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Happy birthday, Giving What We Can! Have you taken the pledge?
Leah Libresco responded to my request for an Effective Altruism holiday by proposing John Snow Day on September 8th. I really like this idea! I look forward to many, many jokes about sewage and/or knowing nothing.
Kidney donation can save 14 quality-adjusted life years at a cost of less than a month of life-years. Related: did you know you can also do living donations of your liver and lungs? And be sure to sign up for the marrow donor registry!
(Apparently the strategy I have worked out for nonconfrontationally bringing up effective altruism is link posts.)
Whenever I read stories about really clever people doing really evil things, I end up rooting for the clever evil people. Thus: a man makes $200 million of perfect counterfeits and gets away scott-free; Roger Ailes created a classic, completely false attack ad and made Mitch McConnell Senator. Slytherins are the most sympathetic.
Catholic nun who ministers to trans people. I have a pretty complicated relationship with Christianity, which means that, asshole atheism aside, this story really warmed my heart.
Don’t know if it’s true but it’s interesting: argument that Chinese test scores are better than Americans’ because the Chinese school system emphasizes rote learning, suggesting that poor American test scores is not actually an example of a failure on Americans’ part.
Recently Tumblr reminded me that Julia Serano has a blog. Someday, when I grow up, I want to apply the same precise and nuanced thought which she does to gender issues to everything. In particular, I wish to highlight her discussion of the history of the word “tranny”, her defense of people more attracted to trans people than to cis people, and this article about cissexism and transmisogyny faced by people who may be considered ‘cis’, which includes some of the most biting satire I’ve heard on the topic.
Evidence suggests small-scale charitable interventions have problems scaling.
Ally Fogg on male violence. “Male violence” is a phrase I tend to use in private but not in public (similar to “patriarchy” or “benevolent sexism”) because of exactly the misunderstandings and misuses that he points out. I endorse this article.
A guide to gender-diverse parenting.
How to leave money to your charity in your will.
The Firestone tire company aided a notorious Liberian warlord.
When I was in high school, I read the New York Times Style section cover-to-cover every Sunday. The Awl has a history of the Style section, from the talented female reporters on awful beats to Thursgay Style to the rise of the Modern Love column. Unfortunately, it does not include information about how you get your wedding in the wedding section, a question I have literally been wondering about for eight years.
Museums are starting to reconsider dioramas of Native Americans. An interesting examination of how to educate people about Native American cultures without assuming the museum-goer is not a Native American and treating Native Americans as if they are as extinct as dinosaurs.
Did you know that initially no one in Jonestown wanted to commit suicide? I doubt this was news to Jonestown aficionados, but I had no idea. I feel like I have a lot less of a handle on how abusive communities work than I do on how abusive relationships work, so the article in general was an interesting insight for me.
Thing of Things 
My parents’ wedding was in the wedding section! Either you or your fiancé/fianceé/ enbyanceé should have parents who are Jewish lawyers in New York City, and who will persistently submit your info to the Style section.
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I’ve always understood that non-directed liver donation isn’t as much of a thing as non-directed kidney donation because the risk to the donor is much higher and the payoff isn’t as good? I’m having trouble finding numbers right now (low on battery life) but it’s certainly a much more involved operation.
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Yeah, it looks like the risk of early death from a liver donation is somewhere around 1/500, compared with roughly 1/2000 for living kidney donors, and there’s also an increased risk of acute liver failure and long-term mortality. The surgery also takes longer to recover from: 4-6 weeks compared to 2-4 for a kidney donation, with a longer hospital stay. I feel like these numbers are high enough that, for an EA who plans to donate a significant amount over their lifetime, you really want to do some multiplying before you decide whether this is a good idea.
Sources:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/758369_1
http://www.mountsinai.org/patient-care/service-areas/organ-transplants/programs-and-services/living-donation/liver-donation-surgery-and-recovery
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I’ve browsed in a few Wikipedia articles and followed a link from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liver_transplantation#cite_note-Liver_Transplant-10 , and at http://www.emedicinehealth.com/liver_transplant/page3_em.htm#donor_qualifications I’ve read: “As techniques in liver surgery have improved, the risk of death in people who donate a part of their liver has dropped to about 1%.” I’ve also read about the risks for marrow donors at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematopoietic_stem_cell_transplantation#Risks_to_donor .
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I’ve also seen the 2013 article First UK live liver donation to a stranger takes place linked from Wikipedia. It says this about liver donation:
(It also quotes a transplant specialist as saying that “If we do 400 of these then statistically at least one altruistic donor will die”.)
I also wonder: if you donate a kidney and have only one left, do you have to be on a special diet for the rest of your life?
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Ah, the NYT on education. Go ahead, grep for the word “race” in that article. Not there. Or, say, “black”. One instance. Hmm. “IQ”? Don’t be silly. This is the NYT.
Now here are the facts. PISA, like all standardized tests, is basically an IQ test. IQ is strongly heritable, with different means among different races. East Asians (and Jews) are “smarter” (“IQier”, if you squick about the obvious equation of IQ and intelligence) than whites, who are smarter than “hispanics” (meaning Native American descended), who are smarter than blacks.
When PISA is disaggregated by race — as done by Steve Sailer, who does the reporting jobs that the NYT won’t do — then you see a much different story. Overall, the USA is 29th or whatever. By race, however, the USA educates among the best of any country in the world. Our “Asian” math scores are not quite up to those of Shanghai, most likely because we lump in a lot of non-East Asians as “Asians”, and Shanghai is somewhat unrepresentative of China in general. But our whites score as well as any in Europe, our Hispanics score better than those in Latin America, and our blacks… well, apparently no African countries took the test, but our guys still beat a bunch of other non-African countries, which is pretty good.
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Dude. You’re a neoreactionary. I am willing to have neoreactionaries in the open threads, for the Full SSC Race-n-Gender Experience ™, but not in the rest of my blog. Banned.
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Does that mean I’ll be getting banned too ? 😦
(not that I consider myself much of a neoreactionary)
(I wonder if you’ll have five more people to come over and also repeat the same kind of argument about genetics)
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My current definition of neoreactionary is “people whom I recognize from Scott’s blog or elsewhere around the Internet as being neoreactionaries and are not Konkvistador or Nydwracu because I like them, also people who go on about degenerates and alpha males and the Jews continually.” My big concern is keeping all threads from becoming Arguing With Neoreactionaries, because tedious; I’m not going to be all “you must have liked three or fewer Moldbug posts to comment on this blog.” Leonard’s comment would not have been enough to be banned except that I recognized his name and knew he was a neoreactionary exiting the Designated Neoreactionary Preserve.
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I have liked or at least enjoyed like… more than a dozen Moldbug posts. Have enjoyed yet more in a “look at the blood-splattered ten cars pile-up” way.
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Er, I don’t know if it’s the principle of the thing or not, but the analysis Leonard brings up is correct and important. it’s transparently correct – Sailer just takes the numbers that already exist and highlights them. And it’s important in that I don’t think it makes sense to talk about international comparisons of PISA scores without it.
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As I said to Nomophilos, I’m not banning him for his opinion, I’m banning him for being a neoreactionary and not sticking to the open thread. If he’d said “I like flowers a lot!” he would also get banned.
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Not to mention that the paper about Chinese schools is actually the New York Review of Books, not the “NYT”, doesn’t talk about PISA results much at all, and actually argues against the notion that we’re doing better than China. If I were feeling cynical I could use as evidence for how much Leonard’s comment was based on a reasoned appraisal of the article in question and how much was based on a burning desire to inform us that These Shocking Facts about Race and IQ Will Blow Your Mind. (Which they won’t, because everyone coming here from SSC has heard them a hundred times already.)
James Flynn wrote a book in 1991 called Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ that argued that 1) Asian American IQ scores are actually about the same as whites’, and 2) they accomplish far more than one would expect even given very high-end IQ estimates, suggesting other, likely cultural factors at work. It seemed plausible to me when I read through it, though it is from 1991 and there may be better data now. Flynn gives a quick summary of his methods in a different paper on PDF pages 6-8 here. It doesn’t seem that The Bell Curve cited it, though a couple of Lynn and Rushton’s later did. (I am precommitting to ignoring any attempt to argue with me about this.)
Anecdote: I taught one summer at an English-language immersion program for Chinese high-school students, mostly from wealthy families in Beijing. (I’m white, if it matters.) I devised a game where I would come up with a rule for classifying whole numbers into two groups – for example, “the number of even digits divides the number of odd digits” – and students would have to work together to figure out the rule by asking me whether certain numbers passed it. I was struck by the fact that they didn’t ever think of guessing numbers systematically (for example, by trying consecutive integer ranges, or all permutations of a certain group of digits), instead coming up with trial numbers seemingly at random despite my advice not to. This could be evidence for “Chinese students don’t know how to invent creative methods when faced with new problems”, though admittedly this is a convenience sample of 40 or so people who were already way out of their comfort zone in other ways, and I’ve never been able to try the game with high-school students not from China, so I don’t have any proper grounds for comparison.
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Aah, typos everywhere. My kingdom for an edit function!
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That Firestone article seems to me like a straightforward case of, “company begins paying taxes to new government upon ousting of old government from company’s location.” It’s like, no shit?
Which reminds me of another article on more recent Firestone events: Firestone Liberia halts spread of Ebola on it’s plantation.
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“Don’t know if it’s true but it’s interesting: argument that Chinese test scores are better than Americans’ because the Chinese school system emphasizes rote learning, suggesting that poor American test scores is not actually an example of a failure on Americans’ part.”
(I only skimmed the article)
A couple alternative interpretations:
1) the Chinese have better scores because they emphasize rote learning, which is effective; so there *is* a failure on Americans’ part, it’s dropping unfashionable but effective methods in favor of making everything easy and giving prizes for participation only.
… but actually I don’t really believe that, the more likely explanation is, of course,
2) the Chinese have better test scores because of genetics (of intelligence, rule-following, etc.), despite having a worse educational system; rote learning may be unfairly maligned, but their system still has plenty of cheating and teaching to the test and bad material and lower budgets than the US, and as a result, Americans of Chinese ancestry perform better than they would have in China (though is also well explained by selection effects, so I don’t know if the Chinese system is really worse; in Shanghai and Hong Kong at least I’d expect it to be at least as good as the average American system).
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Out of curiosity, are you yourself intending to take the pledge?
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Already have, I’m pretty sure.
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Huh; I asked because I occasionally search the public list for the names of EAs I know, and you aren’t on there.
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>Catholic nun who ministers to trans people.
Yay! Always great to see people doing God’s work … wait, what’s this about radical feminism? They can’t give her identity because the Vatican is cracking down on this? What?
For Pete’s sake, is the Catholic Church anti-trans-people? … why? I mean, I know they can’t be priests there because they require a whole male … but restricting ministry to trans folks?
Is this for real? I know there are Catholics in the comments here. Wikipedia seems vague on the subject…
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Ex-Catholic here. I don’t ever recall hearing the issue discussed, but I would imagine that transitioning would be considered sinful on the grounds that it’s disrespectful of God’s creation. “Love yourself as God made you” and all that. A quick googling suggests that:
A) The body and soul are considered to be united as one, and therefore the notion of being e.g. a man trapped in a woman’s body goes against the teachings of the Church.
B) Reassignment surgery falls into the category of self-mutilation, which is forbidden for non-medical reasons. In light of A, gender dysphoria is unlikely to be considered grounds for surgery
Note that neither of the above sources appear to be in any way official, despite citing passages from the Catechism. Further investigation turns up this, which, in addition to supporting the above statements, brings up a conspiracy theory about a secret anti-trans document, with (supposedly) a link to the full text.
Most search results seem to point roughly in the same general direction while expressing frustration at the lack of official Church statements.
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Modern Catholicism is generally small-c conservative from what I can tell. That would be in line with a mildly anti-trans position.
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About Native American dioramas:
Today a class I’m in got to talk to Coco Fusco, an artist with a cool piece on this issue. She and a partner went to natural history museums and locked themselves in a cage, posing as members of an uncontacted tribe.
“Enacting rituals of “authentic” daily life such as writing on a laptop computer, watching TV, making voodoo dolls, and pacing the cage garbed in Converse high-tops, raffia skirts, plastic beads, and a wrestler’s mask, the two “Amerindians” rendered a hybrid pseudo primitivism that struck a nerve. Interested members of the audience could pay for dances, stories, and Polaroids. Guilt, molestation, confusion, and letters to the humane society were among audience responses. Nearly half the visitors that saw the cage in Irvine, London, Madrid, Minneapolis, and the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. believed that the two were real captives, true natives somehow tainted by the detritus of technology and popular culture.”
From this interview with Fusco:
“In Washington, for example, there was a Native American elder from the Pueblo tribe of Arizona who was interviewed by a Smithsonian representative. He said that our performance was the most real thing about the Native Americans displayed in the whole museum. He said the installation and performance ought to be permanent to give people a very clear idea of the Native American experience.”
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Of course “male violence” is a problem — in fact, violence is nearly exclusively a male problem. (Men who take offense at this fact are in some kind of denial, and we shouldn’t spare their feelings.) What baffles me is the grasping after cultural explanations for a problem that has existed in every human culture in recorded history. Culture is not the problem; culture, better known as “civilization” in this context, is the solution! If “our society brutalizes men and boys”, we’re doing it wrong. Compare the murder rate in contemporary Western Europe to the murder rate in contemporary Afghanistan, or for that matter, 16th-century Western Europe. Our society pacifies men and boys, to an unprecedented and frankly miraculous degree.
That seems to be sort of what Fogg is saying, but not really. She still wants to talk about “emotional isolation” (which violence-prone men could, if anything, probably use a little more of) and “made, not born”, when the obvious conclusion is simply that the liberal experiment is working and we should keep doing it.
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Um, Ally Fogg identifies as male.
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Aw, geez. Somehow I had it in my head that he was a trans woman.
Apologies to Mr. Fogg.
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Of course, some would apply the same argument to race.
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They’d need to explain why lily-white medieval Europe makes modern inner-city Detroit look like a Jain monastery.
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stillnotking: “X is associated with violence” does not mean you can give an example of a non-X which is more violent than an X and say you have disproven it. The claim is that X is associated with violence keeping other factors constant. Being in a medieval society is indeed associated with violence, but that is perfectly consistent with being male or black also being associated with violence.
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But still the difference in violence between races is hardly comparable to the difference in violence between genders, is it? That is, after all, the point that stillnotking was making.
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Yeah, he said upbringing is responsible for male violence, and then cited *correlations with childhood abuse* to prove it. Shudder.
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How to get your wedding covered by the NYT: you apparently have to send out a press release, like this lady (unicorns help too) http://www.xojane.com/fun/i-got-married-on-a-unicorn-and-other-tips-for-having-a-cheap-amazing-wedding-covered-by-the-new-york-times
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I actually had my wedding announcement published in the NYT. It seems to be one of the few major papers that takes free submissions for a wedding announcements section instead of just having paid-for announcements as part of the classifieds.
The way to do get your announcement published is to use their submission form and have an interesting story about how you met (and got to know) your partner and/or interesting plans for the wedding ceremony itself. They edit and publish the ones they select, choosing a small number to rewrite as highlight pieces and an even smaller number to actually send a reporter to the ceremony/reception and write a full-page feature (having outlandish ceremony plans really helps if you want that last one).
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Wait, so this guy doesn’t want the paper company he’s dealing with to catch on to the fact that he’s making counterfeit $20 bills…
…and then, out of the entire space of possible fake first names to use, he goes with “Jackson”?
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I’m on the marrow donor list! I also regularly donate blood. I don’t agree with some of the restrictions on blood donation WRT gay men, but I figure everyone, including gay men who want to donate blood (and might need blood later), is much much worse off if no one donates blood because of the donation restrictions.
I just read about this resource for young sexual assault survivors of all genders. It might be interesting to you/your readers from a NSWATM angle.
The index has categories for male allies/victims/survivors and a transgender category.
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I actually support the limitations on MSM donating from a Bayesian perspective: something like one in twenty MSM have HIV, compared to less than one percent of the general population.
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I guess I’m kind of influenced by William Saletan’s writing on that (even though he’s occasionally terrible)–it would be better to be more specific about sexual behaviors instead of the more broad “have you ever had sex with a man [who’s had sex with a man, if female] since 1970-something”? But they don’t want to get into the specifics too much because it will make some people feel icky. (I think people’s ickiness-feelings are less important than letting as many people as is safe donate blood.)
The good news is that there was a recent recommendation to allow gay men to donate blood in the US if they’ve been celibate for at least a year, which I think is a step in the right direction. I’m guessing that’s something you can still support, since it’s specifically for low-risk gay men?
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One thing that you might keep in mind is that blood is currently in surplus thanks to new surgical techniques that cause less bleeding and such.
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Not sure this is 100% on topic re: the Catholic nun, but one eschatological question that might come up in Catholic trans stuff: when the dead are resurrected into glorified bodies before the Last Judgment, do trans people get the bodies they “should” have had all along?
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I initially misread this as “Libertarian”. I like my version better.
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