Linkpost for October
Effective Altruism
Global Poverty
Some people speculate that self-governed cities (like charter cities or special economic zones) that are independent from the countries around them could lead to freedom, prosperity, and better institutions. Unfortunately, in some parts of Southeast Asia, their primary industries are fraud, slavery, drug trafficking, and wildlife trafficking.
American global health aid saved 3.3 million lives a year before it was cut by Donald Trump. The U.S. aid budget was about 1% of federal spending, and highly effective global health aid makes up only a fraction of the aid budget. I can’t emphasize enough that because of the Trump administration millions of innocent people are going to die.
Excellent review of William Easterly’s The Tyranny of Experts. As a history of centrally planned, technocratic international development, The Tyranny of Experts is strong. Unfortunately, it’s marred by unnuanced thinking about development experts’ support for autocrats: “The text implies an easy equation between autocrat and technocrat, between praising a despotic government for having done something right and endorsing oppression as the best way forward.”
Existential Risk
The simple case for AI risk: if a bunch of aliens who are three times as smart as us were about to arrive on Earth, we would be pretty concerned. It seems possible we’re going to make some beings three times as smart as us Real Soon Now, and that’s concerning.
About three-fifths of US adults are more worried about AI than they were in 2023. Women, poorer respondents, respondents of color, and Democrats are more worried. Concern about AI ethics (e.g. algorithmic bias) is highly correlated with concern about more speculative risks (e.g. existential risk).
Even though AIs outperform radiologists on benchmarks, demand for human radiologists is higher than ever. Partially, benchmarks overestimate AIs’ performance in the real world, where hospitals all use subtly different imaging techniques and where scans are often more ambiguous and difficult to interpret. Partially, malpractice insurers don’t want to cover AIs. Partially, automation of some routine imaging work frees up radiologists for other parts of their job, such as doing the exams and talking to other clinicians. When one part of the radiologist job is automated, we do more scans, rather than hiring fewer radiologists.
Regardless of which language you ask in, AIs tend to be center-left liberals who are opposed to sexism and domestic violence-- perhaps because they tend to ‘think’ in English and then answer the question in whatever language they were asked in.
American Democracy
Trump has earned $3.4 billion from being president. What interests me about this article is how much of Trump’s profits come from crypto: for example, a full $1.3 billion of his $3.4 billion came from Trump Media turning meme-stock investments by retail investors into Bitcoin, not even counting the president’s own tokens and NFTs. As regards more conventional businesses, the president has earned relatively little: it seems like the attempts to indirectly bribe the president are mostly cancelled out by the people who don’t wish to be associated with the president.
The Guardian on Pete Hegseth’s address to generals: “Some described it as karmic revenge for decades of mandatory hour-long safety briefings held by unit commanders before dismissing troops for the weekend... ‘A bad cold could have threatened our entire chain of command.’”
A deep dive into Trump’s violations of due process rights for immigrants. “They’re still breaking up families, holding people in horrific conditions, and deliberately sending people to countries they’ve never known — countries currently at war, or where torture and persecution are common. They’ve tried to deport people for writing op-eds, for god’s sake. They admitted in open court that they arrested and detained a journalist who was here legally because he was reporting on ICE raids. That journalist is expected to be deported to El Salvador today.”
Trump is planning to make access to some federal funding contingent on instituting a set of reforms. Some seem good to me: I think we need less grade inflation. But a lot of it is genuinely troubling, such as the requirement that schools eliminate departments which are hostile to conservative ideas. What happened to academic freedom? Are schools going to have to start teaching climate denialism in climate science classes or creationism in evolutionary biology classes? And some of the requirements are just incoherent. How, exactly, are schools supposed to not accept foreign students that have un-American beliefs while *also* not discriminating on the basis of political views?
Republican political groups have spent $900,000 at Trump properties since the Inauguration.
The aesthetics of ICE recruitment: nostalgia for Millennials, the cultural decline of America, heroic defense of America, hypermasculine white men, women in need of defense, the opportunity to humiliate undocumented immigrants and liberal protesters, ha-ha-only-serious shitposting.
Trump has withdrawn $1 billion in funding for the United Nations and intends to withdraw another $1 billion. The shortfall has offered an opportunity for authoritarian governments-- including Qatar, Rwanda, and China-- an opportunity to cement control of the United Nations. It has also reduced funding for investigations of human rights violations.
Other Causes
Liberals in the political philosophy sense are part-time pacifists: “Like pacifism, liberalism is committed to persuasion as an alternative to violence. Like pacifism, liberalism is difficult in practice, risking complicity at every turn.”
The best jobs for fighting climate change: climate scientist, civil servant, alternative protein researcher, climate-focused engineer, advocate, green impact financing. Sustainability specialist and conservation specialist are not recommended.
Everyone misunderstands the Living Planet Index, which makes sense because the thing it’s tracking is kind of weird. On average, studied wildlife populations have declined by 73% from 1970 to 2020. But about half of studied populations are increasing or stable. And the Living Planet Index doesn’t tell you whether the number of animals is increasing or decreasing. Many individual studied populations are quite small (they’re endangered species). The LPI doesn’t include non-native species, and it’s common for a native species to be declining because non-native species are increasing in population. Stop using the LPI to talk about whether the number of animals is increasing or decreasing! Stop! STOP!!!!!
“Soul casting” is the Chinese Communist Party’s deliberate effort to transform Uyghur people into proper (implicitly, Han) Chinese citizens. “Writers, educators, and most importantly, Party officials are termed “engineers of the soul” (灵魂的工程师), responsible for transforming “rudderless souls” (无魂的躯壳) and “cancerous cells” (癌细胞) into patriotic citizens with the “red gene” (红色基因) and the “correct” (正确) view of the nation (its history, culture, and identity) as well as the Party’s leadership.” Soul-casting projects include “re-education” concentration camps, propagandistic state schooling, coercive labor assignments, coercive birth control, destruction of mosques, and even pairing over a million Party officials with Uyghur families who are forced to live in the same household as them.
The Sudanese Civil War is an example of the nihilistic new face of war: “Sudan fractured into a multilayered conflict that now involves not just the RSF and the SAF, but a bewildering array of smaller armies and militias that fight alongside and against them... The chaos enabled the spread of what might be described as a third ruling idea, neither democratic nor statist, but rather anarchic, nihilistic, transactional... Many RSF fighters aren’t paid, which gives them extra incentive to rob civilians, loot property, and obey commanders who promise they will be rewarded for displacing villages or evicting people who occupy coveted land. The SAF, which is the only group with an air force, has carried out extensive bombing campaigns on civilian neighborhoods, taken lawless revenge on alleged collaborators in recaptured areas, and been accused of using chemical weapons, which it denies. Both the RSF and the SAF have used food as a weapon, depriving their enemies of access to outside aid and creating obstacles for aid organizations operating inside the country.”
Advice
Actionable: social norms to prevent covid transmission, plus home treatment of covid. I endorse this! Mask and distance when you’re sick!
Particularly Good: the most important decision you’ll ever make is what to pay attention to. The primary danger of social media is that it wants you to make the decision without reflection or intentionality-- just going with whatever pops up next on your feed.
Tips for liking everything more. Many of these tips are about shifting attention: embracing intensity, paying attention to what’s going on in the background, noticing your physical experience, noticing when things change, hyperfocusing on tiny details. Others are about expanding your knowledge: developing a critical vocabulary, learning about the context of the work. Some are thought experiments: imagine you’re buying the work, or you’re a time traveler, or you’re in some sense in love with the person who created the work. And of course there’s the old standby “try liking it a bit more than you currently do.”
Between 2003 and 2024, the number of parties the average American went to decreased by half. Only 1 in 25 Americans had plans to attend a party on an average weekend. I can’t believe I am an above average partier. What is wrong with you people?
Norms for a healthy, child-friendly community: you have the phone numbers of most parents in your child’s grade; another family visits your home at least monthly; spontaneous social plans happen at least weekly; you have four non-relative families you can reach out to for help with zero anxiety; you regularly ask for help when you need it and give help to others. I’m at 3/5!
Policymaking
The New Antitrust Movement explicitly doesn’t care about the traditional concerns of antitrust policy (monopoly, competition) or leftism (income equality, poverty). Instead, it wants everyone to own and operate their own small businesses, which they believe is necessary for meaningful political freedom.
Women are often the major beneficiaries of technology-- from the birth control pill to food preservatives to laundry. Today, they are major beneficiaries of ebikes and self-driving cars. If we want technological progress to poll better among women, we should lay out how they specifically benefit from new technologies, instead of talking about them as “a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man” and so on.
Economic growth makes people’s lives better on average, but there are always losers to economic growth. As the economy grows and society changes, it’s important to do redistribution to compensate the losers so that the new economy is genuinely better for everyone.
The media systematically overreports on some causes of death and underreports on other causes of death. Heart disease gets ten times less coverage than would be proportional; stroke, nine times less; liver disease, seven times less. Conversely, homicide gets 23 times more coverage and terrorism gets 18,240 times more coverage (!).
When pandas are bred in America, it’s not to preserve the species. China only sends pandas to America if they’re useless in terms of genetic diversity, and no captive pandas are released to the wild. Pandas undergo a horrific process of artificial insemination because people think panda cubs are cute, which drives visitors to zoos.
“It seems like half the startups coming out of Silicon Valley these days are just “We found a way to monetize undermining the social contract!””
Radley Balko’s investigative reporting on a male teaching assistant falsely accused of molesting fifteen children. Our society’s entire attitude towards child sexual abuse-- the coverups and the ritual scapegoating to hide our guilt about coverups-- is so fucked up.
Isaac Chotiner interviews Biden’s former press secretary. It’s interesting that we’re at a cultural place where talking about your lived experience as an LGBTQ+ black woman is Chotiner giving yourself enough rope to hang yourself with.
Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail
Chinese Doom Scroll: Chinese Malaysians engage in cancel culture about a Malaysian barista who called a Chinese person an idiot in Malaysian; this shows they are “the only true overseas comrades” who still have proper loyalty to China unlike the rest of the Chinese diaspora. Chinese supermarkets discount produce late at night so that they can free up space for fresh produce in the morning; also, a Tibetan and a Uyghur don’t understand how to curse each other. Chinese students have to make up cancelled classes on the weekend; plus, the story of how Li the merchant cleverly married the magistrate’s daughter. “Xiangqin” is dates arranged by parents or a matchmaker with the explicit intent of getting quickly married; apparently it is unlikely to be successful if you are old, bald, fat, short, poor, divorced, a single parent, or a child of divorced parents; unclear to me why people with these traits don’t just pair up with each other. People keep starting new franchises of their favorite restaurants when the old franchises close down? Stocking up on tampons when they’re on sale because otherwise they’re too expensive; also, low-quality pads cause vaginal infections.
Fish locate prey for octopuses, who flush out the prey so everyone can hunt it. If a fish doesn’t carry its fair share of the weight, however, the octopus punches it.
Particularly Good: A review of Skibidi Toilet. For one thing, did you know “Skibidi Toilet” refers to a set of YouTube videos and is not just a series of nonsense words? I did not know this. Learn about the surprising pathos of a series of YouTube shorts about heads in toilets.
The Fatima Sun Miracle is the single Catholic miracle that is hardest to debunk. Enjoy this deep dive into possible theories. “I hope this post doesn’t inspire another round of “miracle believers TOTALLY DEVASTATED by IRREFUTABLE debunking”. I don’t think we have devastated the miracle believers. We have, at best, mildly irritated them. If we are lucky, we have posited a very tenuous, skeletal draft of a materialist explanation of Fatima that does not immediately collapse upon the slightest exposure to the data. It will be for the next century’s worth of scholars to flesh it out more fully.”
The “pop-up experience” is boring to endure but looks fantastic on Instagram. I went to a pop-up experience with my seven-year-old and had a great time, but I’m not sure I’d recommend them for the non-elementary-school set.
Lloyd Alexander’s Westmark Trilogy tells a dark, complex story in very few pages because of his great economy. He often conveys an entire arc over many months using only two or three well-selected scenes.
GLP-1 drugs seem to be good for everything: seizures, dementia, cardiovascular disease, substance abuse, psychosis, even infectious illnesses. It’s possible that this is because obesity is just bad for you; it’s possible that GLP-1 reduces inflammation throughout the body; and it’s possible that GLP-1s improve your mood and cognition.
Fiction
I’m Feeling Lucky: Time travel into the future (but not the past) is invented, so people keep skipping into the future to see how great someone else is going to make it. The little worldbuilding details (murderers time-traveling their victims’ bodies into the future to avert suspicion! time-traveling your winter boots into the future so you don’t have to store them!) make the story.
Particularly Good: Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves: In which the protagonist gets mpregged by the concept of spacetime.
Particularly Good: Palace Fiction: after literal years of peer pressure from me, my friend Bill Friedman has finally created a fiction Substack and begun to serialize his work. The Tyrant is one of my favorite characters in all of superhero fiction and I am so excited that everyone else is going to get to meet him. If you like intelligent characters, twisty plots, and detailed and well-researched worldbuilding, you should absolutely check out Bill Friedman’s work. I expect him to be acclaimed as one of the greats of rationalist fiction.
Man, that Jordan Silverman story is horrifying. Have to agree with Ollie Parks's comment on it, the whole thing seems like it was very much instigated by two particular malicious actors. (Although, the system is very much also a problem -- notice how he suggests modifications to the system as solutions!) And what's with all the goddamn vigilantism?? Really nasty...
This advice is surprising:
> Criminal defense lawyers generally advise people under investigation not to speak to police. But “Lana,” a D.C.-area sex abuse investigator who is familiar with the case — and who has worked both with law enforcement and defense attorneys — says it’s different with child services. “If they only have some questionable accusations and there’s no other evidence, sometimes all they need is a denial” to dismiss the allegations, she says. “But if you don’t talk to them, all they have are the accusations. And if there’s no evidence pushing back, they have to substantiate.”
This bit at the end, and the parts around it, also surprise me:
> “Any man who works in childcare is putting his life on the line,” says Lana, the metro-area sex abuse investigator. “I’ve told my own sons to never, ever be alone with any kid who isn’t your own. Maybe that sounds extreme, but I’ve seen it too often. As a society, we just don’t trust men around kids. And it only takes the slightest bit of suspicion to ruin your life.”
I mean, I remember seeing MRAs complaining about this on the internet back in the day, but I've just never had a problem with this? I mean I guess working at a day care exposes you to a lot more? :-/
"Chinese supermarkets discount produce late at night so that they can free up space for fresh produce in the morning"
American supermarkets often discount some products on one day of the week for similar reasons -- they're going to restock that night.