The full quote suggests this is because he classifies Operation Warp Speed (reactive, targeted) as very different from the Office (wasteful, impossible to predict what you'll need, didn't work last time). I would classify this as a disagreement about means rather than ends.

One last question, Mr. President, because I know that your time is limited, and I appreciate your generosity. We have just reached the four-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic. One of your historic accomplishments was Operation Warp Speed. If we were to have another pandemic, would you take the same actions to manufacture and distribute a vaccine and get it in the arms of Americans as quickly as possible?

Trump: I did a phenomenal job. I appreciate the way you worded that question. So I have a very important Democrat friend, who probably votes for me, but I'm not 100% sure, because he's a serious Democrat, and he asked me about it. He said Operation Warp Speed was one of the greatest achievements in the history of government. What you did was incredible, the speed of it, and the, you know, it was supposed to take anywhere from five to 12 years, the whole thing. Not only that: the ventilators, the therapeutics, Regeneron and other things. I mean Regeneron was incredible. But therapeutics—everything. The overall—Operation Warp Speed, and you never talk about it. Democrats talk about it as if it’s the greatest achievement. So I don’t talk about it. I let others talk about it. 

You know, you have strong opinions both ways on the vaccines. It's interesting. The Democrats love the vaccine. The Democrats. Only reason I don’t take credit for it. The Republicans, in many cases, don’t, although many of them got it, I can tell you. It’s very interesting. Some of the ones who talk the most. I said, “Well, you didn’t have it did you?” Well, actually he did, but you know, et cetera. 

But Democrats think it’s an incredible, incredible achievement, and they wish they could take credit for it, and Republicans don’t. I don't bring it up. All I do is just, I do the right thing. And we've gotten actually a lot of credit for Operation Warp Speed. And the power and the speed was incredible. And don’t forget, when I said, nobody had any idea what this was. You know, we’re two and a half years, almost three years, nobody ever. Everybody thought of a pandemic as an ancient problem. No longer a modern problem, right? You know, you don't think of that? You hear about 1917 in Europe and all. You didn’t think that could happen. You learned if you could. But nobody saw that coming and we took over, and I’m not blaming the past administrations at all, because again, nobody saw it coming. But the cupboards were bare. 

We had no gowns, we had no masks. We had no goggles, we had no medicines. We had no ventilators. We had nothing. The cupboards were totally bare. And I energized the country like nobody’s ever energized our country. A lot of people give us credit for that. Unfortunately, they’re mostly Democrats that give me the credit.

Well, sir, would you do the same thing again to get vaccines in the arms of Americans as quickly as possible, if it happened again in the next four years?

Trump: Well, there are the variations of it. I mean, you know, we also learned when that first came out, nobody had any idea what this was, this was something that nobody heard of. At that time, they didn’t call it Covid. They called it various names. Somehow they settled on Covid. It was the China virus, various other names. 

But when this came along, nobody had any idea. All they knew was dust coming in from China. And there were bad things happening in China around Wuhan. You know, I predicted. I think you'd know this, but I was very strong on saying that this came from Wuhan. And it came from the Wuhan labs. And I said that from day one. Because I saw things that led me to believe that, very strongly led me to believe that. But I was right on that. A lot of people say that now that Trump really did get it right. A lot of people said, “Oh, it came from caves, or it came from other countries.” China was trying to convince people that it came from Italy and France, you know, first Italy, then France. I said, “No, it came from China, and it came from the Wuhan labs.” And that's where it ended up coming from. So you know, and I said that very early. I never said anything else actually. But I've been given a lot of credit for Operation Warp Speed. But most of that credit has come from Democrats. And I think a big portion of Republicans agree with it, too. But a lot of them don't want to say it. They don't want to talk about it.

So last follow-up: The Biden Administration created the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, a permanent office in the executive branch tasked with preparing for epidemics that have not yet emerged. You disbanded a similar office in 2018 that Obama had created. Would you disband Biden's office, too?

Trump: Well, he wants to spend a lot of money on something that you don't know if it's gonna be 100 years or 50 years or 25 years. And it's just a way of giving out pork. And, yeah, I probably would, because I think we've learned a lot and we can mobilize, you know, we can mobilize. A lot of the things that you do and a lot of the equipment that you buy is obsolete when you get hit with something. And as far as medicines, you know, these medicines are very different depending on what strains, depending on what type of flu or virus it may be. You know, things change so much. So, yeah, I think I would. It doesn't mean that we're not watching out for it all the time. But it's very hard to predict what's coming because there are a lot of variations of these pandemics. I mean, the variations are incredible, if you look at it. But we did a great job with the therapeutics. And, again, these therapeutics were specific to this, not for something else. So, no, I think it's just another—I think it sounds good politically, but I think it's a very expensive solution to something that won't work. You have to move quickly when you see it happening.

link

Cool idea, thanks for working on it.

According to this article, only Deepmind gave the UK AI Institute (partial?) access to their model before release. This seems like a pro-social thing to do so maybe this could be worth tracking in some way if possible.

Yeah I agree Richard's story is about illustrating journal incentives and behaviour, not specially about a Right of Reply. In the specific Leif Weinar case I would say that Will, and maybe CEA, [should] have a Right of Reply, but a random EA person would not.

I don't think it's that strange to accept replies for lower-quality work. A newspaper, when quoting the subject of an article saying "the accusations are false and malicious and we are confident the Judge will side with us" or whatever is guaranteeing them space even though they wouldn't have given the subject a platform normally. The purpose of the reply is to allow readers to better evaluate the criticism, which was deemed sufficient quality to publish, and if the reply is low quality then that is informative by itself. Important to this is that replies should be constrained to a much shorter length than the criticism itself.

All academic works have a right to reply. Many journals print response papers and it is a live option to submit responses to critical papers, including mine. It is also common to respond to others in the context of a larger paper. The only limit to the right of academic reply is that the response must be of suitable quality and interest to satisfy expert reviewers.

This sounds like... not having a right of reply? The right means a strong presumption if not an absolute policy that criticized people can defend themselves in the same place as they were criticized. If only many, not all, journals print response papers, and only if you jump through whatever hoops and criteria the expert reviewers put in front of you, I'm not sure how this is different to 'no right of reply'.

A serious right would mean journals would send you an email with the critical paper, the code and the underlying data, and give you time to create your response (subject to some word limit, copy-editing etc.) for them to publish. 

I vaguely remember some universities getting into trouble with allegations that they were divvying up choice applicants rather than competing for them.

This is explicitly the policy in the UK, and (I would guess) almost entirely eliminates offer acceptance uncertainty for Oxford and the other place:

... you can't apply to Oxford and Cambridge in the same year.

I think the idea of a motivational shadow is a good one, and it can be useful to think about these sorts of filters on what sorts of evidence/argument/research people are willing to share, especially if people are afraid of social sanction.

However, I am less convinced by this concrete application. You present a hierarchy of activities in order of effort required to unlock, and suggest that something like 'being paid full time to advocate for this' pushes people up multiple levels:

• Offhand comment
• irate Tweet
• Low-effort blog post
• Sensationalised newpaper article
• Polite, charitable, good faith, evidentially rigorous article

I don't believe that the people who are currently doing high quality Xrisk advocacy would counter-factually be writing nasty newspaper hit pieces; these just seem like totally different activities, or that Timnit would write more rigourously if people gave her more money. My impression is that high quality work on both sides is done by people with strong inherent dedication to truth-seeking and intellectual inquiry, and there is no need to first pass through a valley of vitriol before your achieve a motivational level-up to an ascended state of evidence. Indeed, historically a lot of Xrisk advocacy work was done by people for whom such an activity had negative financial and social payoff.

I also think you miss a major, often dominant motivation: people love to criticize, especially to criticize things that seem to threaten their moral superiority. 

Thanks for sharing. I found it very interesting, and I thought the focus on elite incentives and creating pro-growth coalitions is very promising. Having said that, I am less convinced by some of the specific policies being highlighted.

One theme I noticed running through many of the proposed policies is strengthening the power of the state. I think in some cases this can make a lot of sense - maybe El Salvador's crackdown on the gangs is good at reducing violence - but I would have thought it was worthwhile to consider the downsides to this strategy. Governments have been responsible for many pro-growth policies, but they have also been directly responsible for many of the largest disasters in history - incremental taxes do not necessarily go towards "fund growth-enabling activities".

This particularly came to mind with the discussion of financial flows and civil asset forfeiture, which while not explicitly endorsing is generally quite positive:

There is another route for affected countries to recover stolen assets. In many jurisdictions, civil forfeiture and analogous processes allow assets themselves to be prosecuted and returned if you can prove they were stolen or obtained with the proceeds of crime. This allows a wronged party (in this case, a government that is the victim of corruption or graft that generates the IFF) to press a claim against the proceeds of crimes rather than the criminals per se. This is a lower bar for evidence and successful prosecution than criminal proceedings — but a successful prosecution of stolen assets can then result in money being repatriated.

I am not an expert in the subject matter, but the 'civil forfeiture' being discussed here sounds very similar to the doctrine of 'civil asset forfeiture' in the US, which as far as I'm aware is widely regarded as an illiberal, arbitrary and capricious regime that unjustly deprives innocent people of their money (see for example the IFJ or the ACLU). The "lower bar for evidence" you highlight positively has the negative effect that many people who are not criminals end up losing their money, and face a lengthy and costly process they may struggle to navigate to get it returned.

The situation seems if anything likely to be worse in the third world than in a generally well-governed country like the US. My impression is that in many places diasporas can be valuable forces for positive change against ill-governed countries, providing a link to the outside world and a source of expertise and wealth when a regime opens up. Giving regimes more tools to crack down on people who flee seems potentially quite dangerous.

I could see a utilitarian argument that, even though states can be brutal and unfair at times, you cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs and on average we are better off under the the Leviathan. But I have trouble reconciling this attitude with the stance taken towards scholarship contracts with return obligations as a means to combat brain drain:

Classic scholarship programmes cannot reverse this; even they impose “rules” that students need to return: the global labour market for highly skilled labour is highly flexible, and it would be unfair to deny opportunities for individual progress. 

These scholarships are voluntary contracts, to go abroad to study in return for some number of years of service upon return. Given that people choose to accept the offer, and seem to benefit from the programs (there is no secret 'gotcha'), the idea of repayment through work does not seem inherently unfair, no more than it is unfair to expect repayment for a loan - and cash repayment is sometimes offered as an alternative anyway. Certainly I struggle to see how these contracts could be so unfair as to render them verboten while civil asset forfeiture, widely regarded in the US as one of the worst and most unfair abuses of US policing, can be recommended without qualification.

Thanks! Perhaps you or someone else with an iPhone could copy-paste it.

Thanks for sharing; would be great if there was a transcript! 

This paper was previously shared and discussed (with detailed responses from Toby) here, and the arguments also shared and discussed before that here.