Arturo Macias
Bio
I am an Economist working at the Financial Risk Department of Banco de España (Spanish Central Bank). I was born in 1977 and I have recently finished my PhD Thesis (See ORCID webpage: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1623-0957 ).
How I can help others
Risk Management, banking regulation, energy and commodities, mechanism design.
Posts 17
Comments163
What are the alternatives? As long as you accept the autonomy of matter (this is physicalism) there are not degrees of freedom left.
I dont know what is the current majority, but physicalism is clearly majority for scientists, and once you are a physicalist either you are epiphenomenalist or eliminativist. Probably there is a majority of self reported eliminativists, but I take the charitable position of thinking that they don't really understand the issue.
"The majority of farmed animals (85% in the UK, 99% in the US) are factory-farmed (i.e. raised in the most intensive conditions)"
But the majority of cows and sheep are not factory farmed. All chickens are factory farmed and they are many. On the other hand, ruminants are often raised from pastures, as anybody driving in the coutryside can check by herself.
Do we have a curve of the stress intensity of stress of mother cows after separation from the calf (at least by age of calf). I would try to identify neural indicators of stress (you need to map stress signals between humans and cows), and graph them under different circuntances.
More generally, a full predictive model of bovine stress could be useful to assess what can be done to measure and improve the cow conditions (how better is a free range vs. a farmed cow).
In my perspective, there exists a significant disparity between “intensive animal farming” and other forms of animal utilization. Animals enduring their lives in stressful, overcrowded, and unsanitary environments, often subjected to mutilation and neglect, represent a distinct horror that humanity has introduced to the world. EA utilitarian perspective allows for graduated animalism (see here).
I simply cannot understand how some people considers the 2024 a "normal" election.
Here I put the abstract: the post was a little bit too long:
On the contrary, the effective proposal for the high corporate owner’s aristocracy is: i) the preservation of their own existence with a sustainable birth rate, a sense of social purpose and focus on wealth preservation, ii) support for a republican corporate governance inclusive of all stakeholders, and in the case of platforms, designed to foster a competitive ecology, iii) genuine altruism in the use of political influence, iv) the use of business surplus more for conspicuous (and effective!) altruism than for conspicuous consumption or display. Let it be clear, however, that utilitarianism recommends moderation, never asceticism.
I wrote this thinking in a case like yours. I hope it can be useful to you:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/z8H7q3fgY4gCqnpTJ/jeff-bezos-wealth
This post has been more commented in Less Wrong:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wqFoHBBgpdHeCLS6/storable-votes-with-a-pay-as-you-win-mechanism-a
Your will has effects on the world, of course, but it is determined by a physical system.
I developed that position in the first reference of this post (Freedom under naturalistic dualism).