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Effective Altruism
The four kinds of problems: problems to be solved, problems to be gotten over, crucial considerations, and defeating problems.
Parenting
Read Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift to prepare yourself for parenthood and its effects on your relationship. “The problem: We tend judge our husband’s contributions not by whether they are equal to ours, but by how they measure up other dads’ contributions.”
Virtually every health website contains misinformation about preeclampsia.
“Having a child, like heterosexuality, is a very stupid idea.”
Civil Liberties
Sarah Huckabee Sanders used to be an activist for voting rights.
Louisiana police department under the impression that it is constitutional to jail anybody for up to 72 hours without probable cause. (It is not.)
Police officers routinely misgender and deadname murdered trans people, potentially hampering investigations.
One man’s quest to bring better ramen to the incarcerated.
Texan professor fired for his support of gun rights.
Border patrol agent almost decides not to listen to a podcast because the guest is a sex worker, listens to it and discovers the sex worker was actually really interesting, realizes he’s bigoted, starts to think about how else his bigotry affects his actions… and quits the border patrol. Absolutely heartwarming.
Miscellaneous
A beautiful personal essay about abuse in academia.
The student loan system is a perfect example of how there’s no government program so awful you can’t make it worse by adding corporations to it.
Just Plain Neat
A student mistakes an example of an unsolved statistics problem for an unusually difficult homework problem and, due to the power of positive thinking, solves it. Sounds like glurge? Actually, according to Snopes, it totally happened.
There are lots of Thai restaurants in America because the Thai government deliberately promotes them.
Pop songs written by fluent but non-native English speakers have some weird lines.
It never occurred to me before that elementary school history books would have to talk about President Trump. Inside what is no doubt the world’s most awkward job.
Thing of Things 
Based on my reading of the article about Dr. Curry (the professor who received push-back for his views), the outrage had more to do with his support for black people owning and using guns than with general anti-gun sentiments. Unless I am mistaken the article also states that he will be returning to the university as a full professor in the fall. Please let me know if there is another source that mentions him being fired.
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This seems like it appllies to a lot more than work allocation by sex in marriages. In many shared-production arrangements, there’s a vast range of plausible bargaining outcomes, so we use the representativeness heuristic / our sense of what’s “normal” as a Schelling point. It’s probably not good to switch to individual adversarial bargaining since that massively increases deadweight loss and can lead to more shirking as easily as less.
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If ‘individual adversarial bargaining’ and ‘status quo’ are the only two options, sure, use the status quo. But for my own life I’m gonna go with c), ‘collaborative division of labor trusting one another to seek an objectively fair outcome’.
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Objectively fair? What’s that?
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The article on genocide frequently quotes Samantha Power, who wrote a book about how selfish and cowardly it was that the US military wasn’t intervening to stop genocide. Years later she finally got a chance to put her ideals into practice when she was part of the group that persuaded Obama to intervene in Libya.
It was a disaster that caused tremendous chaos and suffering. Obama has said that his failure to plan properly for the intervention was the worst mistake of his presidency.
Maybe the reason that we don’t intervene to prevent more genocides is because the people who think it’s easy to stop genocides with military force are ludicrously optimistic.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the article is right and some form of Scope Insensitivity is the reason people ignore genocides. But in this case people may be getting the right answer for the wrong reasons. Military interventions are really, really hard to get right.
Of course, there may be other, nonviolent ways to alleviate genocide, like admitting more refugees. It is sensible to criticize people for ignoring that possibility.
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I keep seeing people assert that the NATO bombing of Gaddafi-government forces in Libya in 2011 was a mistake. Clearly, the aftermath has been chaotic, but the whole argument in favor of NATO intervention was that Gaddafi was perpetrating a mass killing of anyone suspected of rebel sympathies. Has anyone laid out a compelling consequentialist case anywhere that (a) Gaddafi was definitely going to defeat the rebels if not for NATO, and the human cost of his victory would likely have been less bad than the subsequent chaos, or (b) maybe the country was destined to fall into a protracted state of violence anyway, but at least NATO could have kept their hands clean? I did a little searching before writing this comment, but I couldn’t find anything that looked authoritative. Are people just operating on the assumption that power vacuums and instability are usually worse in the long run than the brutal suppression of rebellions? Are they looking at it from the point of view of NATO countries’ national interests, according to which blowback terrorist attacks or oil-market disruptions or whatever count as bad outcomes, but the lives of Libyans are of minimal concern? Is it driven by politically motivated criticism from Republicans happy to use any excuse to bash Obama and Hillary, and isolationists and anti-colonialists who deny the possibility of a valid humanitarian rationale for military intervention in a foreign war? I honestly can’t tell.
The commentary I’ve seen has been almost unanimous in it’s condemnation, so I’m tempted to assume that evaluation is correct, but I’ve noticed that people seem resistant to the idea that there are times when making the right choice can still predictably lead to a deeply unsatisfactory outcome, and we seem to be especially susceptible in those cases to evaluating the road not taken with an optimistic bias. An example of this that I feel pretty confident about is when people assert without justification that the US government’s 2008 bank bailout was bad policy, full stop; the view of mainstream economists seems to be something more like “It would have been nice if we had avoided letting things get to the point where several huge financial firms were facing bankruptcy (and if we had done more to help out regular people caught up in the crisis, and if we had exacted more punitive measures against corrupt bankers) but, given that we didn’t, bailing out those firms still served the public interest better than not doing so.”
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Police officers routinely misgender and deadname murdered trans people, potentially hampering investigations.
This is… like, what, how are experienced investigators even making that mistake. I mean — internally in their files they can use whatever name and gender they want; I don’t care if people find that insensitive. But an investigator should be used to the idea that a person might, y’know, have an alias. Or present themselves differently to different people. Not quickly picking up on the use of different names especially is like… how are you even making that mistake?
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The article explains that those police officers look at the government-issued ID. To some extent this seems logical when there is an official gender-change and name-change process. The police is part of the government, so it’s hard to see how they can use anything other than the gender and name recognized by the government for statistics and such. It seems to me that a person who has not undergone these procedures, has not legally transitioned and it’s accurate to describe them as a person living as the other gender, rather than being the other gender.
If there are accessibility issues with the official gender-change and name-change processes, then it seems to me that this is a complaint specific to those, not the police. It doesn’t seem workable to expect all parts of the government to have their own separate official gender-change and name-change processes (you will get horrible bureaucratic nightmares if the different parts of government then disagree on it).
Of course, as you say, they can use the new name and gender similar to an alias, although this would presumably often mean using both, which some activists oppose.
I think that it can be hard to initially distinguish between a cross-dresser and non-transitioned trans person. In general, I can see how it would often only become clear during the investigation in what contexts the person used what name (and/or presented as what gender). So I think that the objection to deadnaming (as in: also using the birth name) is unreasonable and may itself cause problems during the investigation.
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What issue are we talking about here? The perceived insensitivity of using a particular name, or that the investigation is hampered by investigators going around asking about them using a name people don’t recognize? It seems to me like your comment confuses the two. And I already said I don’t particularly care about the former.
But I’m confused as to how the latter is a mistake investigators would be making. Sure, if you literally have nothing but a cadaver with an ID in its pocket, maybe you might have a hard time finding out that typically they use another name and getting your investigation off the groud. But if you have, like, any context beyond that at all — say, a relative or friend of the deceased to speak to — surely this shouldn’t be a problem? Especially if you’re trying to find the common name from the rare name, rather than the other way around, and especially if you have pictures available.
Basically, I see three explanations here:
1. The police are just utterly incompetent and don’t know how to handle someone using multiple names even though this is a situation they should encounter all the time.
2. The police are so cissexist that even though they investigate people who use aliases all the time, they refuse to do this in the case of transgender people because that would, in their mind, be legitimizing transgenderism.
3. Actually the cadaver-with-an-ID situation is much more common than I would expect, or investigating people who uses aliases is just in general much harder than I realize.
Either of the first two would reflect very poorly on any police forces they apply to, although if it’s the first then this isn’t an issue of transgender discrimination, it’s just a general policing issue. If it’s the third, then I suppose they can’t really be blamed. But unfortunately the article doesn’t seem to clarify which of these three it is, and also wraps it up with this separate issue of insensitivity. Just tossing things together where it should be breaking things down.
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I don’t think that my comment is confusing sensitivity with the best way to do the investigation, but that the article is. I was pointing out that the article portrays sensitivity and an effective investigation as being perfectly compatible, when that doesn’t have to be the case.
Anyway, I think that you are wrong to suggest that a relative or friend is necessarily going to know how a person presents in all situations. Plenty of people present themselves differently to their family and/or employer than in their ‘night life.’ This seems especially true for cross dressers. If a person didn’t have a legal and/or physical sex change, then how can the police distinguish easily between someone being trans or cross dressing? I would say that this can only become clear during the investigation, where it seems unwise for the police to simply believe the first person they talk to. They then still need to make choices early in the investigation, before they talked to (m)any people.
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I was pointing out that the article portrays sensitivity and an effective investigation as being perfectly compatible, when that doesn’t have to be the case.
Oh, yeah, completely agreed. If you’re investigating someone who goes by multiple names (or genders), you better be prepared to use all of them, whether people like it or not. Yes, refusing to use their chosen name will hinder your investigation, but so will refusing to use their legal name.
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It depends. I didn’t change my legal name for a while after literally everyone I ever talked to used my chosen name, and none of them would have any idea who this Deadname person was. I think this is not an uncommon situation for trans people to be in– especially poor trans people, who are unlikely to have the few hundred dollars necessary to pay for a name change.
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Huh; that example of yourself doesn’t, like, seem consistent with what I know? But, um, I hardly want to get into such things here. 😛 So, I’ll, uh, take your word for it.
I guess maybe I’m just confused about what the starting context for such an investigation looks like. As I said above, if literally all you have is a cadaver in an alley with an ID card, I can imagine it would be pretty hard to get things off the ground. I was kind of assuming that, like, there would be someone to identify the corpse, that the police would be able to find a starting point via non-name means, simply because things that occur typically occur in some context. For instance, if the person was found dead in their home, then when you ask the neighbors about it, you’ll likely learn that the name on their documents was not the one they were known by. If that’s not the case then maybe I’m being too hard on these investigators. I guess maybe I just don’t have a great idea what the start of a murder investigation looks like.
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This quote from Derrida is pretty amazing, since it describes so well one of my main objections to Social Justice: equating relative disadvantage to oppression. A consequence of this is anthropomorphism, treating natural disadvantage as the fault of humans. So then sacrifice by the advantaged to help others doesn’t result in recognition or gratitude, but instead it is considered a duty that people can only fail at. This is as oppressive as religions that demand inhuman ethical behavior, that practically no one can live up to, so the demand then causes a lot of psychological suffering (and also causes a lot of people to prioritize virtue signalling, which is a lot more doable than being perfect).
It also ignores that advantage doesn’t tend to come merely from having an opportunity. Very often, taking advantage of opportunity requires sacrifice. Then equalization of outcomes (but not sacrifice) actually only makes people equal on one measure, but makes those with greater ability worse off on other measures (which are commonly ignored). So the able will then often refuse this, resulting in either corruption/duplicity or them refusing to sacrifice, which will then cause society to miss out on the value they could produce.
Finally, the lack of (real) rules (ironically) allows those to take advantage who have the capability to most effectively demand gifts, with little relationship to their actual need or disadvantage.
PS. Derrida didn’t aim this quote at SJ, but at deconstruction. He also somehow seems to have seen this as a positive description…
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Native Swedish speaker Max Martin has been responsible for a huge number of English pop hits by American singers, and some of his songs have some very awkward wordings. In particular, he’s responsible for the line “Hit Me Baby One More Time” in the Britney Spears song. In context, it was supposed to mean something like “hit me up one more time”…
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The rightist stigma against sex work seem more honest. The religious part of the American right at least pays lip service to the idea that the only legitimate form of sex is between a heterosexual married couple. Being against kink and sex work fits in with their generally cosmology.
Liberal/leftist hatred of sex work is more complicated and more dishonest. A queasiness about commercial sex has long been part of some forms of liberalism. Its seen as an inherently exploitative profession, something that can not be made safe. There is something to this critique. Certain industries are going to attract unethical participants or at least more of them than other industries. There are always going to be kinks that not even the most broad-minded government is going to have stomach to legalize. There will be unethical people willing to do immoral things to meet the demand though. If I’m remembering correctly, the Netherlands and other countries with legal commercial sex still having a thriving black market in commercial sex because of this.
Another reason why sex work is not liked on parts of the liberal-left spectrum is that while many on the liberal-left spectrum might lionize sex workers for a variety of reasons, I’ve never really understood why this is, they loathe their customers. People resort to commercial sex, especially if they are cis-gendered heterosexual men, are seen as losers. They receive little sympathy. Its going to be hard to be totally pro-sex work if you can’t stand the customer base. Without a customer base, there isn’t any reason for any provider of goods or services to carry on business.
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The difficulty with legalizing sex work in The Netherlands is not kinky sex, but that banks are not willing to provide bank services for the sector. This means that sex workers have to spend their money as cash or launder it, even if it is technically legal income. Furthermore, it means that loans to build brothels and such pretty much have to come from criminals.
So the end result is that operating legally mainly has downsides in having to pay taxes and adhering to strict regulations, with few of the upsides that other legal businesses have (especially since the police doesn’t go after illegal sex workers very much, so it doesn’t make much difference in that respect).
Furthermore, relatively few sex workers want to make a career out of it. In many cases, sex workers see it as a short term solution for their financial problems. This, plus various other characteristics of the job draws people towards illegality. Note that this is also true for builders, for example. So it is true for other jobs as well.
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Also, there are plenty of people on the left who are queasy about commerce, even if they’re not consistent about it.
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The CBP officer in the link is better than the CBP officer that turned out to be a serial killer:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/15/us/us-border-patrol-agent-arrested-slayings/index.html
I’m an immigration lawyer, so this is a topic of special interest for me. I’ve been dealing with CBP, USCIS, ICE, and EOIR for the past eleven years. Its getting tougher under Trump, Sessions, and Miller.
Another weird thing is that this CBP officer is a little younger than I am. One of the weirder aspects of being an adult is reading about evil people your age. When I was growing up, I’d always associated this sort of evil behavior with older generations.
Now, I read about messed up people in my age.
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re: Thai government support for restaurants,
If you get a chance to watch Searching for General Tso, it describes dialect-based benevolent organizations that supply recent immigrants with a location currently without a Chinese restaurant, a book of gweilo-palatable Chinese recipes, and a loan.
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Searching for General Tso is a great documentary.
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I only clicked on this link for the pictures. I was not disappointed. ^_^
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