Linkpost for June

Effective altruism, politics, economics, rationality, children, sex, short stories/poetry, fun

Hark a Vagrant.

Effective Altruism

Regardless of income, Americans (in 2004) gave about 3-4%. However, if you look at giving as a percentage of total household expenditures (which would account for people who happened to earn less money this year for some reason) and control for age, marital status, family size, and education level, poor people no longer give more than rich people.

Friend of the Blog Jenn writes an essay about her experiences working in non-effective-altruist nonprofits. Lessons effective altruists can learn: long-term trust in your institutions is a valuable asset; nonprofits should network with other nonprofits; organizational slack helps you achieve cool things; people will be more likely to use your service if you seem warm and like you care about them as individuals.

The cost of solar energy has decreased by 89% in the past decade. As more people want solar panels, we get better at making them, so they become cheaper, so more people want them—a virtuous cycle. Fossil fuels are stagnant in price because much of the price is fuel and because fossil-fuel-burning plants are already as efficient as they can be. Nuclear power is increasing in price because of increased regulation.

Personal essay about the author’s pet rabbit and making the world a better place.

One of the participants in the Time article about sexual harassment in AI has written an essay going into more detail about her experiences. I think her advice about red flags to watch out for is wise. I agree with her that being in a community full of women is a protective factor, although I would also add queer people. Straight-male-heavy communities all too often have horrifying norms about sexual harassment and abuse.

Global Poverty

One in three children globally suffer from lead poisoning, and the problem is getting worse. However, we understand how to get rid of lead, so the problem is very tractable.

Offering coupons for free chlorine may cost-effectively make people less likely to die of water-borne diseases. The coupons create a “hassle cost” which means that only people who use chlorine would get the chlorine, saving money.

Antimicrobial resistance is responsible for millions of deaths a year, and the number is increasing over time. Few resources have been devoted to antimicrobial resistance given the scale of the problem. Effective altruists could work on developing new antimicrobials, help governments implement policies which reduce antibiotic overuse, and develop better diagnostic tools so that people are less likely to wrongly prescribe antibiotics.

If people who are giving birth lie on a plastic sheet with a pouch that collects blood, doctors can easily see whether they’re bleeding too much and suffering a hemorrhage. Hemorrhages cause a quarter of maternal deaths, and the sheet costs only $1-2.

Paying people to get vaccines may be a cost-effective way to increase vaccination rates in the developing world.

Cash transfers reduce mortality rates.

$900,000 was stolen from GiveDirectly in 2022—its largest loss to fraud to date. GiveDirectly had loosened up its anti-fraud controls due to violence in the Congo, and some staff responded by conspiring to steal the money.

Microloans are a major cause of poverty in Cambodia. More than ten percent of the country has borrowed money from a microfinance company. The average loan ($4000) is more than twice the median income in the country. The market is oversaturated, so loan officers lend people money that they can’t afford to pay back, often using land as collateral. Debtors can’t afford food, take their children out of school, or even sell their children as slaves.

Y-RISE is the only organization studying how to scale up interventions. It connects researchers with implementers in order to collect data on how well various implementations work, so that researchers can better understand what makes one intervention work well outside of the randomized controlled trial and one intervention work poorly.

Animal Advocacy

The world’s first large-scale octopus farm has opened. It may lead to zoonotic diseases and water pollution—not to mention the harm caused to these intelligent and beautiful creatures.

Animal welfare in aquaculture may help protect the environment. Poor water quality harms animals and leads to water pollution. Diseases spread to wild populations and, if treated with antibiotics, can lead to antibiotic resistance.

The USDA plans to crack down on false animal-welfare claims on packaging.

The ASPCA has begun to certify some brands of pet foods as high-welfare.

If you read one article in this post read Elizabeth van Nostrand’s excellent piece about why and how animal advocates should have a higher level of epistemic rigor about the effects of vegetarianism on health.

Vegans and vegetarians are more likely than omnivores to feel bitter about their diets, especially if they have a history of eating disorders, see themselves as being discriminated against, or have ethical motivations to be vegan or vegetarian.

Most people don’t participate in animal advocacy. However, many people express at least some willingness to, especially “quieter” forms of activism such as fundraising for charity or hosting a vegetarian dinner party. Participants who would like to engage in animal activism are most likely to be deterred because they think they don’t know enough or wouldn’t be good at it; they aren’t vegan or vegetarian; they don’t have time or resources; and they are worried about being judged by others.

CULTIVATED MEAT IS APPROVED IN THE UNITED STATES!

FDA may require plant-based milks to list on the front of the packaging ways in which they are nutritionally inferior to milk. Of course, cow’s milk doesn’t have to list ways it’s nutritionally inferior to plant-based milk.

The Got Milk? people ran an illegal anti-plant-milk ad. Because they are a quasi-governmental agency, they are legally forbidden to disparage other agricultural commodities.

Plant-based meat sales are slowly declining because people are no longer trying them for the novelty and ultimately don’t want to eat something that’s more expensive and tastes worse.

Existential Risk

Non-superintelligent AI may still increase the risk of nuclear war. AI may make it easier to find other countries’ nukes, which means that mutually assured destruction is far less mutually assured. AI put in charge of nuclear weapons may launch when we don’t want it to.

Will MacAskill on how recent developments in AI affect other EA cause areas.

When communicating about artificial intelligence, take care to avoid “crying wolf”. If artificial general intelligence is thirty to fifty years away, people may assume that AI safety advocates exaggerated the risk of AI when artificial general intelligence doesn’t exist five years from now.

Politics

Inside the Niskanen Center, the leading liberaltarian think tank in the U.S..

Moderate Republican Elise Stefanik gave up her ideals and became a Trumpist for power.

Website lists stories underreported on the right and on the left.

States are starting to require parental consent for teens to use social media.

In the case Martin v. Boise, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that people can’t be punished for sleeping outside if there are no adequate other options available. Surprising decency.

Rights as Schelling points.

Richard Hanania continues to entertain me with his essay about how genuine bravery as a writer is not saying things people don’t like but saying things your audience doesn’t like. Stay for the take on Trump that I can only describe as “Hanania-ish”. Further Hanania-ish Trump takes: DeSantis should fistfight Trump.

Economics

The U.S. Fed has a 2% inflation target because the New Zealand finance minister set an off-the-cuff inflation target of 1%, so the central bank of New Zealand felt that this meant that it had to have a target and doubled the target because they tended to underestimate inflation. Then everyone adopted it.

The real inflation rate is not 14%. The person who said that made an elementary reading comprehension error and confused a 5.1% difference over 31 years with a 5.1% annual difference.

While not a solution to high housing prices, rent control keeps people from being forced to move out of their homes, which can ease the pains of the housing crisis while we work to build more housing.

I recently discovered that Siderea’s excellent series demystifying the economics of therapy has a part two and part three. She goes through exactly how much everything costs and why, in spite of the high cost of therapy, therapists make little money. In general, therapists can’t afford to pay rent in the cities they work in so most of them are married to high-earning spouses, retired, independently wealthy, or working two jobs. I found it particularly troubling that the amount of money a therapist is paid has nothing to do with how good a therapist they are.

Rationality

Types of Non-Honesty In Public Health Communication. Public health communications commonly leave out the size of the benefit or harm of a particular behavior or the harms of medical interventions; leave out the denominator (e.g. saying ‘X people have this condition’ instead of ‘X% of people have this condition’); list numerous outcomes without saying which are more or less important; report relative risks, which tend to confuse people; report relative risks of harms and absolute risks of benefits, which makes the benefits look larger than the harms; give upper bounds instead of a central estimate; are more precise or display more certainty than is warranted by the data; claim a relationship is causal when the data doesn’t exist to back it up; treat ‘there is no evidence that X’ as equivalent to ‘X is false’; and provide meaningless signals of their credibility.

The five reasons that things are associated: chance, causation, reverse causation, confounding factors, both factors lead to group selection.

To achieve your goals, build a really good understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve.

A paper about dishonesty had faked data. In two different studies. By two different people. Who didn’t know about each other faking data.

Preventing loneliness is about more than just talking to a lot of people. You also need high-quality conversations and interactions with people you have many different kinds of relationships with (family members, friends, coworkers, strangers). More social interaction isn’t always good: social exhaustion is also bad for your wellbeing.

Fiction writers seem to be unusually likely to write in the morning.

It’s hard to placebo-control studies of psychedelics because people know whether they’re tripping or not.

Children

Informal mentoring relationships (for example, with a teacher or coach) have a strong positive effect on children, especially poor children. Children with an informal mentoring relationship are 9 percentage points more likely to go to college.

Good parenting means warmth (acting like you care about your kid), structure (clear rules and expectations), and consequences (appropriate and consistent responses to children breaking rules or meeting expectations). In general, rewards work better than punishments to shape behavior.

I loved this essay about what the author gave up when she became a parent. Raw, honest, heartfelt.

Sex

A small qualitative survey finds that men tend to describe their sexuality in terms of seeing an attractive person and wanting to have sex with them, while women have very diverse experiences.

The Talking Heads’ lyrics as an expression of autistic sexual desire.

Short Stories/Poetry

Attachment: Love among sentient anglerfish.

Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death: Sapient nonhumans, weird gender/sexuality stuff, and the struggle to overcome the instincts that shape your life.

Closer: I love this story because it looks like a standard look-at-what-this-new-technology-says-about-the-human-condition story, but if you read it carefully it’s a character study. The new technology has the effect it does on the protagonist and his girlfriend specifically because of who they are as individuals. Fun stuff.

Attunements: A horror story about aliens, pregnancy and changing what you want.

The ants and the grasshopper: Thirteen retellings of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper.

Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies: Poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The Fascination of What’s Difficult: Poem by William Butler Yeats.

Fun

(Give Me Some Of That) Ol’ Atonal Music.

The Weibo substack gives us gay memes from China, the Chinese online feminist movement, a bizarre lack of concern for dogs’ wellbeing, and China’s nice names for other countries.

People who adopt hyperrealistic baby dolls debate whether breast is best and whether it’s ghoulish to roleplay that your baby doll has a chronic illness.

Which emotions do people in various countries feel? I’m kind of concerned about Armenia, I don’t know what’s wrong with it but it’s on a lot of the Bad Lists. Why are people in Nigeria and Senegal particularly likely to learn things? Also, I think that it’s hilarious that Japanese and South Korean people were among the least likely to think they were treated with respect.

Insider traders on the prediction market Manifold predicted a major statement about AI before it came out, then realized that this might be bad and reduce the impact of the statement so they memed people into thinking the market was just high for the memes.

How to make your house look like the cool rationalist houses in Berkeley.

Miscellaneous

The Weibo substack is answering questions about Chinese culture. In this article: the hukou system, or China has illegal intra-country immigration; stereotypes of different Chinese regions; China taking guess culture to an unprecedented level; and more.

The history and true meaning of Juneteenth.