Tags
Rationality
Different kinds of risk and how to mitigate them.
Chronic sleep deprivation is bad. This is a pro-sleep blog. Please make sure you get enough sleep tonight.
It’s hard to pick a best line from the incomparable Nathan J. Robinson’s jeremiad against Bernie Sanders for not giving away his millions, but it’s a beautiful explanation for why the rich should give away our money.
Effective Altruism
“[A]cademics predicted that there is 1% chance of nuclear extinction risk in the 21st century.”
Some interesting critiques of effective altruist approaches to charity evaluation from a former GiveWell employee.
An interview with Melinda Gates, shared because of the horrifying fact that Bill Gates had to explain to Trump the difference between HPV and HIV more than once.
To improve education in the developing world, give children free food.
Miscellaneous
Why are online degrees so expensive?
Thing of Things 
“shared because of the horrifying fact that Bill Gates had to explain to Trump the difference between HPV and HIV more than once”
aaaaaaaaaaaaa
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Pardon me if I’m less than horrified; I’m rather sympathetic here to getting “HPV” instead of “HIV” stuck in the brain, because the same thing happens to me. For instance, (names changed to protect the innocent), there’s someone I regularly deal with whom I keep calling Smith instead of Brown. I don’t know why (except that their first name is the same as someone else whose surname was Smith) and it embarrasses the life out of me every time when I go “Mary Smith – I mean Brown! Brown not Smith!”
Maybe I’m just an idiot, I don’t know why this happens. Sorry for “horrifying” you all with this “horrifying fact” of “horrifying mix-ups of similar acronyms”.
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It paints a picture when we consider this in context with other things that we know about Trump. On its own, “mixing up HIV and HPV” is just an amusing, embarrassing anecdote, but combined with everything else, it’s further evidence that Trump is just kinda deficient.
(Also, you are not the head of state of a very large, militarized and nuclear-capable country, whose actions have a tremendous effect not just on the millions of people within that country but the billions of people living outside it.)
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The actual quote is:
This seems to imply that Trump didn’t just misspeak or even misspeak multiple times, which would have been understandable; rather, it looks like he specifically didn’t know that they are different things.
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Are new studies being done on the effectiveness of deworming?
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Clearly Ozy is in the pockets of Big Sleep.
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Today I learned that there is a movement to create animal abuse registries. These will be like sex abuse registries but for people who abuse animals. Many people seem to think that this will be a good idea even though it is really a horrible one. The sex offender registry system makes rehabilitation an impossibility because of the demands imposed. They also tend to be applied very broadly. Animal abuse registries will have the same issues. I can’t believe that the people who get outraged when a sex offender gets a very light sentence or that cops persecute minorities too much, believe that this will somehow work.
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A response to Kevin Carey’s article on online education is here: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/04/10/expert-roundup-what-kevin-carey-got-right-and-wrong-about-opms
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“He’s handing a stick to conservatives with which to whack him. Why? Why would he keep his wealth when giving away a million dollars could yield incredible political gains and would be completely costless? ”
It would cost a MILLION DOLLARS!
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I don’t see the Trump-HPV anecdote anywhere in the interview, though it’s briefly mentioned in Corrections at the bottom. Was it removed?
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Re: online degrees:
For anyone who’s interested, the british Open University is more widely accredited than almost any other distance learning program while being much cheaper than most american distance learning programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University
It also has a pretty good reputation.
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