Linkpost for December
Effective altruism, economics, criminal justice, global politics, science, rationality, fiction, fun.
Announcements
The effective altruism survey is open until December 31. You are eligible if you “feel that you broadly identify with effective altruism, or are at My all engaged with the EA community, however loosely.” Rethink Priorities is seeking a broad base of respondents, including people who feel like they “don’t count.”
The first issue of Asterisk Magazine has come out! The editor of Asterisk is my friend Clara Collier. I have been hyped for Asterisk for six months and you have no idea how excited I was to read the first issue. Asterisk intends to provide in-depth reporting on the world’s biggest issues. The first issue’s articles cover Chinese attempts to develop a semiconductor industry, the replication crisis, the history of abolitionism, and the history of nuclear escalation. Check out the monkeypox article: I was a sensitivity reader for it.
I am pleased to announce that I will be joining the Shrimp Welfare Project as a volunteer researcher. While this shouldn’t interfere with my blogging schedule, you should probably anticipate more blog posts about shrimp.
Effective Altruism
Deworming may reduce child mortality by 24% (!) in the children of dewormed people. The mechanism is that children without worms attend school more reliably and become richer in adulthood.
In the late 1980s, there were millions of cases of guinea worm worldwide; in 2021, there were only fifteen recorded cases. (Some cases, particularly in conflict-torn regions, may not have been reported.) The guinea worm eradication effort focused on access to clean water and education about how not to spread the disease.
Twelve criticisms of GiveWell’s numbers. Michael Plant has been doing great work in criticizing GiveWell. Definitely my vote for Effective Altruist Researcher of the Year.
A tentative attempt to figure out how uncertain GiveWell should be about its cost-effective numbers. Quantitatively modeling uncertainty can help GiveWell figure out what research it should prioritize to make its estimates more certain.
Why are plant-based meat sales flat? Most customers don’t want to pay a lot of money for something that doesn’t taste as good as meat and which they perceive as unhealthy.
Farmers don’t vaccinate their animals for bird flu because it’s difficult to tell apart infected birds and vaccinated birds, so countries without bird flu don’t want to import eggs or slaughtered meat from vaccinated birds.
Report that questions two key assumptions of the bioanchors paradigm for predicting AI: that current algorithms can scale to transformative AI and that we can rerun evolution using the same amount of compute that evolution did.
Lab accidents in labs researching viruses are very very very common. “An Intercept investigation based on over 5,500 pages of NIH documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act has uncovered a litany of mishaps: malfunctioning equipment, spilled beakers, transgenic rodents running down the hall, a sedated macaque coming back to life and biting a researcher hard enough to lacerate their hand. Many of the incidents involved less dangerous pathogens that can be handled with basic safety equipment, and most did not lead to infection. But several accidents happened while scientists were handling deadly or debilitating viruses in highly secure labs, and a few, like the Chikungunya virus slip-up, did lead to illness.”
You’ve never heard of Robert Greenstein, but he played a major role in expanding America’s welfare state through his think tank, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The think tank provided detailed, technocratic policy analysis with a quick turnaround time. Greenstein practiced a moderate, bipartisan style of politics focused on incremental improvements.
How much money does EA actually have?
Effective altruism underrepresents people from the developing world. Because of this fact, effective alruists tend to have serious blind spots and to have a harder time implementing effective interventions. I particularly appreciated that this essay talked about inclusiveness and welcomingness without prioritizing people who are currently “in the room” in effective altruism.
People tend to have unrealistically idealistic ideas about effective altruism, realize that effective altruism is incredibly flawed, become disillusioned, and leave. This essay encourages disillusioned effective altruists to instead provide the thoughtful, informed criticism of effective altruism that we need to improve.
A beautiful personal post about burning out on effective altruism and coming to a more balanced view of what makes a good life.
Thirty reasons to be thankful that you may not have thought of.
Economics
Article mostly about how good the Faroe Islands’ tax service is has a great quote about the IRS: “The agency [the IRS] has a Taxpayer Advocate Service that produces an annual report to Congress on how the agency is functioning, and the 2021 version reads like someone who has been locked in a basement surviving on chicken bones and crusts of bread for 15 years shouting out a window, begging passersby for help."
About 80% of credit card profitability comes from collecting interest on loans, while 15% comes from fees charged to the user, especially late fees. The majority of credit card revenues are paid by accounts that carry a balance from month to month.
Criminal Justice
America’s syringe-exchange programs might actually be increasing mortality. HIV is no longer a death sentence, but fentanyl has increased the number of overdoses, and syringe exchange programs make people more likely to use injecting drugs that have a high risk of overdose.
Woman arrested and jailed for allowing her eight-year-old son to walk home alone because he might have been kidnapped and sex trafficked. (The officers did not present any evidence that this happens in suburban Waco, Texas.)
Global Politics
Interview with a Russian spy who defected to Estonia because liberal democracy is better than Putin’s authoritarian dictatorship. I’m mostly sharing it because people realizing liberal democracy is better than authoritarianism is heartwarming to me.
Chinese and Taiwanese students fear censorship by American universities if they protest China—including having their identities revealed, which can lead to reprisal by the Chinese government against them or their families. Shamefully, some universities justify censorship by claiming that opposition to the Chinese government is racist.
Solar manufacturing supply chains are linked to Xinjiang, where the Chinese government is currently committing a genocide. Suppliers in the region are very cheap, which raises the question of whether they’re relying on Uyghur slaves.
Science
Hereditarians are wrong: African hunter-gatherers are really really smart. “I think giving hunter-gatherers who have never been indoors or held a pencil before a maze test, and concluding that they are dumb because they didn’t follow the instructions you are reciting to them in like their 6th or 7th language, is comically stupid.”
When people imagine how things could be different, they almost always imagine how things could be better. Shared half for the finding and half because this is how scientific research should be conducted. “I have a confession to make: I don’t remember why we ran this study. I definitely remember seeing the results and going “yes!! We nailed it!! It all makes sense!” but now I can’t remember why. I asked Ethan about it and he was like, “bro I do not even remember RUNNING this one.” So if you can figure out why we ran this study, please let us know.”
Seventy-three independent research teams used identical data to analyze whether more immigration would reduce support for social services. Researchers’ results varied greatly, from large positive to large negative effects. Expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the results they found. More than 95% of the variance remained when every identifiable decision in the teams’ workflow was accounted for.
Many scientific journals photoshop their results.
We should get rid of the scientific paper. Scientific papers force the scientist to dumb stuff down, cause publication bias, make correcting mistaken findings difficult, and don’t offer affordances for easily sharing data.
Rationality
A clear explanation of the Kelly criterion and related concepts in probability which some effective altruists get wrong (and may have contributed to the fall of FTX).
The concept of “rudeness” is useful because you can softly enforce social norms without having to have strict rules.
Acute stress is good for you and helps you deal with challenging situations. However, believing that stress harms you can keep you from taking advantage of it.
Drinking coffee infused with a microdose of psilocybin makes you open, energetic, curious, more appreciative of beauty, and prone to your mind wandering. This article successfully pitched me on psilocybin microdosing. That sounds fun.
While I don’t agree with all of the gender dysphoria bible, it does an excellent job of clearly describing gender dysphoria in a way that may help people identify their own gender dysphoria. (Crucially, it avoids “if you’re questioning your gender you’re trans” and similar misleading takes.) If you’re cis, you might enjoy reading it to learn more about what being trans feels like from the inside.
Short Stories
Hard science fiction about an artificial intelligence used for harassment. From my perspective as an interested amateur, this seems very realistic and might help improve the readers’ intuitions about why unaligned artificial intelligence would be so bad.
A necromancer whose job is to investigate mysterious airplane crashes.
Aliens are startled that human beings are made out of meat.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Introducing Myself is… undescribable. Check it out.
Fun
Case study: A woman hallucinates voices that correctly diagnose her brain tumor. When she gets treatment, the voices say “We are pleased to have helped you. Goodbye.” They never return. (The article is on the 17th page of the PDF.)
There's a pretty good short film of They're Made Out of Meat.
https://youtu.be/7tScAyNaRdQ
RE "Many scientific journals photoshop their results"
In the NYT article, the Dr Bik complains that authors do photoshops, and that journals should have more quality control and respond to Dr Bik's reports and pay Dr Bik, but Dr Bik does not allege that the journals are doing the photoshopping.