On Measuring Tradeoffs In Effective Altruism

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effective altruism, ozy blog post

[Content warnings: scrupulosity; assumes the reader is an effective altruist and broadly on board with measuring the value of human lives in money.]

I.

A lot of arguments that vegetarianism is not effective altruism– for instance, this essay by Katja Grace– use the current cost of saving a life according to GiveWell as the approximate value of a human life. [ETA: see Katja’s comment, that is not precisely what her essay is doing.] This would be sensible if charitable donations were an efficient market, in which people arbitraged lives: if there were an opportunity to save lives for much less than the value of human lives, then people would do that, and then we could expect that the cheapest one can save a life for is approximately the value of a human life.

However, one of the key facts leading one to effective altruism is that human lives are not arbitraged; because people have certain biases– we favor people in our own country, we don’t intuitively understand the difference between 10,000 and 100,000– it is possible to get tremendous steals on saving lives.

The value of a human life according to the US government is somewhere between six million dollars and nine million dollars. Take the middle number and call it seven and a half million dollars. With that calculation, the ethical cost of a chicken meal turns out not to be equivalent to the $5.50 Katja calculates but a mind-boggling $3669.

Of course, that assumes that chickens have equal moral weight to humans. I don’t think they do. But assuming that chickens are worth half as much as a human are, it still works out that the average chicken meal causes almost $2000 of damage.

(Some people are going to read this and be like “wait, that means that every time I pay for a Netflix subscription instead of donating to GiveWell I am complicit in thousands of dollars’ worth of harm.” And, well, yeah. Are you new?)

II.

The second argument I see a lot of non-vegetarian effective altruists using against becoming vegetarian is that it trades off against donating more. This is a pretty common argument whenever anyone brings up a form of altruism unrelated to direct work or earning to give: should we really be protesting, or donating kidneys, or boycotting Nestle, or eating vegetarian, or not driving, if it reduces our effectiveness in direct work or earning to give?

Now, there are two groups of people this does not apply to. First, some effective altruists like Jeff Kaufman decide how much good they’re going to do in approximate dollar values. When an opportunity comes for a high-cost opportunity for doing good, such as becoming vegetarian, they measure the cost in dollars and then don’t donate an equivalent amount of money. Second, some effective altruists do “morality offsets”– every time they eat meat, they donate five dollars more to the Against Malaria Foundation than they otherwise would. Both of those are perfectly reasonable behavior and my blog post does not apply to people doing them.

However, I think for most effective altruists this is a terrible model for understanding how to do the most good.

First, adding a new form of altruism might make it easier to do direct work or earning to give. Vegetarianism is, for most people, a lot cheaper than eating meat, simply because eating meat costs more. If you go vegetarian, you free up money that you can spend on donating. Another place this argument applies is conserving resources and general environmentalism: reducing the amount you fly or using energy-efficient appliances is good for the earth, but it also saves money, making it easier to donate more. (These two examples suggest a general heuristic– when looking for money-saving ideas, favor ones that are also more ethical.)

Second, this model assumes that humans have a single limiting factor on how much good they do. However, in many cases, the limiting factor on one’s donations or career success is completely unrelated to limiting factors on one’s ability to be vegetarian.

For instance, imagine Alice. Alice has a salaried job; if she worked additional hours, she would not earn more money. She has calculated that, above fifty hours a week of work and study, the marginal effect of additional time on her career success is essentially zero. While she could theoretically get a part-time job or work on Mechanical Turk, that would be sufficiently dispiriting that it would burn her out. She is also donating income at a percentage above which she would burn out.

Now, Alice is considering going vegetarian, or attending her local #BlackLivesMatter protest, or selling her car and taking CalTrain to work. While all of these have costs, they probably aren’t coming out of the time Alice is spending on her career. They’re coming out of (respectively) the diversity of food with which Alice tantalizes her tastebuds, Alice’s ability to sit in her underwear on Saturday and watch cartoons, and Alice not having to check the schedule to make sure she doesn’t miss her train. None of those decisions are likely to have any effect on how much Alice donates.

In my own case, I’ve been everything from vegan to pescatarian. I did not donate more when I was eating fish; if anything, the correlation went the other direction. Instead, my donations were mostly affected by whether or not I have a job– a constraint nearly entirely unrelated to my dietary habits. And my quality of life as a pescatarian was not particularly higher than my quality of life as a lacto vegetarian. (Vegan is hard. Cheese!)

Basically, my argument is this: the marginal cost of Alice becoming vegetarian is much much lower than the marginal cost of Alice donating more money. Therefore, if Alice wishes to do more good in the world, she should become vegetarian– regardless of whether donating more money is more effective.

Obviously, not everyone’s costs of becoming vegetarian are as low as Alice’s. Some people have health problems if they don’t eat meat. Some people have eating disorders that are triggered by any sort of restrictive diet. Some people have diets restricted in other ways, and not eating meat would cause them to miss out on important nutrients. Some people live in food deserts and take what they can get. Some people are completely disgusted by vegetables and trying to become vegetarian would mean they would live entirely on bread. All of those are perfectly reasonable quality of life reasons not to become vegetarian– and (for that matter) all of them seem likely to interfere with how much someone can donate.

However, for a lot of people, vegetarianism does not interfere with other forms of altruism. I encourage meat-eating effective altruists who read this to consider whether they can reduce their meat consumption in relatively low-cost ways. Can you learn to cook a handful more vegetarian meals? Try Meatless Monday or vegan before 6? Stop eating chicken? Drink more Soylet (or MealSquares, if they come out with a vegan version, HINT HINT)? Obviously, if reducing your animal product consumption affects your career or your quality of life, you should scale it back. But I suspect a lot of people will find that reducing their consumption of animal products is a lot easier and lower-cost than they think it is.

On QALYs

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ozy blog post, utilitarianism it works bitches

I am a big fan of QALYs, and not just because you get to play exciting games of Things That Suck Worse Than Depression Scavenger Hunt. (So far the list includes literally being born without a brain.) I think they’re a great first attempt at actually quantifying utilitarianism and solving the interpersonal utility comparison problem.

A lot of my disabled friends really hate QALYs. They say: “QALYs are literally saying that my life is worth less than an abled person’s. This isn’t theoretical: people have advocated distributing organs on the basis of QALY maximization. Sure, I’d like a cure for my chronic pain issues, but I don’t want to die.”

Worse, some of my utilitarian friends have agreed with them.

(Side note: talking about organ allocation is fairly ridiculous, given that about four-fifths of people on the organ transplant waiting list are waiting for kidneys, and it is possible for living people to donate kidneys. Instead of encouraging people to donate kidneys to strangers, the US medical system inexplicably makes it difficult. Also, if you’re in good health, you should donate a kidney.)

QALYs take two things into account: first, the number of additional years you will live if you have a treatment; second, how much better your life will be if you have that treatment. That is perfectly sensible if you are trying to figure out whether it’s cost-effective to cover my mental health care, because the effects of my mental health care are that I live longer and have a better life. However, this is only a good method of figuring out who should get an organ if you believe that disability is the most important factor in someone’s happiness, to the point that it completely swamps every other consideration.

Ideally, we’d look at people’s happiness setpoints. Unfortunately, we don’t have a way to measure happiness setpoint objectively, and if saying they are extremely happy is what it takes to get an organ most people will say so. However, there are demographic factors correlated with happiness: we should not only favor abled people, but married people, people who attend religious services regularly, Republicans, and rich people. Furthermore, people who are well-rested after only six hours a night have an extra eighth of a life-year per year compared to those who require ten; how much you sleep is just as important as, say, mild intellectual disability.

I notice that no one has invented Sleep-And-Political-Party-Adjusted-Life-Years, much less advocated their use in organ allocation. I feel like this is probably because disability feels very mediciney, the sort of thing doctors should be concerned about, whereas religiosity is clearly out of their sphere.

I suspect my utilitarian readers are half going “okay, you’re right, sleep-and-political-party-adjusted-life-years are kind of absurd”, and half going “actually, that sounds GREAT, exactly how we should allocate kidneys.” However, QALYs do not pass the enemy control ray test.

Non-utilitarians mostly are interested in allocating organs “fairly”, so a proper analogy will involve some people acting quite out of character. So imagine that the Catholic Church, in a sudden fit of consequentialism, invented the Telos-Adjusted Life Year: in the future, you will be far less likely to get an organ from a Catholic hospital if you’re in a gay relationship, you’ve gotten divorced, or your medical history includes contraception use. Both utilitarians and AU Catholics are using the same rule: we’re giving organs to people whose lives more closely fit our idea of the good life. It’s just that utilitarians think the good life is being happy or having your preferences satisfied, whereas AU Catholics think that the good life involves using your passions in a way compatible with their final end. If we want a leg to stand on when condemning the use of Telos-Adjusted Life Years to distribute organs, we shouldn’t use QALYs to distribute them either.

I would like to propose the radical idea that philosophers should figure out the definition of the good life, and the medical system should cure sick people. We wouldn’t give Derek Parfit a scalpel and shove him into the operating theater, and we shouldn’t ask the medical bureaucracy to solve all of normative ethics for us.

Labels, Not Identities

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follow ozymandias271 for more sad gays, ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

This is a thing that helped me, and it helped some other people on Tumblr, so I’m going to turn it into a real blog post.

When you think about your sexuality and gender, think about what you want to signal.

There are basically two reasons to identify as LGBA. First, you might want to signal to prospective romantic partners: you might want to say “I’m bisexual” so cuties of all genders know that you’re into them, or you might want to say “I’m a lesbian” so that men know not to waste their time hitting on you (as tragically unsuccessful a strategy as that might sometimes be). Second, a lot of people want to know who does and doesn’t experience homophobia and compulsory heterosexuality, for a whole bunch of reasons. A lot of LGBA people are more comfortable talking about their experiences with people who share them. Many people will take your opinion more seriously if they know it’s informed by life experience. Groups ranging from health centers to suicide hotlines are primarily open to LGBTA+ people.

So: if you want to signal to guys “hey! Guys! I want to kiss you!”, and you want to signal to girls “hey, girls, not my thing!”, congratulations, you get to identify as a gay dude.

And it’s 100% okay if you want to change your label. Because this isn’t some Basic Reality Of Your Fundamental Being: it’s just a word. It’s just signaling. If you used to be a gay dude and now you’re like “actually, that whole sex thing is not my bag, baby”, you can be asexual– homoromantic, if you still want to signal to boys that you want to hold their hands and get gaymarried (which we can do in all fifty states!), or aromantic if you’ve decided that’s not your bag either.

Similarly, trans shit.

The best advice I got when I was transitioning was stop worrying about your fucking label. A lot of times it’s easier to answer questions like “do I want people to use female pronouns for me? do I want to change my name? do I want to wear makeup or dresses or girl-cut jeans? do I want to tuck or wear falsies? do I want to take hormones? do I want voice therapy? do I want sexual reassignment surgery or electrolysis or facial feminization surgery?” than it is to answer questions like “really, on a fundamental level, do I identify more with men or women?” There is no empirical way you can answer the latter question. On the other hand, if you want to find out whether skirts are fun, you can go out and buy a skirt. Problem solved.

(Skirts are fun, by the way.)

And eventually it’s going to turn out that one set of vocabulary is the easiest to use to explain what’s going on with you. You can say “I’m a crossdresser” if you want to wear falsies and lipstick sometimes but mostly want to be called “he” and wear pants. You can say “I’m a woman” if you want to take HRT and use “she” pronouns and be called “Mary.” You can say “I’m nonbinary” if you like “they/them” and you want a boob job but you’re okay with your current hormone balance. You can say “I’m genderfluid” if your preferences change a lot, or “I’m a demigirl” if you’re mostly female but like “zie/hir” sometimes, or even “I’m cis” if this whole process ended with you going “actually, chest hair and Michael Bay movies are the shit.”

If Deep Essences of Ineffable Whatever are your deal, it’s cool. None of this blog post should be taken to say that you can’t go about having a deep essence of gay if you want to. But if you’re worried about being Fake Trans or Fake Gay or Fake Ace or Fake Bi… it’s fine. It’s just signaling. As long as you’re signaling what you want to signal, you don’t have to worry about whether you count or not. You do.

Functioning Labels Are Kind Of Silly

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disability, ozy blog post

The problem with talking about someone having “high-functioning autism” or “a high-functioning developmental disability” or “a high-functioning personality disorder” or “being a high-functioning sociopath” (thanks Sherlock) is that how well you function is a product of a whole fuckton of stuff, only one of which is your impairment.

For instance, what’s the environment like? I do great in environments where I have a lot of expectations and structure, and poorly when my brain has a lot of time to eat itself. An autistic person might appear a lot more autistic if they happened to live in a place with sirens going off constantly. This is particularly true because a lot of people tend to behave in more dysfunctional ways under stress.

Another important aspect is what people expect of the person. If you define “functions well” as “can speak”, a lot more autistic people are going to function well than if you define it as “can hold down a forty-hour-a-week job and have a romantic relationship.” That matters on a more micro level too: if no one expects me not to break down in response to routine life problems, I don’t have to hide my emotions, and then I can devote more energy into recovering better from my breakdowns.

Similarly, the person’s other abilities matter a lot: an autistic person who’s a tremendously gifted writer might easily find a workplace that tolerates her eccentricities, while an equally severely autistic person might join the 58% of autistic people who are unemployed. It also matters what coping skills they’ve developed or been taught: a person with a personality disorder who’s spent a year working with a really good therapist will probably do better than someone who hasn’t.

This is a problem because a lot of times people use high-functioning to describe the disorder, rather than the person. Saying “Joe has high-functioning autism” makes it sound like Joe’s autism is very mild. But, in reality, someone exactly like Joe, but with comorbid bipolar disorder, no knowledge of how his brain works and what sets him off, and a noisy environment full of people constantly talking to him and expecting him to do complex neurotypical social games– and Joe is going to look a hell of a lot less well-functioning.

Even if you use “high-functioning” to describe the person, it’s inaccurate to treat high-functioning and low-functioning as binary categories. A lot of times, whether someone comes off as high-functioning or low-functioning depends on what traits they choose to emphasize. Stimmy Abby writes powerfully:

Let’s take two girls with autism.

Trisha is an articulate and eloquent writer. She has autism, but that hasn’t kept her from presenting and preforming for large audiences. Her teachers have described her as introverted, bookish, gifted, and eager-to-please. She has multiple friends, she can take a train across the city independentally, and her mother thinks nothing of leaving her home alone with her younger brother.

Kailey cannot bathe herself and has trouble with dressing, eating and most activities of daily living. She spends hours engaging in self-stimulatory behavior and she routinely self-injures to the point of bloody sores. She has meltdowns in which she hits herself, bashes her head into walls, and destroys things; medication cannot control them. She has limited verbal ability and a wandering problem that has led to her almost walking into cars. She cannot function in a normal school.

Which of these people sounds “low functioning” and which sounds “high functioning”?

Guess what? They are both me.

For instance: a lot of people who come off as Aspie are nonverbal sometimes or otherwise have poor expressive language (for instance, forgetting common words and having to be like “that purple thing (makes rectangle hand gesture)” “you mean the Skittles packet?”). A lot of people who come off as Aspie headbang. I guarantee you, every single fucking thing you hear described as something that low-functioning autistic people do, there’s a ton of people who come off as high-functioning who do it too.

A lot of neurodiversity advocates think we should throw out functioning labels entirely. I don’t think that’s true! I think it’s important to talk about how some people function better than other people. However, when we’re talking about this, we should remember that it’s a vast oversimplification of a more complex reality. We should never say that a person’s disability functions well– instead, they function well. And we shouldn’t use functioning labels as a way to silence people, either by saying that people who function less well can’t speak for themselves or have opinions, or by saying that people who function better don’t count.

Words For Nonbinary Identities Are A Huge Goddamn Mess

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ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

It’s true.

First, there’s the fact that no one can agree on which one of “genderqueer” and “nonbinary” is the umbrella term, and which one refers to people who identify specifically outside the gender binary (instead of as both men and women or whatever).

There are well-behaved words like “genderfluid” which have a fair amount of predictive power, insofar as I can expect a genderfluid person to have “girl days” and/or “boy days” and/or “nonbinary days”. These are, tragically, the exception.

There are words like “agender”, which seems to have at least two different kinds of people in it. There are agender people who don’t really care about gender: they just go “meh” and move on with their lives. And there are agender people who feel incredibly shitty whenever anyone calls them any gender or treats them like any gender. Those two groups seem, to put it lightly, like they have absolutely fucking nothing to do with each other whatsoever.

And then there are words like “bigender” and “trigender” and “pangender” and “androgyne” and “intergender” and shit, where people who clearly have different gender experiences are identifying as the same word, and people who have the same gender experiences are identifying as different words, and it’s a total goddamn mess and I can’t predict anything about how someone experiences gender based on what words they like.

And then Tumblr happened and a bunch of fourteen-year-olds started using extremely elaborate metaphors for their genders and deciding that they’re “voidgender” because their gender is so nonexistent it’s like T H E V O I D. This is very nice from an aesthetic perspective but doesn’t exactly help the “no one has any goddamn idea what they’re talking about” problem.

I’m not sure this problem is actually fixable. Gender feelings are, by their nature, very hard to talk about– I can’t feel exactly what you’re feeling, so how do I know if we’re experiencing the same thing or not? And the way we experience our genders is so influenced by our race, our disabilities, our sexualities, our class, where we grew up, our assigned sex at birth, our parents, our childhood friends, the books we read, and so on, that getting at the raw feeling itself is nigh-impossible.

I guess the take-home message of this post is that you cannot assume that someone is not dysphoric because of the words they identify with. If someone identifies as stargender, it gives you information about some things– for instance, that they probably have a Tumblr– but it doesn’t tell you whether they have to dissociate to get through sex, or whether they avoid mirrors because they can’t stand their body, or whether it feels like a icicle in their gut every time someone calls them “she”. You have to go with the base rate of those traits among people who use gender-neutral pronouns, which is “high”. The whole fucking situation is entirely too messy for anyone to conclude things about a person’s gender experiences from their chosen labels.

On Moral Progress

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ozy blog post, utilitarianism it works bitches

A lot of moral philosophies lead to strange, counterintuitive, and often demanding conclusions. Utilitarians think you should donate as much money as you possibly can to charity. Kantians think you should never tell even little white lies. Catholics think you shouldn’t jerk off. Et cetera.

Let’s say you believe in moral progress: that there are moral questions we as a culture get right now that we didn’t get right two hundred years ago. This argument requires a very weak form of moral progress– you don’t have to believe that our culture is right about everything, or even most things, just that there is at least one issue that the nineteenth century got wrong and we got right. For instance, two issues which spring obviously to mind for me are “should we sentence people to prison for engaging in consensual homosexual sex?” and “should women have the right to vote?”

Now, if a moral philosophy with no obvious relation to homosexuality or feminism happened to get both of those questions right, back in the nineteenth century, that seems to me to be a strong argument in favor of that philosophy. If their strange, counterintuitive, and demanding conclusions turned out, several hundred years later, to be a good idea, then probably the current strange, counterintuitive, and demanding conclusions which it’s peddling are good ideas too.

Virtue ethics was, unfortunately, not very popular during the nineteenth century, so one cannot check how well it holds up. However, Kant (characterized as “central to deontological moral theories” by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) does not come across very well at all. He said that homosexuality was an unmentionable vice. Not only did he believe that women should not vote for “natural reasons“, he believed that wives were owned much as one would own property, very much reflecting the prejudices of his time, but perhaps not what a reasonable person would conclude from “treat people as ends and not means”.

The position of Christians on homosexuality is well-known, and I direct the interested reader to the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia’s entry on women:

The third branch of the woman question, the social legal position of woman, can, as shown from what has been said, only be decided by Catholics in accordance with the organic conception of society, but not in accordance with disintegrating individualism. Therefore the political activity of man is and remains different from that of woman, as has been shown above. It is difficult to unite the direct participation of woman in the political and parliamentary life of the present time with her predominate duty as a mother. If it should be desired to exclude married women or to grant women only the actual vote, the equality sought for would not be attained. On the other hand, the indirect influence of women, which in a well-ordered state makes for the stability of the moral order, would suffer severe injury by political equality.

On the other hand, by this criterion, the nineteenth-century utilitarians do very very well. Jeremy Bentham supported women’s full equal rights, while John Stuart Mill went so far as to write a groundbreaking feminist text, The Subjection of Women. Jeremy Bentham concluded that homosexuality is morally fine, while John Stuart Mill was silent on the topic.

In conclusion: don’t eat meat, give money to the Schistosomiasis Control Institute, and a hundred and fifty years from now someone might be writing a blog post about how great your moral system is.

Book Post For June

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ozy blog post

[Thanks to Ruxandra, sonic-maineboom, picklefactory, Taymon, and Emily for getting me books.]

Self-Therapy: A Step By Step Guide To Creating Wholeness And Healing Your Inner Child Using IFS, A New Cutting-Edge Therapy. About halfway through this book I was like “God, that seems familiar” and then I thought to myself “holy shit, it’s magick.” Specifically, the techniques to work with parts in IFS seem very similar to the creation and empowerment of thoughtforms/tulpas. It’s interesting to me that the same techniques seem to have been independently invented, and makes me think it’s more likely that tulpas/thoughtforms/parts are a thing brains naturally create under certain circumstances (although of course that doesn’t mean that creating one is a particularly effective therapy).

I did not complete any of the exercises in this book. A year or so ago, I read that a large number of iatrogenic multiples are borderline, and as soon as I read it I could feel the parts of my brain I’d have to rip up to become a multiple; IFS exercises felt like they were straining those parts. For that reason, I’m curious if IFS has a history of causing multiplicity. I am also somewhat concerned about the fact that all exiles (parts in pain, fear, shame, or trauma) are believed to be a product of a traumatic childhood memory. I feel like that’s a setup for false memories of abusive or merely bad parenting, as well as undue pressure on parents (“if you don’t feed your child on demand then they could grow up to have long-term psychological damage!”).

Getting Things Done. This book thinks I have much more filing to do than I actually have to do. However, I am generally in support of the “make lots of lists” strategy of time management, and am pleased about the new list ideas it has given me. I might swap over to GTD next time I get bored of my current productivity strategy. [ETA a ~month later: I swapped over to GTD and it is in fact delightfully full of lists.]

The Varieties of Scientific Experience. A treat, if only for the question-and-answer section in the back where Sagan explains to a variety of New Agey/liberal theists that it is important to believe only things that you have evidence for and that Einstein’s god was more of a metaphor. Sagan makes the universe feel deeply spiritual. The same resonance which a Christian writer gives to the Incarnation and the Redemption, Sagan gives to the size of the universe and the fragility of life. In a lot of Sagan’s writings, it feels like Sagan was a theologian for a religion that didn’t exist yet; reading a book which is actually about his opinions on religion only makes this feeling more intense. I was continually thinking of Secular Solstice as I read. Very pretty galaxy pictures.

The Ayn Rand Cult. I totally had a lot of grown up thoughts about this book, but they were entirely derailed by the LAST COUPLE PAGES in which the author outs himself as A GODDAMNED MISOGYNIST. In the last few pages, the author writes an alternate universe in which Ayn Rand had a child, which apparently makes her become a well-respected philosopher and author instead of an abusive asshole. Like, seriously? Would you pull this shit about a man? What kind of nineteenth-century dunghole did you dig this “intellectual work is all very well for the ladies as long as they remember their true role as wives and mothers, lest it tax their uterus and turn them into hysterics” shit from?

This book is very reassuring, because people keep accusing Less Wrong of being a cult and yet we don’t do half this shit. I mean, I assume if people were being excommunicated they would have gotten around to me or Topher (cw: basilisk) by now.

Empowerment and Interconnectivity. The author continually feels the need to interrupt a very interesting history of nineteenth-century utilitarian feminists with ramblings about the methodology of feminist history of philosophy. It reminds me a lot of the way that sociology books, by genre convention, must have a chapter where they talk about incorporating Foucault’s theory of blah and Butler’s theory of whatever. Apparently no one can just be interested in feminist utilitarianism or small-town abortion politics, they have to have Greater Meanings and comment on Ongoing Intellectual Discussions. The rest of the book is tremendously interesting, particularly the chapter which argues that Catherine Beecher, the founder of home economics, is actually a feminist utilitarian philosopher. I have a slight grudge against the author for criticizing Mill’s The Subjection Of Women for being written by a privileged man unaware that he isn’t a complete expert on women’s experiences, since this is totally erasing Harriet Taylor Mill’s influence on his philosophy and continuing the erasure of nineteenth-century feminist utilitarian philosophers that this was supposed to correct. I suspect I have fundamental issues with the concept of feminist philosophy, to be honest. I feel like if your metaphysics has a whole lot to say about the subordination of women you’ve probably made a wrong turn somewhere.

Hard Magic. I read this book because a later book in the series was one of the first Sad Puppies candidates for the Hugo, and I felt I ought to have an informed opinion about Mr. Correia’s work. Inevitably, this led me to compare it with John Scalzi’s Redshirts and Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, those being the recent Hugo winners I’ve actually read. I really don’t think Redshirts deserved its Hugo– it had a clever premise, but was not exactly well-written– but it deserves a Hugo much, much more than this book. The premise is sort of X-Men Film Noir. The worldbuilding has a couple nice details, particularly in the epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter, but mostly feels like setpieces for fighting to happen during. The villains are lazy, sloppy Yellow Peril cliches. The witty dialogue feels like the sort of dialogue I thought was witty when I was eight years old and pretending to be a superhero. The hero is characterized as smart, yet underestimated because of his gruffness and working-class background, primarily via having all the other characters talk to each other about how he’s smart yet underestimated because of his gruffness and working-class background. (No less a figure than Teddy Roosevelt is recruited for the purpose.) One really good touch is that the magic powers are used very creatively: the characters not only notice their required secondary powers, they deliberately hone them.

Awareness Through Movement. A very strange book which is under the impression that the full development of one’s personhood happens when one has excellent posture and moves gracefully and efficiently, apparently based on the logic that whatever things one does as a person they are probably all going to involve movement. Contains a lot of descriptions of various stretches, which are probably about as good for you as easy yoga, but at least the yoga gives you the opportunity to learn to do a headstand.

Language in Thought and Action. Holy shit Eliezer ripped this book off a LOT. (And did it better, IMO.)

The Expanded Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Skills Training Manual. Sort of an expansion pack for DBT. Several of the classic DBT modules have new skills and several old skills are rebranded. In addition, there are new modules: setting boundaries, figuring out that the truth lies between the two extremes, basic CBT, and building routines and structure into one’s life. For several of the skills, I would have appreciated more examples and specific guidance: telling people “you should be gentle!” is not terribly helpful unless you more clearly outline what is and isn’t gentle. I suppose that’s what therapists are for. However, some of the skills were extremely well-operationalized, particularly the Routines one, which contained many long and helpful lists of things you really should be doing on a regular basis like “talking to friends” and “watching TV shows you enjoy.”

Starship Troopers. Every woman adores a Fascist, the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you.

(In other words: I liked it.)

Dataclysm. The first book by the author of OKTrends. I was sort of expecting more meat to it. While I appreciated the reiteration of several classic OKTrends posts (sorry, black women and women over 22), I was sort of expecting more, well, content. It definitely includes some “man, I’ve got to tell people THIS” sections, including one on the linguistics of Twitter and one on the most common words in people’s profiles by sexuality and gender, but mostly it’s just… meh.

Queer and Pleasant Danger. Kate Bornstein’s memoir about being a nice Jewish boy who grows up into a kinky genderqueer lesbian borderline by way of Scientology. Like all of Kate Bornstein’s books, it comes off as if you’re getting coffee with your cool aunt; this time, instead of giving you advice about your mental health problems or your gender, zie’s telling stories from her checkered past. The book is actually intended to be for hir children: because Kate is a suppressive person, hir children are not allowed to interact with her. Zie decided to become a famous author so that if they ever wanted to track hir down or even read about hir life they could.

The Leather Daddy and the Femme. An excellent porn novel. The protagonist is an assigned-female-at-birth femme genderqueer who passes as male well enough that she’s picked up by a leather daddy. Queer, kinky, and strangely sweet. I am now vaguely upset that my life has not included getting gangbanged by leather daddies and trans women. (Yet. Growth mindset.)

Frugality and Restaurants

Tags

effective altruism, ozy blog post

Right now, my largest frivolous/entertainment expense– by a large margin– is restaurant food. I suspect a lot of other people are in a similar boat: see how often “eat out less” is given as advice for people looking to save money.

I think the problem is twofold. One, restaurants are a lot better at cooking than I am. When I order a panini at a restaurant, it is probably going to taste a lot better than a panini I make at home. This is a relatively solvable problem for me, because I like cooking, I’m just not very good at it yet. (Restaurants are also convenient, but I typically cook large amounts of food and reheat it when I’m hungry, so that’s less of a problem for me than for many people.)

The more serious problem is that restaurants are pretty much perfect at providing what I want out of social interaction. When I hang out with someone at my house, it’s really easy for us to end up sitting on our separate computers reading Tumblr. While that’s companionable and definitely not something I would give up, it doesn’t meet my need for focused conversation with other people. On the other hand, when I’m at a restaurant with someone, there’s not a lot to do but talk. It’s setting aside a particular time period just to talk with that person.

Restaurants also take a relatively fixed amount of time: you can predict that getting dinner with someone is probably going to take about an hour. You don’t end up with the awkwardness about whether you’ve spent too much time with so-and-so, or whether you’re leaving too early and they feel rejected, and you don’t have to worry that you’re committing to a whole evening hanging out.

It’s hard for me to think of another activity that meets those same desires. Hiking (or long walks more generally) might do quite well: you could go to a park and plan to walk a path that goes about an hour. Unfortunately, a lot of disabled or less physically fit people are incapable of going on hikes (although, of course, going to restaurants is inaccessible to people too broke to afford restaurant meals, it’s a lot easier to cover a friend’s dinner bill than to walk for them). Another option might be getting coffee instead of a meal, or deliberately choosing to go to less expensive restaurants; there’s no particular reason that you can’t get dinner at Subway instead of a nice restaurant.

Anyone else have any ideas?

Concerning The Optimal Distribution of Poly and Mono People

Tags

ozy blog post, polyamory

[epistemic status: trolling]

So, let’s assume there is some percentage of the population (call them “obligate mono”) who really, really want a monogamous relationship. And let’s say there’s some percentage of the population (call them “obligate poly”) who really, really want a poly relationship. There are probably more obligate mono people than obligate poly people, on account of they managed to get the entirety of society to agree to make their relationship goals mandatory. Call it three times more obligate mono.

However, there is a much larger percentage of the population (call them “undetermined”) who can be happy in either a polyamorous relationship or a monogamous relationship. This group is probably larger than the obligate monos and the obligate polys put together. This is based on my own experiences: before I was in the rationalist community, I found new partners by hitting on people who, in their past relationships, had been happily monogamous; not only did I only once get turned down because someone preferred monogamy (despite its obvious advantage as a face-saving tool), I also never experienced any problems from accidentally dating a mono person. I might be subconsciously selecting for poly-open people, but I’m not that good.

So let’s say sixty percent undetermined, thirty percent monogamous, ten percent poly.

The interesting thing is that undetermined people aren’t really undetermined- not most of them, anyway. Shifting an undetermined person from mono to poly, or from poly to mono, involves breaking up all of their current relationships– a hefty price to pay, particularly on the first date. And cowboying and cheating are both considered pretty bad behavior in their respective communities– not to mention being pretty unappealing gambles for the person considering them.

Therefore, obligate poly and (single) obligate mono people inevitably find themselves with competing interests: fighting for the pool of undetermined people. We can see this in the number of monogamous people who complain loudly about everyone in their social circles being poly, and the number of poly people who would complain loudly about everyone in their social circles being mono, except that you can’t do that because then you’re Saying Polyamory Is Superior To Monogamy and Don’t You Know You’re Not Allowed To Do That, Only Monogamous People Are Allowed To Say That Their Preferred Relationship Style Is Superior. Usually, this winds up soundly in favor of the obligate mono people, since there are far more of them.

But if a community (let’s call it, just as an example, the “rationalist community”) happens by chance to have a higher number of poly members– even as small a minority as twenty or thirty percent– they get a chance to take over and grab all the undetermined people.

This is, obviously, unfortunate for obligate mono people. But the situation of an obligate mono person in a highly poly community is worse than the situation of an obligate poly person in a highly mono community, for two reasons. First, currently monogamous people have the grace to remove themselves from the dating pool: the poly person in a highly mono dating community finds themselves with poly people (both obligate and undetermined), undetermined people, and the odd single obligate mono person. Currently poly people are not nearly so polite, and the obligate mono person finds himself picking through poly person after poly person.

Second, the poly network is self-perpetuating. If an undetermined person breaks up with their monogamous partner, they’re back on the market and can be poly or mono. If an undetermined person breaks up with their poly partner, they… probably have two or three other partners that mean they’re going to stay poly. A poly network can stay poly even if no one in the network is obligate poly. A community that has more obligate mono people than obligate poly people can stay primarily polyamorous because of quirks of the community’s founders. This is, to put it lightly, suboptimal.

Is the solution, then, stigmatizing polyamory?

The problem with stigmatizing polyamory is that obligate mono people really, really don’t want obligate poly people in their dating pool. Obligate mono people are so distressed by their partners cheating on them that some of them have murdered their partners over it. Since many people who cheat want multiple partners, if all the obligate poly people date each other, the obligate mono people are at much lower risk of experiencing this pain. Stigma is a blunt instrument; what we need is something that separates the obligate poly people from the undetermined people.

The solution is obvious.

Baby, we were born this way.

Present polyamory as something genetic, something set before you’re born. We managed to do it for homosexuality despite it being literally less genetic than how nice a person you are, so the facts won’t get in the way. Present obligate poly people as a tiny minority who discover who they are in adolescence. The people who don’t discover that they’re poly will assume they were just born monogamous, like everyone else, and become happy monogamous people.

Some undetermined people may notice that they can be happy in both mono and poly relationships. It might be wise to stigmatize being undetermined. The stigma against bisexuals is instructive here. Teach everyone to consider them fakers, unable to make up their minds, just trying out polyamory for some sexy thrills before they leave you for their real monogamous relationship. Undetermined people might have their own stereotypes: for instance, mono people might stigmatize them as cheaters, and poly people as having crappy communication skills because they can get away with that in monogamous relationships.

But even if being undetermined is destigmatized, most people don’t notice that they can be happy in a poly relationship until they try it and like it. The most important thing is to hide that fact: to tell people that you have to know you’re poly, that you can’t try it out. The relatively few people who are self-aware to notice are no threat compared to the number of people who might like it if they tried it. As long as that happens, poly people will be a minority in all communities not specifically aimed at us, and both obligate mono and obligate poly people will be happy.

 

Preferring Psychosis

Tags

disability, fuck the natural order, ozy blog post

While we are nowhere near a Transhumanist Morphological Freedom Utopia, people are capable of altering their brains through chemistry. They take stimulants to be more focused and energetic; they take antidepressants to ward off one of the most unpleasant experiences it is possible to have; they take euphoria-inducing drugs to make themselves happier. So far, so good.

What strikes me as interesting is how often people take drugs to become psychotic. LSD, mushrooms, peyote: all induce a state remarkably similar to psychosis.

Probably some of this is that it’s relatively easy to make human brains psychotic and relatively difficult to make humans (say) experience romantic love for a specific individual. The fact that no one takes love potions doesn’t provide any evidence about whether they would be desirable, it just says they don’t exist. So we can’t conclude from this that psychosis is one of the top changes people would want to make in their brains.

On the other hand, a drug that induces depression exists. No one fucking takes it because it’s awful.

Of course, the fact that hallucinogen users can control when they’re psychotic matters: schizophrenics don’t get to be nonschizophrenic during the work week. Psychosis does not seem to solely strike people who want to be psychotic, whereas most hallucinogen use is by consenting individuals. And actually psychotic people have far more than the optimal level of psychosis. LSD lasts for about ten hours; r/drugs seems to have a consensus that once a month is fairly heavy use, and once a week is very heavy. Psychotic episodes are, at minimum, a few days long, and often last indefinitely.

(This lines up pretty well with my own experiences. I experience dissociation, and it is the worst, but I can see where it would be really interesting if it happened consensually, for a few hours, once every few months.)

But it still strikes me as interesting that, by revealed preference, there is an optimal level of psychosis for many people, and it isn’t zero.