Effective Altruism
Long-term monthly payments and lump sum cash transfers are both effective ways of helping people, but short-term monthly payments are less effective. Long-term monthly payments increase saving and investment, while lump sums cause people to create new businesses with the sudden infusion of capital. Cash transfers don’t reduce work hours (suggesting that they don’t make people lazy or dependent).
The Copenhagen Consensus Center has published a list of twelve programs that help with global poverty, all of which they estimate to be more cost-effective than unconditional cash transfers.1 The programs are agricultural R&D; childhood vaccination; improved ob/gyn care; better government procurement IT; tuberculosis treatment; improved nutrition for pregnant people and babies; making trade easier; preventing and treating chronic noncommunicable diseases; strengthening property rights in land; insecticide-treated bed nets; increasing skilled migration; and improving education, such as by not teaching kids significantly behind grade level grade-level material.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that malaria vaccines may be less cost-effective than bednets and seasonal malaria chemoprevention. The logistics are more complicated and the efficacy seems to be similar.
Particularly Good: A reflection on killing ants.
There have been 80 events since 0 AD which killed more than 0.1% of the world population. Common threads among those events and animal extinctions include: “[v]ery large-scale natural events; [h]ighly adapted, self-replicating organisms, especially ones that the victim is not co-adapted to (epidemics, novel pathogens and predators, invasive species); [c]oordinated groups of humans (wars, hunting, habitat destruction)'; [p]olitical repression or disruption (forced labor, bad policies leading to famines)'; [f]ollow-on effects from other catastrophes.”
Historically, the “offense-defense balance” hasn’t changed much even as technology has changed. The main reason is that attackers and defenders aren’t different groups: all attackers also have to defend themselves. So technology that makes it easier or harder to defend yourself has remarkably little effect on how often and seriously people get attacked.
Fascinating look at the people who annotate data in order to train artificial intelligences. "Another Kenyan annotator said that after his account got suspended for mysterious reasons, he decided to stop playing by the rules. Now, he runs multiple accounts in multiple countries, tasking wherever the pay is best. He works fast and gets high marks for quality, he said, thanks to ChatGPT. The bot is wonderful, he said, letting him speed through $10 tasks in a matter of minutes. When we spoke, he was having it rate another chatbot’s responses according to seven different criteria, one AI training the other."
There are concerns about community-building with young effective altruists. It can be very difficult for young effective altruists to leave effective altruism, because it’s familiar and it offers meaning and community. Young effective altruists can center their lives around effective altruism and define “success” as “getting a job at an effective altruist organization”—which can harm them if working at effective altruist organizations isn’t right for them.
If it’s worth thinking a long time about whether you should apply to an effective altruist job, you should just toss in an application. Applying normally doesn’t take very long, and it gives you a lot more information than ruminating does.
Particularly Good: 66 pieces of good news in 2023.
Trump intends to scale up mass deportations and massively reduce the rate of even legal immigration. His policies would lead to human-rights violations, children torn away from their parents, and deaths. Undocumented immigrants make up 5% of the national workforce; any attempt to deport a large fraction of them would wreck unimaginable economic havoc.
Henry Kissinger died at 100 last November. Through his support for American war crimes, genocidal regimes, and coups against democratically elected leaders, his actions led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He remained well-respected and very influential in politics until his death.
How GiveWell employees donated. As usual, mostly to GiveWell.
Psychology
The cerebellum probably handles classical conditioning and anticipation or preparation. This is a really good review of the various lines of evidence about what the cerebellum does. (There’s lots of weird brain damage facts!)
While self-report measures are widely criticized, alternatives are also not very reliable, and lying is much less common than people think. However, self-report measures need to be well-designed, because people interpret questions differently.
60% of people don’t lie in any given 24-hour period. Half of lies are told by just 5% of subjects.
How much does people’s self-identification as having certain personality traits (like “easygoingness”) correlate with their self-report of performing related behaviors? Traits that show a low correlation: “Easy-Goingness, Conformity, Irritability, Perfectionism, Sensation-Seeking, Trust, Compassion and Impulsivity.”
For beginners, meditation is supposed to be pleasant, and if it isn’t you’re doing something wrong. Aim to be calm and collected, not to have no thoughts. It’s often easier to try to be aware of everything than to focus on a single meditation object.
The most interesting thing in this article about the neuroscience of psychedelics was that psychedelics can cause people to think objectively false insights are true—probably because there’s a general sense of meaningfulness that isn’t connected to the insights actually meaning anything. This explains a lot about the people I’ve met who take a lot of psychedelics.
Psychotic experiences and psychedelic experiences are, in many ways, very similar. We could view psychotic experiences, like psychedelic experiences, as a potential source of meaning and mysticism. We could study the role of set and setting in making psychotic experiences better or worse. Instead of the frightening and traumatizing treatment that psychotic people all too often get, we could develop supportive and empathetic first aid for psychosis similar to psychedelic first aid.
Economics
Kia Canada deliberately kept cars that people wanted to buy on lots so that the overall company wouldn’t think it was too successful and cut back on marketing.
Even though fast food prices aren’t increasing much, people are spending more on fast food, as retailers get better at price discrimination, upselling customers, and delivery. Similar dynamics in other industries might be one reason people feel inflation is higher than it is.
Cybersecurity protocols in medical organizations are rarely designed by people who understand medical professionals’ workflows, so medical professionals have a number of creative ways of working around them. My favorite is making the lowest-ranking person go around pressing the space bar on everyone’s computers so they aren’t logged out.
Politics
Particularly Good: An essay by the former opinion editor of the New York Times about the New York Times’s transition to partisan journalism.
The Oklahoma attorney general is bringing a case where an innocent man is going to be executed to the Supreme Court in the hopes that the Supreme Court will overturn the conviction. Everyone who has the power to pardon the man has refused to do so.
Dog bites man: Anti-sex-trafficking grifter turns out to be a sexual predator.
The decreasing total fertility rate in the United States is mostly driven by a reduction in births among people younger than 24. Anti-teen-pregnancy programs worked too well?
The 2023 Hugo Award nominating data was recently released. Two works (the Sandman TV show and R. F. Kuang’s Babel) and two authors (Xiran Jay Zhao and Paul Weimer) were inexplicably declared ineligible even though they weren’t. It’s believed this is in retaliation for the authors’ criticism of the Chinese Communist Party. The statistics themselves are very fishy. Charlie Stross provides context for people less familiar with fandom.
Science
Hawaii is “the extinction capital of the world” because its species evolved in total isolation from many predators and parasites, and can’t evolve fast enough to keep up when they were introducted. For example, a species of “mintless mint” in Hawaii doesn’t have a mint flavor because it didn’t need that chemical to drive away animals that wanted to eat it.
Parasitoid wasps are a strong candidate for the taxa with the most species in it: one scientist estimates that each beetle species corresponds to at least two wasp parasitoid species (one for the larvae and one for the eggs).
Early in the universe’s history, there are a lot of galaxies—even though there wasn’t enough time for galaxies that large and bright to form. No one knows why, and all proposed hypotheses so far involve revisions to our current models of astrophysics.
Excellent article about orcas’ intelligence and the cruel way we’ve treated them. Also: orcas have a cultural fad of ramming into yachts!
Short Stories
Particularly Good: The Hofmann Wobble: A semiautobiographical short story, or perhaps a fictionalized personal essay, about being one of the first people to do politicized edits of Wikipedia. Asks a lot of questions about the nature of truth and how we know what we know.
A Saint Between The Teeth: The person who recommended this story to me described it as a “gay vegan vore story.” It is all those things.
Cinderlands: A fun little horror story in the “what if there were a really fucked-up house” subgenre. Content note for rats.
Ubbo-Sathla: I’m a sucker for science fiction stories about how the universe is very, very old, and Clark Ashton Smith’s Ubbo-Sathla does it very well.
It’s As If You Were Making Love: Short computer game in which you have sex with your browser. Obviously, very NSFW.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Goncharov: An epistolary story about two academics/fanfic writers falling in love over passionate arguments about the fictional movie Goncharov. Extremely cute.
Fun
Chinese Doom Scroll: marry for wealth or good looks, not whether someone treats you well, because they can always stop treating you well. To save money, the Chinese health care system funds intravenous traditional Chinese medicine.
Particularly Good: The effective altruist’s guide to Christmas.
America can and should to have the largest scale model of the solar system in the world.
Particularly Good: The origin of the word “blurb” is impossible to summarize.
GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness numbers are more careful than most people’s and therefore typically show most programs to be less cost-effective, so you should adjust for that.
I love the piece on the Times. I'd seen a lot of very shallow, hyper-partisan anger on both sides about the whole Tom Cotton controversy, but this is the most thoughtful and compelling argument for "the NYT has become overly infused by politics" that I've seen. Thanks for sharing!
Great line: "Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it."
Wait, the CCP hated Babel too? I never thought I'd agree with them on anything!