Linkpost for May
Effective Altruism
If being told about factory farming turned you into a vegan, you’re super weird. There are not enough weird people to end the abuse of animals through persuasion.
Relatedly: animal advocacy should both work towards a vegan world and for improvements to animals’ lives in the short term.
News articles about climate change relatively rarely cover the effects of animal agriculture on the climate.
The U.S. government treats vegan activists as terrorists.
i don’t want to talk about AI. PREACH
An adversarial AI developed techniques to beat KataGo at Go, which strong human players are capable of using. To me, this implies that humans could wind up beating AI at Go even without AI assistance—the AI just plays very differently than we do. I await corrections in the comments!
Economics
A 2013 article about the corrupt way that the American Medical Association sets prices for Medicare. (A brief Google suggests the situation has not much changed.)
Another article from 2013: even if legislation is passed, the rule-making process necessary to implement it can easily make the regulation something very different from what Congress intended. Usually, this is because of regulatory capture and the input of industry lobbyists.
The IRS is piloting a free filing program for taxpayers. Yes! Beat TurboTax!
Gender
A bodybuilder argues that women have almost as much capability to perform at an elite level as men do. While testosterone has benefits for sports, so does estrogen. (Puzzlingly, the author thinks that feminists would be upset by this sentiment.)
FDA advisors say the birth control pill should be over-the-counter. Please?
Neurodivergence
Neurotic and mentally ill people are more likely to have PMS.
Using social media might actually make people more depressed. Content note that this is from Richard Hanania and contains Hanania-typical sideswipes at social justice, although I think his bias against the social-media-depression hypothesis makes me more likely to think it’s real.
Many old people want to die because they don’t have anything else to do, feel lonely, and generally feel like their life has wrapped up.
A Christian counselling center offered prayer instead of genuine psychological treatment, caused its patients to have fake memories of abuse, and demanded total submission to its beliefs.
Rationality
Sarah Constantin breaks down the distinctions between “wanting,” “motivation,” “choosing,” “liking,” and “agency.”
Relatedly: “The world does not flourish when everyone tries to be the ideal human. The world flourishes when we are messy, broken, and above all specific. I do this thing because it is my thing to do, not for universal reasons. If you are interested in it, great. If not, I’m glad you have your thing.”
Philosophy can be useful to read as a source of vivid thought experiments even if you don’t buy the theories.
Deadlines might make people less creative, but are still useful if you’re not getting the work done at all or if you already know what you’re supposed to do.
I am absolutely obsessed with the Weibo Substack, which translates and provides cultural commentary on the top posts on Weibo each day. A few ones I’ve read and enjoyed:
China is astonishingly patriarchal. I’m shocked by the amount of discourse about people blatantly favoring their male children over their female children, including making their sons better food than their daughters. Even quite sexist parents in the U.S. wouldn’t do that.
A good employee should be like ChatGPT and obediently carry out commands without thought or emotions. Also: “I read through all the comments and could not figure out why there is a sheep at a hotel.”
Some people feed newborns live earthworms to make them grow taller. Some people get boiled potatoes as their work cafeteria lunch. One person thinks that her brother’s virgin girlfriend deserves to date another virgin and not her nonvirginal brother, but the comments mostly think it’s none of her business. A bunch of people are disturbingly okay with beating their children.
Children’s Day seems like a cute holiday even from the discourse about it. Weibo also discourses about “children are imitating cartoons and hurting themselves” and “the children at the dance recital have been put in weirdly slutty outfits.”
“Enjoyed” is the wrong word for this post about horrific human trafficking in China. It’s very disturbing. I spent an hour or two after reading it unable to think about anything else because my mind kept looping back on it.
Short Stories/Poetry
The Limb Garden: Body horror story about fertility (in both the sense of gardens and the sense of childbearing) and the sacrifices we make to have children.
The Haunted and the Haunters; or, the House and the Brain: I have been misled about how purple Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s prose is by the Lyttle Lytton contest. It’s actually perfectly normal for a Victorian. The Haunted and the Haunters is a charming little story about a skeptic facing down a ghost and discovering it was science all along! (Because this is Victorian, the science in question is some implausible claims about the capabilities of magnetism.)
St. Ailbe’s Hall: Heartbreaking story about an uplifted dog who wants to convert to Catholicism even though the church believes that dogs don’t have souls, and the priest who defies the hierarchy in the name of God.
Journey Into The Kingdom: Horror. A man falls in love with a woman who is maybe a ghost and maybe just a fantasy author when he reads the artist’s statement on her paintings. I really enjoyed the story-within-a-story and the themes of male exploitation of women.
The Death of Allegory: Poem about what happens to the Slough of Despond and Truth Coming Out Of Her Well To Shame Mankind now that we no longer write allegories.
Myconids: Description of a culture of telepathic mushroom people. Originally intended for D&D but delightful to read on its own.
Pop: INTENSE body horror about trichotillomania. I think that the vast majority of my readers should not click on this one, but if you’re here for extremely disturbing and intense body horror you’ll like it. Technically fanfiction of The Magnus Archives, but you don’t need any context from the podcast to follow it.
Just A Minute: One-page cyberpunk comic; sad. I particularly liked the way the author smoothly incorporated details of the worldbuilding. I also thought they did a good job capturing what it’s like to be overwhelmed and stressed and always having too much to do and not enough money.
A Photo Of Yourself From The Future: A sweet comic from the same creator, about what it says in the title.
Fun
Submit your articles, stories, and poetry to the new literary magazine Taco Bell Quarterly. It’s real, not a joke, and 100% about Taco Bell.
Replace Dianne Feinstein with an LLM trained on Dianne Feinstein.
Dermatillomania, not trichotillomania. Trichotillomania is when you pluck out your hairs. (I used to tweeze my facial hair, much to my parents' dismay, because I couldn't stand the rough feel of the stubble that would grow in after shaving. These days, I have a beard instead.)
You are badly misinterpreting Menno.
Menno is writing marketing copy for his coaching business, making the entirely true statements that:
- high load weight training is effective in building muscle in women
- the lower T levels don't make that not true
- hormone differences change somewhat what is optimal
- if you pay him money, you're likely to get strong and look good by the physique athlete standards
He is not saying that women can reach the same levels of strength or mass as men can. He is not saying that because he trains elite women and sees what they can do, which is impressive and excellent but not remotely competitive with men. Note what you read as "women get as strong as men" was actually "women gain the same relative strength as men" i.e. go from 40 to 100 on a lift where men go from 100 to 250 (numbers made up.)