Effective Altruism
Politico on Sam Bankman-Fried has a quote from Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign manager:
“He’s trying to create friendly relationships so when the time comes, when people in Congress, from Democrats to Republicans, look to regulate crypto, they don’t want to pick that fight with him,” said Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign manager.
“It’s almost like they set up an algorithm, fed in three provisions: One, I want a high win percentage, over 90 percent; two, I don’t want to go negative, and I want to maintain a positive presentation as a serious-minded person; and three, I want to engage politics, but I don’t want it to seem like it’s about crypto,” Shakir said. “Some genius comes up with pandemic preparedness, spends millions and that’s what this looks like.”
Man, as someone who is like two degrees of separation from Sam Bankman-Fried, that is deeply weird to read. I guess it is in fact a very strange thing to do to decide you want to donate lots of money and become a billionare so you can do so, but he totally did do that! For once the cynical explanation is false!
The decline of footbinding as a case study in moral progress. The author concludes that footbinding would have disappeared for economic reasons, but the moral campaign sped up its disappearance.
Pilot study of the release of genetically engineered Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to eradicate the species shows tentatively positive results, but we don’t know if it suppresses the wild population or reduces disease burdens.
Water treatment programs (such as chlorination) may be four to eight times as effective as cash transfers.
Parenting children so that want to do good: be confused openly and out loud, but treat confusion as something that can be solved; don’t teach them to despair; take their moral convictions seriously.
Rationality
How is blind wine tasting similar to medical diagnosis? It involves using your perceptions to distinguish signal from noise in order to classify an item as a member of a group. Maybe you can get better at medical diagnosis by learning to tell apart wines?
I love this interview with Michael Lewis about why we don’t trust experts, but I’ll just excerpt a little bit:
Americans have this unbelievable talent for getting lost at sea, which is a whole other thing. On average, every day, the Coast Guard is saving 10 people who are lost in the sea and losing three. So you’re talking about thousands of people who are getting in this situation every year.
The problem is that if you fall off a boat into the ocean, you’re going to drift differently than if you are in a life raft, or if you’re on top of an overturned sailboat, or if you have a life vest on — you get the point. So if the Coast Guard knows where and when you started, as they often do, they should be able to predict where you are in the ocean four hours later, knowing the currents and the wind and your drift. But they didn’t know the drift, until Arthur A. Allen figured it all out. He spent years of his own free time tossing objects into the Long Island Sound, where he lives, measuring the specific drift of like 80 different categories of objects.
That all sounds boring and tedious, I know. But he reduced the drift to mathematical equations and embedded them in the search-and-rescue software program, and instantly they were able to find people they never would’ve found before. Thousands of Americans are alive because of Arthur A. Allen. And thousands of people are alive around the world because of the work he did here. No one knows who he is. No one pays any attention to him. They furloughed him as if he’s useless.
Seriously, though, read the whole thing.
Social Science
Do voters punish politicians for things they have no real control over, like shark attacks? Probably not but there is a lot of debate about it.
Machine translation struggles with translating from non-English languages to other non-English languages. There aren’t many (say) Chinese-Spanish texts available, so machine translation algorithms rely on Chinese-English and English-Spanish texts to translate between Chinese and Spanish.
Liam Kofi Bright has an excellent paper about “white psychodrama”. Bright argues that, because the white bourgeoisie dominates the media and academia, it gets to set the agenda for “the culture war.” Therefore, our discussions about race are centered around the concerns of the white bourgeoisie (not feeling guilty about racism, either through atonement or through declaring there is nothing to be guilty about), not what is best for people of color. Intelligentsia of color are coopted for this discourse. He encourages intellectuals of color to deliberately step away from the white bourgeoisie culture war and focus on the concrete needs of people of color.
An in depth explanation of environmental reviews, when they’re bad for the environment, and when they’re actually good. I enjoyed the author’s nuanced take on the subject. Whether making it really expensive to do a building project is a good thing depends a lot on what the project is; delays related to environmental reviews might be fixed through hiring more people and through certain technical fixes.
Book review of a book about the fall of the Ming dynasty. Quote to give you a sense of what you’ll get:
But 1587 has no unambiguously heroic protagonist, nor any dramatic resolution: in some ways it truly was [as the subtitle of the book says] “a year of no significance.” The settings and characters certainly lend themselves to the tropes of fantasy fiction: the Forbidden City, the Emperor's Tomb, the Gate of Polar Convergence, the Literary Depth Pavilion - so many evocative names. The action involves floggings, concubines, eunuchs, dynastic scheming, and battles with Japanese pirates. Yet this is not some bodice-ripping work of historical fiction: it's well-sourced and vetted history, with plenty of primary source citations.
Interesting
Amazing true crime story: how Bitcoin tracers took down the largest child porn site in the world.
Scott Alexander on new Saudi Arabian city Neom:
I think maybe this is what happens to your brain when you read too many YIMBY blogs. “The only things people want out of cities are super high density and a ban on cars, right?” Dude, you are Saudi Arabia. The only two things in your country are open space and fuel. Log off Twitter, touch grass, etc.
Click through to find out about how the crypto people seem to have gotten a Native American tribe.
What do New York City’s garbagepeople learn in their training?