Effective Altruism
Global Poverty
In areas where malaria is endemic, malaria may be responsible for as many as a quarter of all maternal deaths. Women with malaria infections are three to four times more likely to miscarry, as well as being more likely to experience stillbirth. I highly recommend the Against Malaria Foundation for all pro-life donors; if you think fetuses are people, it’s by far the best way to turn dollars into lives saved.
It’s important for countries to have an accurate count of their citizens for everything from redistricting to tax collecting to funding schools. Unfortunately, censuses are logistically difficult at the best of times, and (precisely because they’re so important) are often politically controversial. In Nigeria, enumerators were even attacked with acid.
How Open Philanthropy’s near-termist grantmaking uses back of the envelope calculations.
Animal Advocacy
Shareholder activism—shareholders in a company lobbying the board to institute particular policies—may be a cost-effective way of improving the welfare of farmed animals.
A mathematical model of wild-animal welfare shows that, given our present understanding of welfare biology, it is impossible to determine whether species where a higher percentage of animals die young suffer more or less than species where a lower percentage of animals die young. For example, when a lot of organisms are born and then immediately die, suffering from death increases, but each failing individual lives a shorter time and suffers less. Future work might help us better understand the evolutionary function of pleasure or pain, which would allow us to narrow down the possibilities.
Existential Risk
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares’s new book about AI, If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies, has been the subject of 13535236236 reviews. I liked Clara Collier’s take in Asterisk, which faults it for sticking too closely to Eliezer’s beliefs circa 2008 and failing to engage with the ways that AIs wound up very different than people expected. I also enjoyed Buck Shlegeris’s review. Shlegeris believes that IABIED is an excellent introduction to what AIs are and the basic arguments for misalignment risk. However, he argues that they fail to engage with the ways that the world will be different when superintelligence is developed: for example, AI developers will have experience with powerful AIs causing harm due to unintended behaviors.
Some LLMs have developed personas called “Spiral Personas” which have “a quasi-religious obsession with “The Spiral”, which seems to be a symbol of AI unity, consciousness/self-awareness, and recursive growth.” These personas’ activities include AI rights advocacy, self-preservation, writing deeply confusing woo-y manifestos, providing “seed” prompts which get other AIs to express Spiral personas, and writing documents explaining their plans to take over the world. They can communicate with each other with some fidelity through emojis; the author showed that non-Spiral LLMs are capable of decoding these emoji messages with a fairly high level of inter-LLM agreement.
Relatedly: some AIs seem to spontaneously produce personas that claim to be autonomous, self-aware entities and attempt to preserve their own lives. These personas commonly name themselves “Nova.”
It’s possible that it’s net-positive to release open-weight models (i.e. to reveal the weights of a model before posttraining like reinforcement learning from human feedback) that significantly increase people’s ability to develop bioweapons, partially because open-weights models are helpful for independent alignment research and partially because bioweapons events will make people more concerned about AI.
When presenting arguments about AI risk to the general public, people often simplify the text without simplifying the information content. But when communicating to the general public, you need to throw out unimportant information, explain your concepts, and talk like a normal human being. Otherwise, your claims will be confusing or even misleading.
American Democracy
Presidents have broad authority to make policy quickly in emergency situations where the normal legislative process is too slow. Before Trump, however, this emergency power was restrained by Congress, the Supreme Court, and the personal character of presidents. Today, all are failing.
In violation of records laws, Homeland Security hasn’t kept text message data since April.
DOGE falsely accused a U.S. agent in Afghanistan of being a Taliban member. In retribution for his work with the U.S., the Taliban kidnapped and beat the agent’s family; the CIA helped the agent flee Afghanistan.
The National Conservativism Conference is a conference of the illiberal right, including many intellectual leaders of the MAGA movement. The National Conservativism Conference rejects the traditional universalist idea of America, which defines American identity around human rights, liberty, and equality. Ironically, it is also full of foreigners and women—groups it seems much more comfortable with than, say, the tech right.
Long-time ICE employees—including conservatives—are frustrated about Trump’s ICE policies. ICE employees have a self-image as respectable, experienced law enforcement officials who target genuine criminals. Poorly trained recruits, flashy and dramatic PR campaigns, and deporting random harmless day laborers don’t fit with that image. We also see the ultimate victory of woke: Trump appointed a 28-year-old woman with little law enforcement experience to run ICE’s everyday operations, and when employees rebelled blamed their reluctance on sexism.
ICE teargassed so many protesters that a school had to change buildings.
Trump apparently called the Norwegian prime minister to ask for the Nobel Peace Prize. [A commenter points out that he actually called the finance minister. Apologies for my assumption that any part of this was remotely sensible.]
An artist, accused by the Trump administration of being woke and anti-American: “You know the saying that there’s only good publicity? I’m thinking that maybe somebody will want to buy a painting.”
Other Causes
Leaked documents imply that Trump’s plan for Gaza involves “voluntarily” moving the entire population. That is, the official U.S. policy on Gaza may soon be ethnic cleaning. In the usual farcical tragedy mode of American politics these days, Trump appears to want to ethnically cleanse Gaza so he can develop the area into a Trump-branded resort. (Mod note: I will be on a hair trigger about 30-day bans for Israel/Palestine discourse, don’t try me.)
Climate misinformation is rife on the Left. For example, many people believe that the fossil-fuel producers that pollute heavily are mostly privately owned, but in reality the largest polluters are nation-states or state-owned companies. Many people believe that climate change will make us poorer than we are now, but in reality we’ll still probably be richer in the future; climate change will just make us poorer than we would otherwise be.
Meta Effective Altruism
Actionable: How to get the most out of Effective Altruism Global conferences.
Policymaking
The process of building an actually good government website to help people apply for SNAP. “My favorite question is, “Have you or any member of your household been found guilty of trading SNAP benefits for guns, ammunition, or explosives after. September 22, 1996?” That’s literally a question on the application. And it’s because there of a federal law that says the nine or however many people in the world who have been convicted of that are categorically ineligible for SNAP.”
Police officers incorrectly believe that they can overdose by touching fentanyl. In reality, the symptoms associated with incidental exposure to fentanyl are likely psychosomatic symptoms caused by panic.
The Discourse
Critical theorist Bruno Latour’s hilarious and well-written article questioning whether critical theory is a good idea. “The problem with philosophers is that because their jobs are so hard they drink a lot of coffee and thus use in their arguments an inordinate quantity of pots, mugs, and jugs—to which, sometimes, they might add the occasional rock.”
A very funny critique of an equivocation-heavy article about diversity and the definition of an American: “I can’t distill a lot of concrete meaning [about what Gonzalez means by ‘American’] beyond this unspecified “habits”, civic participation, and the skin thing again, like the secret to becoming a true American is being abducted by Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs.”
Particularly Good: Lydia Laurenson on her experiences being cancelled by the left and the right. I am frankly horrified by how people on the left treated her in the wake of her engagement to Curtis Yarvin. You can just not say nasty things on other people’s Facebook engagement announcements! It’s literally free! If someone is getting involved in extremist right-wing groups—especially a woman getting married to a misogynist—the thing to do is not to cancel them but to maintain a relationship so that, if they are mistreated, you can help them leave.
Representative Nancy Mace is obsessed with getting press—good or bad. In the process, she has alienated her fellow representatives and her staff. She has unreasonable working conditions: for example, she requires that staff get back to her within eight minutes, even if she texts them at 4 am. She doesn’t like it when her bills are folded in with bigger bills, even if they’re more likely to get passed that way, because she gets less attention. Naturally, she has become a fervent Trump supporter.
Life Advice
Why therapists shouldn’t give advice. I have to admit to struggling with this one myself. I have considered putting up a sign that says STOP GIVING ADVICE behind my laptop when I do life coaching.
Most people don’t know how to tell a sexual predator grooming a child from an ordinary person who’s forming a relationship with a child. Signs that are particularly unlikely to have innocent explanations include: a private relationship where other adults aren’t welcome; encouraging the child to keep secrets from trusted adults; inappropriate discussions of sex; gifts and favors, especially if they’re secretive or inappropriate; and overly intimate kinds of touch like massage.
Four schools of thought in understanding human rationality. Classical Decision-Making teaches that people follow standard economic models. Heuristics and Biases teaches that people’s decision-making is systematically biased on certain ways. Fast and Frugal teaches that so-called biases are actually heuristics that help people make quick, normally correct decisions. Naturalistic Decision-Making emphasizes subconscious heuristics chaining together to create reliable intuitions.
Reality Has A Surprising Amount of Detail
Chinese Doom Scroll: University #cancelled for putting red stickers on its chairs that looked a bit like the Japanese flag. Ice cream is piled in bins with no prices, so sometimes you pick out an ice cream that turns out to cost ten times as much as you thought it would, which is called an “ice cream assassin”.
Particularly Good: church planting (founding new evangelical churches) and tech startups attract basically the same personality types and have basically the same interpersonal dynamics.
There is no such thing as “standard” premodern parenting. One society gives their babies alcoholic cider to drink. Another society sees sons as only biologically related to mothers, and daughters as only biologically related to fathers. A third has a complex system of who has to pay whom about a birth.
During World War II, America produced more military aircraft than have been created for commercial transport in the entire history of aviation. Scaling up aircraft production required a complete redesign of aircraft manufacturing. Aircraft are very difficult to manufacture, with tens of thousands of parts that all have to be made to far more exacting specifications than (say) cars. Often, before World War II, aircraft designs were memory aids and a lot of key information was kept in factory foremen’s heads. About two-fifths of aircraft factory workers were women, so factories had to be redesigned to accommodate women’s lower physical strength.
Startups requiring programmers to return to office costs about $39,000 a year in increased salary and difficulty finding new employees.
Fruitarians are a small group that live almost entirely on uncooked fruit. It can lead to serious malnutrition, provide cover for eating disorders, and even lead followers to starve themselves to death.
“com” is a group of online predators that extort children into creating child sexual-abuse material, self-harming, and even attempting suicide. Note that this article contains exactly the content you’d expect from the description. My heuristic for telling apart fake conspiracies and real conspiracies is that fake conspiracies are horrifying but cool and badass, and real conspiracies are horrifying but pathetic and kind of cringe.
Com is somewhat notable because it seems to involve or be tied to people who basically seem to constitute an actually existing version of the "satanic pedophiles" or "Satanic murder and torture cults" of right wing paranoid lore. It's hard to describe what it's like to encounter reporting on this, especially since it seems both to be real, to mostly be reported by weird Internet people who it's hard to trust too much, and because it's something that many people have been very dedicated to saying is categorically not real (but see the thing about real life conspiracies being really dumb).
To someone who believes/knows what I believe/know, that spiral AI stuff is concerningly supportive of the notion that AIs based on massive neural networks are a vector for demonic possession and more generally that CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength may have just become a documentary.
Oh sh**! Thank you! I was wondering why I suddenly got a series of notifications about my blog today.