Linkpost For February
Effective altruism, free speech, economics, anti-woke, short stories, fun.
Effective Altruism
If you read one post read this: Nate Soares’s searchingly honest personal account of what he knew about Sam Bankman-Fried, when he knew it, and how he could have done better. A model for everyone who wants to take accountability for their errors.
An argument that the Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness framework suffers from conceptual problems. Traditional cost-effectiveness analysis should be used when possible. When it isn’t possible, focus on importance and neglectedness, then see if differences in tractability change your conclusion. Not sure about this but thought it was a very interesting argument.
The most cost-effective interventions within a cause area are about three to ten times better than the average intervention. However, the differences between cause areas are much more stark.
India is on track to be one of the largest sources of consumers and labor in the knowledge economy.
Buying carbon offsets from people who promise not to cut down their forests may be a cost-effective way to reduce emissions, especially if you use an accounting approach which takes the entire state or country into account and applies the same standards across the entire area. Related: Upfront conditional cash transfers may reduce air pollution from crop residue burning.
Preventing violence against women and girls is a potential effective altruist cause area. The best intervention is funding and training local community activists.
The mental health charity StrongMinds has little evidence behind it and the evidence that exists has serious methodological flaws.
People are significantly more likely to report that they’re happy in non-anonymous surveys.
Anima International suspends their campaign against live fish sales because of worries it would lead to more people eating salmon (a carnivorous species) and thus more fish suffering overall.
China is aiming to build a satellite Internet program run by the Chinese government. Seems bad.
It’s said that AI won’t trade with us because we don’t trade with ants, but actually there are quite a lot of trades we’d like to do with ants if we could reliably communicate.
Holden Karnofsky believes that the jobs which have the best chance of positively guiding the future are AI safety research, information security for AI, general AI roles, government, government-focused think tanks, politics, forecasting, and “meta” careers.
Requiring indoor air quality interventions which reduce pathogen transmission—such as ventilation, filtration, and sterilizing air with UV light—could meaningfully reduce the harms of a serious pandemic.
I gave feedback about this excellent and balanced post about polyamory in effective altruism. A refreshing break from the rest of the EA Forum’s Community section.
Free Speech
Public employees have free-speech rights when on the job, but these rights are limited by the government’s legitimate interest in limiting certain kinds of employee speech.
The Harvard Kennedy School disinvites the head of leading human-rights organization Human Rights Watch from a fellowship because Human Rights Watch believes that both Israel and Palestine have committed war crimes, and this is apparently anti-Semitic.
A black professor of black studies encounters the censorious nature of Robin DiAngelo Thought at his seminar for high-school students. A chilling read.
Economics
The social construction of copyright and how it relates to computers.
How money laundering and anti-money-laundering practices work and what Know Your Customer and anti-money-laundering regulations mean in practice.
Competition for patients from nurse practitioners causes doctors to prescribe more opioids and other controlled substances.
America is distinguished not by its healthcare system but by its diversity of healthcare systems. There are five US healthcare systems: employer-sponsored health care, Medicare, Medicaid, individual health insurance, and the system that works with the unemployed. Each of these resembles a different country’s health care system. The first three work reasonably well; the last two work very badly.
The gender wage gap for people working the same job accounts for about half of the gender wage gap. However, this is very different between countries: it accounts for 90% of the gap in Hungary and only a third of the gap in Israel. The gender wage gap itself is also heterogeneous across countries.
Migration benefits the economies of receiving countries, benefits sending countries if migration is voluntary but not if it’s forced, and improves economic opportunities for migrants while worsening their health.
Hollywood cuts corners on visual effects, leading to poor working conditions and worse movies.
Anti-Woke
A nice introduction to the Bronze Age Pervert, an author popular among many young conservatives. The author makes a coherent case that BAP is a fascist, relying heavily on BAP’s own words, without falling into Everyone I Dislike Is A Nazi.
Richard Hanania has such a way of writing a paragraph I agree with 90% of the way and then the last 10% makes me roll my eyes back into my skull. I recommend Why The Media Is Honest And Good if you would like this reading experience. (Please note title of section.)
Short Stories
PRojects IN Controlled Environments, version Sith: An overworked project manager on Coruscant gets some help from Darth Vader.
Pop-punk Much Ado About Nothing.
Fun
Taliban fighters are like us.
More intelligent people are less Neurotic and more Open. More intelligent people tend to be more intellectually engaged and unconventional, but also less sociable and orderly.
Women are generally more interested in violent, kinky, or nonconsensual erotic content than men are.
Someone put a Pokemon parody game in a font.
Japanese fan explains antis1 to other Japanese fans and brings us the wonderful term "feelings yakuza."
If you’re not in fandom: don’t ask.
> If you’re not in fandom: don’t ask.
I mean, you could also say, if you're not in famdom, read this and you'll learn. :P I only had a vague idea what "antis" were... I just saw "antis" referred to a bunch on your Tumblr previously and was confused. Anti-*what*? I remember my initial inference was that it was something related to transgender politics, but eventually I realized my mistake and gathered it was something vaguely like what's described here. But this gives me a better idea!
I really do have to wonder where it started, though...
Re: carbon offsets by preventing deforestation.
I'm a landscape architect in Maryland, USA and I am very curious about how the REDD+ system will work out. We have had very strict forest conservation regulations for the last ~30 years here (though I personally been doing forest conservation compliance work for the last ~2 years) that are mandated on the state level but implemented on the county level.
One of the ways to meet forest conservation requirements is off-site forest banking. Essentially, instead of meeting forest requirements by retaining/protecting onsite forest or afforesting a certain percentage of the site you're developing, you pay the owner of an offsite forested property to put some of their land in a perpetual conservation easement. Problem is, after only 30 years, there is basically no available forest in the counties I work in that is owned by anyone willing to bank it. Maybe that means there's just not enough remaining forest, or that the incentives aren't big enough, or something. Perhaps a national program, especially in a country with much more remaining forest, wouldn't have this availability problem.