Linkpost for October

[HOW IS IT NEARLY THANKSGIVING]

Effective Altruism

Global Poverty

Actionable: Open Philanthropy is directing only $300 million to GiveWell over the next three years—less than expected (Open Philanthropy’s post, GiveWell’s post). Partially, this is because OpenPhil has more good giving opportunities elsewhere (especially in longtermist grantmaking); partially, this is because Dustin Moskovitz has less money. GiveWell expects to identify more good opportunities than it will be able to fund, and therefore donations to GiveWell are especially valuable.

In addition to oral rehydration solution for diarrhea, children should receive zinc supplementation. I didn’t know this! Apparently zinc reduces the severity of diarrhea.

We know how to drive malaria-carrying mosquitoes extinct for a few million dollars. The problem is political.

Even though tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment is better than ever, gaps in the health care system of the developing world make it difficult for us to control and eventually eradicate tuberculosis-- the world's single most deadly infectious disease. 

African health startups include virtual consultation, private pharmacies, and even drone delivery to remote areas (!). 

I have been procrastinating on summarizing GiveWell's StrongMinds assessment since mumblemumble March, so here we go. StrongMinds provides group therapy to people in the developing world. The Happier Lives Institute thinks that StrongMinds beats GiveWell top charities, if you only care about people's self-reported well-being. GiveWell thinks that, even using a subjective well-being approach, StrongMinds is about 25% as effective as its top charities, although the real difference could be anywhere from 5% as effective to 80% as effective. They argue-- in my opinion, persuasively-- that the Happier Lives Institute doesn't properly account for problems in the studies, such as publication bias, social desirability bias, and the program being less well-implemented outside of a trial context. Further, the Happier Lives Institute overestimates the effect of depression on people's well-being, the effect of one person getting therapy on the well-being of others around them, and how long the effects of one to two months of therapy will last. 

Animal Advocacy

Actionable: Animal Charity Evaluators has announced its recommended charities. Congratulations to Legal Impact for Chickens, New Roots Institute, and Shrimp Welfare Project for joining the list this year!

Actionable: Ameliatarian Recipes offers recipe advice for an ameliatarian diet. (The blog seems to be private such that only people who have Tumblr accounts can see it.)

Wayne Hsiung, founder of Direct Action Everywhere, has been convicted of felony conspiracy to commit misdemeanor trespassing (apparently a real crime) for rescuing a sick animal from a farm. Hsiung continues to defend his actions as legal, because under California law you're allowed to trespass to aid sick animals. I think a lot of Direct Action Everywhere's tactics are pretty stupid. However, I think open rescues (a form of civil disobedience in which you publicly rescue sick animals from farms) are a potentially powerful tactic-- everyone agrees you should be able to take sick animals to the vet. I wish DxE luck on appeal and hope they manage to establish a right to rescue.  

As countries get richer, they tend to eat more meat. However, some countries continue to not eat much meat or even have consumption fall as they get richer. No one knows why and this is a promising avenue for future researchers.

The U.S. beef industry offers an MBA: a Masters of Beef Advocacy, that is. (You don’t actually get a master’s degree.) It teaches people to spread false information that beef is sustainable.

One of the authors of a scientific declaration in favor of meat-eating called veganism “an eating disorder requiring psychological treatment.”

A provocative argument that (1) corporate chicken campaigns improve the world more cost-effectively than GiveWell top charities (2) we should more explicitly consider the effects of global health and development interventions on farmed animals. I don't know that I agree, but I think it's a fascinating argument to bring up. 

Mostly linking to this for the facts about bristlemouth fish and the suffering caused to them by climate change. 

Existential Risk

Particularly Good: The techno-optimist’s fallacy: if technological development is good, then every conceivable technological development must be good.

Related: venture capitalist Marc Andreesen’s ideology is “reactionary futurism”. It combines the futurist’s interest in science fiction shit with the reactionary’s belief that there was some great period in the past¹ when (to quote Douglas Adams) men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Dumb ideas like degrowth and important concepts like existential risk and environmental stability are the same thing—limits on the ability of the Nietzschean Ubermensch to do as he likes.

Large language models have lead to massive amounts of impossible-to-detect cheating on college campuses. The undergraduate essay is doomed. 

A brief reflection on being scared of the changes AI will bring. 

Tyler Cowen has written the first book ever published intended to be read with assistance from a customized large language model. I haven’t tried it out because large language models give me the creeps, but post in the comments if you have thoughts.

Meta EA

Mostly follow conventional wisdom about ethics, except for a small number of “bets” against it. Consider a variety of perspectives when choosing your bet. Be more careful if your bet has a larger effect on more people. Don’t do things that seem very bad according to an important perspective.

Particularly Good: There’s not much that’s original in this set of criticisms of effective altruism, but I think they’re nicely and clearly put and it’s good to have them all in one place.

Other

Particularly Good: How to think ethically about Israel and Palestine.

“Genocide” has four definitions. Legally, it's the use of state violence against a category protected by the Genocide Conventions which is, beyond a reasonable doubt, an attempt to eliminate that group. In the social sciences, you can commit genocide against political and other groups, and intent doesn't have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In policy, it refers to any mass killing of civilians. Colloquially, it refers to the greatest harms people can experience. 

The Amazon rainforest may be reaching a critical tipping point. Without enough trees to transfer water from the soil to the air, rainfall will decrease, which kills more trees, which means there are even fewer trees to transfer water from the soil to the air. Although we have not yet reached this tipping point, some models suggest it may be distressingly close.  

Particularly Good: De facto banning nuclear power is harmful to human health, the economy, and the environment. Nuclear power plants are required to reduce radiation exposure "as low as reasonably achievable": that is, when the price of electricity increases the safety standards for nuclear increase until it costs the same as other electricity sources, and the safety standards are never allowed to go down. This is an insane way to regulate anything and if applied evenly would ban, for example, the Sun. I was also interested to learn that nuclear reactors have been discovered in nature on Earth. 

Politics

This article about Medicaid work requirements taught me how irregular many poor people’s work hours were month-to-month. Nearly half of people subject to a Medicaid work requirement have at least one month a year where they don’t work eighty hours—even though 70% work 1000 hours in a year (i.e. slightly more than 80 a month on average).

40% of Americans were always or frequently confused how much they would pay for health care after receiving it, while an additional 30% were sometimes confused. A free market in health care would be great, we should have one.

Nearly half of Finland’s grocery market goes through a single chain: S Group, one of the largest workers’ cooperatives in the world.

Particularly Good: Commentary on a biography of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. "If Putin is basically a spook and Modi is basically an ascetic, Hugo Chavez was basically a showman. He could keep everyone’s attention on him all the time... And once their attention was on him, he could delight them, enrage them, or at least keep them engaged. And he never stopped. Hugo Chavez was the marathon runner of dictators." 

A small neighborhood outside Phoenix, Arizona is designed for people not to use cars.

The Indigo Blob is the 70% of the country which is liberal, centrist, and non-Trump conservative. The Indigo Blob controls many ostensibly nonpartisan organizations (the mainstream media, science, many corporations), which wind up slightly left-skewed. Before Elon Musk, Twitter was the "town square" of the Indigo Blob's intelligentsia: the fact that the Indigo Blob is so diverse made it seem like everyone's viewpoints were represented on Twitter, but they really weren't, which caused systematic underestimates of the number of people with MAGA Republican views. 

College students have remarkably low tolerance for even mildly controversial speakers. About 60% of conservative college students tolerate any particular controversial speaker, while liberal college students tolerate only controversial speakers who are liberal. 

Crime

Particularly Good: I love this five-page paper explaining that forensic science is unreliable, unreproducible, unreliable, and unreplicatable. It’s clear, funny, and a general masterpiece of science communication. Send it to someone you know who’s been called for jury duty.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders refused to pardon Charlie Vaughn, a mentally disabled man coerced into confessing to a murder he almost certainly did not commit.  

I recently learned that, back in August, the founder of Backpage.com committed suicide, just days before his federal trial for facilitating prostitution. I am angry at the federal government for destroying the life of a man who did nothing but enable consenting adults to sell services to other consenting adults. 

Thieves have been stealing catalytic converters, which make car exhaust less harmful to the environment, from cars. The pandemic led to precious metal shortages, which means that thieves can make a profit selling the precious metals in catalytic converters to scrap recycling centers-- and because catalytic converters don't have serial numbers, it's nearly impossible to connect them to any specific car. Installing a "cat shield" can protect your catalytic converter from theft. 

Today in incentives: a jail appears to be releasing dying inmates so they don’t count as deaths in custody.

The test used to determine if babies were born alive or dead is highly unreliable and may be sending innocent women to prison for having stillbirths.  

Rationality

In defense of reading entire books for an overview of a field or a deeper dive into a topic.

Parenting

If we want a more equal society, men have to be willing to sacrifice their careers for their spouses'. 

Emily Oster’s podcast has an excellent episode (transcript available) about deciding whether to divorce your coparent and how to minimize the effects on your kids if you do. Oster’s characteristic rationality and focus on tradeoffs cuts through the emotion and moralism around this topic.

A rationalist alphabet book.  

A recent study of DBT for middle schoolers in the general population found that it worsened mental health. Possible explanations: the kids felt depressed because they had another task put on their plate; the kids were confused by DBT; the program didn't manage to teach real DBT; it taught the kids to ruminate about their problems; the parents weren't on board which caused problems if e.g. the kids were suddenly behaving assertively to their parents. 

The U.S. Defense Department runs the best schools in the U.S. They outscore every other jurisdiction on tests and are integrated racially and in terms of class. Reasons: all students have at least one employed parent, housing, and health care; teachers are well-paid; the centralized, bureaucratic system controls everything teachers do to maintain high standards.

Short Stories

How To Serve The Dead: An oddly heartwarming flash fiction about Confucius’s lesson to one of his students.

The Girl And The House: metafiction about being trapped in a gothic horror novel. 

Fun

Matt Yglesias picks a fight with Elon Musk’s approach to comic book interpretation.

Chinese Doom Scroll: weird cynicism and disdain for the concept of helping others, plus “girls don’t have homes once they grow up.” A conspiracy theory that connects COVID with the Unit 731, the Imperial Japanese unit that committed medical crimes against humanity in World War II. Concubines as imperial Chinese surrogates. Chinese patriarchy as a way of bribing low-status men to work by making sure they have families and wives. China's real estate crisis is downstream of (a) it being a legitimately good idea to build infrastructure before it was needed while China was going through rapid growth (b) dictatorship leaving the dictator with no way of finding out what people actually want or need (c) a government-created Ponzi scheme to get more land taxes. 

Windex gives a statement on Israel/Palestine: "Windex is for big boys and girls, and we didn’t become a dick-swinging Alpha Dog of a cleaner that terrorizes the nightmares of streaks and smudges by playing it safe."

1. Specifically, ancient Greece.