Linkpost for November

Calls to action, effective altruism, social justice, rationality, short fiction, fun.

If you need a picture to click on the post you can get a funny but irrelevant meme.

Calls to Action

My friend Aidan has a birthday fundraiser for the Good Food Institute, an effective animal advocacy charity which focuses on developing alternative meats. Help give Aidan a happy birthday by donating! (Also available on Facebook.)

If you’re transgender and American, consider taking the US Trans Survey. The US Trans Survey, the largest survey of trans Americans, has provided a lot of statistics that we rely on to understand trans people’s lives—most notably, that 40% of trans people have attempted suicide. Anyone who identifies with a gender different than the one they were assigned at birth is eligible, whether or not they identify as trans, are out, or have taken steps towards transitioning. The survey takes about an hour, although it’s significantly shorter if you haven’t experienced much transphobia.

Effective Altruism

Everything we do as effective altruists is ludicrous. Being aware of this fact makes us kinder to others, gives us perspective, and helps us cope well with failure.

“Following an idea to its logical conclusion may be extrapolating a model beyond its valid range.”

Are longer-lasting but less severe pains worse than more severe pains that only last a short amount of time?

A thoughtful criticism of the Centre for Effective Altruism’s community building work. In short, they tend to have inadequate staff to execute their goals, rarely evaluate their projects, regularly repeat mistakes, and understate their mistakes in public communications. However, the current organization is better than the organization was in the past.

Sri Lanka has widespread hunger caused by incompetent governmental policy. This article tells the heartbreaking personal stories of people impacted.

The World Bank and the IMF are getting it wrong on climate change by prioritizing reducing emissions over economic development in poor countries.

Lead poisoning affects a third of all children, but we spend only $7 million a year on fixing it.

The Living Planet Index doesn’t say that there are two-thirds fewer animals today than there were fifty years ago. It measures the relative decline in size in each population, and then averages it. (Populations that are already small are more likely to decline.)

Honey, wake up, a new crime just dropped: cattle laundering.

Chinese consumers’ attitudes towards animal welfare. The term “animal welfare” is confusing to Chinese consumers because they associate it with welfare payments.

Redemption arc: “Rick Pitman, a California-based turkey farmer, testified in favor of the defendants. His position likely came as a surprise: In 2018, DxE activists took his turkey from a farm in Utah and exposed cruel conditions maintained there, which were then covered by the Salt Lake Tribune. “There’s a difference between stealing a turkey and causing damage to the property or economic damage to me, or whether he’s trying to rescue a turkey that’s suffering,” said Pitman. He added that talking to DxE has helped him improve living standards for his animals.”

Scientists have recreated the 1918 flu virus and infected macaques. Setting aside all the other issues with this: those poor macaques!

It is not unreasonable to believe that climate change is an existential risk. Much of the risk comes from our uncertainty about how much damage is caused by a given amount of warming.

Discussion of AI takeover scenarios is often superficial and fails to seriously analyze the difficulties in an AI taking over.

Social Justice

One of my favorite essays: about what it’s like to cut off people who treat you like you’re worthless but who are very invested in the relationship continuing.

An incompetent public defender causes an innocent man to spend years in prison.

Expanded mandatory reporting actually harms victims of child abuse by flooding the system with frivolous reports and reducing the resources available for investigating serious cases. Even many serious reports are of child neglect, which is often best solved by giving the parent more money rather than by removing the child. Since Pennsylvania’s reforms expanding mandatory reporting, the number of children who die from child abuse has doubled.

Rationality

What does the A-button challenge (trying to win Super Mario 64 with a minimum number of button presses) teach us about science?

Use GPT-style prompt engineering to write better.

Short Fiction

The Redaction Machine: philosophical science fiction exploring the ramifications of a new technology—a machine that lets you “rewind” to a previous self.

Reasons To Be Cheerful: what happens if you’re happy all the time due to a brain tumor, and then its removal makes you incapable of happiness?

The Quiet Rebellion of Tardigrade Sela Writings: what would it be like if tardigrades could write?

Frost’s Boy: is it good to marry the cruel yet beautiful boy in a fairy tale?

How The Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid The Universe, or The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly: Metafictional fairy tale about the crown prince of Jupiter falling in love with the princess of the Sun.

The Sea Witch Sets The Record Straight: The Sea Witch from The Little Mermaid feels that she has been misrepresented all these years.

The Silmarillion In The Style Of Lemony Snicket.

Fun

The Onion’s hilarious amicus brief about the right to parody.

Mondrian painting has been hanging upside-down for seventy-five years.

Review of the Malleus Maleficarum, which is very concerned with the possibility that witches will steal your penis.

A maritime shipping advisory panel suggested that the government charge all present and past members of the Cato Institute with treason.