Linkpost for May

Effective altruism, writing, life advice, politics, short stories

Effective Altruism

Global Poverty

The $1/day international poverty line came from averaging developing countries’ poverty lines. It’s very vivid and easy to remember: in fact, people keep using it even though the current international poverty line is nearly twice as high. But the poverty line homogenizes the experiences of different people: for example, living on $1/day in a rich country is far harder than living on $1/day in a poor country. And overemphasis on the lowest poverty line can lead people to dismiss people who are not technically the poorest of the poor but are still, by any reasonable measure, unconscionably poor.

30 most interesting facts from Our World In Data. A particular favorite of mine: “Polio used to affect few people because bad hygiene caused babies to be already exposed to the virus when they could still benefit from their mother’s immunity. Thus, ironically, it was improved sanitation that caused polio to kill many people in the early 20th century!”

Several converging lines of evidence suggest that the average effect size of a 1 SD increase in test scores is 12%-28% of lifetime earnings, averaging about 19%. Every intervention that increases test scores and has income data also improves income. Potential mechanisms include education making people smarter and more knowledgeable, more conscientious, or more emotionally stable, as well as network effects from smarter classmates.

Animal Advocacy

Lessons for animal advocates from the founders of the modern animal advocacy movement: focus on the biggest issues; combine “radical tactics [and] reasonable demands”; be practical; be willing to compromise; tell the truth; avoid infighting; combine public protests with private lobbying of decisionmakers.

A new report reveals animal cruelty at prominent “humane” farm Alexandre Farms. The milk of cows who have ever been given antibiotics—even once—can’t be sold as organic, so Alexandre Farms left sick animals untreated. They sent sick cows to auction instead of euthanizing them.

A California high school student sued the LA school district because she was refused soy milk without a doctor’s note and forbidden to give her classmates pamphlets about dairy alternatives unless she also gave them pamphlets about dairy. She and the school district have settled.

Techniques for menu design to nudge people to eat less meat.

Other Causes

Poor indoor air quality spreads diseases. Breathing air with a lot of carbon dioxide concentration makes people perform less well on intellectual tasks. Breathing in indoor pollutants makes people sick. Building regulations that require higher standards of ventilation and filtration would leave everyone better off, as would research into new technologies that would let us disinfect the air.

An insightful analysis of one way that censorship works: “The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power…   This makes sense when we realize that (A) preventing someone from writing/saying/releasing something in the first place is the only way to 100% wipe out its presence, and (B) encouraging self-censorship is, dollar for dollar and man-hour for man-hour, much cheaper and more impactful than anything else a censorious regime can do.”

Effective Altruist Community

A detailed explainer of the crimes of fraudulent crypto exchange FTX.

GiveWell and Open Philanthropy founder Holden Karnofsky has left Open Philanthropy to become a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he will study AI risk reduction. Open Philanthropy article here.

Related: Open Philanthropy’s 2023 progress report and plans for 2024. The list of mistakes is particularly interesting.

Actionable: Have you considered taking the Giving What We Can pledge but ended up not taking it? Talk to Giving What We Can and earn a $50 donation to an effective charity.

Writing

Tech journalism is terrible because most people don’t know much about tech, and therefore require a lot of context in order to understand why they care enough to read the article. The only articles people tend to read are either hype about the next world-disrupting technology or scandals (real or made-up).

Traditional publishing is a vanity project financially supported by celebrity memoirs and The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Life Advice

Some ways that ‘try harder’ is a bad strategy.

Particularly Good: ways to fix it if your entire life kind of sucks right now and you don’t know what to do.

Most people should go to in-state schools, which are significantly cheaper than elite private colleges. As favorability ratings of elite private colleges decline—particularly in fields like tech or finance—the value of the credential is likely to go down.

The demise of the teen babysitter: we’re less likely to trust preteens and young teens to be alone by themselves, much less to watch younger children; parents of young children want professional babysitters who will provide enrichment; parents of teenagers want them to do things that will pad their resumes.

Politics

Particularly Good: A review of Number Go Up, a book about crypto.

Leading crypto people practiced the Bond Villain compliance strategy—their company wasn’t officially anywhere, so therefore no laws applied to them. Did this work? No. The opinion of the US government is “that if you have ever touched an electronic dollar, that dollar passed through New York, and therefore you’ve consented to the jurisdiction of the United States.”

This article about the infant formula policymaking process is a masterpiece of data visualization.

The Koch brothers, the villains of Bush- and Obama-era liberal political analysis, are strongly opposed to both Trump and DeSantis because of their libertarian ideals—in particular, their support of LGBT issues and criminal justice reform. Koch brothers, welcome to the Resistance?

An in-depth analysis of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. DiAngelo has a stupid politics of personal purity and white psychodrama which ironically puts the focus of antiracism on white people’s feelings and virtue. Kendi’s analysis is significantly less dumb. But he rejects anything that smells like blaming black people for their own outcomes—which leaves him unable to grapple with violent crime in black communities or the fact that the inadequate public education system leaves many black children genuinely struggling to read. Further, defining all policies that produce racial inequality as racist means you often can’t know whether a policy is racist until it’s implemented for many years—which seems like a counterintuitive claim.

Among the volunteers who sit in airports and count the number of people being deported. One of the major groups participating is Tsuru for Solidarity, a group for survivors of the Japanese American internment camps and their descendants.

Chinese Doom Scroll: scalpers that get you seats by tackling the security and then yelling “run!” Overworked children. Life in rural China. Han Xin was definitely isekai’d into Han Dynasty China.

Short Stories

The Boy in the Box: An odd and disturbing story about the perils of omnipotence, which reminds me a lot of the classic Twilight Zone episode It’s a Good Life.

Greetings, Humanity! Welcome To Your Choice of Species!: A galactic court decides that humans ought to be eradicated and forces all humans to reincarnate as a variety of displeasing species to reincarnate as.

Particularly Good: Sacrid’s Pod: An AI runs a troubled teen camp in the form of a Nozickian experience machine.

To the Substitute Art Teacher: A comic about finding beauty in the mundane.