Link Post for October
Effective altruism, religion, science, history, criminal justice, money, fun.
Effective Altruism
A reader who works in fundraising for a major UK medical charity sent me an email about this post about talking about your donations. She believes that encouraging people to talk about donating in their wills is particularly impactful, because people who donate in their wills tend to make large donations. So if you’re considering which donations to talk about, that might be particularly valuable.
Via Vox: “So Fred Kaplan, in his book [The Bomb], was detailing one of the tabletop exercises the Obama administration was holding. In the tabletop exercises, Russia used its tactical nuclear weapons against a NATO installation. So I think it was the Principals Committee who had to come up with a response: NATO was attacked with nuclear weapons, what do you do? But if you attack mainland Russia, Russia would probably respond in kind. In that scenario, they decided to nuke Belarus, even though Belarus had nothing to do with this.” Man. I understand the logic here, but if I were Belarusian I would be pissed off.
One of GiveWell’s risk factors for its grant for New Incentives to expand to Nigeria is that factions in the government might oppose it. Again, I understand the logic here (people in the government might be mad if New Incentives is taking their power away, is supported by their political enemies, etc). But I still feel, fundamentally, there should be not be meaningful political opposition to rich people voluntarily giving you free stuff.
Why longtermists should care about global development.
A critique of the bioanchors report for relying heavily on poorly justified assumptions.
Why one person both donates and does direct work.
A South African writes about how South African politics works three decades after aparteid ended. tl;dr “The political party that has been running the country since the end of apartheid has screwed up royally, and is ethically and intellectually bankrupt. They also seem to be incapable of performing the basic functions necessary to run a state… The ANC has no real commitments towards upholding democratic values or improving the lot of the common South African - they are greedy and entitled, and will do whatever it takes to accrue power to themselves. Until the electorate understands this we will continue our slide towards a kleptocracy.”
Right-of-boom approaches to nuclear war make us more resilient if a nuclear war happens; left-of-boom approaches try to prevent nuclear war. Right-of-boom approaches are underinvested in.
Congress’s PREVENT Pandemics bill is hilariously inadequate to actually prevent pandemics.
The Future Fund is giving grants in the hopes of increasing the representation of people from the developing world in effective altruism and longtermism.
Religion
Man takes a bunch of DMT, tries to start a DMT-based cult, and loses everything, including his life.
The Cheesecake Factory’s founder is part of a weird but apparently innocuous new religious movement that got in a NIMBY slapfight about whether it was allowed to build a giant temple in a particular small town. (I’m on the YIMBY side here. People get to build giant temples, this is called religious freedom. You guys will get used to it.)
Science
Ever wonder how people get all those gorgeous photos of wild tigers, since many animals tend to be hard to find and frightened of humans? A lot of them are actually of captive tigers who are professional wildlife photography models.
Sometimes, the more you know about a topic, the less surprised you are when everything about it turns out to be very strange. Deep sea creatures, for example. The more you learn about deep sea creatures the more you’re like “yeah, that sounds about right” to anything.
This is a really interesting data detective story and I recommend reading the whole thing. Basically, some computer science journals seem to be publishing papers that have odd “tortured phrases”: “haze figuring” instead of “cloud computing,” “gullible Bayes” instead of “naive Bayes,” “counterfeit neural organization” instead of “artificial neural networks.” These papers have other serious problems, such as plagiarism and sentences that don’t make any sense. They may be produced by paper mills which write fake scientific papers to order; the tortured phrases may be produced by a program called Spinbot, which replaces words with synonyms.
History
Why did it take so long for people to invent knitting, given that both string and sticks are very old technology? For that matter, why did it take five hundred years for someone to invent alphabetizing books by the second letter after alphabetizing books by the first letter was invented?
I love this conspiracy theorist’s history of Chicago because I have no way of disproving it? There are a lot of things I believe on evidence approximately as good as the evidence in this post. My prior is much lower on Chicago’s history being faked! Otherwise it’s the kind of thing I would believe! Terrifying reading experience to be honest.
Criminal Justice
The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is run by gangs and no one seems to want to do anything about it. (Note that the Sheriff’s Department is different from the LAPD, which has other problems.)
Excellent poem: Award, subtitled A Gold Watch to the FBI Man who has followed me for 25 years. The last line is a kick in the stomach.
You should not #cancel people for hiring formerly incarcerated people because, like, we want incarcerated people to get jobs and not have to go back to crime in order to eat.
The World Wildlife Fund funds paramilitary organizations that have been linked to human rights abuses.
Money
Fascinating essay about the experience of being poor and its sequel about how life changes when you become middle-class.
Argentinians use crypto so that they don’t have to rely on the chaotic and volatile Argentine peso. Interestingly, the average Argentinian doesn’t use crypto themselves. Instead, the places where they illegally exchange Argentine pesos for US dollars use crypto as an alternative to smuggling physical cash from Uruguay and then physically transporting it on motorcycle couriers.
Small business uses the Freedom of Information Act to obtain military engineering drawings and aircraft manuals, and then sells the information to military contractors and foreign countries. (The founder spent some time in jail for violating the Arms Control Export Act.)
Hilarious Twitter thread about how hard it is to get a permit to build houses.
Fun
I have never seen or indeed heard of Heat but this review of the director’s novel, which is a sequel to the movie, made me laugh out loud.
Did Hans Niemann cheat at chess using a sex toy?
A fifteen-year-old girl with a two-inch vagina got pregnant via giving a guy a blowjob and then getting stabbed in the belly.
Thai boys’ love dramas have the most batshit origin stories. (Please note that I do not speak Thai and am getting this from word-of-mouth among fans, and may be making mistakes—please correct me!) Normally, you expect a TV show to have an origin like “someone pitched it to a producer, who made it happen.” Kinnporsche originated when Mile Phakpum, a Thai socialite, read thinly veiled real person fiction of himself in which he was a gay mafioso; he then decided that this was awesome and threw a whole bunch of money behind making it happen so he could star as Me, But I’m A Mafioso, And Also Gay. The Eclipse originated when the first trans member of the Thai Parliament was expelled from Parliament on trumped-up charges because of their pro-democracy beliefs. They decided the appropriate response was to showrun a gay romance TV show about teenagers rebelling against their authoritarian school that is actually thinly veiled pro-democracy propaganda. (Thai boys’ love tends quite anti-authoritarian, for reasons that I’m sure are fascinating but which I don’t know because I don’t speak Thai.)
Knitting isn't so obvious as all that. As a person who's done both that and weaving, weaving is much faster and uses less yarn. When you have to spin every thread you make on a drop spindle, you're not really looking for new methods that use twice the yarn.
Plus, given the long time it takes to make clothes of any kind, people kept clothes for a lifetime. You're probably not interested in a method that springs a hole one year in and the whole sock unravels.
What if knitting was invented dozens of times and just didn't really catch on?
Once *spinning wheels* were around, suddenly knitting made a lot more sense. Early spinning wheels weren't great at the kind of thin, strong yarn you needed for weaving, but it could produce tons of soft knitting yarn in a fraction the time. (Hence why most modern spinners use wheels.) At that point it makes sense that knitting would take off as it hadn't before.
Well, that's my hypothesis anyway.
Gosh. I already didn't want to live in Belarus, but that desire has greatly intensified.
> captive tigers who are professional wildlife photography models.
This almost immediately brings to mind a scene of tigers organizing into a union. I would hope that the tigers get good benefits, but my understanding of the modeling industry is that it's not very good to most of the models, and it seems no different for tigers.
That Chicago article is interesting. I feel like the thing that would most readily send up alarm bells is the semi-frequent reference to ideas formed by pop culture, but that's an explanation generated by somebody who's already not inclined to believe Chicago conspiracy theories. ACX had those for/against synthesis papers and the anonymous book reviews; maybe the next great Things of Things contest could be dual, rival papers on obscure subjects, one factual and the other built on a house of lies. It would be very in flavor for a blog which previously hosted a series of Intellectual Turing Test papers.