Effective Altruism
Global Poverty
Particularly Good: About 6% of the war-torn Central African Republic’s population died in 2022—all while most Americans haven’t even heard of the country. Read the article for heroic attempts to collect epidemilogical data.
A day in the life of a vaccination program field officer in the developing world. “The back of the All Babies card reminds caregivers about their next vaccination day. Program participants and community members helped us create this format, which uses the phases of the moon to show the passage of time (sticks for weeks and moons for months).”
The extreme poor live on less than $2.15 a day ($1.25 at the time the post was written). It’s hard to wrap your mind around. One way to think about it is that people in the developed world can’t buy goods as low-quality as exist in the developing world: “Even the most basic lentils and rice sold at Walmart in the US would be regarded as a luxury item for people living on $1.25 a day.”
GiveWell’s cost-effectiveness analyses involve a lot of judgment calls. For example, they make judgment calls about study reliability and generalizability, how to trade off different values, and what other people would do if GiveWell didn’t act.
Animal Advocacy
A U.S. government program pays TikTok influencers to promote animal products.
People generally love animals and hate animal cruelty, and are generally complicit in animal cruelty through factory farming. The reason is that going vegan or vegetarian is difficult, so people rationalize their behavior. If an issue doesn’t affect you personally, it’s easy to ignore it.
Most people are generally open to “quiet” animal activism, such as donating to charity, volunteering, or talking to friends and family. Most people are not open to protests. Key barriers to advocacy are: self-limiting beliefs (not knowing enough, not being confident, worrying you're not good at it); not being vegan/vegetarian and so feeling unwelcome; not enough time and resources to get involved. Key facilitatorsof advocacy are having time for advocacy and having tasks you’re comfortable with that use your skills.
Actionable: lower-suffering egg brands available in the Bay Area.
Other Causes
The job of “telephone operator” was completely automated from the 1920s to the 1970s. Former telephone operators earned less money, but there was no long-term effect on the demographic that became telephone operators (young women).
Particularly Good: How Chinese censorship works.
People are actually pretty okay with immigration increases as long as they happen in an orderly way—that's why Canada and Australia have higher immigration rates and more approval of immigration than the U.S. does. People don't like asylum seekers because the asylum-seeking process feels chaotic and out of the government’s control.
Meta Effective Altruism
Particularly Good: When people are asked to rank how much moral obligation they have to members of particular groups, about a third of the variance is person-specific, a third target-specific, and a third a result of both person and target. Check out the ranking of various targets: do people care more about apple trees or spiders? Intellectually disabled people or charity workers?
Actionable: Five to ten minute survey for effective altruists (with no writing) about the worldviews of community members.
Actionable: Survey for effective altruists about which newsletters you read, YouTube channels you watch, and podcasts you listen to.
How two effective altruists decided whether to have kids. I liked the frank discussion of time, money, and impact.
Politics
The autopsy evidence shows that Derek Chauvin was at fault for the death of George Floyd.
Dallas, Texas made more black and Hispanic kids take honors math classes by automatically enrolling students who scored highly on their exams, and requiring parents to opt students out. Teaching more math, not less math, is the path towards racial equity in education.
The discourse implies that most parents are unhappy, but actually parents tend to be reasonably happy and satisfied with their lives. Egalitarian chore and childcare division is possible in heterosexual couples if both partners are committed. In some circles, it can feel embarrassing to admit that you actually like parenting.
History
Japanese internment camps weren’t justified as a way of arranging for prisoner exchange. I love reading about history fights I’ve never heard of. Most interesting fact: “When the State Department actually did send out questionnaires about the exchange program - 84 percent of the Japanese-Americans in the camps - ~100,000 out of ~120,000 - swore loyalty to the United States, expressed willingness to serve in the US war effort, and refused to return to Japan. The Japanese government expressed incredulity at this, but it was the case. Even though the American government was holding these people in camps, they were still happy to help the American war effort.”
The popular story for why Planck came up with quantum physics is wrong.
No names were changed at Ellis Island. Immigration officials checked names off a list and didn’ write down names. Instead, immigrants changed their names to more “American” names in order to assimilate.
Scientifically, Pluto is a planet… and so are a bunch of moons.
Psychology
There is no evidence that playing Tetris after a traumatic event reduces your risk of getting PTSD. Many studies weren’t actually of traumatized people, were uncontrolled, or showed no effect. Studies that showed an effect generally showed that the two groups were indistinguishable within a few weeks regardless.
Sometimes an idea about how seems trite until you suddenly get it and it seems profound. Sometimes this is because the idea is in your model of how thinking works but you haven’t actually implemented it in how you think.
Particularly Good: A personal essay about having a manic episode and deciding whether to divorce your husband.
Bourdieauan analyses of how all your tastes are class signalling are true, insightful, and extremely neuroticism-inducing. This is a really good essay explaining how various kinds of tastes are class-signalling, for people who aren’t committed enough to signalling intellectualism to actually read Bourdieau.
Having many components of your identity can build resilience and help you empathize with people different from you. People often have good conversations about aspects of their identity if the context feels safe.
The three requirements for good sexual relationships: friendship and trust; prioritizing sex; not caring about other people’s opinions.
How to do deliberate practice.
According to Swedish administrative data, 7% of PhD students experience depression in a given year, which is only 72% of the rate found in surveys but still much higher than the general public. A difference-in-differences design attributes 80% of PhD students’ depression risk to the PhD program.
Aumann’s Agreement Theorem actually does reflect how humans learn things. You often change your mind immediately when you learn someone you trust knows something you don’t: for example, when you read a sign that says the hours a business is open. People think it doesn’t because we reserve the word “disagreement” for situations where Aumanning doesn’t happen.
Stories
The Little Dirty Girl: A ghost story about parenting and feminism. Beautiful prose, as always for one of Joanna Russ’s stories.
Crispin’s Model: A cosmic horror story about a woman who models for a mysterious artist. Captures the synthesis of awe and terror I always look for in cosmic horror.
Skeleton: Isn’t it creepy that you go around with a skeleton inside you all the time?
Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole: I love Omelas fanfiction and this is one of my favorites.
Fun
Chinese Doom Scroll: surely no one immigrates to the U.S. for freedom? and the ethics of leaving garbage for the poor to pick over. Weird pseudoscientific medical takes. Men with erectile dysfunction are cute. Don’t tell suicidal people to think of their families because that might make them do it + people who are mean on the Internet haven’t been beaten enough. Liveblog of the Spring Festival Gala. People burn paper covid vaccines and Chat-GPT for their ancestors.
Researchers captured the first picture of a baby shark.
Things unexpectedly named after people.
Review of an anti-Nazi book written by a far-right authoritarian… who lived in Germany in the 1930s. It’s a wild ride.
The creator of Keurig cups regrets inventing them. He thought they’d decrease plastic waste, but actually they increase plastic waste because people use them in their homes. He’s very confused by the appeal.
Marbles in marble sports “have skill”: that is, some consistently outperform other marbles.
> Scientifically, Pluto is a planet… and so are a bunch of moons.
This is a good post, but for those of you who are more audio-visually inclined, physicist Dr. Angela Collier published a video essay about this even earlier on her excellent youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwCbMJmgShg
I've mentioned this in your comments and I really don't mean to become a one-issue-commenter harping on about it, but
> The reason is that going vegan or vegetarian is difficult, so people rationalize their behavior. If an issue doesn’t affect you personally, it’s easy to ignore it.
seems like an unnecessarily hostile/judgemental framing. At best it assumes the conclusion (i.e. that vegetarianism is so obviously logically implied by everyone's values that any rationale they could give for not going vegetarian has to be a *rationalization*). Where many people will naturally fall off is at the idea that buying already-processed meat makes them "complicit" in the animal cruelty happening at the source. Maybe because they're not consequentialists at all, or because they don't believe any boycott will ever make a dent so they may as well enjoy the spoils of the inevitable. The latter seems particularly common to me (and is, of course, an unrefined form of thinking about it in tragedy-of-the-commons terms like I do) — people shake their heads slightly that it would be a better world if no factory farming happened, but don't believe that it'll ever actually change, so individual switches to vegetarianism would just be pointless self-deprivation to no practical end.