I don't have a clear answer to the question, but I want to point on the simplicity/simplification of some of the claims. (to be clear, I am not making claims here that one country/government is better than the other, or that one would be preferably to have AGI)

The idea that the Chinese government is responsible for improved prosperity of the Chinese people is somewhat true, but an alternative narrative would be that the Chinese government stopped preventing people from improving their lives, and then lots of foreign direct investment helped. There is also something to be said of "catch-up growth." Unfortunately, I have only the vaguest of understandings of the factors that influenced Chinese growth over the past few decades. I think it is also worth nothing that many of the things that the Chinese government has done for the flourishing of it's citizens are things that the US government had done previously (infrastructure, consumer protection, public universities, etc.).

The claim that a wealthy China will take care of everyone is a very strong claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Nations and governments tend to show a strong preference in favor of their own existence and their own people.

While there are plenty of things I dislike about the United States, I very much like the "liberal" aspect of liberal democracy: individual right matter, and a very strong justification is needed to violate individual rights. The USA doesn't always do this well, but I feel comfortable saying that it is less common for the US government and for government employees to violate individual rights than in China.

It is true that America's founding and expansion were based on exterminating other people. It is also true that many countries throughout history (including China) have spent military and government resources exterminating "others." It has been several decades since the USA engaged in or openly endorsed the extermination of a people. I hope that hope modern people look on those events with shame and disgust, regardless of whether they were 10 years ago or 500 years ago.

These are, of course, a very complex topic with lots of details and nuance. Plenty of full dissertations have been written on them. But to the extent possible I'd like to nudge us toward avoiding overly simplified narratives here on the EA Forum.

Thank you. Both the links to the tag on LessWrong and the dozen examples are helpful. I appreciate it.

When people write "more dakka," do they simply meaning that we need to try harder and/or try more things? I've seen this in two or three pieces of writing on the EA Forum, but I've never seen a clear explanation. Apparently "dakka" is slang from a sci-fi video game/tabletop RPG? Is this useless in-group terminology, or does this actually have value?

As best I can tell, "more dakka" is a reference to this quote. Can anyone point me to a more clear or authoritative explanation?

We know the solution. Our bullets work. We just need more. We need More (and better) (metaphorical) Dakka – rather than firing the standard number of metaphorical bullets, we need to fire more, absurdly more, whatever it takes until the enemy keels over dead.

Very interesting work! A few questions:

• Would it be easier to convince lots of people to buy and consume chanca piedra than to convince lots of people to drink an extra liter of water each day? Any thoughts comparing the relative impact and tractability of these two paths? I’m particularly thinking of patient compliance and of the fad/popularity of large water bottles in recent years.
• Have you spoken with a doctor or medical researcher specializing in kidney stones about this?
• Considerations regarding the distribution of pain? Not all kidney stones result in intense pain; some result in moderate or minor pain, which can be managed with analgesics and muscle relaxers. It does make sense that accounts online tend toward the more extreme, but we don’t want to assume that these are representative of kidney stone experiences. As an analogy to cancer, The top voted and most visible posts about cancer online are never stage A1 cancers that are easily treated and cause minimal life disruption.

I’ll certainly add some chanca piedra to my digital shopping cart and consider actually buying some. I appreciate you taking all the time and effort to do this. I imagine it took a lot of effort.

I would very much like to see something like this. Being able to communicate EA ideas to people that are roughly aligned in terms of many altruistic values is useful.

I'm not able to provide much insight regarding the options you listed, but I want to make a quick note about reaching your FIRE number and potential future donations. If you decided that you need X dollars per year before you feel comfortable FIREing, see if you can have enough in investments so that you have a little more than X per year in investment income, maybe 1.1X or 1.2X. That way you would be able to generate ever-increasing donations without lowering your own quality of life.

Some previous thoughts I threw together a while back that might help a little bit: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/sbtdPJpeKDtYLr2Zf/joseph-lemien-s-shortform?commentId=AWaKkWjBpiAnrtRAC 

I'm going to draw an analogy to finance/investments. If I check the level of the stock market every day or multiple times a day, I become acutely aware of increases and decreases. I might feel a rush of adrenaline when the stock market goes up by 2%, and an overwhelming feeling of despair if it drops by 2%. But if I stop checking it frequently, I can "zoom out" and see that the broader trend is upward. It is true that there is a lot of variation on a short timeline, but over decades the trend is quite clearly upward. Like all analogies, this falls somewhat short in a variety of ways, but the idea I want to drive home is that "the news is just incredibly depressing" because we look at the short-term news. We allow ourselves to be emotionally buffeted and battered by what is happening this day or this week rather than paying attention to larger trends. If it really is vital for a job to stay up to date on the latest news, then at least try to keep some perspective: what is and isn't within your control, and this too shall pass.

One useful framing can be asking yourself if there is anything you can do to affect this, asking why you care about this particular issue, and asking if there is any purpose/outcome in focusing it. I think that people dying in a civil war in Yemen is horrible because I detest suffering in general, but I have no influence to affect that at all, and my worrying about it doesn't serve any purpose. I think that the world will be a worse place if USAID funding is reduced, but there isn't any benefit to me stressing out about that. There are a million things that I would like to see different in the world, but most of them are very much outside my scope of influence.

Thanks for sharing your list. Several of these are new to me, and look useful.

I want to second the recommendation for Everything. It is much faster and easier than the built-in search function on a Windows computer, and it also allows for a variety of parameters to the search. If I want to quickly list out all the files I have related to a particular topic, Everything is what I use. As a simple example "Documents\Docs to Read\" !pdf market|promo would search for files within the Docs to Read folder that have either market or pomo in the title (which would capture marketing and promotion), excluding and PDFs. You can even use regular expressions.

I also want to second the recommendation for Libby for free, legal access to audiobooks and digital books through public libraries.

(my apologies for commenting here without having read your academic paper)

I suspect that two major elements prevent anti-capitalist ideas from being more popular within EA.

1. First, it tends to be an issue that draws a lot of negative attention as a result of being far outside the Overton window.^[1] I'm guessing that if influential EA organizations or figures came out against capitalism, that would do more harm than good: other EA organizations or figures  would disagree, and many newspaper articles would be published ridiculing EA. While reputation and status is not the goal of EA, it is (much like other types of power) a useful tool for achieving altruistic goals.
2. Second, most of us lack a coherent vision of what else we would use as an economic system. The majority of people in EA have lived with a capitalistic economy and society their entire lives. Although some anthropologists or scholars might have a clear conception, I'm guessing that most of us have a lot of ignorance regarding what we would replace capitalism with.^[2]

And that isn't even getting into the tractability element.

1. ^{^}

   If the leader of some organization (say, the Catholic church) were to make a statement that capitalism is bad for people and a different economic system should pursued, many Catholics would (to varying degrees) disagree, disrespect, or leave the catholic church. Even people who are not part of the catholic church would talk about how ridiculous the church's statement is. It would make it harder to convert people to Catholicism. 

2. ^{^}

   I have vague conceptions of worker's communes from documentaries I've watched, and I've read plenty about ways that non-capitalistic systems have failed, but I have a paucity of examples for ways that non-capitalistic systems have succeeded. I'd love to live in an intentional community with respect and equality and each contributing according to their ability, but I have no idea how that would work on a society-wide scale. So although the idea appeals to me, it is hard for me to envision how it would actually function.