Link Post for May

Tags

ozy blog post

An argument that books are a bad way to learn things.

Air pollution seems to cause dementia.

Map of self-reported life satisfaction around the world.

Fascinating interview with a biologist who specializes in invertebrate consciousness.

Missisippi prisons are somewhat horrifying: “Another time [the informant] called from prison and said, “You hear that?” The noise sounded like a busy construction site. He explained that it was metal striking metal as gang members made weapons.”

““Police officers are the first ones to say, ‘Hey, that’s unfair that I’m not gonna get this promotion, because some algorithm said I might be more violent or at risk than someone else,’” Ferguson says. “And you want to turn around and say, ‘Exactly. It’s unfair that some kid gets put on a heat list because he lives in a poor area and he’s surrounded by poverty and violence.’””

This is the ideal religious figure. You may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like.

This article about incel plastic surgery is trying to nudge me to dislike the plastic surgeon who gives incels plastic surgery but honestly I respect the hell out of him. “It’s not my job to ask why you want seven-centimeter testicles, it’s my job to invent groundbreaking surgical techniques to get you them” is a position I can support. Bodily autonomy! (To be clear, the incels don’t want seven-centimeter testicles, he just separately does both seven-centimeter testicles and incels.)

TurboTax has lied to people seeking refunds, such as by claiming that ProPublica was going to run a retraction of its story about how TurboTax deliberately deceived people who should have been able to file their taxes for free into paying. (Incidentally, if you earned less than $34,000 last year and paid TurboTax, to file your taxes you may be able to get a refund. I suggest seeking it because fuck TurboTax.)

This article about ransomware data recovery firms is incredibly interesting. Data recovery firms usually just pay the ransom; the value they add is (1) plausible deniability about whether you paid a ransom and (2) long-standing relationships with hacker groups, which lets them negotiate discounts and know who is likely to flake or claim to be able to decrypt something they can’t. Ransomware has become remarkably professionalized, including special discounts for data recovery firms who use a particular ransomware group regularly. Because multiple hacker groups use the same virus, there’s competition to see who can offer the cheapest ransoms.

One from the Goodhart’s Law files: requirements that a high percentage of teenagers graduate from high school lead to heavy use of online credit recovery, which might not teach kids anything.

Medieval books of penances for particular sins give us insight into the sex lives of the medievals. Also, into the fact that sex urban legends are not a modern invention, although at least the present-day ones are less likely to involve dead fish.

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Link Post for April

Tags

ozy blog post

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?

Vaccines may not last as long as we believe they do.

Link Post for January

Tags

effective altruism, ozy blog post, rationality

Rationality

“A ball and a bat together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” A fascinating article about why everyone gets this question wrong.

The media signal-boosts weird occurrences, which makes you think that very strange things happen more often than they actually do.

To learn a skill, read one book that explains the what of the skill, one that explains the why, and one that explains the how. I think this article could have used more examples of reference books, but I really enjoyed the author saying what you should look for in the negative reviews.

Effective Altruism

A guide to careers that don’t require a college degree for effective altruists.

Twelve pieces of general consensus about global poverty.

Many people claim that women reinvest ninety percent of their income into their family. However, further research suggests that this statistic doesn’t come from anywhere.

Social Justice

Content warning for drugs, suicide, abortion, miscarriage, pregnancy, corpse desecration, and probably a dozen other things I’m forgetting: how the concept of fetal personhood winds up trading off against women’s rights. Three things that hit home particularly hard for me: if you attempt suicide while pregnant you can be charged with attempted murder; if you die while pregnant you can be kept on life support against your previously stated wishes in order to keep the fetus alive; many doctors and CPS workers disapprove of pregnant people taking Suboxone, so pregnant people go off it and wind up relapsing and sometimes overdosing.

Gay escorts offer a service helping men get used to having sex without drugs. This is the sort of thing that warms my heart.

Cop apologizes for arresting people for trading in drugs. This is the sort of story that always warms my heart.

Just Plain Neat

A cable tech talks about the weird people she saw on the job, feat. Dick Cheney.

Meet the woman who invented cosplay.

Fake nude of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez debunked by foot fetishists.  “”I’ve sucked enough toes in my life to recognize when something doesn’t look right… Because we can’t dorsi- or plantarflex our 2nd-5th toes independently I knew it wasn’t a matter of the toe being bent. I thought that maybe she has some form of brachydactyly but her Wikifeet page has clear evidence to the contrary.”

Poker player locks himself in solitary confinement for 20 days for $62,400.

Secret music composed by medieval nuns.

Put MSG In Everything You Cowards. Recommending partially for the cooking advice and partially for the delightfully belligerant tone.

The Stranger Regrets These Errors.

Link Post for December

Tags

ozy blog post

Effective Altruism

A critique of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence on the EA forum. (I don’t 100% agree with it but I think it’s worth reading.)

What do Africans think about advertisements raising money for global poverty charities?

Radical transparency makes it harder to be honest with yourself.

QALYs might underweight the importance of eradicating diseases.

Social Justice

““I don’t want to” wasn’t a reason not to have sex, because everyone wants to have sex under the proper conditions. I could say no if I wasn’t ready, but there would come a day when the stars would align and all my necessary conditions would be met and I would be ready. I was terrified of that inevitable star alignment, because I knew that when it happened I would have to have sex.”

Really moving essay about suicidality and the experience of being on the psych ward.

“Yet even as Sullivan decries political tribalism, here is his theory of it: A decline in people practicing his form of Christian faith has led to a rise in “political cultists” who find their ultimate meaning in politics, who will stop at nothing to achieve their political goals, and who cannot be reasoned or compromised with.”

Maryland’s state song is a pro-Confederate anthem.

Civilizational Inadequacy

Being frequently woken up in the hospital provides little benefit and makes people sicker.

“The children reared on some version of Dickens will go on to be Scrooges, not because they are stupid but because they can’t help it—that’s what the world is set up to make of them.”

Sarah Constantin has some thoughts on playing politics.

Food

The cookbook The Joy of Cooking was one of the first organizations to uncover that disgraced scientist Brian Wansink was cooking his data.

Best bad restaurant reviews of 2018.

Hot take: pizza is not a meal.

Just Plain Neat

World’s oldest woman turns out to be a woman who pretended to be her deceased mother to avoid inheritance taxes.

There’s apparently some person named Ninja who has tens of millions of fans and is a multimillionaire and spends ten hours a day streaming something called Fortnite? I’m not entirely sure what Fortnite is honestly and yet people are making millions of dollars playing it. Is this what being old feels like? (His longest vacation from Fortnite-playing was apparently six days for his honeymoon.)

Economist David Friedman’s favorite jokes that teach economics.

Yuletide, the huge small-fandoms fic exchange, has dropped! I haven’t read everything so I can’t do a full set of recommendations, but I particularly enjoyed this Gore Vidal/William F Buckley fic (warning: nsfw) which is exactly as wonderful as it sounds.

Link Post for November

Tags

ozy blog post

Sex

Aellagirl writes a really interesting guide to successfully camming. (Worth reading even if you’re not interested in camming for the insight into the business.)

As a change of pace, the Atlantic clutches its pearls about how people are having less sex. I make fun, but this is actually an interesting, albeit deeply flawed, read. It’s really unclear to me to what extent people having less sex is a result of positive trends– such as people not being coerced into sex they don’t want or people having enjoyable and satisfactory sex lives that consist primarily of writing about fictional characters having sex on Tumblr– as opposed to negative trends– such as people getting into Facebook arguments when they’d prefer to have sex or porn making miserable celibacy just tolerable enough that people don’t do anything about it. Excellent read for being appalled at straight people. 72% of women experienced pain the last time they had anal sex?! Some straight men apparently go around choking people without asking first?! Seriously, guys, do you need help?

Old article, but an interesting read: the Protestant sexual abuse crisis is more decentralized but just as far-ranging as the Catholic sexual abuse crisis, and Billy Graham’s grandson has set himself up as the person to fight it. Boz Tchividjian is a really admirable person and I salute him.

Disability

I’m sharing this article about the complications of Lasik less because I want to raise awareness about complications associated with Lasik and more because it’s a fascinating example of how our culture talks about disability. The eyes of people who get Lasik are repeatedly described as “healthy eyes”, despite the obvious fact that they are not: Lasik is a treatment for various medical conditions, including nearsightedness, farsightedness, and myopia. The assistive tech for people with vision problems is hardly perfect: I once accidentally flushed my glasses down the toilet and had to call a friend to Seeing-Eye dog me to the glasses store. But they are normalized. It’s interesting to me that there does not seem to be any social pressure on people with myopia to cure our myopia at any cost, even though a cure is inexpensive and readily available. It’s also interesting to me that the cure is considered cosmetic (!) and not covered by insurance.

Just Plain Neat

Okay, fine, Payless, you got me to share your advertising stunt: Payless creates a fake luxury store, Palessi, and discovers a lot of fashion influencers are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for twenty-dollar shoes.

How chain restaurant menus get made.

This is one of the greatest restaurant reviews of all time.

Link Post for October

Tags

ozy blog post

Discourse Norms

“The only purpose of redefining past atrocities as mental illness is to try and declaim responsibility as human beings for the darkest moments of our past.”

Cass Sunstein on technocracy: “Among people on the left, if it turned out that a regulation on occupational safety would hammer the construction industry and have modest effects on safety, people committed to workplace safety would, behind closed doors, say, “Let’s not do that one.” Often, immersion in the facts often makes value disagreements feel much less relevant.”

Benjamin Franklin’s debate rules.

Social Justice

In many teaching hospitals, students perform pelvic exams on anesthesized women who did not consent.

Joshua Harris, author of purity-culture evangelical dating manual I Kissed Dating Goodbye, has apologized and discontinued the book’s publication. I applaud him for having the courage to publicly admit his mistakes; that’s really hard.

Fascinating story about callout culture in hardcore punk music. 

How restorative justice works in practice.

Just For Fun

Things that are not as good as nicotine gum.

White House issues adorable report about socialism. Sample sentence: “The socialist narrative names the oppressors of the vulnerable, such as the bourgeoisie (Marx), kulaks (Lenin), landlords (Mao), and giant corporations (Sanders and Warren).”

Link Post for August

Tags

ozy blog post

Effective Altruism

Why do we ignore genocides?

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.

“Stigma against porn, kink, and sex work is bipartisan—which is precisely why this particular tweet [about Bigfoot porn] was so effective in garnering attention and in targeting Riggleman.”

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.

Bird with fifty ducklings.

Link Post for June

Tags

ozy blog post

I will be at EA Global San Francisco this month. You can catch me as one of three panelists at the Strategic Movement-Building for Wild-Animal Suffering panel, where we’ll be talking about appealing to mainstream experts, framing wild-animal suffering in a way that counters common objections, and avoiding making the entire EA movement look like a bunch of weirdos.

Also, this month I am going to be moving out of a house on Ward Street, the rationalist hub in Berkeley; contact me at ozyfrantz@gmail.com if you’re interested.

Effective Altruism

Reducing Wild Animal Suffering literature library— a fascinating collection of papers about empirical, theoretical, and moral aspects of RWAS.

Argument against prediction markets.

Triple-counting impact in EA.

Postmortem of a failed happiness app. I would like to congratulate Michael Plant on his honest and forthright admission of failure; we need more of this in EA.

Detailed criticism of the chapter on existential risk in Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. “So far as I can tell, almost every paragraph of the chapter contains at least one misleading claim, problematic quote, false assertion, or selective presentation of the evidence.” Beware the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect!

Is biodiversity as important as people claim?

Discourse Norms

A conflict about a two-person protest at the University of Nebraska goes national. A very good, in-depth case study of a single campus free speech case, going beyond the headlines.

ACE intervention report on the effects of protests, which may also be of interest to activists who aren’t involved in animal activism. Many of the points may generalize.

Linking this less for the object-level points and more for the interesting example of how different conversations can look for different people.

I’m not sure this post about the King of Cambodia is worth reading, but lèse-majesté laws are evil and I feel a duty to signal-boost posts violating it as much as possible.

Gender

I think this essay‘s claims about women in general are incorrect– people are more diverse than that– but it’s a very vivid depiction of one particular way internalized sexism affected a particular person.

Anti-heterosexual hate crimes basically don’t exist, but police inaccurately report that they do.

Just Plain Neat

DNA blunder creates serial killer.

What would you do if a bank glitch gave you one and a half million dollars?

The new cartoonist for eighty-year-old newspaper comic Nancy is actually… good?

Dirtbag Sappho.

Bad stock photos.

Link Post for May

Tags

ozy blog post

I’ve been posting my book reviews on Goodreads recently instead of here; I’m interested in people’s thoughts about whether I should crosspost or whether you want to just read it here.

Violence

Better Angels of Our Nature misrepresents data.

An in-depth debunking of myths about campus rape statistics. Covers both feminist and anti-feminist myths.

Effective Altruism

A thoughtful critique of several common EA tropes, including some I support. This is the sort of disagreement we should encourage in effective altruism.

Holden Karnofsky’s AMA about working for the Open Philanthropy Project.

Men’s Issues

What happened to the black autistic man whose therapist was shot by police while trying to protect him?

Racial gaps in upward mobility are primarily driven by a gap between the upward mobility of black men and white men; major causes appear to be incarceration and black men growing up in shitty neighborhoods.

Positive portrays of masculinity.

Health

NIH RCT of moderate drinking funded by the alcohol industry.

I used to think only I relived all my most embarrassing memories all the time, but it turns out that’s an everyone thing. The solution is self-compassion. How about something easier like climbing Mount Everest?

Just Plain Neat

Why open plan offices don’t work.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg has a blog! It is as delightful as his many fans have come to expect.

Link Post for November

Ozy Elsewhere

A review paper I wrote about methods for assessing wild-animal suffering. Critics have raved that it is “surprisingly interesting.”

Screwtape in San Francisco, a Screwtape Letters fanfic. Updates on Mondays until I run out of things to say and/or go on parental leave.

Ever said to yourself “I wish I had a version of Thing of Things, but without the book posts, link posts, cursing, sex jokes, and culture war stuff?” I have started crossposting on Less Wrong 2.0 and that is precisely what is available there! You can also entertain yourself by trying to catch the comments from LW’s resident troll, who really seems to dislike me specifically, before they’re deleted.

Government

Deescalation works.

The Republican case for donating to Roy Moore’s opponent. Honestly, if Roy Moore were fictional, I would be like “oh, come on, no one is that pointlessly, dickishly evil.”

How to be a socialist without being an apologist for the atrocities of communist regimes. “If your revolutionary movement keeps producing mountains of skulls, it is important to consider whether the problem may be with you rather than the people who were turned into the mountain of skulls.” [CW: picture of a Khmer Rouge mass grave.]

The UK’s harsh laws about libel may be protecting famous British sexual harassers.

The US government arrests people for trafficking in nonexistent drugs.

Economics

Even if Tesla goes bankrupt it might still benefit the world.

Social Justice

Why we need to get better at critiquing mental health diagnosis. A good list of fallacious arguments; I particularly like the observation that “mental illness” is a broad category and things that are definitely true of schizophrenia may not be true of erectile dysfunction.

Flint water crisis may have caused over two hundred miscarriages.

Needing assistance to manage your finances because of disability does not mean you are an unsafe gun owner.

A feminist approach to sexual abstinence.

Facebook continues to allow people to put up racially discriminatory housing ads.

Study suggests autistic social impairment may be caused in part by neurotypicals disliking autistic people for no reason. Might fail to replicate, of course, but it definitely fits my biases.

One ordinary week of the heroin crisis. [CW: even more depressing than that description makes it sound]

“Blasphemy” is not an apolitical concept.

Effective Altruism

Against neglectedness. Not sure if I agree, but an interesting contrarian argument to effective altruist conventional wisdom.

New research paper argues that animal welfare reforms reduce the number of animals in factory farms. [CW: pictures of factory farming.]

Fascinating article which argues that dehumanization is not actually the cause of acts of great cruelty.

Just Plain Neat

Judge Alsup, “the judge who codes”, is an old nerd who codes in BASIC (!) and judges Silicon Valley IP cases. I am pretty sure he is now my favorite.

A pill to make exercise obsolete (h/t Sniffnoy).

An analysis of the economy depicted in Harry Potter.

EVE Online corpse collectors.