Link Post for August
Global poverty, global catastrophic risks, social science, news you can use, fun!
Global Poverty
GiveWell expects to have a funding shortfall this year. Is this going to finally get people to stop saying “effective altruism has all the money it needs” and replace it with “existential risk reduction has all the money it needs”? (I actually wrote a blog post complaining about this but I feel like it was sort of superceded by ‘GiveWell has a funding shortfall.’)
Conference attendees from developing countries have trouble getting visas. God, immigration systems are a mess.
Charity research (i.e. researching how to improve the lives of the global poor in a cost-effective way) is different from development research (i.e. researching how to improve a country so that there aren’t any more poor people in it). I’ve long thought that there’s a gap in “Weird EA” stuff in global poverty work, and development is a key gap.
Guinea worm has almost been eradicated. There were only 21 cases in 2021—down from 890,000 in 1989.
A nice deep dive into Oxfam’s dodgy statistics.
An explainer about Sri Lanka’s food crisis.
Key facts about world population: the world population will pass eight billion by the end of 2022; the global population will peak at ten billion in 2086; the global fertility rate has fallen to 2.3 children per woman; India is projected to replace China as the world’s most populous country by 2023; a lot of people died of covid.
Which programs successfully scale? A lot of examples, but in short: programs that are hard to get wrong, not hard to get right.
Global Catastrophic Risks
Climate change: very bad, probably not an existential risk. It’s a very weird position to be in to be like “don’t worry! Only hundreds of millions of people are going to die!”
Relatedly: disasters are getting more severe but killing fewer people.
It’s easy to believe you’re in a race to develop some destructive technology before the Bad Guys do when you really aren’t—and so speed up the development of the technology.
ACX book review contest: The Internationalists. An intriguing argument that attempts to ban war actually decreased war by establishing international norms so that it was clear when people were violating them.
News You Can Use
An argument in favor of jargon.
Why you shouldn’t read academic papers.
In favor of biking without a helmet.
Lab rats and wild animals don’t seem to be getting fatter, raising questions about some theories of why humans are getting fatter.
If you’re an effective altruist, and you can stand being a Republican, be a Republican.
How one writer lost their greatest opportunity to have a positive impact on the world.
Social Science
ACX book review contest: a review of a biography of Jimmy Carter. My favorite bit:
His campaign strategy has two core planks: 1) pretend to be a racist to appeal to the masses, and 2) avoid taking a stand on any other issue. Carter describes himself nonsensically as a “conservative progressive” and avoids commenting on the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement. He’s so good at pretending to be racist that the white supremacist White Citizens Council endorses him…
Just a few minutes into his inaugural speech, Carter drops the pretenses of his campaign and executes on one of the most dramatic about-faces in modern-day political history when he declares that “the era of racial discrimination in Georgia is over.”
The history of the concept of “two-spirit.” Many Native cultures had third genders, but not all of them did, and a lot of the conventional wisdom about third genders has as much to do with racist white people projecting on Native cultures as it does with anything Native people actually believed.
An argument that college costs are high because there are fewer students per professor.
Fun
A joke about a programmer who embodies the virtue of laziness. (I really recommend this one, it’s hard to describe without spoiling.)
“Ghost characters” in Unicode.
Remember the scene in the Princess Bride you could get if you wrote William Goldman? Some people actually wrote him, and here are the letters he wrote back.