costs increase because the price of loans goes up then firms will increase prices which means that inflation goes up. My friend works as a handyman and he charges £150 for a day of work plus the price of materials. If the price of materials went up he’d charge moreLetting people emigrate to rich countries from poor countries will increase crime in rich countries. The immigrants who are most likely to leave their home countries are those who have the least social ties and the worst employment outlooks in their home countries. This selects people who are more likely to be criminals because criminals are likely to have bad job opportunities in their home countries and weak ties to their families. If we try and filter out criminals we end up selecting smart criminals who are good at hiding their misdeeds. If you look at areas with high crime rates they often have large foreign immigrant populations. [Edit - most people wouldn't find this selection argument intuitive but I thought it was worth including because of how common selection based arguments are in the EA and rationality communities.I'm also not taking aim at arguments that are intuitively obvious rather arguments that those making find intuitively appeal, even if they're counterintuitive in some way. i.e some people think that adverse selection is a common and powerful force even though adverse selection is a counter-intutive concept.]Cash transfers increase poverty, or at least are unlikely to reduce more than in-kind transfers or job training. We that people in low-income countries often spend a large fraction of their incomes on tobacco and alcohol products. By giving these people cash they have more money to spend on tobacco and alcohol meaning they’re more likely to suffer from addiction problems that keep them in poverty. We also know that poverty selects people who make poor financial decisions, so giving people cash give...