Linkpost for November

Effective altruism, happiness, writing, social justice, science, short stories, fun.

Woman who has not just fallen out of a coconut tree. Photo by Rémi Jacquaint on Unsplash

Monthly reminders: I am available for consulting work, including writing and editing. If you like science fiction stories adapted from metaphysics papers, you can buy my novella Her Voice Is A Backward Record nearly anywhere fine ebooks are sold; it may also be available at your local library, depending on which ebook services your library subscribes to. Recent post on my fiction blog is a short story in the form of a DSM entry, Mythos Exposure Disorder.

Also, if you’re an American, please remember to VOTE and to vote for KAMALA HARRIS, who believes in abortion rights, a U.S. medical system that is slightly less garbage, not attempting coups, and an end to lead poisoning.

Effective Altruism

Global Poverty

USAID and UNICEF have announced a program intending to end lead poisoning around the world. Lead exposure affects a third of children globally, and causes ADHD, loss of IQ points, and cardiovascular disease. Many sources of lead poisoning are relatively easy and cheap to eliminate. In my opinion, this program has the potential to be as cost-effective as the anti-HIV program PEPFAR—or perhaps even more. Open Philanthropy is a major funder.

Economists know a lot of relatively simple rules for the economy, such as “don’t do subsidies or price controls, especially at the same time.”

Recent research complicates the idea that the Black Death caused wages to go up. While the Black Death caused labor shortages which did eventually raise wages, it took decades for wages to readjust. Before then, landowners engaged in collusion to try to keep wages low.

Animal Advocacy

All other animal advocates should get on Faunalytics’s level and write papers explaining how to use “loyalty to Donald Trump” as a value that might convince people to support some animal advocacy causes. (Trump has supported some pro-animal legislation, and many of his key issues—such as free speech and making goods in America—can be connected to key animal issues.) Not only is this outreach to conservatives, it’s outreach to the kind of conservatives that actually exist, as opposed to the imaginary ones liberals like to make up in our heads. I hope more animal advocacy groups follow Faunalytics’s example.

An excellent piece critiquing Rethink Priorities’ Moral Weights Project—which attempts to put numbers on how much we should value animals vs. humans—for making several decisions that wind up weighting animals over humans. For example, the Moral Weights Project assumes that only the ability to feel pleasure or pain matters morally; doesn’t include neuron count as one of its proxies; and assumes that any animal which can e.g. feel anxiety feels anxiety the same way a human can. The author says—and I agree—that the Moral Weights Project is still a fantastic piece of work clarifying a confused field, but it is clearly preliminary.

Animal advocacy has a mixed track record, with some huge successes and a number of programs creeping along and never quite failing. Weak evaluation of animal advocacy programs, and the difficulty of extrapolating future performance from past results, mean that cost-effectiveness analyses of animal advocacy programs are very uncertain—and may be overblown.

Existential Risk

The story of SB-1047—the AI safety bill vetoed by Gavin Newsom. I particularly liked the analysis of how AI safety seems to be splitting away from the techno-optimists and allying with people with a broad range of concerns about AI (deepfakes, misinformation, etc.). I’ve generally thought that the alliance between AI safety and techno-optimists was mostly a product of whom AI safety people find it congenial to go to parties with, which isn’t the basis of a mass movement. Glad to see that people are realizing that AI safety is AI ethics, and that tech companies (like any other kind of company) are not particularly happy about.

I’m not sure I agree with the policy recommendations or the graphic design choices, but I enjoyed this explainer of how databases for training generative AI are built. In particular, I didn’t quite internalize how much databases rely on other machine learning models and ratings from human beings (many of whom have idiosyncratic preferences). The article is perfectly understandable even if you know nothing about generative AI.

Meta EA

Charities that try to get people to donate more money vary depending on whether they target everyone or just rich people, and on whether they’re trying to promote giving money at a specific time or a longer-term attitude of effective giving. There are numerous tradeoffs between these strategies: for example, targeting a small number of rich people allows you to give them a more in-depth education about effective giving, but means you aren’t spreading pro-charity norms across the general population.

Dustin Moskovitz, the major funder of Open Philanthropy, on his approach to effective altruism.

A list of highly effective charities for various causes. The list includes recommendations in several noncentral-EA cause areas, such as research and development, policy, and improving the quality of information available to people.

Other Causes

The Living Planet Index supposedly tracks whether animal populations are increasing or going down. But its methodology is confusing: it averages together population declines, so the loss of 50 animals from a 100-animal population is the same as the loss of 100,000 animals from a 200,000-animal population. The media mistakenly reports the fact that the average population in the LPI declined by 73% as the overall number of wildlife in the world declining by 73%. Further, it tends to overestimate declines: for example, if an animal population is already quite small, an apparent decline might just be scientists missing five animals this year that they counted last year.

Particularly Good: A climate scientist wrote an essay saying he had left out important nuance from his study of wildfires and climate change in order to get published in Nature—and then everything exploded. I’m genuinely impressed by this article in Grist Media, which has an attention to shades of gray that I (sorry!) don’t normally associate with environmentalist media. Instead of falling into simplistic narratives about the climate crisis or the replication crisis or any other crisis, this article makes you understand why the scientist made the choices he made and what it means for our knowledge of climate change. Good stuff.

Reducing pollution from diesel-powered schoolbuses could raise school performance as much as improving teacher quality by half a standard deviation. Air pollution matters!

Rate hikes for home insurance aren’t primarily related to climate change: they’re primarily related to homes getting more expensive.

Trump’s “universal tariff” policy is horrible. Many goods—from cocoa to diamonds—aren’t really possible to produce in the United States. A tariff on these goods doesn’t stimulate manufacturing at home: it’s not like a tariff would get cocoa producers to invest in those weather machines Marjorie Taylor Green seems to think exist. It’s a sales tax with a disproportionate negative effect on the poor, who spend a higher percentage of their income on goods. A universal tariff would paradoxically deindustrialize America, because key capital equipment is produced in non-American countries and it would be too expensive to put the factories to make them in the United States. Further, the universal tariff would damage our relationships with our allies and reduce our exports, as other countries put up high tariffs in retaliation.

A “living literature review” is a website, maintained by an expert, that accessibly summarizes all currently available evidence on a particular topic. Open Philanthropy is seeking preproposals from individual experts who wish to write living literature reviews.

Happiness

Sweden has unusually complete administrative data about its population. A study of Swedish PhD students showed that use of psychiatric medication and psychiatric hospitalizations increases in PhD students compared to matched controls. The effect is both larger and longer-lasting than the effect of the unexpected death of a parent. Don’t go to grad school!

Economists exploit a natural experiment to show that, conditional on wanting a video game console, owning a video game console makes you happier. They also settled the console wars once and for all—owning a Switch improves your level of happiness five times as much as owning a PS5.

Particularly Good: “The most fulfilled people I know tend to have two traits. They’re insatiably curious—about new ideas, experiences, information and people.1 And they seem to exist in a state of perpetual, self-inflicted unhappiness.”

Writing

For many writers of short articles, writing a book can have a high opportunity cost. It prevents you from going down interesting unrelated rabbit holes, which replenishes your stock of ideas. Going a few years without publishing can reduce your audience. And having a book out that you can’t edit can make people think you believe something you actually don’t.

Academic papers should show lots of digits to make it easier to catch fraud.

Social Justice

The heartbreaking story of a woman, with some behavioral problems and who speaks English as a second language, who graduated high school without learning to read. Disability accommodation programs can be very hard to navigate for immigrants, poorer people, less educated people, people who don’t speak English well, etc. All too often, instead of accommodations that actually help the child learn, the child gets ‘‘‘‘accommodations’’’’ that make her someone else’s problem.

A woman whose child would die within hours of birth was forced to carry her child to term because of Florida’s harsh anti-abortion laws. “You could have people coming up to ask you, ‘Is this your first or second child? Are you excited?’ And I didn’t know how to answer. I was like, ‘Yes and no.’ And they give you that look like, no? I would say ‘I found out my son has a life-threatening condition and he’s going to die after birth.’ And it leaves me in this awkward position with these people because they don’t know what to say… Sometimes I would just agree with them and say, ‘Yeah,’ because I just didn’t want to get into those conversations.”

American police officers commonly believe in a pseudoscientific diagnosis, “excited delirium.” People with excited delirium purportedly are superstrong and nearly immune to pain, which justifies extreme police violence to subdue them. Other symptoms of excited delirium include a patient who “exhibits mental health” or has “any behavior that seems out of the ordinary.” The manufacturer of tasers particularly pushes the diagnosis, presumably to deflect attention away from tasers’ role in deaths in police custody.

Science

Fact-check of Outlive, which I reviewed here. The author found that Outlive is broadly accurate, but its claims about the importance of stability-related exercise seem to be overblown. In reality, nearly all exercise improves your balance.

Particularly Good: the world of microbiology is very weird and we don’t know much of anything about it. (By friend of the blog Georgia Ray!)

Short Stories

The True History of the Gem War: Steven Universe fanfiction in the form of an ancient Near Eastern history of the Gem War. The author’s pastiche of ancient Near Eastern esoterica is flawless.

The Girl of Tomorrow - I Can Make You Famous: Superman fanfiction set in the 1950s. Like all good Superman stories, it’s mostly about the kinds of problems created by having a fantastic suite of superpowers that make you one of the most powerful people in the world—like “what do you do with them?”

The V*mpire: A short story about being abused on early 2010s Tumblr (by a vampire). I particularly enjoyed that the abuser was lame, kind of pathetic, and not very good at manipulation—this kind of abuser is underrepresented in fiction. I gave feedback on an early draft!

Noncombatants: The Mocheyn Diaspora: Creepy little piece of Lovecraftiana. The well-chosen details suggest a broader story and leave you to fill in what’s really going on. The twist at the end is a delight, at least if you’ve read as much Lovecraftiana as I have.

Fun

Chinese Doom Scroll: America has free shoplifting, plus a list of tips for screwing people over that to me reflects a shockingly low-social-trust society. More shockingly low-trust society. English education in Chinese schools.

Very charming business advertising $15 website designs. This is the old-school Internet we need.

Someone put up an Android phone somewhere in San Francisco’s The Mission to identify what people are listening to. It updates regularly with the current song. (As I type this, the current song is El Wero (Versión Doce) by El Makabelico.