Linkpost for September

Effective altruism, culture war, short stories, fun.

Monthly reminders: I am available for consulting work, including writing and editing. If you like science fiction stories adapted from metaphysics papers, you can buy my novella Her Voice Is A Backward Record nearly anywhere fine ebooks are sold; it may also be available at your local library, depending on which ebook services your library subscribes to. Recent posts on my fiction blog are How To Tell If You Are In A Danmei and Thoughts On Writing About Torture.

Effective Altruism

Global Poverty

An effective altruist local group in Cameroon talks about its experience ranking local charities for effectiveness. They found that even experienced organizations with large grant sizes propose relatively ineffective programs, speculating that organizations “get more effective at capturing donor funding not at providing a better service.”

Animal Advocacy

The startups developing delicious new vegan cheeses.

Wild Animal Initiative announced its new grants, which are mostly for research on parasites/pathogens and on indicators of wild-animal welfare. I’m really excited about them funding research on cognitive biases as an indicator of wild-animal welfare—I’ve always thought that one had high potential.

A history of PETA. I started tearing up at this quote from a movement insider talking about why PETA continues to run a shelter that takes in any animal, no questions asked, and so has a high euthanasia rate: “PETA euthanizing animals is absolutely a detriment to PETA’s image and bottom line. From a reputation, donor, and income vantage it is the worst thing that PETA is doing … Everyone would prefer they don’t do this. But Ingrid [CEO of PETA] just won’t turn her back on the dogs.”

Existential Risk

SB 1047 has passed the California legislature, albeit in a significantly weaker form. The link is an excellent explainer of this common-sense piece of legislation. If there is even a small chance that your new technology could kill millions of people, then you should take safety precautions. There are dangers from overregulation, but AI should not be less regulated than airplanes.

Meta Effective Altruism

The new CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism clarifies how the Centre for Effective Altruism makes its decisions. I am a huge fan of this post which I hope is a sign of a new era of transparency in CEA’s decisionmaking. I have long had concerns about many of CEA’s decisions—ones which felt to me like they were favoring people who prioritize AI over the rest of the EA community. I didn’t know that (for example) the majority of CEA’s funding comes from Open Philanthropy’s Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building Team, so CEA feels constrained in how it can spend money. I think more clearly communicating CEA’s decisionmaking processes will help reduce confusion about its goals and actions.

Actionable: Charity Entrepreneurship announces the slate of charities that it’s seeking founders for: cage-free egg farming in the Middle East; preventing keel bone fractures in cage-free hens; fish welfare in East Asia; a digital pulmonary rehabilitation app for people in lower- and middle-income countries; cognitive behavioral therapy to prevent crime; and a global health charity to be decided. Charity Entrepreneurship offers mentoring and seed funding for young charities. It’s a great organization and I recommend applying if you might want to found a charity.

Rethink Priorities introduces the Moral Parliament Tool. The Moral Parliament Tool allows you to enter your level of credence in different moral systems, your strategy for compromising between them, and your empirical beliefs about various charities. It will then tell you what you should prioritize given your beliefs. You can also use it with pregenerated moral systems and pretend charities (from Artists Without Borders to Direct Transfers Everywhere).

Other Causes

The sunflower sea star suddenly lost 90% of its population from 2013 to 2015 due to a wasting disease outbreak. The species went from fine to critically endangered so quickly that we didn’t even have many in captivity: Californian aquariums have a total of five individuals. However, captive breeding programs are going well and they may be restored. Link has beautiful pictures.

Culture War

Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, plagiarized her PhD thesis. I often see arguments between people who say that serious scholars of race think that DiAngelo is bullshit and people who point out that she has a PhD. But notice that her PhD is in multicultural education! Education, sadly, is a bullshit field of little academic merit. That it gave DiAngelo a career is annoying but ultimately not very important. But education academia has led to children getting fundamentally inadequate education in reading and math—a problem that disproportionately harms poor children and children of color.

Ron DeSantis has taken steps to ban “debanking”: the practice of banks arbitrarily denying people services for their political viewpoints. This law puts banks in a very awkward position. Banks enforce laws against money laundering, anti-terrorism laws, sanctions, etc. by closing the accounts of people they suspect to be terrorists, money launderers, sneaking money to North Korea, etc. These compliance policies are often kind of vibes-based, not the quantitative and impartial processes now required by Florida law. And the government wants banks to discriminate based on political viewpoint: you’re far more likely to get your bank account closed for suspected terrorism if you’re an active member of the Earth Liberation Front. Interesting to see how this will play out.

Writers of color often wind up with covers that signal “this is by a person of color”: pictures of people or color; stereotypical Asian images like lotus blossoms or saris, if the author is Asian; Papyrus font, if the author is Native American; pictures of white people and people of color hugging or holding hands; for some reason, blobby paint splotches. Marketers think it’s important to convey that books are by people of color in order to market to virtue-signalling white women.

Particularly Good: This terrifying review of popular fake-news website Real Raw News. “I work in the broader world of American right-of-center politics, and we encounter Real Raw News believers constantly.. A friend of mine who served in the Trump administration has described attending parties where, when he mentioned looking for a post-admin job, he received knowing looks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks from people signaling they knew what was “really” going on.”

Short Stories

The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl: The ghosts that haunt Chernobyl (Chornobyl in Ukranian) respond to the Ukrainian war. Given the premise, this story has a surprising amount of cool fungus stuff.

Sins of the Children: A satisfying hard science fiction story of the type Orson Scott Card once called “the scientific method, but dramatic.” The aliens are very interesting; I don’t think I’ve seen one like them before.

YEAR OF THE MK III SONICARE ULTRASONIC TOOTHBRUSH: Infinite Jest fanfic in which Hal Incandenza recovers his voice through writing fanfiction. The pastiche of David Foster Wallace’s writing style is fantastic, as is the loving rejection of the themes of Infinite Jest. This is what fanfic should be.

comme la pluie: A delightful, strange, melancholy little story about an actress in pseudosnuff pornography dying for real. Also it’s Harry Potter fanfic.

Fun

Chinese Doom Scroll: everyone in Tibet is rich. All fans of China are reasonable people and that’s why they’re less likely to get dogpiled; also, affirmative action drama. Oil trucks reused machine-oil barrels for food oil. Doctors slut-shaming women for wearing tampons. “We need to actualize [reforming fan culture] into handcuffs and prison time.”

The game of figuring out which track the train will depart from at Penn Station.

Unusual but successful ads: advertising a moldy burger and exactly how boring Oslo is to visit.