Linkpost for July

Tweet: “notice how EVERY show has a gay character these days? what happened to making all the characters straight so young women can decide who’s gay in their fanfiction? are we really this against a woman’s right to choose?”

Effective Altruism

The Netherlands’s Seed Valley develops the next generation of seeds, hopefully leading to the next Green Revolution.

Some animal rights abolitionists (people who oppose animals being legally property) are opposed to animal welfare legislation because those laws presuppose the idea of owning animals. However, they should support animal welfare legislation because it likely prevents suffering in the short run and is unlikely to delay the abolition of animal ownership.

The EATS Act, recently introduced in Congress, would prohibit states from regulating how agricultural products they purchase from other states are produced. While targeted at cage-free egg laws, the EATS Act could potentially overturn laws that protect food safety and prevent the transmission of infectious diseases.

OSHA is not legally allowed to inspect 96% of animal agriculture operations with employees because they employ under ten people. 85% of animal-agriculture-associated deaths occur at operations OSHA is not permitted to inspect.

About 40% of British people experience “meat shame”, or feelings of guilt, remorse, and shame related to eating meat. The most common reason for experiencing meat shame is concern for animal welfare. Liberals, women, people who know a lot of vegetarians, and people who know a lot about animal agriculture are most likely to experience meat shame.

Ethical vegans are less likely to lapse from veganism than health vegans. Vegans who consider veganism an important aspect of their identity are less likely to lapse. Time spent around other vegans matters for health vegans, but not for ethical vegans. Health vegans who think it’s important that other people know they’re vegan are, interestingly, more likely to lapse.

People who care more about obedience to authority are more likely to think it’s okay to hurt animals in order to gain some benefit, while people who care more about not hurting others are less likely to think so. People who view animals as moral patients are more likely to disapprove of hurting them to gain a benefit, regardless of their other moral beliefs; whether someone sees animals as similar to humans doesn’t matter.

Primates in laboratories tend to be bored, lonely, and understimulated, so research using them can give inaccurate results. Although it is more difficult to conduct research in sanctuaries and the wild, experiments in these environments will give a more accurate sense of primate psychology.

Much iconic scientific research that used animals (including Pavlov’s dogs, Harlow’s monkeys, and learned helplessness research) involved serious animal welfare issues that limit the generalizability of the work to nontraumatized animals (including humans). The authors suggest citing these works with a problematic tag, like so “(Pavlov, 1960: problematic).” Going forward, they suggest that researchers honor animals’ individuality by naming them whenever possible; seek animals’ agreement to engage in research tasks; and describe welfare conditions clearly so that future researchers know whether to discount the research findings because of poor welfare conditions.

Great power conflict could easily kill hundreds of millions or billions of people or even drive humanity extinct. It could also speed up the development of dangerous technologies. However, many other people are working on this problem, and there’s not a lot that people can do that would obviously help.

This essay from Chinese Doom Scroll is only one writer’s opinion, but I found it very interesting. Western colonialism of China left many Chinese people feeling like China was a failure that the West would take advantage of. The Chinese Communist Party is popular because they promise to make China win. Environmentalism, opposition to the Uyghur genocide, and even vegetarianism are parsed as Western attempts to sabotage China and keep it from challenging Western hegemony.

Chinese Doom Scroll also has a translation of a lecture from “The Best History Teacher In China” about modern Chinese diplomacy. It discusses four stages: “one-sided diplomacy” (China is on the side of the USSR), “punching with both fists” (China dislikes both America and the USSR because the USSR tried to make it a subordinate state), “one line” (China is on the side of America after Nixon went to China), “No Enemies” (China tries to get along with everyone after the fall of the USSR). A lot of interesting stuff there.

The climate change movement is made up of three factions that don’t like each other very much. The standard environmental movement wants to preserve the environment as it was before human involvement. The environmental justice movement combines environmentalism and civil rights to focus on how the effects of pollution have disproportionately harmed people of color. The green growth movement wants to grow the economy and have ample energy while also preventing climate change, mostly via technological development. They tend to favor environmental deregulation, which they believe will make it easier to adopt new clean energy technology.

Criminal Justice

As climate change causes heat waves, many prisons have failed to adapt. Air conditioning is seen as a luxury, so providing it in prisons is unpopular. Fans and cooling towels can cost far more than prisoners making fifty cents an hour can afford—even when the prisons actually charge market rate for them, which they don’t always do. Heat exposure causes more violence in prisons.

Every possible way you can behave is suspicious to cops.

“Jawboning” is a government official threatening a private actor with some negative consequence in order to get the private actor to do something that the government official is not allowed to tell them to do. Jawboning to get social media platforms to remove speech protected by the First Amendment is common. Citizens have difficulty holding politicians accountable for social-media jawboning, because users have no idea that their speech was removed because of government action instead of the private judgment of the site.

Tens of thousands of migrants are stranded in Tapachula, Mexico. Under pressure from the U.S., Mexico has stopped allowing migrants to leave the state they’ve filed their immigration claim in until their paperwork is processed—which can take months to years. (The U.S. cares because if migrants stay near Guatemala they can’t illegally immigrate to the U.S.) Human Rights Watch calls Tapachula an “open-air prison” as shelters overflow and vulnerable workers are exploited by farmers.

The National Review has misrepresented the law in order to falsely claim that Trump was accused of actions that didn’t break the laws that he was indicted for breaking. In fact, the actions Trump is accused of break the laws he was charged under, according to well-established precedent.

Policy

If you only read one article in this post read this: Members of the American civil service are primarily held accountable for following the same procedures that everyone else does—whether or not those procedures make any sense. In tech particularly, no one wants to be held responsible for not following a “best practice” they don’t understand, so it’s very difficult to route around any not-so-best best practice.

The result is nonsense policy: “Jack did end up working for the DoD, after DDS team members and others reached out and coached both him and various HR teams through the process, but it took many tries to get him in. They had to overcome several obstacles besides his non-compliant resume, including Jack’s age — he was 17 when he won the contest. In the course of the saga, an HR professional advised this highly sought-after security researcher to get a job selling computers at Best Buy for a few years and come back, because then he might be qualified for the job he was applying for.”

As of the beginning of July, most strip malls and parking lots in California may now be converted into four-to-six-story multifamily housing—regardless of local zoning.

David Friedman critiques the idea of nudges. Even if someone can opt out in principle, in practice many people don’t know they can opt out or opting out requires a lot of paperwork and dealing with bureaucracy. Many effective nudges genuinely limit people’s freedom of choice.

Pedestrian deaths have been rising. Pedestrian death rates are closely linked to road design decisions: the absence of a sidewalk, high-speed roads, high traffic volumes, and multilane roadways. These decisions are particularly common in low-income areas, which means that poor people are more likely to die because they were hit by a car. Big vehicles like SUVs also lead to deaths.

By law, truckers in the U.S. are surveilled constantly to ensure that they don’t drive more than they’re supposed to. However, companies take advantage of this information to control and monitor truckers’ behavior—up to and including signs that indicate they might be about to quit.

School quality matters a lot! Low-income students at an 80th percentile school were 6 percentage points more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree and earned about $3,600/year more at age 30. There is no relationship between the poverty level of a school and its effect on college graduation rates or earnings (although of course schools that teach poorer students will have lower baseline college graduation rate and earnings). To improve schools, we don’t need one big fix that makes everything better: just a lot of small, marginal improvements.

Relatedly: a major reason why American institutions aren’t diverse is that not enough black and Hispanic young adults go to the moderately selective colleges from which most institutions draw their leadership. The “achievement gap” (where black and Hispanic children get a less good education than white and Asian children) matters a lot. However, too much emphasis on the achievement gap keeps people from recognizing that educational reform sometimes improves test scores for everyone—which also matters.

Rationality

Aella writes about learning to deal with Internet hate. Please be nice to Internet celebrities. They can read the things you’re saying, and they’re people too.

Nine examples of how “yes requires the possibility of no.”

When one person harms another, the cause is usually at least one of model (the harmer misunderstood the situation or the harmee’s preferences), execution (the harmer was unable to bring about the non-harmful outcome), or care (the harmer cares about something else more than they care about not harming the harmee). Understanding which causes played a role in the harm can help prevent harm going forward.

Lovely personal essay about the author’s experience with cognitive behavioral therapy.

Another personal essay, this one about the author’s experience having a psychotic break and recovering.

You are always going to procrastinate for the rest of your life. There’s no magic bullet to fix it. You just need to figure out a set of tools that will allow you to figure out why you’re procrastinating and change your behavior.

Centering distractions (walks, meditation, letting your mind wander) refresh your brain and help you focus on your tasks. Divergent distractions (social media) draw you away from your work.

A dose of MDMA caused a white supremacist to realize that the most important thing is connection and to become antiracist.

Monogamous men in long-term relationships are quite dissatisfied with their sex lives.

Ice cream consumption is bizarrely well-correlated with positive health outcomes and researchers just kind of shrug it off because it makes no sense.

Total Responsibility Transfer is a strategy for more evenly distributing the burden of chores. When you do Total Responsibility Transfer, you hand over every part of the task to the other person—for example, if you TRT dinner to someone, that person plans dinner, shops for it, and cooks it. Importantly, if you used to have responsibility for the task, you have to accept that it won’t be done the way you prefer. You can set a few limits (“dinner must have a protein and a vegetable”), but if you start going “what if we have more Mexican?” then you’re planning the meals again.

Unvirtuous Owns

“‘Judeo-Christian roots’ will ensure U.S. military AI is used safely, general says.” Gee, why didn’t we think of that? Guess we’ve got to close down all these AI safety orgs and go to church lol

The Florida Department of Education lists slaves who learned skills while enslaved—a list which is mostly made up of people who were free their entire lives, including a folklore character and George Washington’s white sister.

Embarrassed Republicans Admit They’ve Been Thinking Of Eisenhower Whole Time They’ve Been Praising Reagan.

Short Stories

If you enjoy stories of beautiful men falling in love with each other, I can’t recommend the publishing house Seven Seas Danmei highly enough. Danmei are Chinese gay romance novels. While danmei is as diverse as the romance novels of any other culture, Seven Seas tends to translate “cultivation” novels. Cultivation novels take place in fantasy settings remarkably similar to Dungeons and Dragons, except that instead of misunderstanding medieval European history and Christianity they misunderstand medieval Chinese history and Taoism.

By genre convention, cultivation danmei typically includes one evil guy and one good guy, and they fall in love. Sometimes the good guy redeems the evil guy with The Power Of Love. Sometimes the evil guy is actually rebelling nobly against an unjust system, and the good guy realizes that Society was the actual evil guy all along. Sometimes the evil guy wakes up in the body of his fourteen-year-old self and has worked out that being evil makes him miserable and has set about trying to be good with absolutely no understanding of how to do so.¹

The danmei series Seven Seas translates tend to be six or seven novels long, which give you a lot of time to settle in with a particular couple and get very invested in them dating. Danmei also tends to be strikingly horny, particularly given that sex scenes are illegal in China, a law often flouted by danmei authors. I have sometimes complained that every demon in Fake Fantasy Medieval China seems to have the sole goal of dosing the main couple with sex pollen so they can accidentally make out with each other.² And of course there are plenty of fight scenes, save-the-world quests, political intrigues, lovers torn apart by war, feudalism, honor, evil monsters, swords, and everything else you want out of a D&D-alike.

Anyway, if it’s your thing, check it out! With no further ado, some short story recommendations.

Better Living Through Algorithms: I always enjoy short stories that strike me as being realistic about how an artificial general intelligence might work. Kritzer’s high level of realism is, as always, striking.

Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist: “Cool and Sexy Asian Girl stands outside the convenience store under the striped awning and waits for the rain to stop. The rain is never going to stop. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl would need to go to a different city for the rain to stop, a city not built on phosphorescent fluorescence and slick glass, a city that doesn’t breathe through its elevated train lines and subways. Cool and Sexy Asian Girl doesn’t remember when they built the train lines. She dreams of cities where it is not always night. Not that it’s always night here. But it is. In the heart, it is.”

The Monad Laws: An app allows you to channel various polytheistic deities to help you resolve relationship conflicts and do your work. The final outcome involves the true destiny of Clarence Thomas.

The Narrative Implications Of Your Untimely Death: The protagonist is trapped in a deadly reality show where every time he dies his consciousness is placed inside a new body. His only hope for escape is to come up with a sufficiently satisfying conclusion to his arc that they don’t want to bring him back, so he can move on to life outside the game.

Fun

Chinese Doom Scroll of the month: Chinese people are legally required to take care of their parents when their parents are old! Chinese people think male ob/gyns are better. Some really weird philosemitism. Weibo also seems weirdly obsessed with statistics (height, income, university prestige, house location) and uninterested in true love when it comes to dating. I’m not sure if that’s a Chinese cultural thing or if I’d see similar things if I spent more time around dating Reddit.

Maryland recently legalized oral and anal sex.

Forgotify plays songs from Spotify that no one has ever listened to.

If humanity dies out, the bones of broiler chickens may serve as evidence that an industrial civilization existed.

A teen girl pretended to be an adult married man for eight years in order to write about baseball. She was also a serial sexual harasser who coerced women into sending her nudes.

Behind the fonts in the video game Pentiment. I've been telling everyone “I want to play this game because a solid 20% of the information I’ve heard about it is about the fonts” and everyone is like “Ozy, that is a terrible way to choose which video games to play.” I’m right though. Read the article and stop judging me.

1. That’s The Husky And His White Cat Shizun.

2. Also The Husky And His White Cat Shizun.