Linkpost for May
Effective altruism, psychology, rationality, politics, short stories, fun.
Effective Altruism
Global Poverty
Malaria vaccination is an emergency, and we should rush out the vaccine. Problems are not less urgent just because they’ve been going on for a long time. A similar take that goes more into why the delay is happening.
Animal Advocacy
Why we should value animals in cost-benefit analyses. I particularly liked the discussion of the ethical implications of “speaking for the voiceless” and how we can incorporate animals’ perspectives more closely in activism to allow them to “speak for themselves.”
440 billion farmed shrimp are killed each year—nearly three times the number of farmed fish and farmed chickens combined.
Qualitative interviewing of the jurors in the Smithfield case, in which two animal advocates were acquitted of felony theft after rescuing two injured piglets. Jurors acquitted the animal advocates because they hadn’t intended to steal a piglet if no piglets were injured, the piglets weren’t worth any money, and the jurors saw the defense as respectful to both jurors and animals.
International survey of beliefs about animal advocacy. In general, people in countries that don’t eat a lot of a particular animal have the same feelings of emotional connection to that animal, but Muslims are less connected to pigs and Hindus are more connected to cows. People in every country are equally likely to underestimate the prevalence of factory farming. The number of animal advocacy organizations is uncorrelated with support for factory farming. The authors write: “The… finding suggests that there are some countries—those with relatively high support for animal advocacy but relatively few animal advocacy organisations—where there is potential for more animal advocacy organisations.” Optimistic!
Using gene drives to eradicate the screwworm—an enormously painful parasitic infection which affects 0.1-4% of wild mammals in South America every year—is a plausibly cost-effective intervention for wild-animal welfare. As the screwworm also affects farmed animals, the animal agriculture industry would likely support eradication, which makes screwworm eradication plausible. The screwworm has already been eradicated in North America without serious environmental damage.
Wild ecosystems are too complex for us to understand whether fishing is good or bad for wild animals. I continue to think it’s fine to eat wild-caught fish.
Existential Risk
Excellent explainer about California’s proposed new Senate Bill 1047. If passed, SB-1047 would require the creators of cutting-edge AI models to follow any regulations developed later about ensuring the safety of such models, as well as presenting and following a plan for how to prevent the AI from causing “a) the creation or use of weapons of mass destruction; b) at least $500 million of damage through cyberattacks on critical infrastructure via a single incident or multiple related incidents; c) the same amount of damage, performed autonomously, in conduct that would violate the Penal Code; or d) other threats to public safety of comparable severity.” Although subject to social-media fearmongering, this regulation is, if anything, less strict than regulations about other dangerous technologies, such as nuclear power plants and airplanes.
Meta Effective Altruism
Actionable: Effective altruist career evaluator Probably Good has launched a job board. Related: Probably Good’s basic guide to doing good with your career. Read it or send it to a friend making a big career decision!
Things you should think about if you’re considering joining a small effective altruist project.
Particularly Good: An in-depth discussion of different ways of visualizing the most common causes of death, and the benefits and costs of each.
Other Causes
Chinese seafood is often processed by Uyghur slaves.
Actionable: How to shift the 2024 election. Target your donations carefully (advice is given in the post). Get a visible signal of your support for Biden/Harris (e.g. shirt, lawn sign) to create social permission to be enthusiastic about Biden and thus argue with your swing-voter relatives. Whenever arguing about the election, online or offline, do your best to argue about abortion, prescription drug pricing, and healthcare—Biden’s best issues.
Psychology
Some researchers used kinky volunteers to study the communicative function of pain vocalizations.
When people critique “the medical model” of mental illness, they tend to ignore the ways that their criticisms of the medical model apply to physical health just as much. Physical health problems are often vaguely defined, caused by Society, not associated with any concrete physiological changes, etc.
Actionable: This year’s Gender Census—which collects information about identity labels and preferred pronouns, titles, and family labels—is available! It’s open to anyone who does not identify as “[a] woman/girl - all the time, solely, and completely (may be cisgender or transgender for the purposes of this survey) [or a] man/boy - all the time, solely, and completely” (including gender-critical people and other people who identify outside the binary for political reasons).
Rationality
Imagine that there exists a manual that tells you the best way to solve all problems. How do you notice if a solution you’ve come up with is in the Manual? What solutions from the Manual do you already have access to?
Metta meditation Sarah Constantin’s way. I independently developed basically the same thing and it works!
What if we understand techniques for solving problems as magic spells.
Particularly Good: Naively, better things are better than worse things. But why do we sometimes prefer things to be worse? Why do people actively value making bad art, doing wrong things, being irrational, and so on? This essay is very insightful. It has a kind and empathetic view of both “you should want better things” and “sometimes I don’t want to rank things on the better/worse scale.”
Politics
The Department of Education attempted to simplify FAFSA. Unfortunately, the rollout was botched: for example, over 70,000 emails were ignored until the close of college application system. “I don’t think highly of many of these contractors, but the ones that win these bids are objectively good at what government asks them to do, which is largely to master voluminous, opaque procurement processes and documentation, and then to fulfill a long list of pre-specified, detailed requirements that don’t add up to applications that actually work. It should not be a mystery why these companies often aren’t good at making forms that work for people because that is not what we ask them to do. We have a bad system, and the contractors can’t do anything about that, so blaming them gets us nowhere.”
Problems libertarianism doesn’t know how to solve, by a libertarian.
Particularly Good: Deep dive by The New Yorker into the case of Lucy Letby, a nurse who was found guilty of murdering seven babies in spite of considerable evidence that she didn’t do it. Especially horrifying: the way that British law silences criticism of the justice system (including the New Yorker article itself, which is blocked in Britain, so there’s Very Probably No way for my British readers to check it out).
Since 2000, the percentage of American bridges that are in poor condition has more than halved.
Short Stories
97-Year-Old Dies Unaware of Being Violin Prodigy: The Onion knows how to write a tragedy.
God Mode: Horror about video games as Buddhist meditation.
Fun
Chinese Doom Scroll: middle-aged man hobbies ranked. Tiktok video sets. Girl praises her boyfriend for leaving a bit of food for her and commenters say he’s just trying to get her to do the dishes. Chinese colonialism. Conspiracy theories about Chinese history (all Western science was stolen from the Chinese). Western food safety is totally worse than Chinese food safety.
Particularly Good: I’ve recently become obsessed with the blog Admiral Cloudberg. Admiral Cloudberg breaks down the reasons behind specific plane crashes. Each story is a little engineering and systems design mystery. It’s kind of a wish fulfillment fantasy for me, because airplane crash investigators are very competent, and most of the articles end with “and then we fixed everything and planes don’t have that problem anymore.”1 Particular favorites: a plane that crashed because the pilot let a child fly the plane; an air traffic controller has a brain fart and kills 35 people, but the investigators correctly place all the blame on the system; the insane story of pilots successfully troubleshooting what was wrong while their plane kept veering random directions and flipping upside-down.
Except in Indonesia. Don’t fly in Indonesia. Nepal is also suspicious.
I wanted to see the British side of the Lucy Letby story, so I looked at the Lucy Letby subreddit. I was expecting fierce debate about the case and the UK justice system. Instead, the atmosphere was eerie: the users (and many of the mods?) all wanted Letby dead and were banning anyone who (roughly) cited arguments from outside the trial.
"We do not permit posts or discussions that run contrary to evidence and outcomes legally accepted, because such sources have not survived cross examination the way that admitted evidence has."
The British consensus seems to be that the New Yorker ignored enormous amounts of anti-Letby evidence. It's not the kind of reaction I'm used to in my own internet spaces, but I'd be curious to see some LessWronger examine both sides the way folks were doing with Amanda Know back in the day, especially to summarize which parts of the prosecution's case were left out of the article.
I've come to the conclusion that ToT link posts are the best link posts among the substacks I follow. I not only click through quite a few of the links but also find really interesting stuff at the other ends. Thank you for compiling those! I realise this is a completely useless comment from the "information or stimulation value" point of view, but I can't think of anything to add to increase that.