Linkpost for December

Effective altruism, psychology, policy, short stories, fun

I am participating in a book club for House of Leaves and this is my mood

Monthly reminders: I am available for consulting work, including writing and editing. If you like science fiction stories adapted from metaphysics papers, you can buy my novella Her Voice Is A Backward Record nearly anywhere fine ebooks are sold; it may also be available at your local library, depending on which ebook services your library subscribes to. Recent posts on my fiction blog is 200 Word RPGs.

Effective Altruism

Global Poverty

GiveWell estimates that cash transfers are three to four times more cost-effective than previously believed. The drivers of this effect are: unexpectedly high positive effects on people who didn’t receive the cash; unexpectedly high effects on child mortality; GiveWell misestimated the level of consumption in certain countries; and the benefits of cash transfers fade out less quickly than previously supposed.

Particularly Good: What GiveWell learned from red-teaming its top charities. I highly recommend this article to any GiveWell donor—it clearly explains what kinds of mistakes GiveWell makes, why it made them, and how it plans to avoid them in the future.

Actionable: The Against Malaria Foundation has unusually large funding gaps this year because the Global Fund (which also funds net distribution) raised less money than they thought they would. They estimate their room for more funding at $250 million.

Actionable: GiveWell is on Metaculus! Make predictions about their grants, help them make decisions, and earn imaginary Internet points!

Animal Advocacy

Actionable: The Animal Welfare Fund has made several announcements: a new full-time chair, greater transparency for donors, better coordination with effective giving organizations, and some technical changes to their grantmaking procedure. They also plan to seek more grants in areas that Open Philanthropy has moved out of, particularly insect welfare and wild animal welfare. I’m excited by these changes on the part of the Animal Welfare Fund, many of which (presumably by coincidence) mirror my own recommendations for funds. They estimate their room for more funding at $6.3 million.

Farmed animal advocacy policy in the United States may be difficult going forward. State-level laws which ban cruelly raised animal products are under threat from the EATS Act, which would ban states refusing to import cruelly raised animal products from other states. The Democrats don’t want to be seen as wanting to “ban meat,” and so might throw animal advocacy under the bus to win over swing voters.

Relatedly: a balanced take on the Trump administration’s likely effect on animals. The Trum administration is likely to support the EATS Act. However, its other effects on animals are unclear. Several close Trump allies, such as RFK Jr., are opposed to agribusiness. The libertarian wing of the party supports cultivated meat, while the culture warriors see cultivated-meat opposition as a way to own the libs.

Spending money on global health is better than spending it on animal welfare in terms of reliable societal capacity growth (i.e. people are healthier and richer and better able to do good things). However, animal welfare has a higher chance of transformative change (e.g. producing pro-animal transformative AI).

Existential Risk

To prevent pandemics, we need tests that are “triple rapid”: tests that can be rapidly reconfigured to test for new diseases and rapidly distributed to everyone who might have the disease, and that rapidly give reasonably accurate results. I think that the coronavirus pandemic was as bad as it was in part because we failed to have tests quickly enough, and I hope people take this paper to heart.

Actionable: The Long Term Future Fund has written an article explaining its current role in the AI safety ecosystem. It considers its primary roles to be funding technical AI safety research, particularly from independent researchers; funding career transitions; being an independent funding source that isn’t beholden to big AI companies; and funding unusual cause areas or those that might be a PR risk for other funders. They estimate needing more than $1 million a year.

Meta Effective Altruism

Moral campaigns probably sped up the decline of footbinding by years or decades, but economic progress would probably have ended footbinding regardless.

Don’t donate to the causes you think are best in a vacuum— donate to causes you think are underfunded relative to the overall EA pot (that is, causes underfunded by Open Philanthropy).

When trying to figure out how effective a charity is, don’t just consider what it does—consider what its budget is.

A frank look at what it’s like to work on the Online Team for the Center for Effective Altruism.

Rethink Priorities explains its basic approach. It tries to apply profound skepticism to answer the most important questions about how to do good in the world. It then seeks to use those answers to influence the behavior of decisionmakers (such as charities and policymakers) and to develop fields for historically overlooked causes (such as shrimp welfare).

Actionable: Gwern Branwen is one of the essayists I admire most: curious, rigorous, always willing to admit mistakes. From his definitive guides to modafinil and spaced repetition to his beautiful thoughts on subcultures to his piece on when writers write, Gwern is always worth reading. Like many others, I recently discovered that he lives on only $12,000/year from his Patreon. I have since backed him on Patreon and I hope you will also consider doing so. I placed it in this category because I sincerely believe that Gwern’s writing improves the epistemic commons for everyone and makes us much smarter.

Other Causes

I found these reflections from Ken White after the U.S. presidential election to be very moving.

Coal requires orders of magnitude more mining than low-carbon technologies like solar or wind. Nuclear, as it often does in this sort of metric, performs best. Don’t freak out about mining for solar panel raw materials.

Particularly Good: Everything that’s wrong with the Jones Act of 1920, which has destroyed American merchant marine and shipyards while making shipping anything over water somewhere between expensive and impossible.

Psychology

Particularly Good: You know all that fraudulent psychology research? A huge percentage of it comes not from psychologists but from business school professors. Between this and the nonsense that comes out of education departments, I think we should be seriously reconsidering whether “vocational” subjects are appropriate to include in academia at all.

“Parentification” is treating your kids like adults, usually because the parents are overextended in some way (nasty divorce, had more children than they can handle, immigrants to a place where they don’t speak the language, drug addiction, mental illness…). Parentified children often grow up to be “overfunctioners” and to derive their sense of self-worth from taking care of others. This article cogently argues that “parentification” often pathologizes behavior that’s actually fine—who cares if you’re toilet’s always clean?—and puts unneeded guilt on parents who are already going through a hard time. I liked the nuance here: don’t parentify your kids if you can avoid it, but that doesn’t mean that parentified children have to understand themselves as “traumatized” as opposed to as “having gone through a bad time.”

Anecdotal reports from professors that elite college students are bad at reading entire books. I’m curious to what extent other professors or people who work with young adults have similar experiences.

Jordan Peterson’s latest book, a guide to what the Bible has to teach us about psychology, is terrible. “[T]here is something dispiriting about spending multiple paragraphs agonising conscientiously over different translations only to be breezily informed a few pages later that Jiminy Cricket is the archetype of Jesus Christ.”

Particularly Good: the lives of Putin’s children, who live completely isolated from the outside world, in great luxury but great loneliness.

Contrary to the ideas of some prominent hereditarians, being a hunter-gatherer in Africa is actually quite intellectually demanding. IQ tests tend to be culturally biased. For example, the San people performed poorly on maze tests in the early twentieth century, but this is probably because the maze test was often their first exposure not only to mazes but also to the concept of not being able to go somewhere.

Actionable: Preservation of your brain after death is currently free in Oregon and Germany. (Check comments for caveats.)

Policy

Astral Codex Ten reviews the evidence on incarceration. In most of the United States, incarceration reduces the crime rate, but more police officers would reduce the crime rate much more inexpensively.

Declaring subjects to be “public health crises” is rarely done in a systematic or principled manner, and often just results in alarm fatigue. We should be paying consistent attention to health issues, not freaking out when something newsworthy happens and then ignoring them for years at a time.

Expanding optometrists’ scope of practice reduces the rate of vision impairment by 12%.

Organ donations defaulting to opt-out doesn’t increase organ donation rates at all. Sorry, nudge fans.

It is now legal to circumvent DRM in order to fix devices, but only if they’re medical devices or commercial food preparation machines.

This article is, by word count, mostly about Interesting Facts About Building Ornamentation, but I can’t get over the main point. Some guys in the 1920s and 1930s decided that architecture that no one likes is cool? And ever since then all our high-status buildings have been designed in a way that, I repeat, no one likes? I prefer Brutalist buildings myself, but I think I should take one for the team here. This is ridiculous! If everyone has to look at a building, it should be designed for normal people’s aesthetic preferences! Have NIMBYs looked into this?

Academia justifying itself through leftist politics—even in seemingly apolitical fields like math or art history—likely is a cause of the backlash against academia.

Short Stories

Second Person, Present Tense: Thoughtful and fucked-up little story about a drug that severs your “I” and replaces you with a new person in the same body. I loved the depiction of flawed but ultimately loving parental relationships in this one.

Stanislav Petrov Quarterly Performance Review: I… don’t know how to explain this one. It’s… absurdist humor about the apocalypse, I guess? I liked it.

The Spindle of Necessity: This is about the experience of being a queer trans man who loved Mary Renault in middle school and, in your darkest hours, suspects that you’re only a queer trans man because Mary Renault made you that way. I don’t know how well it would work for people who don’t share this extremely specific experience, but I do and it was great.

Particularly Good: The Ones Who Come At Last: The refugees who come to Omelas from other cities.

Fun

Chinese Doom Scroll: Widespread and blatant cheating on exams to qualify for the trades. Why tacticians can’t be leaders. Crappy academic-success-focused childhoods; math races—the new chess boxing? Daoism is about being a lazy shithead and letting other people carry you to success. Psychiatrists also suck in China; plus, wow, people are weirdly indifferent to child abuse.

Particularly Good: Living a high-agency life at an art gallery.

“Cavefish are fish that live solely in caves… They are obese, eyeless, and exceptionally long-lived… You may wonder why I call these fish “cavefish” and I never give their scientific names. That’s because they don’t have any. Cavefish is a generic term for any fish that lives solely in a cave, and represents a diverse group of over 200 fish, from catfish to eels.”

Faith-based movies are cheap to make and have a built-in audience. For this reason, even though audiences (both Christian and non-Christian) generally think they’re bad, 70% of faith-based movies are profitable—a higher percentage than any other genre.

The Oz books are enjoyable for young readers because they’re a succession of interesting and exciting setpieces. However, for adults, the books are pretty weak: there’s no overarching plot and the world gets in the way of the stories instead of facilitating them.