What section do you put Marco Rubio in?

The side that defied a court order to eliminate 90% of USAID programs this week including all the lifesaving programs described above, with the name Marco Rubio referenced as being the decision-making authority in the termination letters.

I'm not sure the number of statements he's made in favour of some of these programs being lifesaving before termination letters were sent out in his name is a mitigating factor. And if he's not actually making the decisions it's a moot point: appealing to Rubio's better nature doesn't seem to be a way forward.

Where was USAID mentioned in the PDF you linked?

My bad, I should have linked to this one 

FWIW I agree with your point that people who are broadly neutral/sympathetic are more likely to be sympathetic to a broad explainer than a "denunciation".

But I worded my post quite carefully, it's "people who like Musk's cuts to US Aid and AI Safety" I don't think overlap with EA. I don't imagine either of the EA-affiliated people you linked to would object to EAs pointing out that Musk shutting down AI safety institutes might be the opposite of what he says he cares about. And I don't think people who think foreign aid is a big scam and AI should be unregulated are putative EAs (whether they trust Musk or not!)

I don't think a "denunciation" is needed, but I don't think avoiding criticising political figures because they're sensitive, powerful and have some public support is a way forward either.

I'm pushing back more at 80k ranking it as a priority above the likes of global health or mental health rather than concluding it doesn't have any value and nobody should be studying it! 

I mean, something like CleanSeaNet probably is cost effective using standard EA [animal welfare] metrics, it's certainly very effective at stopping oil dumping in the Med, but I wouldn't treat that sort of program as a higher level of priority than any other area of environmental law enforcement (and it's one which is already relatively easy to get space agency funding for....). 

Well I did say I went further than you! 

Agree there are valid space policy considerations (and I could add to that list)^[1], but I think lack of tractability is a bigger problem than neglect.^[2] Everyone involved in space already knows ASAT weapons are a terrible idea, they're technically banned since 1966, but yes, tests have happened despite that because superpowers gotta superpower. As with many other international relations problems - and space is more important than some of those and less than others -  the problem is lack of coordination and enforceability rather than lack of awareness that problems might exist. Similarly Elon's obligation to deorbit Starlink at end of life is linked to SpaceX's FCC licence and parallel ESA regulation exists.^[3] If he decides to gut the FCC and disregard it, it won't be from lack of study into congested orbital space or lack of awareness the problem exists. 

1. ^{^}

   "Examine environmental effects of deorbiting masses of satellites into the mesosphere and potential implications for future LEO deorbiting policy"  would be at the top of my personal list for timeliness and terrestrial impact...

2. ^{^}

   And above all, am struggling to see the marginal impact being bigger than health. as 80k suggested. 

3. ^{^}

   It's also not in SpaceX's interests to jeopardise LEO because they extract more economic value from that space than anyone else...

Charities removing false claims from their website is usually a good thing that should happen as soon as possible.

The exception to this would be if they are removing them to deny the claim was ever made and attack your credibility, but a mixture of screenshots, archive links and sharing reviews in advance with other trusted third parties who don't have any stake in those companies should be enough to make that approach very unlikely to work.

Frankly it's much lower risk for charities to respond with "we have corrected this. these are our excuses. but thanks anyway" even if its a really bad excuse than try to claim they never said anything

That's more than I thought, but it's also a decade ago when Elon had very different priorities, and I'm not sure that EA has any image problems associated with people thinking EAs basically want what Elon wants. (I don't think the Transgender Law Center needs to worry their name might be sullied by his donation to them in 2011 either!)

I largely agree with this, and would go further and say I think that in most cases I don't think space governance is even a solution to the problems humanity want to solve, as much as a background consideration that will need to be taken into account if deploying some potential solutions, and one which you probably need to speak with the specialists if you are deploying those solutions.

"Space governance" can easily be compared to international policy because much of it is a niche specialism within that category (especially the "what about the future of the solar system" questions that seem to animate longtermists). For more practical near term considerations like monitoring the environment or crop health or human rights or threats from passing asteroids, space assets are just tools, albeit tools that are much more useful with someone who understands how to interpret them in legal contexts and how to communicate with policymakers. Other aspects are just about how governments regulate companies' activity, with a safety aspect that's closer to the "should we consider this 1 in 10000 possibility of hitting a person" than preventing nuclear armageddon.^[1] 

Even as one of the few people actually likely to apportion [commercial R&D] grant funding towards a research that could be construed as "space governance" in the next couple of years, I'd really struggle to rate it as being as important for maximising global impact as 80k Hours does.^[2] A potentially interesting and rewarding career which can have positive outcomes if people actually listen to you, yes . Amongst the top ten things a talented individual could do to positively impact human lives, nope.

P.S. thanks for linking your paper, I'll add it to my reading list.

1. ^{^}

   I mean, Kessler syndrome would have a huge impact on some critical technology short term, but that's a risk addressed by developing technical risk mitigation and debris clearing solutions, not by policy papers for regulators who are very aware of its threat already.

2. ^{^}

   More impactful at the margin than global health!

I don't think it's necessary for EA to denounce Musk on the basis that apart from a vague endorsement of a book a few years back and some general comments on AI safety which run in the opposite direction to his actual actions, he doesn't seem to be associated with EA at all. (cf people like SBF needing "denouncements" because they were poster boys for it)

But I don't think the popularity stat you've put up there is particularly representative of his present popularity or the direction it's likely to trend in. More recent polls suggest he's incredibly unpopular in Europe, whilst in the US's more partisan environment his popularity clearly depends on party allegiance, but is still well underwater and less popular than USAID etc and also trending downwards.

Yes, people working in policy have to work with the polity they've got, not the one they want, but I suspect if you drew a Venn diagramm of "people who like Musk's cuts to US Aid, AI safety initiatives etc" and "people who are likely to be remotely supportive of EA there wouldn't be much overlap. I suspect many of the conservatives sympathetic to some of the things EA wants to do are the ones that think he has too much power and is taking the wrong approach...

Using colloquial, simple language is often appropriate, even if it's not maximally precise. In fact, maximally precise doesn't even exist -- we always have to decide how detailed and complete a picture to paint. 

I tend to agree, but historically EA (especially GiveWell) has been critical of the "donor illusion" involved in things like "sponsorship" of children in areas the NGO has already decided to fund by mainstream charities on a similar basis. More explicit statistical claims about future marginal outcomes based on estimates of outcomes of historic campaign spend or claims about liberating from confinement and mutilation when it's one or the other free seem harder to justify than some of the other stuff condemned as "donor illusion".

Even leaning towards the view it's much better for charities to have effective marketing than statistical and semantic exactness, that debate is moot if estimates are based mainly on taking credit for decisions other parties had already made, as claimed by the VettedCauses review. If it's true^[1] that some of their figures come from commitments they should have known do not exist and laws they should have known were already changed it would be absolutely fair to characterise those claims as "false", even if it comes from honest confusion (perhaps ACE - apparently the source of the figures - not understanding the local context of Sinergia's campaigns?)

1. ^{^}

   I would like to hear Sinergia's response, and am happy for them to take their time if they need to do more research to clarify.

I think the problem of entities lying about what they're doing (especially in low trust regions) is wider than just corporate campaigns. Ultimately charities have to make some sort of decision on how and if to audit whether the outcomes they're expecting are the ones they're getting. 

Asking whether Sinergia had any way to evaluate whether companies were complying (before or after their intervention) is I think the main reason that it would have been good for VettedCauses to share their initial findings before publication. Sinergia appear to have Brazilian staff focused on this specific issue so they shouldn't have been ignorant of the relevant law, but it's possible they intentionally targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant (this is the whole theory of change behind Legal Impact for Chickens) and had some success. It is also possible they targeted companies they suspected were noncompliant and simply believed what the companies said in response. It is also possible there are loopholes and exemptions in the law. But I'd still have to agree that taking 70% of the credit for campaigning against something already made illegal is a bold claim, and some of the other claims Sinergia made don't seem justifiable either.