Linkpost for January
Effective altruism, rationality, social justice, short stories, fun
Effective Altruism
Good things that happened in effective altruism this year. I’m particularly excited about the various criticism contests, improved conditions for many farmed animals, the work of the Lead Exposure Elimination Project and Dispensers for Safe Water, and Rethink Priorities’ new Moral Weights series.
Who should get a policy master’s degree? Maybe you!
Giving What We Can lists top charities if any of several evaluators recommend them, but currently doesn’t require a publicly available charity evaluation. They should require one, because the purpose of donating to a charity rather than a fund is not having to trust evaluators. Donors should be able to check evaluators’ work.
The Clinton Foundation saved lives. I’m fascinated by how Bill Clinton used his comparative advantage here. He’s one of the most interpersonally charismatic people in the world, he knows everyone in politics, and he wants to help people. What does he do? He convinces developing countries to negotiate collectively for drug companies to switch to a high-volume low-margin business model for HIV drugs, then convinces the drug companies that this is a good idea. In my opinion, more effective altruists should follow Bill Clinton’s example in leveraging his particular talents to do something unusual that no one else is better-suited for.
This article about what unconscious processes in humans tell us about indicators that an animal is sentient is genuinely important, but I’m mostly recommending it because it reads like it was written by an alien anthropologist.
A conservative writer writes an article in favor of cultivated meat and is astonished that her fellow conservatives suddenly dislike “technological innovation and market competition.”
“Three sections about artificial intelligence and one section about enlightenment” is perhaps the prototypical Scott Alexander post. I’m linking because the first three sections improved my model of what large language models like GPT-3 are doing. It’s something very different from the types of AIs discussed by books like Superintelligence. It’s a simulator: it’s trying to complete the prompt the way that it would be completed in its training set. I’m very interested in work specifically on the threats posed by simulators; drop me a link if you know of any.
But also see friend of the blog Adam Schleris’s response to this post, which discusses how simulators still have serious alignment problems. I also liked Beth Barnes’s post about ways that the simulator frame tends to mislead people.
Rob Nostalgebraist predicts that GPT-4 “won’t be very useful, and won’t see much practical use.” “It has taken the mainstream research community multiple years to acquire the most basic intuitions about skilled LLM operation (e.g. “chain of thought”) which were already known, long before, to the brilliant internet eccentrics who are GPT’s most serious-minded user base.”
The descent into EA madness and/or sanity.
Rationality
The “neo-rationalist” strain in analytic philosophy rejects the ideas that humans are unchangeably biased, that science doesn’t work because of the replication crisis, and that unjust societies teach people false beliefs that they’re unable to fully reject. Instead, they argue that people often learn true things about their surroundings in everyday life; that bias research is overblown; that science generally produces knowledge; and that people can learn true social facts and thus make progress in ctreating a more just society.
Thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to think about is a key live skill. Prompts for practicing the skill are at the link; more here.
Don’t do things because there’s a vanishingly tiny possibility of a very good outcome!
Relationships get noticeably worse at the seven-year mark. Aella blames children, but doesn’t have the data to check whether childfree people have higher relationship satisfaction. I think it’s more mundane than that. If your relationship that’s three months old becomes terrible, you just dump your partner. If your relationship has lasted for seven years, you’re more likely to stick around to try to fix things. I’d expect even people in a five-year-long relationship to stick around to fix things, so “seven” is kind of a weird result. Maybe people only commit to good relationships and it takes a while for them to become bad?1
The 36 questions which lead to love are actually a different set of questions from ones used in the original studies and were modified to be less romantic. The real 40 questions are available in the linked thread.
The media almost never deliberately makes provably false statements of fact.
The secret to success as an Internet writer is posting as much as you can.2
Social Justice
Better housing policy will increase discretionary income, productivity, and innovation; decrease inequality, obesity, and carbon emissions; and enable people to have as many children as they want.
Alexandre Dumas, of Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo fame, was mixed-race. How did that affect his life?
The stars of the movie Romeo & Juliet accuse the director of filming them nude for the movie without their knowledge.
In spite of claims about “groomers”, increased LGBT acceptance has reduced support in the LGBT movement for sex with minors.
The second part of Radley Balko’s interview with a defense investigator is a great read. In the previous part, the interviewee said that his job wasn’t very cinematic, but I think defense mitigation would make a great TV show. Mysteries! Police procedures! Juicy moral dilemmas about helping truly awful people! Heroic investigators saving people who are genuinely innocent!
Preschool boosts college attendance, SAT test taking, and high school graduation rates. Eagerly awaiting the “no it doesn’t” paper by someone else next month.
Short Stories
No Silver Bullet Solutions To The Werewolf Crisis. “Well obviously, werewolf victim assistance needs to be means-tested and closely regulated. After somebody's family has been murdered and then eaten by werewolves, we'll ask them to sign a bunch of forms, provide proof of income, as well as character references to make sure they're sufficiently deserving of assistance. And naturally, we'll hire a team of officials who work full time scrutinizing recipients' spending to make sure there's no financial waste in the system.”
Wolf Incident Postmortem. “Incident #210. Status: Complete, one action item outstanding. Summary: Sentinel consumed by wolf after repeated false alarms. Impact: Loss of sentinel. No flock impact.”
my wife doesn't know I hench, the evil sex ray made my employees do it, and more. Ask A Manager advises villains’ henchmen.
Glimpses in Amber. A devil figure gives the protagonist his heart’s desire in exchange for providing a good home to a severed body part. Why the devil figure wants to do this is the heart of this delightfully creepy horror story. Content warning for body horror and eye trauma.
Writing Real Person Slash About The Pope Day is not what it sounds like. It is a gentle, melancholy meditation on grief and loving your enemies and, yes, writing real person slash about the pope.
Fun
A slug runs on a running wheel.
Is it defamation to claim someone committed a murder based on Tarot card readings? Probably not, because it’s an opinion based on disclosed facts (what the Tarot cards said) and it’s not defamation just because your evidence is really really dumb.
The philosophical issues created by the House not having any members.
While many people believe that yuri readers are mostly male, in fact about half of yuri readers are female. Among English-speaking audiences, 96% of female yuri readers are queer. Among Japanese audiences, only two-thirds of female yuri readers are queer. This tracks my anecdotal experience, but to be honest I’d bought into the stereotype that yuri readers are male. But it turns out I’m not in a bubble.3
Archive of Our Own’s most-written ships of 2022. Highlights: The top ship is “Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson” (Stranger Things). The popularity of the Dream SMP has gotten not one but two platonic ships in the top ten. The first ship with a woman in it is #13, “Original Female Character/Original Male Character.” The first femmeslash ship is #28, “Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler” (Stranger Things). “Eddie Munson/Reader” is the most popular Reader ship.
Even today the #3 ship is from Harry Potter. However, the number of Marauders on the list shows that much Harry Potter fanfiction is as influenced by All The Young Dudes (which knocked Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality out of the position of most popular Harry Potter fanfic of all time) as it is by the original books. The Harry Potter femmeslash writers have standardized on “Marlene McKinnon/Dorcas Meadowes”, both of whom are not given any traits other than a name in canon.
In the Kinnporsche fandom, Vegaspete beats Kinnporsche, which I assume you is hilarious.
Dwarf Fortress: “Locking my most annoying dwarf child in a kill chamber with 30 cats inadvertantly cured his depression.”
What is it like to eat at the restaurant where George Santos often spends exactly 199.99? At this point George Santos should be required to stay in Congress for pure entertainment value.
Hilarious description/mockery of Turning Points USA’s post-election party, written by a conservative author. As a non-conservative author, the funniest bit was:
He then closed with a video meant to trigger the left during which the former president emerged victorious from a Thanksgiving turkey and asked the crowd to stand up and join him in a rousing rendition of Y.M.C.A as the signature pyrotechnics filled the hall.
Guys, that song is about a popular gay cruising spot. It is literally from the album Cruisin’. The popularity of Y.M.C.A. means that people in inappropriate situations are constantly accidentally implying they like anonymous gay sex, and that is why Village People is the greatest band of all time.
I’ve seen various claims that you “fall out of love” at a year or five years or whatever, but my anecdotal observations are that that’s totally false. As you get to know your partner better and to expect them to be there for you, you settle into a calmer and less obsessive form of love. But you still, you know, have inaccurately positive views[1] of them, care more about their happiness than other people’s, and occasionally marvel at how lucky you are to be with them. What fades is new relationship energy. Interestingly, monogamous people seem sadder about the cessation of new relationship energy. Poly people I know are more like “new relationship energy is fun but I am glad that I have my life back.”
[1] The fact that people in happy relationships have inaccurately positive views of their partners is in my opinion one of the few real-life infohazards.[2]
[2] Recursive footnotes!
Not really rationality but where else does it fit.
Now someone do research on straight cis men who read slash fanfic, because I know several men in this category and I would like to be able to generalize more about them. It does seem to be a great way to get girlfriends.
The slug using the running wheel feels deeply meaningful to me. Why does he do it? Not for any reason that makes sense to me. And yet he runs . . .
> “I’m pretty sure that the Web browser is one of the “dens of iniquity” that I keep hearing about on Fox News; I would verify this using a Web search, but a Web search would require me to use a browser, AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT BICOASTAL LIBERAL ELITES WANT ME TO DO.”
Oh ha, I thought that sounded like James Mickens, but I didn't remember that one and was confused because I read the quoted text more seriously than intended.
Anyway he's written a whole bunch of these if you're not aware! You can find links to all of them here: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
IMO, the best one is "The Slow Winter": https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/theslowwinter.pdf