Linkpost for September
[Sorry for the delay. I have been super busy.]
Effective Altruism
Global Poverty
Bangladesh has eliminated lead from spices such as turmeric. Previously, spices were the primary source of lead exposure for Bangladeshi people.
In India, “sound boxes” read out payment confirmations, which helps illiterate small-scale vendors accept digital cash.
USAID Chief Economist Dean Karlan discusses the use of rigorous evidence in USAID programs. Key difficulties he identifies: the research isn’t written in a way USAID decisionmakers find useful; USAID tends not to look at research done by organizations other than USAID; people at USAID are overworked and have too many demands on their time. Karlan also points out that “only X% of programs have an impact evaluation” isn’t a good metric: many programs are known to work and don’t really need an impact evaluation.
Related: USAID has been expanding the use of cash as a comparison for its programs, with the idea that if a program doesn’t outperform just giving people money you shouldn’t do it.
Historically, half of all children died before puberty. Today the number is only 5%. The most common causes of childhood death are pneumonia, preterm births and neonatal disorders, and diarrhea.
50,000 to 60,000 people die of snakebites in India each year, but the Indian government only records 1,000 snakebite deaths. People typically die of snakebite in rural areas and aren’t hospitalized, so the data about their deaths isn’t collected. This is a global problem: worldwide, only about a fifth of deaths are reported to the WHO with a meaningful cause of death (i.e. not “sudden death”).
Animals
Faunalytics has a nice infographic rating various foods by both climate impact and number of animals affected. The worst are beef, farmed fish, poultry, and eggs. Note that this infographic does not take into account the relative misery of various animals, just the sheer number affected.
Fewer people want to ban slaughterhouses than previous research showed, although the number is still quite high (about 16%).
The Aquatic Life Institute has published a second edition of its rating of seafood certification systems. The best certification is the Aquaculture Stewardship Council.
People who increase their consumption of plant-based food are mostly doing so for health reasons. People who decrease their consumption of plant-based food, conversely, are mostly doing so because of high prices and bad taste.
People are less likely to eat food labeled as “vegan” or “vegetarian.”
Margarine being cheaper may paradoxically increase spending on butter. This may be because of methodological issues, or because people spend a fixed amount on butter and margarine and buy more butter when they have to spend less on margarine.
Passing local animal-welfare legislation increases the likelihood that states will pass legislation—even nonbinding resolutions help.
Particularly Good: A deep dive into animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere: its theory of change, why it chooses the actions it does, why it probably isn’t going to work, and why it’s appealing to many animal advocates anyway. The author puts you in the shoes of Direct Action Everywhere advocates and makes you understand why they believe what they do.
The title is goofy, but this piece on the “meat culture war” makes good points. “Culture-war framings, accordingly, tend to wildly amplify and distort real, less sensational messages. “We should eat less meat” is real. “The elites are going to make cows illegal” is not. Statements of fact become ominous threats. Entreaties become vindictive arm-twists. Take Cernovich’s tweet. No one is trying to force anyone in the United States to eat bugs. It’s not clear anyone even wants to try… But in the culture war, feelings don’t care about your facts. What matters is framing the issue around a clear divide between an in-group (red-blooded, red-meat-eating, red-voting Americans) and an out-group (liberal, cosmopolitan, effete, transnational, technocratic elites forcing you to eat crickets). And this, in turn, sends an explicit message about how to align personal behavior with your ideological grievances: Eat meat to own the libs, the globalists, or whoever.”
Primates are severely mentally damaged because they are raised in miserable conditions. It’s very likely that their conditions are too awful for them to teach us anything about psychology or psychiatry.
Particularly Good: looooooooong essay about elephant psychology, but well worth reading. (Elephants probably attempt suicide!)
People who own reptiles are more likely to believe reptiles are intelligent but less likely to believe they can bond with their owners.
Existential Risk
Actionable: A list of brief projects you can do in order to figure out whether you enjoy and are good at working on biosecurity. The author encourages people who have completed a project to email her to talk about next steps.
The United States has finally destroyed its last chemical weapon after a 1997 treaty banning it. A major holdup: figuring out how to safely destroy the weapons. The people in this article are the most reasonable NIMBYs in the world.
Some people argue that AI risk isn’t a big deal because people would just not program AI to try to destroy the world. Bad news: someone already tried that.
Several different considerations affect whether we should put resources into reducing existential risk now or later: we know more about how to reduce existential risk when it’s sooner; it’s better to switch courses from a bad course to a good one as soon as possible; it’s better to make your organization or movement better as soon as possible; resources now can increase the number of resources we have later; some things require many steps, some of which have to be finished before we can work on other steps.
Meta EA
Particularly Good: Longtermist effective altruism is not unique because of its moral beliefs (which are popular) but because of its epistemology. The four central claims: reason with explicit probabilities, even if they’re made up; it’s good to do speculative reasoning; even in crazy domains, our subjective credences are good enough to motivate action; something has gone wrong if our beliefs are both highly speculative and involve only ever caring about one thing.
Effective altruists make up ethical rules in order to keep the newbs out.
Other
An environmentalist explains why environmentalists need to not just say “no” to pipelines and housing developments in the wilderness, but to say “yes” to dense housing, wind turbines, and lithium mines.
Several tour companies continue to offer tours in Xinjiang, in spite of the ongoing genocide. These tours wind up reinforcing Chinese propaganda about Uyghurs as exotic, primitive, and happy being ruled by China. Visits to Uyghur families are likely all nonconsensual, because Uyghur families do not meaningfully have the option to refuse.
In the 2010s there were a lot of protests against oppressive governments. Most of them failed. Oligarchs turned the Internet to be a tool for their own purposes; journalists had a lot of ability to interpret the movements for their own benefit; many people copied tactics that didn’t work or weren’t appropriate for their context.
An anti-immigration book argues that “deep roots”—the amount of time that people in a country lived in a state, with settled agriculture, and with relatively high technology—predicts their current GDP. However, this implies the U.S. should have much freer trade with countries with deeper roots than it has, such as China, India, Pakistan, and Brazil. The whole article goes into a much deeper dive critiquing deep roots theory.
We need less innovative science. In ecology: species descriptions, population and biodiversity surveys and resurveys, studies of whether particular ecological phenomena occur in different locations or among different species.
Health
Syphilis rates are increasing among women. Women in rural America have worsening access to STI clinics and prenatal care (a key opportunity for STI testing). In the wake of the opioid epidemic, which hit rural America hardest, women are more likely to sell sex, be homeless, and use drugs—all risk factors for syphilis.
A while ago I was wondering whatever happened to embryonic stem cells, a top culture war issue of my teenage years. This article gives an answer. We learned to convert any cell into a stem cell, so embryonic stem cells became less necessary. People are still working on stem-cell research, but stem cell research is very complicated and expensive, so it is slow going.
High-school dropouts and people in rural areas are dying at higher and higher rates. The primary factor is not “deaths of despair” but cardiovascular disease.
Psychology
Particularly Good: Review of a heartwrenching, disturbing and brutally honest memoir about a woman who was incestuously raped by her father and about what the response to it says about our attitudes towards rape victims.
Particularly Good: Aella describes her experiences as an escort having sex with married men. To her, a lot of relationships seem to have problems directly downstream of monogamy.
An open letter claims that the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness is pseudoscience. However, a critic argues that this isn’t true. Theories are allowed to have counterintuitive implications like that plants are conscious. It’s true that ITT is difficult to test, but that is true of all theories of consciousness.
Life Advice
Happiness increases with income even among people who make more than 60k a year, except among the bottom 20% of the population, who presumably have large problems money can’t help with.
Alexey Guzey admits that his 2022 self was wrong about many things: meditation is good, you should get enough sleep, and you should have a single 16” laptop monitor. I appreciate his willingness to change his mind and admit his mistakes, and am also glad his sleep decisions are less horrifying.
Randomizing couples to have twice as much sex does not make them happier.
Exaggerating how bad being cancelled is does the work of the censors for them. If you’re a writer or academic, your career will usually improve if you say more stuff that people want to cancel you for.
A letter to young black philosophers: there is less bigotry than outside of philosophy academia (although still, of course, an unacceptable amount). However, many white philosophers accept mediocre work from black philosophers because they don’t think black philosophers can do equally good work but want to be seen helping black philosophers.
Societies
Especially when discussing preliterate societies, we shouldn’t assume that things that weren’t written down aren’t important. (Yes, that means our ignorance is vast.)
A village is a group of people where the average interaction you have is with someone you’ve seen before. Social media companies emphasize growth at all costs, so there is a constant influx of strangers—which keeps people from forming the villages they come to social media for.
Researchers used a machine-learning algorithm to figure out whether goods cost more because they’re better or because of inflation. 60% of food prices changes and 50% of nonfood price changes are explicable through changes in product quality. Food inflation is much lower than standard models suppose, but nonfood inflation is about the same.
A meritocratic society rewards people for abilities they were born with in a pretty arbitrary and unfair way. High taxes and public spending enable people without inborn abilities that happen to be useful right now to still have a worthwhile life.
Interesting story about the Bogd, the spiritual leader of Buddhism in Mongolia. He is an eight-year-old boy, believed to be the reincarnation of the previous Bogd. His family seems to be handling this well. He has a twin brother; the family is raising them identically and refusing to publicly announce who is the Bogd. (A select number of monks know.) The family insisted that the children have a regular education alongside their theological education, and that the child could choose whether to be the Bogd when he turns 18. Some question whether the early process—which involves mystical vision and astrology—was nudged towards the Bogd being a child of a wealthy family and an American citizen (the latter will protect him from Chinese persecution)
Chinese Doom Scroll: don’t commit suicide to make your parents sorry, they’ll just decide you are ungrateful and lack filial piety. Chinese parents also show their children Numberblocks! (It’s a fantastic show, highly recommended, it’s the reason my kid knows arithmetic.)
Books
Why is Tolkien so popular? “We hunger for meaning, value, pattern, a universe that, morally speaking, makes sense… Tolkien gives us instead what we desperately want, in the form of an imaginative creation of great power and subtlety. Escape, as Tolkien has himself written, is not necessarily a bad thing; it depends on what you are escaping from. But he intended his work to be more than merely a fantasy within which one takes refuge from the real world. He intended it rather as a vehicle for what he called recovery, a way in which, through the imaginative creation, we could see the nature of the world in which we live, a world both beautiful and perilous.”
“Invisible prose” is prose that’s easy to skim, and that in some cases falls apart if you don’t skim.
Is early installment weirdness good or bad for a book?
Short Stories
Despoilers of the Golden Empire: The invasion of the Incan Empire as a Golden Age SF story.
Leng: Sublimely fucked-up fungus horror.
The Extended IQ Classification (Classified): What it says in the title. Content note for ableism of the exact sort you’d expect.
The Library of Slaanesh: Borges meets pornography. NSFW.
Particularly Good: The Luxurious and the Obscene: Food In Fiction: What if food and sex switched their roles in our society? NSFW.
Fun
The Magic: the Gathering villains the Phyrexians as erotic transformation horror.
Gwern’s open questions that he doesn’t have an answer to. Some fascinating puzzles in here.
Also from Help Me Hera: “My thinking is, if you’re going to feel inferior to someone, you might as well go all in. Feeling inferior to George Eliot is a lot more fun than feeling inferior to your boyfriend.”
The creator of the meme that symbolizes different kinds of equality through various arrangements of boxes to stand on to watch a sports game tracks down its variants.
How the French Revolution went down in the Yugioh universe.
Whether deer mice tend eat seeds or hoard them is dependent on their personalities.
What technologies would be cost-effective in a world where energy is too cheap to meter? I mostly recommend this as inspiration for science fiction writers.
The "Incest Diary" review was interesting, but one of the author's arguments seems like it might prove too much. Her discussion about how the state of "wanting it" can be shaped by adult violence, and how the author's relationship with Carl is a "price" that she pays, come dangerously close to a fully general argument against wanting anything. The problem with telling someone that they only want something because something in their past made them become the kind of person that wants it is that it is true of literally everything a person wants.
There needs to be, at the very least, a more narrowly tailored argument that is capable of differentiating wants instilled by abuse from wants instilled by normal development. Maybe by introducing the ideas of ego-syntonic or ego-dystonic desires?
> People are less likely to eat food labeled as “vegan” or “vegetarian.”
Sensible. Food labeled as "vegan" or "vegetarian" tends to be bad. (I say this as a vegan.)