Subscriber Questions

I have grouped the subscriber questions loosely by topic, rather than by individual asker, and skipped a couple questions where I felt I had no interesting answer. You can see who asked what in the comments of this post. I have put the more sensitive/private questions behind a paywall.

Not to get you into too much hot water, but are there any critiques of Effective Altruism/Rationalism that you agree with/wish were taken more seriously?

Like anyone in the effective altruist movement is going to get mad at me for criticizing them, instead of saying "thank you, sir, may I please have another?"

Critiquing the rationalist community separately from the effective altruist community mostly feels like a type error to me. At this point, the rationalist community is an extended group of friends, not a group that is particularly intending to do anything. It's fine to not like the norms that have developed, but then you should find some other people to be friends with instead of criticizing people who like the community they've made.

First: I think the effective altruist community isn't taking Inner Ring dynamics seriously enough. Most of the dysfunctional dynamics of the community are downstream of the widespread alief that there exists an inner circle of elite effective altruists and you're a pathetic loser who will never accomplish anything of value in your life unless you manage to be in it. I think this is the throughline connecting:

• Excessive deference to the beliefs of perceived "elite" effective altruists, even if the "elite" effective altruists themselves are very uncertain or don’t know anything.

• People trying to get EA jobs when they would be best served by building skills and experience outside the community for a few years.

• Groupthink among "elites"; disrespect for those outside the effective altruist community.

• Intense fear of failure, because it feels like failure means losing all your friends and community.

• An excessive amount of angst about party invitations.

Conversely, the healthiest parts of the effective altruist community have a mixture of direct workers, programmers, nannies, teachers, baristas, and all the other professions people can have.

Second: I think "we use malaria nets to convince people of effective altruism and then try to get them to work on AI" is an incredibly dishonest, toxic dynamic. To their credit, mainstream effective altruist groups have transitioned away from this recently: for example, 80,000 Hours has pivoted to only focus on AI, while CEA is striving to be more inclusive of many causes. But I still see a lot of individuals use the tactic. You should tell the truth about your beliefs. If you think the world is going to end due to AI in a decade, your strategy for persuading people of this fact should not route through the epidemiology of tropical diseases.

Third: "What about the optics?" is a stupid argument and people shouldn't make it. It leads to the Streisand effect: how many people would be aware of Wytham Abbey if not for the people complaining constantly about the optics of Wytham Abbey?

More than that, effective altruism is the movement for telling the truth about what causes we think are most important. If you want the movement for convincing people to donate money using sentences that are loosely correlated with the truth, you have the entire rest of the charity sector. In my opinion, the entire reason that some global-health charities are thousands of times more effective than others is that everyone is soliciting donations by constantly shading the truth (often with the best of intentions) to make their cause look better than it really is. The result is a horrible epistemic morass where the ordinary donor has no chance of figuring out where their money will go farthest.

You mostly can't deceive normies and make sure the elite insiders know the real truth; the insiders will believe your deceptions and make decisions based on incorrect beliefs about the world. Even if you could, that would be way cultier than group houses or polyamory or whatever it is the "effective altruism is a cult" people are yelling about today. Say what you think is true, do what you think is best, and let PR take care of itself.

In March, you mentioned that your priorities with respect to the Trump administration were preserving American democracy and PEPFAR. Are those still your priorities? With the crazy mess of political things happening, which do you think are the most important to focus on?

Well, now it's preserving American democracy, global health programs, and science funding. We know that the marginal dollar spent on public R&D increases GDP by $2 to $5, and that's not counting any benefits of R&D that aren't included in GDP; science funding is as important as democracy and global health. And the slashing of global health programs goes beyond PEPFAR. For example, RFK Jr. has stopped funding GAVI because of concerns about "vaccine safety”, a decision that will likely lead to the deaths of a million children.

Plausibly, AI policy is equally important, but it would simply be too embarrassing for our species to go extinct with Donald Trump as the leader of the free world so I refuse to consider this possibility.

I am so depressed and enraged by this administration. I keep reading global health stories and imagining that it's my child who is dying of a preventable illness so that Trump can slightly offset tax cuts for multimillionaires. I have gained a vivid understanding of why people believe in moral desert because, holy shit, I don't want to engage in reasoned dialogue until these people understand why their actions are wrong. I want them to suffer.

What do you think of the switch from the term "transsexual" to "transgender"? Many of the things some self-identifying transgender people want (in particular hormonal and surgical changes) appear more motivated by wanting to change something you could call "sex" rather than a change of societal gender role. (Inevitably, of course, there is an interrelation between the two.) Is there a case for rescuing "transsexual", or has it had its time and is now outré?

I like the word "transsexual" a lot and think we should revive it as a way of referring to biomedically transitioning transgender people.

A lot of people I'm very close to are transgender and cissexual. This is completely fine. I respect their genders; when they identify as transgender, I think they're communicating about very real experiences they have. I certainly don't believe that only transsexuals can be victims of transphobia. Indeed, cissexual transgender people often experience more transphobia than transsexuals, if it's harder for them to blend in.

But there are ways that my experience, as a transsexual, is different from that of my cissexual transgender friends. I have a very real experience of male privilege that cissexual people assigned female at birth will basically never have. Too, I deal with some of the disadvantages of being male, such as women being afraid of me and the fear of sexually harassing women. I put a controlled substance, testosterone, into my body, and have to deal with supply and insurance issues. The effects of testosterone on people who produce eggs is understudied, and I deal with the ramifications of that—both immediate medical problems and the impossibility of making a risk-informed decision because I actually don't know how many years of life testosterone takes from me in expectation.

I sometimes see takes from cissexual transgender people who don't seem to realize transsexual experiences are different. For a relatively low-stakes example, a lot of people say that you shouldn't have short-story anthology calls that are open only to women and not transmasculine people. I think a lot of cissexual transmasculine people do, in a very real sense, live as women and face misogyny, and the purpose of women-only short-story anthologies is met by including them. But I haven't faced meaningful misogyny for most of my writing career, because I've spent most of it living as a man (admittedly a really gay man who wears dresses). None of the purposes of a woman-only anthology are met by including me.

Again, I don't mean this to imply that cissexual transgender people are "invalid" or "not really trans" or "not oppressed" or anything like that. But I think a lot of conversations would be easier to have if we recognized that cissexual and transsexual transgender people often have different needs and experiences.

Also, please do not use this as a reason to peer into anyone's private medical information. Unless you're their sexual partner or their doctor, no one owes you information about whether they're transsexual. You will simply have to live in uncertainty about any specific nonbinary person's transsexuality status and birth assignment unless they wish to tell you.

Do the new trans-hostile laws worry you or affect you on the daily? Especially the passport debacle, the government of my own country has now officially advised transgender people not to travel to the States at the moment.

The United States is very large, and most decisions relevant to trans people occur on the state level. I live in California, which is a very nice place to be trans, and I expect it to continue to be nice indefinitely. Since I'm a U.S. citizen who isn't financially able to travel abroad, anti-trans bills have affected my life very little. I'm concerned about Medicaid (healthcare for poor people) no longer covering trans healthcare, because I have a close friend who's on Medicaid, but I think even in that situation California would probably allocate some money so that MediCal (Medicaid in California) would still cover it. I do have some worries about my friends’ kids who are trans, though.

Thoughts on school reform/abolishing school on a broader level? Not everyone can have a cute little micro hippie school run by highly accomplished parents. I've found other rationalists critical of school to not offer many alternatives?

To be honest, helping with the microschool has involved a lot of assuming some thing schools do is pointlessly authoritarian and cruel, tossing it out, and then slowly realizing that schools do it that way for an actual reason. If you don't require children to raise their hands to speak, they will constantly interrupt each other and the less aggressive children will never get a chance to talk. If you have snacks that kids can eat whenever they want, they will get food, take one bite of it, leave it out on the table to go bad, wander off, and then get another snack ten minutes later. If you only make kids clean up if they feel authentically motivated to clean up, the playroom is an absolute mess, the kids don't want to play there, and it's impossible to get studying done because the kids are all playing in the classroom instead.

I think that having a student base of neurodivergent kids makes you appropriately cynical about a lot of school reform, to be honest. I haven't dug deep into the Alpha School stuff, for example, but I've seen people say "this works for any kid who can sit still and focus for 20 minutes!" Let me tell you, my kid's microschool would achieve fucking educational miracles if we had any student who could sit still for twenty minutes.

I'm not a hardcore unschooler. The evidence in favor of direct instruction—basically the least unschool-y educational strategy—is very strong.

And, while homeschooling is the right choice for many families, I strongly reject the idea that everyone should homeschool. Many parents are incompetent teachers. If there's a poor personality fit between parent and child, the child won't move on to a different teacher next year. Most children benefit from strong relationships with adults who aren't their parents. Socialization is, in fact, difficult for homeschoolers: while this would be different in a society where everyone homeschooled, right now you can't get around that most children are at school all week, befriending people who also attend their schools. And I think a lot of pro-universal-homeschooling people have failed to reckon with universal homeschooling meaning that half of all parents—let's be real, mostly mothers—are pulled out of the workforce to teach.

That said, I think that education could easily be more respectful of child freedom. I went to a Montessori elementary school. While by-the-book Montessori is wrong about a lot of facts about child development—for one thing, they think that children shouldn't play pretend—Montessori classrooms provide children noticeably more freedom and responsibility, without sacrificing educational outcomes. We can, in fact, allow elementary-age children to choose their own work and work independently. We can also expect them to prepare their own snacks and keep the classroom tidy.

One thing I didn't take seriously enough before I had kids was that freedom and responsibility are deeply intertwined. You can give people a lot more autonomy if you can trust them not to be horrible little gremlins who tear apart the social fabric for the fun of it. On the other hand, people will never learn to exercise their freedom well unless they're given a chance to be free and to make mistakes. This is something I think Montessori does very well. "You can choose your own work" and "you must make your own snack" aren't separate; they're very deeply intertwined.

I don't have an older child, and I suspect my thoughts are going to change as my child ages. But to me the most serious problem in older children's education is that they usually don't get a chance to do real, meaningful work until they're sixteen (at best) or in their twenties (at worst). Obviously, I don't think we should send the children to the mines. But the best thing my mother ever did for me was hire me to work at her magazine when I was thirteen. By the time I was sixteen, I was working promotional booths at festivals, proofreading articles, and going to press screenings of movies alongside adult critics to write reviews that went out to an audience of thousands of people. I've never used most of what I learned in high school; I use the skills I learned working for my mom every day.

80,000 Hours says in their article about career capital that the average new graduate doesn't know how to run a meeting, give a presentation, or read financial statements. This strikes me as a horrible indictment of our educational system. After 22 years of studying, most people don't have the basic skills needed for a career?

I think a lot of unhappiness and misbehavior among teenagers is directly attributable to the fact that teenagers want to do real work where it actually matters if it's accomplished. Throughout most of human history, teenagers were net economic producers with a lot of independence. Today, we treat them like children. No wonder they chafe at the bullshit they do at school. Wouldn’t you?

I imagine schools having a number of associated businesses, all run entirely by the students. A coffeeshop where students not only work as baristas but also make purchasing decisions, keep the books, and manage employees. A theater where students decide what shows to put on, direct, stage-manage, act, make props and costumes, and promote the show. Some elaborate games could serve a similar purpose: for example, a school might have a detailed wargame of the Thirty Years' War. These wouldn't be adult-curated experiences; the students would have as much control as possible and would face the consequences of their actions. Of course, most of these businesses would be money-losing endeavors; but that's fine, they're educational.

Students would start out with low-responsibility positions aged 10 or so, and as they get older gradually take on more and more advanced positions. By the time they graduate, they would have developed both genuinely useful skills and a sense that they could actually accomplish things.

Also, school should start later for teenagers. I don't care what we have to trade off to make that happen. If we're delaying real life for teenagers so they can learn, we need to make sure they're in the best position for learning, which means no sleep deprivation.

Any book recommendations? Any anti-recommendations, i.e. books to avoid?

Jeez, you people don't ask easy questions, do you?

When I particularly enjoy a nonfiction book, I normally write about it here. So I'm going to interpret this as a chance for fiction recommendations.

You should read Tian Guan Ci Fu/Heavenly Official's Blessing. I am being very selfless here, because my personal favorite series of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's is Mo Dao Zu Shi/Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, but I think my readers would probably like Tian Guan Ci Fu better. In spite of presumably never having read a rationalfic because she doesn't speak English, Mo Xiang Tong Xiu deftly deconstructs and then reconstructs rationalist fiction. She shows what goes wrong when you naively defy the natural order in the name of righteousness, and then shows why you should do it anyway.

Mo Xiang Tong Xiu's characterization is characteristically strong: Tian Guan Ci Fu could be told from the point of view of any character (with one exception) and be an equally powerful novel. It's not a world where only the protagonists are real and the other characters are paper-thin dolls shining in the protagonists' reflected light; it's a world of fully realized people with their own goals and stories.

I also appreciate that it's a romance where the only appreciable conflict between the protagonists is that the world won't stop having disasters long enough for them to go on a proper date. Many effective altruists may find this relatable.

Anti-recommendation: I think we should legally forbid novelists from having social media, because sometimes it devours the brains of perfectly good authors from the inside out. (N. K. Jemisin, what happened?) I loved Xiran Jay Zhao's Iron Widow, so I regret to inform everyone that Heavenly Tyrant involves Qin Shi Huangdi explaining the difference between personal and private property. China was led by a number of authoritarian Communist leaders. Quite famously so! Make Mao the protagonist of your dark romance if you're not a coward.

Have you read any of Wildbow's web serials (Worm, Pale, etc.)? If so, what did you think?

I read Worm in college. I really liked the characterization and the worldbuilding, but skimmed past all the fight scenes. It lost me near the end, when it stopped really being a superhero story. I haven't picked up any of his other books, because the options for "really long web serial novel" have improved a lot since I was in college. Now I can read books where I don’t have to skim past any fight scenes!

Which is better, the 'But I'm a Cheerleader' movie or stage musical?

I had no idea that there was a stage musical! Wild. Has anyone seen it? Is it any good?

What tabletop RPGs are you currently playing (if any), have enjoyed the most in the past, or hate and will never play?

I'm currently playing Good Society, a game in which you play the protagonist of a Jane Austen novel. It's a really well-designed system. It shows that a rules-light system is not the same thing as a poorly thought out system: every rule shapes player incentives in the same way their characters’ incentives are shaped, to give the player the feeling of really being in the Regency.

The system I've probably run most often is Call of Cthulhu,¹ followed by Monsterhearts. I think Call of Cthulhu 7th edition is the best game, bar none, for playing overwhelmed normal humans in far over their heads. My favorite for one-shots is Ten Candles. If you like horror, you should absolutely play Ten Candles; it's the most effective horror game I've ever played.

I dislike crunch and combat (my Call of Cthulhu games are always very investigation-focused). So I don't play D&D, Pathfinder, or OSR.

Do you currently prefer he/him pronouns?

I don't have preferred pronouns. You can use whatever pronouns for me are easy and convenient for you. If it isn't easy or convenient for you to not have a single correct set, then they/them.

Have you ever travelled outside the US?

I visited Ireland when I was elementary school; otherwise, no. A disadvantage of marrying a man six years older than me is that, by the time we married, he was already done with traveling the world in his twenties and wanted to settle down.

How fast do you type?

Just did a typing test. 93 WPM, with 99% accuracy. Of course, when I'm not doing a typing test, I type much more slowly because I have to think about what I'm going to say.

What is the cutest small nonhuman animal?

Tardigrades.