Link Post for December, Allegedly

Effective altruism, rationality, law, money, short stories, fun

Effective Altruism

If you read one link in this post, read Katja Grace’s excellent article “Let’s think about slowing down AI.” Grace’s characteristic clear, thoughtful writing cuts through the confusion about this issue and points out a strategy that not enough people are pursuing. As someone who knows very little about programming, I always find Grace’s articles about AI a pleasure to read. Even when I disagree, they give me a lot to think about.

80,000 Hours career review: what is information security and how can a career in information security help make the world better?

Nasal vaccines may be more effective than injected vaccines for preventing covid.

GiveWell’s December donor briefing. GiveWell has a large funding gap. Partially, this is because of the fall in the stock market and cryptocurrencies. Partially, this is because GiveWell has expanded its set of giving opportunities. GiveWell is increasing its ability to analyze more uncertain interventions with a less clear evidence base. It’s also moving into new areas, like policy and charities that interface with government health programs. GiveWell is planning to focus on increasing its research capacity and its transparency.

The Uyghur Human Rights Project has published a guide for writing about Uyghurs. Particularly of note: try to transliterate people’s names directly from the Uyghur instead of going through Mandarin Chinese; call the region “East Turkistan” (associated with Uyghurs) rather than “Xinjiang” (the term used by the genocidal colonialists).

It was a bad year for authoritarianism. “The core institutions of democracy, including a free press and regular elections, create mechanisms for policymakers to get input from people and adjust accordingly. Authoritarian governments like Iran’s, by contrast, repress dissenting opinions and criticisms of their policies — leading them to blunder into crisis without even knowing it, or to arrogantly assume that they can force unpopular policies onto the public.”

Twitter helped the Pentagon spread pro-US messages in Arabic countries, without flagging the Pentagon-owned accounts as affiliated with the US government.

There’s been a cottage industry of analyses of how effective altruism let the FTX scandal happen. My favorite is Dylan Matthews’s. He identifies the primary issues as an over-focus on philosophy as opposed to practical interventions; the deeply incestuous nature of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire; and overly hubristic utilitarianism which doesn’t follow common-sense morality.

A clever argument that Will MacAskill’s Paralysis Argument in favor of deontologists being longtermists doesn’t hold.

There are a lot of reasons to read this article about Sam Bankman-Fried and Sean McElwee but I like it because McElwee is… observably… a rationalist? The weird Internet group I spent too much time reading when I was twelve has really grown up.

Rationality

UpToFate pirates UpToDate articles, for people who can’t afford UpToDate but want to check what the evidence-based treatment is for a medical condition they or a friend have.

Why don’t scientists write well? Social norms require that scientists write dense, jargon-filled papers without “humor, metaphor, evocative words, and beautiful phrasing.” That makes the public less likely to read scientific papers, and makes people less likely to read outside of their field and come up with new insights.

What playing Minecraft teaches you about agency.

The jhanas are alleged blissful states which one can reach through meditation. But people who can reach jhanas don’t spend that much time in them, because it turns out that bliss gets really old after a while. People want some amount of pleasure, but they also want other things.

What does ego death look like?

A very nice lit review of the case that antidepressants work.

Giving people a placebo and telling them it’s a placebo and they might feel better due to the placebo effect actually makes people feel better. New role for homeopathy? I really want this to be partnered with some qualitative research exploring what these people think a placebo is.

Three dimensions of sex: role enactment, or the structure and scripts of the sex; sexual trance, or the ability to sink into the moment; and engagement with the partner, or your feelings about the sex.

Law

Interview with a defense investigator who worked on death penalty cases. Sample: “One of my cases was once featured on America's Most Wanted. So we get approached by the TV producer. He came down to visit us, and after a couple days, he was like, “Man, you guys are boring. I can't do anything with any of this.” About 90% of the job was looking through phone books or reading stuff on the internet, reading disclosure, reading discovery, talking to witnesses… And frankly, that was the part of the job I really enjoyed. I would spend way too many hours researching cases and, and looking for stuff on Google. I’d be a thousand results deep on Google looking for one stupid thing. And then every now and then I would find something that was a thousand to one shot. I personally enjoyed the boredom, but it wasn’t TV material at all.”

Popehat’s new Substack is fantastic. A few posts I enjoyed: The First Amendment isn’t absolute, but that doesn’t mean that the Supreme Court is going to come up with new exceptions willy-nilly; when discussing free speech, you should distinguish whether you’re talking about legally protected rights (“free speech rights”), the free marketplace of ideas (“free speech culture”), or people not saying rude or hateful things (“speech decency”).

Money

How to do a hostile takeover of a company.

How ATMs work. Sample: “The most common transaction at an ATM is not a withdrawal so much as it is a sale. You are buying some paper with a mystical property associated with it, in return for money, and often paying a convenience fee.”

Housing First doesn’t work to end homelessness if you refuse to build housing to put the homeless people in.

Short Stories

The Low, Dark Edge of Life: gorgeously written erotic horror from a cultist POV. Every sentence is strange and beautiful. It rewards reading out loud. (Note that it is NSFW.)

Than Curse The Darkness: Why would someone summon an Outer God, anyway? Well, maybe they’re a black person in the Congo while the Belgians were ruling it. [Content note: vivid descriptions of the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State.]

Flesh: You construct intricate rituals that allow you to touch the skin of other men. The rituals are cannibalism startups. [Content note: cannibalism startup.]

Fun

Gutfield! is the highest-rated political comedy show on cable, even though you’ve never heard of it.

Which old people do and don’t know who Mario is.

There is drama in the medieval manuscripts fandom! Read this and the five subsequent posts, and bring popcorn.