Linkpost for March

Each red dot represents ten people who depend on the U.S. for HIV prevention and treatment:

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). On the fiction substack I wrote about Fifty Shades of Grey.

Effective Altruism

Global Poverty

The cost-effectiveness of global health charities follows a power-law distribution.

USAID funding cuts have left patients with experimental medical devices in their bodies which their doctors are legally allowed neither to monitor nor to remove.

Samantha Power, former USAID administrator, writes: “U.S.A.I.D. is no longer monitoring bird flu in 49 countries as it was three weeks ago; it has stopped working with at-risk youth in Central America to prevent gang violence that spurs migration; it is not cleaning up fields poisoned by Agent Orange in Vietnam.”

Relatedly: “Adeng Dong [a woman who survived childbirth because of a USAID-funded maternity clinic] thought I was responsible for opening the clinic, and she was ready to name her baby after me. She was grateful for American generosity and didn’t realize the program was ending.”

The U.S. government has consistently spent $40-80 billion on aid each year since 1940. Our highest year of aid spending was 1948. The U.S. government has never spent more than $15/person on aid to sub-Saharan Africa.

How we can rebuild USAID in a way that makes it more effective.

One in ten people receive remittances (money sent by a migrant working in a different country). Remittances amount to more than three times the size of foreign aid each year. Unfortunately, on average, 6% of all money sent back goes to fees—suggesting that remittance reform is an extraordinarily cost-effective way to help the global poor.

Particularly Good: GiveWell’s approach to thinking about uncertainty. An extremely important read for anyone who donates to GiveWell top charities or who thinks seriously about cause prioritization.

Animal Advocacy

At any moment, 51% of farmed animals are shrimp. While shrimp haven’t been studied as much as some other animals, preliminary evidence suggests that they may be sentient—and if they are, the scale of the harm we’re causing them is enormous.

The USDA’s Farm Animal Welfare Research Lab has been accidentally dismantled by DOGE. It has a budget for five employees. Two employees left in 2024, two were probationary employees fired when DOGE fired all probationary employees, and one is due to retire soon. The Farm Animal Welfare Research Lab has an outsize importance given its small staff: because it was part of the USDA and housed within a land-grant university, it worked closely with livestock producers from an insider perspective that most animal welfare advocates can’t.

Existential Risk

Which AI should you be using now?

Advice for ordinary people who would like to help prevent extinction from AI, including learning about AI; helping spread accurate ideas about AI; lobbying your politicians; getting involved in the movement; and volunteering or switching careers.

It’s not enough for AI companies to have a whistleblowing function: “A good system removes the burden of judgement from individual reporters and makes reporting feel like a normal, low-stakes procedure rather than an exceptional, high-stakes accusation.”

Report (from 2024 but I just read it) says that large language models don’t actually make people better at planning bioweapons attacks. The cell of LLM jailbreaking experts did a particularly good job at planning a bioweapons attack though, but not because they’re using LLMs. LLM jailbreaking experts are just good at planning bioweapons attacks apparently.

Meta EA

Even among moral subjectivists, it feels like morality has a certain kind of finality to it: “My will feels like it is not merely mine… It’s rooted in something deeper, beyond both of us; something that seems, to me at least, ancient, and at the core of things; something in the face of which they should tremble; something whose force should hurl them back against the alleyway walls.”

Effective altruist demographics: ~70% male, ~75% white, ~70% left-of center, median age 31. Vegans (25.5%) very slightly outnumber omnivores (25.4%).

Advice for new EA university group organizers. Frame EA as an opportunity, not an obligation. Separate socializing and “EA work” like reading groups or career development. Much of the group’s impact might come from the self-development of you, the organizer. Prioritize getting highly involved effective altruists, even if you sacrifice numbers. Refer your members to other EAs or to resources that can help them. Set clear and specific goals for yourself and your group, and encourage other members to set goals for themselves.

Open Philanthropy’s 2024 updates: new leadership team; reaching out to work with new funders; trying to figure out how to deal with rapid AI progress and an increasingly politicized and adversarial debate over AI.

Open Philanthropy has announced that, over the next three years, it plans to spend at least $120 million on grants in the Abundance and Growth space. Programs it plans to fund include YIMBYism, increasing the rate of scientific innovation, Abundance/Progress Studies movement-building, clinical trial reform, clean energy, and advocacy against excessive non-competes and occupational licensing.

Other Causes

This interview with immigration attorneys about Trump’s policies is from early February, so about a million years ago in Trump years. But I still found it helpful for explaining our already Kafkaesque immigration system and how Trump’s mass deportation efforts are likely to make it worse.

Some people say that fossil fuels receive $7 trillion of subsidies. However, fossil fuels actually only receive $1.3-$1.7 trillion of direct subsidies; the other $5.3-$5.7 trillion is not having an appropriately priced carbon tax.

La Niña years (“cold” years) are warmer today than El Niño years (“warm” years) were a few decades ago.

Politics

Actionable: The positions of Oakland mayoral candidates Barbara Lee and Loren Taylor. (Sorry, non-Oaklanders, I live here.)

San Francisco’s government spent $600,000 on an eight-hour conference, including $10,047 for flowers, $5,000 for a DJ, $2,500 for a fashion show, and $1,210 for makeup and hairstyling.

Tariffs are terrible industrial policy because they wind up subsidizing inefficient and poorly managed firms. Selling to large international markets allows companies to learn about the best manufacturing and management practices, no matter where in the world they were developed.

Tulsi Gabbard was raised in a Hindu cult. Her experiences fighting in the Iraq war led her to be opposed to military interventionism—which led her to become an apologist for Assad, Putin, and other authoritarian regimes.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doubts whether HIV causes AIDS.

Some Democrats are hesitant about the excesses of “woke” and Tema Okun Thought, but are horrified by everything that Trump is getting up to.

The government webpages Trump doesn’t want you to see.

The horror of SSI asset limits: “Because her husband held an $18 per hour job, she was quickly disqualified from SSI and lost the home care she had received through Medicaid. Her spinal muscular atrophy meant she couldn’t use the bathroom independently, so she deliberately dehydrated herself every day so she could wait out the many hours until her husband came home…. When the mother of an SSI recipient allows her son to live with her rent-free, his benefits are reduced by up to a third to compensate for the “asset” of his mother’s love and home. If a friend picks up groceries and grills for his housebound college buddy, the cost of those groceries is “income,” which is offset by a reduction in benefits.”

Mental Health

A thoughtful and nuanced review from a psychiatrist of a memoir written by a former psychiatric patient who believes that her mental health problems were exacerbated by psychiatry.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to treat drug addicts—as well as people who use prescribed stimulants or SSRIs—with a network of “healing farms” where addicts grow organic vegetables and learn about hard work. I have yet to find an article that points out what seems obvious to me: like troubled-teen camps, healing farms would end up wildly abusive institutions which isolate, starve, and torture their inmates. We have tested this kind of get-back-to-nature learn-discipline-and-hard-work institution, over and over again, and people die. Because of an enormous amount of survivor activism, the troubled-teen industry is dying—but Kennedy wants to bring it back to life, now for adult addicts.

Misophonia—an understudied condition in which sufferers feel profound distress and rage related to common sounds—may reflect trapped priors: you expect a sound to be very distressing, so it distresses you, so next time you expect even more strongly that it will distress you.

Creative strategies for intense needlephobia.

A beautiful piece about the guilt and alienation felt by people who accidentally kill someone.

Reality Has A Surprising Amount Of Detail

Chinese Doom Scroll: Fixing autism through beating children. People wash vegetables at work. Why people want to date virgins.

The wild story of Wildberries, Russia’s Amazon.com. Wildberries became successful but refused to seek a krysha (a protector with close ties to Putin). It was subjected to government harassment and perhaps arson. The founders, a married couple, divorced. The woman, who got the company in the divorce, sought protection from an oligarch; the man, from Kadyrov, the brutal ruler of Chechnya. Kadyrov threatened to declare a blood feud on the woman’s patron. This is all so fucking feudal, it’s insane.

At least one fish species can tell divers apart by their outfits.

Particularly Good: How editors shaped the New Yorker. If you love books, you’ll be screeching at all the writer gossip in this article. (Updike!!!!!)

Low-probability Polymarket markets give probabilities that are systematically too high. This is because people might pull their money from the market early if they want to free up cash to bet on other markets. “The Yes traders are betting that the time value of Polymarket cash will go up unexpectedly: that other traders will be short on cash to place bets with, and will at some point be willing to pay a premium to free up the cash that they spent betting against Jesus[‘s return this year].”

The social construction of gender on Reddit sidebars: “For example, according to the rules of r/nsfwhardcorewhere posts ‘must involve at least one male and one female’, ‘Lesbian is not hardcore’, which is added without any further explanation; gay and other sex is not mentioned at all.” Hm. Challenging.

Fiction

A Sojourn In The Fifth City: Science fiction about a monk carrying a dead body to the city of the dead, which is poisoned by radiation. I particularly enjoyed the way that the story hinted at a deeper and weirder world than exists on the page.

After The Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens: A gentle, heartbreaking story about humans and bug-eyed aliens learning to live together after a war between the species.