Linkpost for October

Effective altruism, social justice, economics, society, health, criminal justice, short stories, fun.

From Strange Planet.

Effective Altruism

Global Poverty

A nice explainer of the basic effective altruist claim that some charities are many times more effective than others.

“Tomorrow, newspapers could run the headline “Almost 10,000 children were saved by essential vaccines yesterday”. They could have printed this headline daily for decades.”

Open Philanthropy’s global health and wellbeing team makes its decisions using two frameworks: equalizing marginal philanthropic returns and importance/neglectedness/tractability. For problems they understand relatively well, they equalize marginal philanthropic returns by calculating the expected benefits of an intervention in terms of health and increased income; converting the health benefits into dollars; and then funding everything that is more cost-effective than a certain threshold. To assess new problem areas, they consider how many are affected by the cause and how intensely (importance); whether they can do anything about it (tractability); and whether other people are doing something about it already (neglectedness).

Animal Advocacy

Some people think that humans have “conscious subsystems”: separate conscious parts of the brain that can’t report their experiences. This probably isn’t true. On various popular theories of consciousness, we have no reason to believe that given subsets of neurons in the human brain are arranged properly so as to be conscious. Further, the more likely it is that humans have conscious subsystems, the more likely it is that small insects are conscious, and there are many more small insects than potentially conscious human subsystems.

Chickens raised in unstable social groups—as are typical in overcrowded broiler chicken barns—are more aggressive and worse at associative learning.

Recently released records suggest the FBI is considering using weapons of mass destruction statutes against animal advocates. The FBI argues that, if an open rescue introduces a biological hazard into a farm, this may be a WMD.

Existential Risk

AI governance and policy is now 80,000 Hours’s priority cause area. Read their article about it if you might be interested: the article covers why you might be interested in AI governance, what the career is like, and how you can get into it.

Relatedly: some considerations on the difficult question of whether to work at a frontier AI company. A lot of this depends on which role you’re working and your personal fit—for example, if you are good at persuading people, think independently, and can leave if it’s morally necessary to do so.

Current generative AI tools raise developer productivity by about a quarter, with gains concentrated in less experienced programmers.

It’s probably a good idea to figure out which and whether digital minds matter morally before we create millions of them.

Not only are Waymo robotaxis safer than human drivers, most of the crashes they’re in are clearly the human’s fault.

The book “The Language of Climate Politics” systematically misrepresents the evidence about climate change. Some errors are basic: she mistakes “agricultural productivity is growing more slowly than it otherwise would” for “agricultural productivity is decreasing”; she repeatedly confuses hypothetical dollars used to measure the value of certain outcomes with actual dollars people could use to pay for things. Some are wild: she claims that plants emit ionizing radiation (?!).

Meta EA

Which cause you pick depends on “important between-cause considerations,” so it’s helpful to think through your views on these issues. Potential important between-cause considerations include: population ethics; whether animals matter morally and the scale of their suffering; what to do when you don’t know what the effects of your actions are; whether and how to take future people into account; whether we live in the most important time in history; whether we live in a simulation; whether we should care more about suffering than pleasure; whether we should maximize economic growth; whether we should try to help the global poor; and whether randomized controlled trials identify the best ways to help poor people.

Types of subjective welfare: hedonic states (positive and negative feelings); felt desires (feelings of wanting or not-wanting); belief-like preferences (judgments about what is “good” or “bad”); choice-based preferences (what you would choose in a situation).

Actionable: An eight-week plan for marketing your charity.

How and when to contact the Centre for Effective Altruism’s Community Health team.

Other Causes

Particularly Good: The academic research on degrowth is bad. Like, really really bad. You can skip ahead to section 5, where the authors stop with the academic throat-clearing and really let loose.

Why is Britain’s economy doing badly? The usual suspects: the housing crisis, building transit is too expensive, and nuclear power plants are de facto banned.

Particularly Good: The man who devoted his career to preventing mine cave-ins. This made me cry (but I cry about unusual things).

Trump’s conspiratorial world is increasingly disconnected from, like, reality, even compared to his dubious 2016 standard.

Why do people become terrorists? A small number of people who just like hurting others, and a large number of wannabe heroes and sincere religious fanatics.

George Orwell on the appeal of fascism: “Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.”

Particularly Good: why is North Korea like that? “This “secret privatization” of the entire North Korean economy has been incredibly thorough. It’s estimated that around 80 percent of all goods and services in North Korea are provided in secret and in shadow. It’s capitalism as an extremophile species of lichen, colonizing the cracks and crevices of the official society, and keeping the whole system afloat.”

Social Justice

Psych wards face a tradeoff between safety and dehumanizing the residents. Because the designers will be punished if a resident gets hurt, and won’t get punished if the resident is humiliated or denied autonomy, they create very safe wards which deny patients dignity and self-determination. “[H]ospitals have created such controlling and austere environments that I have had some patients beg me to send them back to the jail since the jail offered them more autonomy and flexibility than the forensic hospital.”

Related: one of the largest chains of psychiatric hospitals holds patients until their insurance runs out, against their will and without medical necessity. Employees were trained to use certain words (“combative”) and avoid others (“compliant,” “calm”) in order to increase the chance that insurance would cover a longer stay.

Interesting facts from a paper about the role of philanthropy in achieving marriage equality in the U.S.: Barack Obama’s support for gay marriage may have caused support for gay marriage among black voters to jump 10 percentage points. The marriage equality movement switched to “love is love”-type messaging on purpose because polling showed it was far more persuasive than rights-based approaches. The Obergefell lawsuit that ultimately led to marriage equality happened against the will of the mainstream marriage equality movement, which supported a more incrementalist state-by-state approach.

The Gender Census released its 2024 results. “They/them” continues to be the most popular pronoun among nonbinary people, and about 10% of nonbinary people do not accept any of “she”, “he”, or “they.” There is still no consensus on nonbinary equivalents of “Mr./Ms.” or “sir/madam.”

I’m linking this report from Columbia University about the climate of anti-Semitism on campus because I’ve historically tended to be dismissive of this kind of concern: the New York Times and social media tend to blow isolated incidents out of proportion. However, this report convincingly establishes that, at least at Columbia, Jewish people face shocking levels of anti-Semitic harassment.

Economics

It is much, much, much harder than you’d expect to get manufacturing data onto computers in a usable form.

You’ve probably heard of Lambda School—the most famous of the 2010s-era programming bootcamps that only got paid if you got a job. In reality, it had bad curriculum, classes of 200+ students, and teachers who had never had a programming job. Its marketing was dishonest: for example, the founder tweeted that 100% of graduates from its first UX cohort got hired, but left out that there was only one graduate. Only about a quarter of graduates found jobs.

A San Francisco nonprofit that the city hired in part to make an antiracist podcast instead spent the money on first-class flights and expensive dinners.

Society

At one speed-dating service, men’s ratings of women’s physical attractiveness were normally distributed, while women rated 72% of men as below the midpoint. Honestly, this doesn’t seem unreasonable to me—women put far more effort into being physically attractive!

Social media and the Internet more broadly create addictive status games that would have been impossible to imagine a generation ago. Famous people will absolutely destroy their lives and their legacies chasing status by posting.

It’s harder for rich people to form deep friendships because they keep solving their problems with money instead of helping each other.

Health

Too much fluoride may lower children’s IQs, according to the U.S. National Toxicology Program. Water fluoridated at twice the recommended level may lower IQ. Water fluoridated at normal levels is safe.

Large study finds no association between lithium in the water supply and suicide rates.

Most cases of so-called supercentenarians (older than 110) are due to fraud or error. Around the world, the number of supercentenarians is correlated with poverty, poor recordkeeping, and (ironically) short life expectancy and few people living past 90. Supercentenarian birthdates are disproportionately likely to be divisible by 5, which indicates that they aren’t their real birthdates.

At least 4% of people in Bowling Green, Kentucky have prescriptions for GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic. The results include shortages, dozens of clinics and medical spas that specialize in the medication, loss of insurance coverage, and at least one twentysomething man doing Ozempic “because everyone else was doing it.”

Criminal Justice

Drunk driving rates halved in Britain from 1980 to 2010. Most drunk drivers were so-called “conditional offenders”: they drove drunk if it was socially acceptable and low-cost, but not if it wasn’t. Stricter enforcement of drunk driving laws increased the costs of driving drunk, and also taught conditional offenders that society disapproved of drunk driving. By creating a new social norm, the criminal justice system sustainably reduced drunk driving.

Drug decriminalization in Oregon probably didn’t increase overdose death rates: in reality, the increase in overdoses was due to fentanyl.

In Mississippi, a “Goon Squad” of narcotics officers has tortured suspected drug dealers into confessions for at least twenty years. Many targets were caught with only a few grams of meth or drug paraphenalia; the biggest case was a $420 heroin deal. In spite of considerable evidence of the Goon Squad’s activities, the rest of the police force covered it up. The article contains brutal descriptions of torture and I recommend considering whether you want to read it.

The United States is the only developed country that asks medical examiners to determine if a death was a suicide, a homicide, an accident, or undetermined. Medical examiners are doctors who have no training in e.g. interpreting suicide notes. Evidence suggests that medical examiners are biased: for example, an RCT found medical examiners are five times more likely to rule an otherwise identical autopsy report as a homicide if the subject is black. “In one especially odd—and perhaps revealing—email to the group, Peterson [a medical examiner] wrote, “Is there anyone in our profession that has not, at one point or another, quipped about ‘spinning the wheel of death’ and picking one?””

Narcopentecostalism is the use of Pentecostal religious beliefs by drug cartels. Many Narcopentecostals practice the prosperity gospel—the idea that getting rich (even through committing crimes) means that God approves of you. Both Pentecostalism and selling drugs are seen as ways to escape from crushing poverty, so it makes sense that they would sometimes go together. Christian beliefs are used to justify the cartels’ behavior: for example, one pastor preached to enslaved sex workers about the importance of “honoring your debts.”

Short Stories

Across the Street: A man goes on a very strange walk indeed. Beautiful imagery in this one—every paragraph is something new and imaginative, and the gradually escalating strangeness is well-done. It’s almost a poem.

Thread: What do Ancient Greek myths tell us about the Greek view of Omegas? A Reddit thread from the omegaverse.

Particularly Good: Our fractional universe: what pop science articles would we write if fractions were discovered in the 20th century?

Fun

Chinese Doom Scroll: subtle and plausibly deniable protests¹ and an AI-generated Chinese New Year mascot [old post]. How to fake being kind without much effort. The difference between Chinese horror and Western horror. Keeping the window open will paralyze you; also, a “tradhusband” is a man who acts like a tradwife. Praising merchants will make them raise their prices; don’t fangirl academics because they all suck as people too. Classical Chinese has a word for being unable to smell. Chinese takes on America. Men’s moisturizer and foundation?!

What colors were most fashionable over the past few years: a statistical analysis.

Why we’re still fascinated by the Golden Age SF short story The Cold Equations today.

Book review of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. I admit I clicked on it because I forgot that The Pale King isn’t one of the names of the King in Yellow. A lovely meditation on one of my favorite authors.

D&D is not fantasy medieval Europe but fantasy Wild West.

Particularly Good: the story of stage magicians Siegfried and Roy. I didn’t know they were gay! Truly, homosexuals achieve everything great in the arts (“great” is a term which here means “sparkly”).

In 1938, a wallet company included a sample Social Security card to show how you could put your Social Security card in their wallets. Over 40,000 people used the number on the sample social security card as their own. In 1977, there were still twelve users.

The surprisingly high quality of Silver Age Marvel Comics.

I cried at this review of Philip Roth’s novel about Anne Frank. “To the judge, Anne Frank is a symbol of Jewish nobility, Jewish purity. She is everything the Jewish people must aspire to. She is the only story worthy to be told. And The Ghost Writer, as its title maybe implies, is among many other things an outraged cry that that isn’t what she wrote. The actual Diary is not intended to edify.”

1. The triumph of the human spirit!