Linkpost for November

Story via MicroSFF.

Effective Altruism

Global Poverty

Particularly Good: A description of a trip to Nigeria that goes in some detail into the recent history and culture of Nigeria. I really got a better sense of Nigeria as a place from this essay. 

Powerful people—from Bill Gates to Boris Johnson to Barack Obama—have praised India’s prime minister Narendra Modi. However, Modi has overseen a massive increase in cronyism and corruption, arrested and jailed people for opposing him, and participated in shocking anti-Muslim violence.

Animals

Effects of AI on animals: AI may make it easier to have more intensive farming. Speculatively, it could improve alternative proteins, and AIs may be sapient beings who suffer. Many AI organizations’ mission statements only mention humans; advocates should push for labs to also include animals.

Meta EA

Particularly Good: A series on potential reforms to make to effective altruism.

It can be hard for longtermists to stay motivated, because they want to help people now and it's hard to feel deeply motivated by abstruse philosophy. It can help to have a supportive group of friends and colleagues, engage with the arguments sometimes, and make a commitment to doing the most good even if it is emotionally uncompelling. 

Having more medium-sized donors is good for charities. They aren’t beholden to a single donor. The effective altruism community’s donations portfolio more closely matches the community’s priorities.

Counterfactual impact drives you crazy. I not only agree but I have this problem with relationships somehow (you say you love me, but have you considered the positive value I provide over your replacement friend or partner? I might be net-negative because I'm preventing your relationship with a better person!). 

Society

Pierre Bourdieu argues that your class affects which stuff you like, and which stuff you like affects your class (because people like people like us). We unconsciously respond to these incentives.

"The standards for truth that you imbibed as a child are not natural standards of truth. If you had been an educated person in 1200s Europe, your standard for truth would have been what has stood the test of time. You would have lived among the ruins of Rome and studied the anatomy texts of the Greek, known that your society could produce neither of those, and concluded that they knew something that your society could not. Your best hope would then be to simply copy them as best as possible."

Chinese Doom Scroll: Chinese children are routinely prescribed growth hormones to get them to grow taller; "We should only be against domestic violence that happens for no reason, with no technique."

Watching porn makes men more likely to believe that women are kinky, but it tends to make their views more accurate— men systematically underestimate how kinky women are.

Banks seem to lack object permanence because getting an institution to reliably remember information is really really hard and expensive. Calling customer service is frustrating because the people who most often call customer service are, for whatever reason, not very good at things, and need to be handheld through simple tasks; therefore, they assume you are also not very good at things and need to be handheld through simple tasks.

Actionable: GrowSF seems like an excellent local political organization focusing on building more housing, improving public transit, getting the police department to do Good Things and not Bad Things, offering advanced math classes in schools, and getting rid of all the excess regulation. Do Oakland next!

Short Stories

The Things: Professionally published fanfic of John Carpenter’s The Thing, focusing on the experiences of the monster. Really interesting alien psychology.

If all stories were written like science fiction stories: A Golden Age SF writer flies on an airplane.

Fun

Ken White confesses to infringing on Elon Musk’s speech.

Automattic (the owners of Wordpress and Tumblr) have a blog where they call out bad copyright claims. In this post, they talk about an adult content creator, La Sirena 69, who did a copyright claim about blog posts about a Star Trek spaceship that happened to share her name.