Right Rationalism is now The Elephant, a magazine of social science, original reporting, and AI policy, co-founded by me and Arjun Panickssery, with Dylan Partner as managing editor. Our advisory board consists of Robin Hanson (The Elephant in the Brain, hence the name; it’s a modern classic), Garett Jones, Pratik Chougule, and Chris Painter.
Expect plenty of analysis and reporting from a slate of writers, starting next week. And come to our launch party in DC on November 7th!
“Fewer things should be exempt from cost-benefit analysis.” That’s what we believe, more or less. Maybe this doesn’t have to be right-wing, but our institutions decide which costs and benefits to tally, and which to set aside as sacred—and our institutions have been swimming left.
We think good things are good. We support air conditioning. We want $1 million GDP per capita and one trillion Americans on one thousand planets—or at the very least economic growth, longer lifespans, and a lab-grown chicken in every pot.
We also believe in traditional Western ways of knowing: the humble genius of the paper, the meta-analysis, and the meta-analysis of meta-analyses. We’re the first to acknowledge that expertise and science are broadly fake. But it took doubling down on the scientific toolkit to find those limits, and such tools are still the best way to actually understand the world—they’re how we know that superforecasters are better than pundits, that demand curves slope downward, and that identical twins raised apart grow up alike. Too many on the right have let their somewhat healthy distrust of elites become a reckless distrust of empirical methods.
And we believe in creative institutional thinking. We’ve read Hayek and appreciate how difficult it is to build new institutions. But we also understand the conditions that let us do better. This is for-profit government, this is futarchy, and this is also Operation Warp Speed and Works in Progress.
We’re also going to be writing about AI safety from this perspective—perhaps 30% of our content will be broadly AI-related. To our rationalist friends, this should be appealing: economic theory indicates the right will be in charge around half the time (and if you believe in AGI by 2028, the right will most certainly be in charge then). And to our right-wing friends who may not yet be interested in AI safety, we hope you’ll see the merits of pushing such efforts in a technocratic, market-oriented direction.
Right now, there is no institution that is both solidly right-wing and pro-safety. We hope for The Elephant to become the most recognizable explicitly right-wing institution to also be explicitly rationalist-oriented on the threat of existential risk from AI.
Pitch Us!
Expect every article in The Elephant to present new information, whether in the form of data or reporting. And, taking inspiration from science reformers, we will do our work in the open: the datasets and code behind our pieces will by default also be published for unhindered replication and extension. Broadly, we’d like to see:
AI policy work from a market-oriented, situationally aware perspective.
Novel research and analysis that takes advantage of the possibilities for social science unlocked by AI.
Writing about the intellectual history of the modern world.
All of this should be genuinely highbrow while also bloggy and fun to read. We’re demand-oriented here at The Elephant and want—even plan—to get 300 likes on Substack. The vice president, after all, reads the same Twitter you and I do!
A few concrete examples of stuff we’d like to commission:
If AI safety is underinvested in—and, as a public good, it always will be—what policies could make AI labs internalize their externalities?
Stand athwart history, yelling be careful: can we price extinction risk? The Caplan–Yudkowsky bet is an interesting start, but what else should we do?
“The Closure of the Internet” is one of the best essays of the year so far. But what are the policy implications?
How much sex is civil rights law preventing? Can we measure it? Can we use cost-benefit reasoning to find a more optimal equilibrium?
The H-1B lottery is anti-meritocratic. What would optimal selection by skill look like?
We’ve seen plenty of high-profile takedowns of plagiarists in politics and academia recently, but there are surely many more about. Can you find one who matters?
To pitch, send a short summary of your idea and a bio to editors@elephantmag.org. We pay a highly competitive rate, will assist your research however we can, and compensate for reporting expenses on a case-by-case basis.
And would you like to support The Elephant? Consider it! Email stevie@elephantmag.org. All donations will be tax-deductible.
We hope to see you all at our launch party in DC on November 7th. If you can’t make it, don’t despair: you can expect an event every month from us in New York or DC.
LFG! 🚀