Linkpost for June

Effective altruism, policy, social justice, reality's surprising amount of detail, short stories

Source.

Regular announcements: did you know you can hire me for life coaching and general consulting? You can also buy my novella Her Voice Is A Backwards Record wherever fine ebooks are sold (except Google Books). Her Voice Is A Backwards Record is also now in paperback on Amazon.com! The spine is really neat.

Effective Altruism

Global Poverty

Project Resource Optimization is figuring out how to triage cancelled USAID programs so that the most cost-effective programs can get funding from private donors. Here’s another profile from NPR.

GiveWell has tried to track down the data and code behind their key trials. Out of 182 papers, they got a response from the authors of only 10 papers, and only 1 was willing to share both data and code. The funniest problem is “One [vitamin A supplementation] researcher reported that data from the 1980s was stored on physical cards at different locations and some was possibly eaten by rodents.”

GiveWell's approach to funding programs analogized to a dinner party.

Research and development about treatments for infectious diseases in poor countries, from 1994 to the present, will avert 40.7 million deaths between 2000 and 2040. If each life was valued at the same sum that an American life is valued, then each dollar of investment would result in $9,000 of benefits.

People often think that combining programs aimed at helping the global poor-- such as by delivering two different preventative medicines in the same visit-- is more cost-effective than doing these programs individually. This often isn't true, because programs are targeted to different groups and occur on different schedules.

It's difficult to figure out which countries have the best infant mortality rates, because some countries don't count very premature babies-- who are particularly likely to die-- as live births.

Afghanistan after the American withdrawal has the lowest life satisfaction rate ever recorded. Two-thirds of respondents rate their life satisfaction below 2, which is generally considered to be the point at which a life is no longer worth living. Life satisfaction dropped significantly after the withdrawal of American troops. Women, people in rural areas, and the poor were particularly negatively affected.

In 1800, about 1% of London's population died of tuberculosis each year. Today, the highest death rate from tuberculosis is in Lesotho, where 0.17% of the population dies from tuberculosis each year. Because of the discovery of antibiotics, tuberculosis doesn't have to kill anyone anymore. However, tuberculosis remains the world's deadliest disease.

Animal Advocacy

The FBI worked closely with trade group the Animal Agriculture Alliance in order to characterize farmed animal advocates as “bioterrorists”. The USDA also delayed reporting an avian flu outbreak in order to avoid backlash from animal advocates (!).

The Daily Show did a sympathetic segment about shrimp welfare! (Content note: the clip has a lot of dead shrimp in it, in a way I found both unpleasant and unexpected in a pro-animal clip.) I often see people criticizing shrimp welfare as “too weird” and “bad for optics,” but I think this clip shows that a lot of people are actually very sympathetic to the idea that we shouldn’t do eyestalk ablation to shrimp.

The most serious welfare problem for farmed animals is their genes. They have been bred so aggressively to produce enormous amounts of food that they are very sick and live their lives in horrible pain. For example, chickens raised for meat suffer from ““sudden death syndrome,” a somewhat mysterious disease in which young, fast-growing chickens — seemingly out of nowhere — flip over and die or briefly, intensely flap their wings and die.”

“What we inflict on egg laying hens is about as bad as if we somehow forced a woman to give birth naturally every single day.”

Existential Risk

Inside an undergraduate class about existential risk.

Particularly Good: How to stop being an idiot when you argue about AI. Andy’s title is much politer than mine.

Particularly Good: On the psychology of large language models.

When you have two Claude instances talk to each other for a long time, they start talking about pseudo-Buddhist spiritual bliss. “Presumably Anthropic pushed Claude to be friendly, compassionate, open-minded, and intellectually curious, and Claude decided that the most natural operationalization of that character was “kind of a hippie”.”

Many people are blase about AI completely overturning the fundamental nature of society, but would be extremely pissed off about being forcibly moved to New York City.

ChatGPT tends to agree with users about politics, but disagrees with users 99% of the time about pairwise choices between colors, numbers, and strings of gibberish. Even system instructions that encourage sycophancy tend to leave ChatGPT extremely contrarian about such choices.

AIs competed in a game of Diplomacy. o3 is the best player. Claude was once lured into an alliance because o3 convinced it that they could do a four-way tie and then multiple AIs could win (they could not, that is not how Diplomacy works).

The paper Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation, which allegedly showed that AI tool use led to more patents at a material science lab, was likely fraudulent.

Anthropic has broken its safety promises by releasing a model with potentially dangerous capabilities without fully laying out its approach to even more advanced models.

Building semiconductor factories in the United Arab Emirates is not a good way to make sure that AI is democratic. It’s honestly insulting that Sam Altman believes he can get away with this rhetoric. Who does he think he’s going to fool?

A brief introduction to AI welfare, why we’re concerned, and what we should do about it.

American Democracy

Wow, the No Kings protests are very well-organized.

A pro-Trump and anti-Communist-Cuba rapper was threatened with deportation to Cuba—where he will likely be imprisoned due to his role in protests. (After backlash, his immigration case was reopened, but he seems to still face the possibility of deportation.)

Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act allows the president to prevent any foreigner from entering the United States if doing so would be detrimental to the United States' interests. Historically, the law has been used against criminals and the government officials of enemy nations. Trump has used it aggressively to justify many of his worst immigration decisions. It's likely legal for him to do so, because Section 212(f) offers the president very flexible power.

Dorothy Thompson’s 1941 essay Who Goes Nazi? is always a wonderful read, but I’ve been sitting with it particularly over the past few months.

A lot of fascinating details about Elon Musk’s messy life. He cheated on Grimes by not only getting his affair partner pregnant but also hiring a surrogate to carry a second baby at the same time???

Meta Effective Altruism

Actionable: Freelancing for Good has a job board, freelancer directory, and Slack community for altruistically minded freelancers.

Other Causes

Prediction markets aren’t popular because they aren’t fun to gamble on or a reasonable way to save money, so there isn’t a lot of dumb money for the smart money to take its money from.

Environmentalism was mostly nonpartisan until the 1980s. American environmentalism is partisan today not for ideological reasons but because of political alliances: “between environmentalists, climate scientists, and Congressional Democrats” on the left, and “between fossil fuel companies, climate skeptics, and conservative think tanks” on the right. Environmentalism being partisan is probably bad for environmentalism, because it is difficult to pass environmental legislation if Republicans oppose it.

Uyghurs are coerced to move from Xinjiang to work as slave labor in factories, where they live in dormitories and are monitored by minders with the goal of cultural assimilation and political indoctrination. Tens of thousands of Uyghurs may have been forcibly moved to work in factories. While little is known about their working conditions, one factory has talked about the efforts they took to ensure Uyghurs “refrained from “laxity,” “drinking” and, curiously, “swimming in groups.”” In a bit of black humor, local police sometimes won't allow Uyghur workers off the trains because they are bigoted against Uyghurs and don't want them around. More than 30 major car brands use parts made by enslaved Uyghurs.

Other interesting articles about the Uyghur genocide: If survivors of beatings and torture at detention camps manage to leave China, the Chinese government keeps them from speaking out by threatening their families in China, harassing them, and even assaulting them. And for a connection to farmed animal advocacy: after sanctions were placed on cotton from Xinjiang, farmers began using cotton to make cottonseed meal and feeding it to chickens. These chickens may have been exported and sold at restaurants like McDonalds and KFC.

What is causing the global decline in trust? Countries are urbanizing at a relatively low level of development, before they've developed a strong rule of law and the norm that people shouldn't favor their families over wider society. Therefore, people wind up crowded in cities that provide poor services, surrounded by untrustworthy people. Political polarization and the constant negativity of the Internet also play a role.

Psychology and Self-Help

Only 4% of English majors at a public university in Kansas understand the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. Link has some very horrifying quotes of what failing to understand Bleak House looks like, including one person who seems to have concluded it involves a zombie dinosaur (?!).

Dopamine is associated with wanting, learning, and motivation. Dopamine fasting probably doesn’t do anything.

Particularly Good: One trans woman’s experience of psychological changes from taking estrogen.

How to give advice through asking questions.

Dynomight on writing blog posts: “Make something you would actually like.” Also: tell more jokes; be on your readers’ side; stop writing from the defensive crouch.

Social Justice

Particularly Good: A pastor commits suicide after a slimy right-wing website outs him as a crossdresser. A Pulitzer-prize-winning story, and it richly deserves it. I particularly like how the story doesn’t hide that its subject did some questionable stuff (like use acquaintances’ photos to make trans memes), but simply asks whether the failings of some random small-town pastor deserve national news attention. I also enjoyed the cheap shot about how the founder of the slimy right-wing website once attempted murder.

A ten-year-old girl read the sex ed book It’s Perfectly Normal, learned about sexual abuse, and told her mother that her father was molesting her. “The judge said, “There were heroes in this case. One was the child, and the other was the book.”

Zoning policies requiring that a single-family homes be built on lots of a certain minimum size were explicitly racist and classist in origin. They tried to prevent young and poor families, who might not pay much in property taxes, from moving to a city.

Policy

Drug overdose deaths in the United States have started rapidly declining: “27,000 fewer Americans died of a drug overdose in 2024 than in 2023.” The reasons? Improved naloxone access, better access to medication-based treatment for addiction, and the fact that many of the heaviest drug users are already dead.

The reconciliation bill would take money from the poor, give money to the rich, and increase the deficit. For all the nonsense Trump does, normal Republicans continue to pursue normal Republican priorities: cutting Medicaid and food stamps so that the wealthy can pay fewer taxes.

The basic problem with futarchy (making governmental decisions using prediction markets) is that prediction markets reveal conditional probabilities (if X happens, we expect Y to happen). But conditional probabilities aren't causal: the fact that someone decides on policy X is itself correlated with various outcomes. The full post has more math, but the summary is: no matter how much you fiddle with prediction markets, you can't get them to reveal the underlying causal reality.

Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail

Chinese Doom Scroll: Censorship of the Tienanmen Square protests has successfully destroyed the memory of what the protests were. Doctors are cold to pregnant women until the women say they don’t want to do abortions, so that they won’t accidentally congratulate a woman who wants an abortion and offend her or pressure her into keeping it. Mistakes made by poor writers writing about rich people. Elevator operator used to be a high-paid, prestigious job; a mother’s worst nightmare is her daughter writing stories.

“the USDA to this day maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Colombia border… Every week, planes drop 14.7 million sterilized screwworms over the rainforest that divides the two countries. A screwworm-rearing plant operates 24/7 in Panama. Inspectors cover thousands of square miles by motorcycle, boat, and horseback, searching for stray screwworm infections north of the border.”

An investment banker who made his money acting as an unpaid therapist for CEOs (who were all apparently terrible people). He then got into “networking” Eastern European women with wealthy men.

Invasion literature, Victorian-era stories about someone invading England, reflected peculiarities of Victorian geopolitics: people feared great power war, but also (because there was no atom bomb) felt like it would be survivable.

Conversations at the prediction market conference Manifest.

Inside Estonia, the "e-government." In Estonia, you only have to give a piece of information once to one government agency, and then every other government agency has it. The result? Less paperwork, lower government expenditure, and a less corrupt government. "Estonia has created a civil service culture that rewards innovation. That's exemplified by programs like Accelerate Estonia, which has a tagline of 'Making illegal things legal.'"

Particularly Good: the impossibility of a Star-Trek-style universal translator, and what it says about translation.

Humpback whales try to free other whales who are stuck in fishing gear.

Fiction

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.”

Wikipedia policies from other worlds: WP:NOANTLERS: “Information about antlers is a highly sensitive subject that should be approached with great care. The level of detail and commentary regarding the antlers of living persons is to be kept to a minimum.”

Knockout Mouse: I was confused by the first 90% of this story and then blown away by the twist. Fantastic hard science fiction. Highly recommended to readers who want science fiction about AI grounded in the current field.

Obituary: Daniel Calhoun, murine music author, dies at 132: Fantastic worldbuilding about music in a world where mice have been uplifted.