Regular announcements: did you know you can hire me for life coaching and general consulting? You can also buy my novella Her Voice Is A Backwards Record wherever fine books are sold (except Google Books).
Effective Altruism
Global Poverty
GiveDirectly study finds that cash transfers to pregnant people literally halve the infant death rate. The primary mechanisms appear to be an increase in the rate of hospital births and a decrease in physically strenuous labor in the third trimester.
Dean Karlan gives an interview after the death of USAID. Dean Karlan has been one of my favorite economists for many years, and I've had huge respect for his work as the first Chief Economist at USAID. This article made me cry from the sheer waste of it all. (It's not actually a very sad article; I just cry easily about USAID.) Karlan was making real, concrete improvements in the culture of USAID to help it become the evidence-based, efficient organization the world needs. And then a bunch of lunatic sociopaths came in and smashed everything because they didn't understand what it was they were destroying. Karlan is forward-looking and I agree with his fault analysis. It was a mistake to say "foreign aid is wildly unpopular but as long as no one pays any attention to it it will be safe." We have to proactively make the case for foreign aid to the American people. I was particularly interested in Karlan's suggestion that, to prevent this kind of thing in the future, politically controversial aid (anything that touches gender or LGBT issues or sex ed, for example) should be put in a separate funding stream so that it can be easily shut off without touching crucial programs like antiretrovirals or therapeutic food.
The United States has eliminated funding for the Demographic and Health Surveys—a key source of information about mortality and morbidity in developing countries with poor state record-keeping systems. Organizations like GiveWell and Our World In Data rely on the DHS to do their work.
Animal Advocacy
In general, telling people about the horrors of factory farming doesn't get them to stop eating meat. But an unusually well-made and persuasive documentary did show an effect, suggesting that the quality of the media matters.
Actionable: So you care about insects—what next? A helpful guide for donors, scientists, and ordinary people. Ordinary people can take action for insect welfare by learning more about insects; raising awareness of evidence-based insect welfare among people they know; and adopting simple practices like using humane insecticides and crushing bugs instead of leaving them to die.
Considerations on whether the effective animal advocacy movement should prioritize countries that already have a lot of factory farming, or countries that factory farming might spread to in the future. I found the arguments for working in currently high-production regions particularly interesting.
Particularly Good: Confessions of a Former Carnivore. A beautiful personal essay about the writer's path to veganism and why it is so difficult for many people to give up eating meat.
Vegan donors should know that GiveWell is open to the possibility of providing animals to people in developing countries. GiveWell may explore giving people animals through its livelihoods research program, which focuses on interventions that increase income. For now, only the All Grants Fund supports livelihoods research; the Top Charities Fund continues to go to cost-effective global health programs. I personally feel comfortable with buying animals for developing-world farmers as an intervention-- presumably, these are small-scale farms with relatively good conditions for animals-- but if you are concerned then that's a good reason to choose the Top Charities Fund over the All Grants Fund.
Reasons for optimism about animal advocacy: the movement's culture and infrastructure are rapidly improving, and more funding is available than ever before.
Existential Risk
Of all the dystopian visions of AI peddled by reckless frontier AI companies, Mark Zuckerberg's is perhaps the least dignified. There is something to be said for developing a technology that experts warn might drive humanity extinct if you think it will lead to an end to disease and a world of material abundance and peace. It is quite another thing to take those risks so that you can develop hypertargeted advertisement, hyperaddictive news feeds, and a computerized replacement for human friendship.
OpenAI has begun accusing its opponents of being secretly funded by Elon Musk, which they absolutely are not. The weirdest part is that—as this article points out—many anti-OpenAI groups are in fact funded by a tech billionaire who is deeply concerned about AI and who has historically invested in AI companies. It's just that that person is Dustin Moskovitz. It's interesting that from the outside it's very hard to distinguish regulatory capture (Moskovitz is trying to destroy OpenAI to protect Anthropic) from legitimate concern (Moskovitz thinks Anthropic is a more responsible AI company than OpenAI, so he both invested in it and is funding anti-OpenAI efforts). I am very irritated that billionaire social drama has this much of an effect on my life.
Actionable: A gentle, compassionate post aimed at people who believe they have discovered a scientific breakthrough with the help of an LLM. Highly recommended to have on hand in case one of your friends is using LLMs irresponsibly.
Particularly Good: A melancholy article about being a writer on the verge of being automated.
Wikipedia's guide to spotting AI-written prose is fantastically passive-aggressive.
American Democracy
The first reports have come out about CECOT, the prison that American immigrants are deported to in El Salvador. The news article is truly disturbing.
ICE is looking for woman-owned businesses to grow its social media presence. I thought Trump was supposed to end woke signalling?
The Trump administration has created an internal scorecard rating companies by how much they campaigned for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Companies that cooperated include "Uber, DoorDash, United, Delta, AT&T, Cisco, Airlines for America and the Steel Manufacturers Association."
FIRE, previously an opponent of leftist censorship on campus, has remade itself into a defender of universities under attack by Trump. We love a principled free-speech advocate.
Meta Effective Altruism
Giving What We Can has reached 10,000 pledgers!
A nice article about how to think about moral uncertainty—when something is wrong under some moral viewpoints but neutral or even good under others. The My Favorite Theory approach ignores all moral theories other than the one you think is most likely to be true, which means that you can be 49% sure that something is genocide and still do it. Conversely, standard decision theory means that if you have a 1% chance that Kantianism is true you shouldn't lie to an axe murderer about where her victim fled to. Incorporating ideas from voting theory resolves some of these problems in a more sensible way, and at least makes your assumptions about the others more explicit.
Some people think you should ignore vanishingly small probabilities of extremely bad outcomes because we don't know how to reason about them. This is reasonable, but pay attention to how small the probabilities you're working with are! People regularly do things-- such as voting, boycotting projects, aviation safety, and tracking asteroids-- because there is a 1 in a million chance of some very good or very bad outcome. People only get bad at reasoning at, like, 10^-60 chances.
The role of quantitative reasoning in decision-making isn't all-or-nothing. Even if quantitative reasoning is very uncertain or misleading in some situations, it can still be helpful when used properly. You shouldn't blindly trust numbers, but you also shouldn't completely throw out the concept of thinking with numbers.
Particularly Good: I really liked this blog post about what Peter Thiel means when he calls effective altruists the Antichrist. tl;dr: he believes effective altruists are in fact the literal, non-rhetorically exaggerated Antichrist; also, Rene Girard is there. I hope more people read this article so they stop holding Peter Thiel's behavior against people that he thinks are, again, the literal no-shit Antichrist.
Tired of arguing with your friends about whether you should direct a trolley to run over baby Adolf Hitler or an entire universe of tightly packed shrimp? Try Reasons and Persons: Just The Thought Experiments edition.
Particularly Good: the most heartwarming personal essay you'll ever read about someone attempting to convince effective altruists of socialism.
By the same author: Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright is the most admirable socialist theorist (the "Derek Parfit of socialist theory"). His failure to find any particularly good way to implement socialism suggests that socialism itself is a failed project.
Common mistakes in importance, neglectedness, and tractability calculations. A lot of these problems boil down to the fact that you need to assess the neglectedness, tractability, and importance of the same cause. If you assess the importance of getting governments to make better decisions, you shouldn't assess the neglectedness of efforts specifically branded as improving institutional decision-making (instead of all efforts that plausibly improve government decision-making). If you assess the importance of improving conditions for all farmed insects, you shouldn't assess the tractability of an intervention that affects a tiny percentage of farmed insects.
Life Advice
Actionable: Advice from Friend of the Blog Sammy Cottrell about how to be a professional freelancer. I do very little of this but I have recently installed a shoulder Sammy whose job is telling me to stop telling people my life coaching sucks and I don't know how to write anything. (The shoulder Sammy has yet to convince me that I should charge more. I like my $20/hour clients!)
Ways of knowing, ranked. Top-tier: literacy, math. B-tier: science, engineering, direct measurement and observation, mimicry. F-tier: cultural evolution, folk wisdom, divine revelation.
Holly Elmore reports on how she was harmed by mindfulness meditation. This is the most detailed article I've ever read about what exactly it's like to have negative mental health consequences from mindfulness meditation. Her symptoms include various problems processing visual and auditory information, relaxation-induced panic, and difficulty "chunking" experience into preexisting concepts and stories.
Relatedly: Problems with Buddhism. There is no core "true" Buddhism that lacks everything people dislike about Buddhism. Most Buddhisms (like other religions) say obviously wrong things about the world, and even secular Buddhisms peddle false beliefs like that life is suffering or that meditation is the best way to access truth about reality. Many versions of Buddhism reject rational thought. And even better versions of Buddhism rarely reckon with all those people running around calling themselves Buddhists who believe wrong stuff.
The Rumpelstiltskin effect: the positive psychological effects of getting a diagnosis, separate from any treatment that you get because you've been diagnosed. Diagnoses help people understand themselves and communicate their experiences to others; give people access to the sick role; give people hope of getting better; and relieve the stress of not having a name for what's going on. On the other hand, diagnosis can also cause harm through stigmatization, internalized shame, or self-fulfilling prophecies of impairment and incompetence.
You can instantly get better at anything by pretending to be the sort of person who's good at it. This reminds me of talking to other writers about writing fiction. Many writers experience "awake characters"-- characters who have their own thoughts and opinions, who will sometimes refuse to act out the nice plot you laid out for them, and who might even offer commentary on your own life. It's often possible to write an awake character who's smarter, more charismatic, or funnier than you are. Humans' ability to model other humans is very powerful and you can use it for all kinds of off-label uses!
Ways that charts can be misleading.
Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail
Chinese Doom Scroll: The value of diplomas at a sweatshop; plus, did people in ancient China dress up like earlier dynasties?
North Koreans regularly risk execution to watch K-dramas. If I were a K-drama writer this would make me feel really good about my career choices.
Policymaking
Paradoxically, cheaply curing diseases can be bad for the federal budget—if people live longer, they spend more time collecting Social Security and Medicare. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic was good for the Federal budget in the long run because it killed lots of old people; conversely, people quitting smoking was bad for the Federal budget because smokers die before they can collect much social security. Interestingly, the Congressional Budget Office only counts negative effects on the budget and not positive effects (such as the extra taxes people pay if they live longer). So saving people's lives looks financially much worse than it actually is.
Friend of the Blog Kelsey Piper discusses the "honesty tax": bureaucratic systems designed stupidly with the idea that most recipients are going to lie. For example, if you split grocery shopping and cooking with your high-earning roommate, technically you no longer qualify for food stamps (even if you pay for half the groceries). I'm with Kelsey in finding this horrific. I don't think the government should be creating a system that expects vice and punishes people for virtue.
Some problems with the book The Two Parent Privilege—a book I myself quite liked. The Two-Parent Privilege doesn't account for the fact that, as Americans become more educated, high school graduates who have never attended college become a smaller and more dysfunctional group of people. It also doesn't seriously consider whether women are single parents because their potential husbands would be net-negative-- for example, because they're abusive, chronically unemployed, addicted to drugs, or criminals. As women have become more able to live independently, they have options other than living with men who beat them, which is good.
After two years, the court system has finally concluded that the government is not allowed to ban drag performances. The fact that such an obvious First Amendment case took so long to resolve is shameful.
Few people are deliberately discriminating against conservatives on campus, but the fact that campuses are overwhelmingly left-wing creates a hostile environment for conservatives. I've often thought the treatment of conservatives on college campuses is an interesting parallel to arguments conservatives reject about women or people of color. Maybe we need affirmative action for conservatives so that young conservatives have conservative role models in academia?
Ten practical policy ideas to improve American science. It's just depressing to read articles like this in the age of RFK and cuts to life-saving foreign aid. (Remember when we were asking the U.S. government to return to five-year budgeting cycles for PEPFAR instead of trying desperately to salvage the wreckage?) But it's an interesting discussion of how a small number of wonky changes to science policy could save hundreds of thousands of lives.
Fiction
How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art upon the Gnoles: A lovely piece of pre-Tolkienian fantasy about the greatest thief in the world and what happens when he tries to steal from beings older and stranger than he is.
I really enjoyed this article about two Fritz Leiber short stories as ambiguously feminist texts. "Whether or not it can properly be called feminist, it is, ultimately, on women’s side. The message of Conjure Wife is not that women are constantly plotting to dominate and destroy, but that there is an aspect of their lives that men don’t see and—because they don’t see it—are inclined to dismiss if it’s brought to their attention."
I'd read Aaron Gell's piece (confessions of a former carnivore, and I think it's good, but the reasons people persist in eating meat that Ozy found interesting seem too complicated to me. People mostly eat meat because meat is what there is to eat. People mostly don't go vegan even if they agree it would be good for the same reason people mostly don't adopt a keto diet or whatever, even if they think it would be good for them- because adopting a severely restricted diet (and veganism specifically is much more restrictive than most health focused diets like keto) imposes a heavy day-to-day mental load in an area to which we're not used to having to devote much mental energy. I don't think it's usually much more complicated than that
> I was particularly interested in Karlan's suggestion that, to prevent this kind of thing in the future, politically controversial aid (anything that touches gender or LGBT issues or sex ed, for example) should be put in a separate funding stream so that it can be easily shut off without touching crucial programs like antiretrovirals or therapeutic food.
Unfortunately those primarily interested in gender causes have an incentive to keep them bundled together by the same logic.