Book Post for June

Tags

becky chambers, cat valente, effective altruism, mary robinette kowal, ozy blog post, rebecca roanhorse, sex positivity, ursula k le guin

Non-Fiction

The Origins of Happiness: A book about the various things that are correlated with life satisfaction scales. In and of itself, this is an interesting topic. However, the author fancies themself a person who is Reforming Public Policy in order to Bring About A New Focus On Happiness, which makes the entire book epistemically dubious. Here are some criticisms not addressed by the author at any point:

1. A life satisfaction scale involves rating your life on a scale of 1 to 10. While this metric has some advantages (it lets people decide for themselves what factors they want to incorporate into their life satisfaction assessment), at no point does the author provide evidence that this metric is correlated with a common-sense definition of happiness. They also provide no reason to choose life satisfaction over other metrics, such as experiential happiness or “how happy are you?” questions, which often have correlations of different strength or even direction.
2. Correlation does not equal causation. People tend to report higher life satisfaction if they are married, but that doesn’t mean marriage increases life satisfaction. Perhaps happier people stay married for longer and miserable people are more likely to divorce, or perhaps both marriage and happiness are caused by some other factor, such as religiosity.
3. Life satisfaction may be compared against a reference class. If you mostly know people with very very good lives, you might consider your life mediocre, while if you mostly know people with terrible lives, you might consider your life very good– even if your life is the same in every way.
4. In particular, the author’s data suggests that being around richer people lowers life satisfaction, holding income constant. In fact, all the life satisfaction you gain from increasing your income a certain amount is exactly balanced by the amount of life satisfaction lost by the people around you. But this is a strange result: it implies that no one gains any life satisfaction at all from any of the things you can purchase with money, such as education, vacations, nice food, entertainment, health care, or financial security. Life satisfaction is only gained by having more than other people. All goods are zero-sum positional games. The author suggests deprioritizing increasing GDP, but does not suggest any of the more radical policies that are implied by this point of view. If life satisfaction is an accurate measure of wellbeing and nothing you can purchase with money affects wellbeing, why not ban vacations? They cost a lot of resources (e.g. flying planes spews a lot of carbon) and don’t actually make anyone any happier.
5. Depression is highly correlated with low life satisfaction ratings. But standard depression inventories ask many questions that are, essentially, life satisfaction questions, like whether you’re unhappy all the time and whether you think you’re a failure. Does this mean that the mental health condition of depression causes low life satisfaction (and thus that the best way to improve life satisfaction is to treat depression), or does it mean that if you define a mental health condition as “people who have low life satisfaction” it will turn out they all have low life satisfaction?

Addicted to Lust: A fascinating ethnography of porn use in the conservative Protestant subculture.

Conservative Protestants are less likely to use porn than the general population, although (like the general population) their use of porn is rising because the Internet is improving porn access. However, conservative Protestants who use porn face much more severe mental health consequences than people of other denominations or religions who use porn.

They face overwhelming shame, guilt, and stigma. Some are socially isolated because they can’t admit their porn use; this particularly affects women, who are believed not to be visual and not to be tempted by porn, and therefore have a hard time finding support and are often stigmatized as ‘unfeminine’ for needing it. Others find their entire moral life reduced to porn use: male ‘accountability groups’ often discuss only porn, masturbation, and lust without ever thinking about any of the other sins that men commit; some people even have difficulty thinking about anything they might do wrong that isn’t porn use. Porn users avoid volunteering, service, missionary work, or helping out at church because they think they’re too broken to be allowed to participate in Christian life. Many even avoid praying, reading the Bible, or participating in church services. One interviewee says:

[D]uring that time I become a burden to god, too. It’s like ‘yeah, I love you. And you know, I died for you. But really I’m just tolerating you right now because I made a commitment to myself and I have to.'”

Because porn use is conceived of within conservative Protestant culture as a form of cheating, spouses experience tremendous jealousy and betrayal when they find out. People can’t talk to their spouses about their porn use and get support in quitting, because it is perceived as such a betrayal; the deception can poison a relationship. The discovery of a spouse’s porn use often leads to threats or even the reality of divorce, even when the marriage is otherwise happy.

My takeaways from this ethnography are twofold.

First, the corrosive effects of purity culture are hard to overstate. When you make a single common sin a litmus test of how a person is doing morally, it is really bad for people. People experience feelings of guilt, shame, and worthlessness. They are isolated from friends and loved ones. It doesn’t even serve to make the person more ethical. Purity culture takes away your ability to see the moral life holistically. While you’re struggling with the fact that you jerk off to porn for fifteen minutes once a week, you might ignore the fact that you shout at your wife, or that you’re lazy at work, or that you go on luxurious vacations instead of helping the poor– all of which may very well be more serious sins. You can feel like you “don’t deserve” to do the things that give you strength to be a better person: the Christian avoids praying and reading the Bible, but a secular person might avoid therapy, journaling, meditation, reading inspiring books, going to meetups of people who share their values, etc.

Effective altruism has (so far) put a lot of thought into avoiding creating a purity culture, although often not in those terms. However, I think this is something well worth thinking about more.

Second, I have often had a hard time harmonizing my positive personal experience of porn with the research that suggests negative effects of porn use. Addicted to Love’s model, I think, explains this very well. The thing that causes negative effects of porn is not the porn itself; it’s the context and the use to which you put porn. Addicted to Love finds that porn use is correlated with depression if and only if you believe that pornography use is morally wrong. Doing things that go against your values makes you feel guilt and shame. If your partner feels betrayed by your pornography use or worries that it means you don’t find them attractive anymore, it is likely to make your relationship worse; watching porn together and using it as a springboard to discuss your sexual fantasies is likely to make it better.

You can expand this model further. A culture around porn which clearly discusses which aspects of porn are reality and which fantasy leads to accurate beliefs about sex; in the absence of such a culture, people might try unlubed anal sex. (Ouch.) In a sex-positive culture of experimentation and open communication, being interested in more sexual acts means you have more sexual variety; in a more sex-negative culture, it can lead to frustration and even sexual coercion. Isolating yourself in your bedroom to jerk off for four hours is different from writing a porny giftfic for a friend. Saying what effects porn has in the abstract is like saying what effects Marvel movies have in the abstract; you have to consider the individual, the culture, and their relationship to porn.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing: At some point Ursula K. Le Guin is going to really truly publish her last book, but apparently not yet. Conversations on Writing is an interview with Le Guin about writing; like all Le Guin’s writing, her compassion and wisdom is palpable, even when I disagree with her. By far the most delightful part of the book is a short story Le Guin wrote about Zombie Michael Chabon infecting literary writers with genre, but the rest is well worth your time.

An Informal History of the Hugos: This book is baffling. I have no idea what the target audience is. Jo Walton briefly talks about her opinions of the Hugo nominees for each year, lists off the titles of various books that might otherwise be nominated, and says whether she thinks the right one won. Since I have usually heard of half of the nominees and very few of the non-nominated books each year, this is incredibly boring.

Fiction 

Space Opera: This is… an incredibly weird book. It’s a Douglas Adams pastiche where aliens decide which newly contacted species are sapient by having them compete in galactic Eurovision; if they come in last place, they’ll get destroyed. Unfortunately, the list of musicians who might have a chance of not coming in last was generated by a time traveling alien who got confused, so only one of them is alive: a washed-up, drunken David Bowie/Freddie Mercury expy who hasn’t had a hit in a decade and has to get the band back together to save humanity.

Cat Valente is one of the best prose stylists in modern science fiction, and she uses all her talent to make Space Opera’s twee whimsy, with a core of jaded cynicism. This is the sort of book that drives me to metaphor. Reading the book is like eating twenty pounds of cupcake frosting: you enjoy the individual bites, but you eventually want something more substantial, and the whole experience makes you kind of sick. The book itself is like building the Statue of Liberty out of cheese: you set a goal and you accomplished it and it’s hard to come up with criticisms that aren’t ‘instead of doing this you should have done a different thing,’ but… maybe instead of this you should have done a different thing.

That said, I’m probably going to vote it #1 for the Hugos this year. I didn’t particularly like Space Opera, I don’t recommend it, but there’s something about “I thought the surprise mpreg reveal in the climax was superfluous” that captures the anarchic spirit of science fiction, and I think that’s what we should honor with our awards. And if it’s the sort of book you like you’ll really like it.

Trail of Lightning: Meh. I don’t like action heroes who are brooding and violent and angry and never talk about their feelings and you have to be SYMPATHETIC to them because they are TRAUMATIZED. Manpain bores me. It does not actually bore me any less if the person experiencing manpain is a Native American woman.

The Calculating Stars: I gave up in disgust after the first part, so take this review with a grain of salt, but: UGH. The author wants to write an alternate history where a giant meteorite landed on Washington D. C. in the 1950s, which kicked off catastrophic global warming, and the only way to save humanity is to go to a moon colony. Fine. Okay. I am willing to suspend disbelief about ‘moon colony’ being a better option than ‘geoengineering’ if only because of the Rule of Cool.

But the author clearly fails to think about the internal life of her villains for even a second. The president’s advisers respond to the protagonist’s report that catastrophic global warming is going to happen with spontaneous climate-change denialist tropes literally five minutes after she delivers it, even though this makes zero sense. No one would think it’s absurd and laughable that a meteorite that destroyed DC would have other catastrophic effects, and climate change denialism is a thing because fossil fuel companies have spent tons of money spreading doubt, a thing which they would have no reason to do in setting and which they could not possibly have pulled off in five minutes.

The protagonist, a former member of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) in WWII, is forbidden to fly a plane to rescue refugees because “nursing is more feminine,” despite the fact that this is literally the sort of thing the WASPs did in WWII and a meteorite just destroyed Washington DC. Women are forbidden from becoming astronauts because they will become hysterical in space; a female character points out that you can’t have a self-sustaining moon colony without women, but it is never discussed what the fuck the villains think about this obvious objection.

Look, I’m not saying that the villains’ behavior is completely unreasonable. (Okay, the climate change denialism is unreasonable and clearly just put in to make a political point.) Maybe the protagonist is forbidden from rescuing refugees by one guy, who’s not very competent at running a military and is only doing it because the entire hierarchy fell apart because DC got a meteor dropped on it, and who’s clinging desperately to normality in the wake of an abnormal situation. Maybe they’re planning to include women in later flights but don’t want to include them right away because they’re concerned about not having developed the safety equipment to deal with their hysteria. But you have to justify this! You can’t just be like “sexists are sexist because they are sexist, this is completely causeless behavior totally unaffected by circumstances or incentives.” That’s not how people work.

Record of A Spaceborn Few: Record of a Spaceborn Few is set on a former generation ship, a few generations after first contact, which currently orbits around a star. The sociological worldbuilding is rich and complex. A great deal of care and thought has been put into the sort of society a generation ship would have: the religious beliefs, the tensions, the economics, the leisure activities, the social arrangements.

It would be misleading to say nothing happens. Many things happen. But there is not very much in the way of plot. It is essentially the events that happen over the course of a particularly interesting few months in the lives of a dozen ordinary people on the generation ship. It is a slice-of-life story; it is as interested in parenting struggles and teenagers fighting with their best friends as it is in starship accidents or the alien ethnographer studying the human colony.

I have literally been craving this book for the past fifteen years. (I really really want it in post-apocalyptic, but you can’t have everything.) If slice-of-life SF with rich sociological worldbuilding is your thing, you’ll really love it.

Link Post for June

Tags

disability, effective altruism, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality, wild animals

Social Justice

“Being taught by Milton Friedman makes you less likely to give long sentences on certain kinds of criminal activity, particularly around like drug crimes.”

Simultaneously “I understand why this was your best choice in this situation” and “aaaawkward”: “To top it all off, reports that Disney had been “browning up” some actors on set… drew a swift response from Disney, noting… that “diversity of our cast and background performers was a requirement and only in a handful of instances when it was a matter of specialty skills, safety and control (special effects rigs, stunt performers and handling of animals) were crew made up to blend in.””

A man whose mother has a severe intellectual disability discusses his relationship with her.

[cw: child sexual abuse] Why Honduran women are being driven to the US border. (Sample excerpt: “When doctors told [12-year-old] Sofia she was pregnant and explained that pregnancy meant she was going to have a baby, Sofia, in her soft, small voice, asked whether she could have a doll instead.”)

From the ‘social model of disability’ files: “In theory, a social definition of infertility—one laid out in terms of intentions and identities rather than diseases and disabilities—circumvents these problems. But it creates complexities of its own. Last year, researchers from Yale and the University of Haifa, in Israel, shared the results of a study in which they asked a hundred and fifty women who have frozen their eggs to explain their motivations. The overwhelming majority of the women cited what might be called “man problems,” including divorces, breakups, and male partners who weren’t yet ready to have children. It takes a conceptual leap to see a recent divorcée and a woman with endometriosis as equally infertile, but Campo-Engelstein argues that they are “similar enough that they should be treated the same.””

Effective Altruism

Is effective altruism growing? “Overall, the decline in people first discovering EA (reading) and the growth of donations / career changes (doing) makes sense, as it is likely the result of the intentional effort across several groups and individuals in EA over the past few years to focus on high-fidelity messaging and growing the impact of pre-existing EAs and deliberate decisions to stop mass marketing, Facebook advertising, etc. The hope is that while this may bring in fewer total people, the people it does bring in will be much higher quality on average.”

The uses of life history classification in understanding wild animal welfare. A thoughtful and nuanced review. (I’m cited!)

A foundational result on the question of how much wild animals suffer is wrong. I am mentioning this 10% because it’s cool and 90% to brag about my role as a catalyst here. (I complained at everyone I could find that this result didn’t make any sense because I was bad at math, and then it turned out to not make any sense because it was wrong.)

Rethink Priorities has an excellent in-depth summary of the evidence that invertebrates suffer, which incidentally explains a lot of really foundational issues related to animal consciousnes in general. Check it out!

Rationality (Practice)

Visualizations of different meanings of probability.

This LW post makes an interesting point about the difference between the norms and goals of science, but I’m mostly linking for the worldbuilding about ALIEN SCIENCE.

People view things as abstractions rather than as atoms, which causes them to miss ways they can interact with things to reach their goals. My summary is boring but the list of examples is very interesting and I really do recommend checking it out.

Subtle errors people make with the concept of conservation of expected evidence.

Weird situations with reasonable explanations, or “why 90% sure is way less sure than you think it is.”

List of examples where one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. Again, the list of examples is incredibly interesting and much better than my summary.

The uses of divination.

Moral realism and moral nonrealism lead to very similar behavior for different reasons.

Rationality (Community)

I don’t agree with everything Ray Arnold wrote about the village versus the mission, but I think he crystallizes for me some important distinctions about the rationality community and moves the interminable conversations about rationalist community norms forward.

Again mostly of interest to rationality community people: rabbit hunts and stag hunts as a metaphor for community participation.

Parenting

Why you should sometimes change your mind after saying ‘no’. I follow this advice personally. My son Viktor only knows a few words and therefore has a hard time expressing preferences without crying. A strict ‘no giving in to crying’ rule would basically mean I couldn’t reassess my decision based on the strength of Viktor’s desires. I am probably going to enforce a ‘no giving in to tantrums’ rule once he’s old enough to express preferences with words, but until then ignoring his communication just seems unethical.

Just Plain Neat

Overzealous cleaner ruins artwork worth 690,000 pounds.

Types of loneliness.

The Secret Rebellion Of Amelia Bedelia, The Bartleby Of Domestic Work.

This is so profoundly my shit that I honestly can’t believe it’s a real article: Georgette Heyer’s crossdressing novels as forced masculinization sexual fantasies.

Why AO3 is one of the best-organized sites on the Internet. “One wrangler, who goes by the handle spacegandalf, pointed me to the example of a character from an audio drama called The Penumbra Podcast who didn’t have an official name in text for several episodes after he was introduced. Yet people were writing fanfic—and trying to tag it by character—before they had any name to tag it with. Because spacegandalf had listened to this podcast—AO3 deliberately recruits and assigns tag wranglers who are members of the fandoms that they wrangle for—they had the necessary context to know that “Big Guy Jacket Man Or Whatever His Name Is” referred to the same person as his slightly more official moniker “the Man In the Brown Jacket” and his later, official name, Jet Sikuliaq (and that none of these names should be confused with a different mysteriously named character from a different audio drama, the Man in the Tan Jacket from Welcome to Night Vale).”

This was recommended to me as one of the best profiles ever written, and it really is: the story of Ricky Jay, one of the greatest living magicians.

Do Animals Have A Right To Life?

Tags

effective altruism, ozy blog post

[content warning: discussion of murdering babies, use of disabled people in philosophy thought experiments]

The Logic of the Larder

One important issue for effective animal altruists is the logic of the larder. The argument goes like this: if farmed animal lives are worth living, then it is good to eat meat, because if you eat lots of meat then more farmed animals will exist and live happy lives. Advocates for the welfare of farmed animals should encourage people to eat more meat to cause more happy animals to come into being.

In most cases, farmed animal lives are unpleasant enough that the logic of the larder doesn’t apply. Their lives are not worth living, so it’s good not to eat animal products. However, in some cases– such as cows raised for beef, or Certified Humane chickens– some reasonable and thoughtful people argue that the farmed animals’ lives are worth living. In those cases, the logic of the larder suggests, effective animal advocates should eat more meat.

 The Baby Farm

Imagine that, among very wealthy people, there is a new fad for eating babies. Out baby farmer is an ethical person and he wants to make sure that his babies are farmed as ethically as possible. The babies are produced through artificial wombs; there are no adults who are particularly invested in the babies’ continued life. The babies are slaughtered at one month, well before they have long-term plans and preferences that are thwarted by death. In their one month of life, the babies have the happiest possible baby life: they are picked up immediately whenever they cry, they get lots of delicious milk, they’re held and rocked and sung to, their medical concerns are treated quickly, and they don’t ever have to sit in a poopy diaper. In every way, they live as happy and flourishing a life as a two-week-old baby can. Is the baby farm unethical?

If you’re like me, the answer is a quick “yes.”

My intuition suggests three things. First, it is a harm– at least to some beings– to kill them. That is, I do not adopt the Epicurean position that the only harm of death comes from the grief other people feel, your unfulfilled plans, etc., none of which apply to the one-year-old babies in the baby farm. You might say that some beings have “a right to life.”

Second, my intuition is not a speciesist intuition. My intuition suggests we should also not farm Vulcan babies, orc babies, house elf babies, Twi’lek babies, or chimpanzee babies. Therefore, my intuition is not grounded in the fact that babies are members of the human species per se.

Third, the “right to life” does not depend on certain sophisticated cognitive capacities unique (or allegedly unique) to the human species, such as autonomy, practical reason, a capacity to form relationships with other beings, awareness of oneself as a subject of mental states, desires and plans for the future, the capacity to bargain, an understanding of one’s duties and responsibilities, etc. One-month-olds are pretty stupid and do not have any of these capacities.

I am horrified by the idea of a baby farm. I am not horrified by the idea of a beef cow farm. Perhaps I am being inconsistent and speciesist; whatever it is about babies that makes it wrong to murder them is perhaps also true of cows, except that I grew up in a society that undervalues beef cow lives, so I undervalue them as well. Conversely, perhaps my judgment of the baby farm is influenced by morally irrelevant factors, like it being very disgusting, and perhaps it is ethical to raise babies for meat.

Incompletely Realized Sophisticated Cognitive Capacities

I believe the solution here is that the right to life comes from certain incompletely realized sophisticated cognitive capacities. What does this mean?

Adult humans without certain disabilities have various sophisticated cognitive capacities, which I listed off a few paragraphs ago. It is not necessary right now to determine which ones give you a right to life. To have concrete examples, I’m going to talk about practical reason (the ability to understand the good for yourself, set goals and create plans, and reflect on your goals and plans) and affiliation (social interaction, putting yourself in other people’s shoes, and love and care for others). But this is purely for illustration and the argument works the same whatever capacities you use.

I will use the terminology “threshold capacity for practical reason and affiliation” as a shorthand for “sufficient capacity for practical reason and affiliation that we believe that you have a ‘right to life.'” It does not matter, for the sake of this argument, what threshold you adopt, assuming that you agree that nearly all adult humans are above the threshold. I believe that most people agree.

It is reasonable to believe that neither babies nor cows have a threshold capacity for affiliation and practical reason. A cow may very well have more capacity for practical reason than a newborn baby. But that doesn’t mean that their position with regards to capacities are the same. A cow has all of the capacities it is ever going to have; it has fully developed cow capacities. A baby has incompletely developed adult human capacities. When a newborn baby cries until it is picked up, or recognizes the face of its parents, that is the beginning of a human ability for affiliation. When a newborn baby waves its arms in front of its eyes, is delighted by the movement, and repeats it, that is the beginning of a human ability for practical reason. We consider not just what the baby is able to do but what its abilities are incomplete fragments of.

As an analogy, consider the difference between a blind person and a blind cave tetra. A blind cave tetra does not have eyes; it does not have any capacity to see in any form. Blind people, on the other hand, have an incomplete form of the capacity to see, in the sense we’re using it here. This has real, concrete effects. A blind person generally has eyes, eyelashes, eyebrows, a visual cortex, and so on. Most legally blind people have at least some vision, such as the ability to perceive light. Some blind people can respond to stimuli they don’t consciously see. Blind people repurpose the visual cortex of the brain to handle language. A blind person and a blind cave tetra may have an equal ability to see, but their situations are concretely different, because a blind cave tetra is not the sort of being that sees at all, while a blind person can has much of the equipment generally associated with seeing.

Running through a list of hard problems, I believe this rule gives satisfactory results. (Again, I use “practical reason” and “affiliation” merely as examples.)

Vulcans, house elves, Twi’leks, and orcs? All capable of affiliation and practical reason, and therefore have a right to life.

Sufficiently advanced artificial intelligences? Capable of affiliation and practical reason, have a right to life.

Fetuses? It is difficult to decide when a fetus begins to have the capacity for affiliation and practical reason, even in an incomplete form. There is little opportunity to plan one’s life in the womb, and it can be difficult to distinguish reflex behavior from complex planning. Nevertheless, it is important to be very very conservative about committing murder; if your plan involves even a one percent chance of killing a person, you shouldn’t do it unless you have a very very good reason. For this reason, society should improve access to highly reliable contraceptives and provide poor and single parents the support they need to avoid abortion. Abortion regulations should be considered thoughtfully, balancing the bodily autonomy of pregnant people with the potential right to life of the fetus. Abortion regulations that lead to later abortions (for example, waiting periods) should be avoided, because they increase the chance that the abortion is murder.

People with impairments in their capacities for practical reason and affiliation? This is a complicated issue and there are several possible considerations. In many cases, impaired people can exercise a threshold capacity for practical reason and affiliation if provided with appropriate support. For example, the vast majority of autistic people are capable of understanding other people with appropriate supports, such as clearly written explanations of things that neurotypicals understand instinctively. Similarly, intellectually disabled people can almost always set life goals, but may need supported decision making. In rare cases, a human may unambiguously not have any capacity for practical reason or affiliation, even in an incomplete form, as in babies with anencephaly; in this case, the human would have no right to life.

Some disabled people will have partial or incomplete capacities. This case is similar to the case of the blind person: while the blind person cannot see, and certain disabled people cannot affiliate at the threshold level, in either case the disabled person has these capacities in an incomplete form. Finally, it is very very common among the severely disabled that we can’t know whether a person has the threshold capacity. Consider a person with total locked-in syndrome: they may be able to reason or affiliate, but if they cannot communicate, how can we know? It can be very difficult to assess the true abilities of nonspeaking disabled people or disabled people with severe motor control issues. For this reason, it is important to be conservative and extend the right to life very widely.

Animals? The threshold capacity is, by stipulation, placed at a point where nearly all adult humans pass it. How many animal species have a right to life will depend on what the threshold capacity should be, which is a subject that is too large to discuss in this blog post.

It seems unlikely that there are no species in which certain gifted members have threshold-passing capacities (or an incomplete form of the same) and others do not. In theory, if we had perfect knowledge, the right to life would be correlated with species but not determined by it, as in general beings have the capacities of other members of their species. In practice, except in extremely unusual cases such as anencephaly, a conservative approach suggests that we should extend the right to life to all members of a species of which at least one member has demonstrated threshold-passing capacities.

Stupid Questions About Donation Splitting

Tags

effective altruism, ozy blog post

I’ve seen many people claim that splitting your donations (that is, donating some money to one charity and some money to another charity, instead of donating all your money to one charity) is irrational because you should just donate to the thing that you think is the best at using money on the margin.

However, I am confused about this. It seems to me that there are more complicated issues that this simple argument has not grappled with.

Imagine a toy problem where there are 100 effective altruists, each of whom are going to donate $100. There are two effective charities, the Against Paperclips Foundation and the Foundation to Cure Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies.  The Against Paperclips Foundation creates +1.0000001 utility per dollar, while the Foundation To Cure Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies creates +1 utility per dollar (the puppies are really cute). The Against Paperclips Foundation has a room for more funding (RFMF) of $9000, while the Foundation To Cure Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies has a RFMF of $1000; if the RFMF is filled, further donations produce zero utility.

In theory, the effective altruists could fill the Against Paperclips Foundation’s room for more funding and then switch to the Foundation To Cure Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies. But there are going to be coordination issues. For example, many EAs donate near the end of the year, so the Against Paperclips Foundation’s RFMF might be filled all at once before they have a chance to announce that their RFMF is full. Some people are not going to read the EA Forum and find out that the Against Paperclips Foundation’s RFMF is full. Some people are going to forget to switch their automated donations.

In short, if everyone follows the “do whatever seems the best” rule, the Against Paperclips Foundation is going to receive extra money that does far less good than the Foundation To Cure Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies.

Conversely, if everyone donates 90% to the Against Paperclips Foundation and 10% to the Foundation To Cure Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies, there is a tiny tiny utility cost, because the Against Paperclips Foundation is slightly better than the Foundation To Cure Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies. But it also totally solves the coordination problem! No one has to communicate with anyone else; no one has to learn whether the RFMF is full; no one has to remember to donate to a different place. The right outcome happens automatically.

Further, “room for more funding” is a bit of an oversimplification. The Against Paperclips Foundation’s most pressing needs might be more important than the Foundation To Cure Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies’s most pressing needs, but that doesn’t mean that any money the Against Paperclips Foundation can use productively is more important as the Foundation To Cure Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies’s most pressing needs. The first paperclip researcher might be more important than curing a sad puppy of its fatal disease, but that doesn’t mean getting them new office furniture that will make research slightly more productive is more important than even the least expensive puppy to treat.

For this reason, I expect at the size the effective altruism movement is now (likely more than a hundred million non-OpenPhil dollars moved), the optimal outcome would be charitable donations spread across many charities. However, if everyone donates to the single best charity, this is unlikely to happen.

When I’ve brought up this argument to other effective altruists, they’ve said that without donation splitting you’re still going to get people donating to many different charities, because people have different values and worldviews. But it seems very unlikely to me that people having different values and worldviews would result in the money being allocated the way I would prefer. Indeed, many such people would donate in ways other people find useless or counterproductive (as a person who doesn’t think animals matter might think about effective animal advocacy). If someone donates to Machine Doggo Research Evaluators, it still doesn’t solve the problem of how to allocate money between the Against Paperclips Foundation and the Foundation to Cure Rare Diseases In Cute Puppies.

Second issue: I have often found myself in a situation where I’m not certain which of two charities is the best to donate to. They both seem like they will have very robustly positive effects, but my uncertainty is high enough that I’m genuinely not sure which of them has the highest expected value.

The sources of uncertainty are often difficult to resolve. For example, building an effective animal advocacy movement seems likely to save animals from factory farming, but it is extraordinarily difficult to say how many animals would be saved by, say, a new translation of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. In some cases I donate to a particular grantmaker– for example, through the EA Funds– because I expect their judgment to be better than mine; I can guess ‘this grantmaker will make better decisions than I will’ without having any idea how many animals this grantmaker will save.

Similarly, in many cases figuring out how good something is would involve solving very difficult philosophical problems. If a new translation of Animal Liberation inspires a person who would otherwise not have engaged in advocacy to become an advocate, and they save ten million animals, how many of those animals do I, a donor, get credit for? Or consider comparing across cause areas– how many animals spared from a factory farm is equivalent to a 20% lifetime increase in income for a person in the developing world? These are difficult problems to solve, and while it would be nice to solve them, I am going to donate this year and not after several decades of philosophical reflection.

In situations of sufficiently high uncertainty, my 95% confidence interval for two charities can often overlap. In general, in these situations, I wind up donation-splitting.

What am I missing?

Visualizing Donations

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effective altruism, ozy blog post

When I donate money to charity, I try to visualize the effects of my donations.

It’s easy for donating money to not make you very happy. You write a check and you don’t get to see the consequences of your actions. It isn’t as viscerally rewarding as, say, talking to a friend who’s been through a bad time or helping someone move or setting up two people on a date– even though donating money can have a positive effect hundreds of times larger than those actions.

Therefore, when I make a donation, I try to make the consequences of my donation very very salient.

I’ve found several advantages to the practice of visualizing my donations. Most obviously, it increases my sense of life satisfaction and pride in my accomplishments and increases my motivation to donate in the future. However, I’ve also found that it aligns my system 1 better with my system 2 when I’m thinking about my values. “I consider saving a child’s life to be about as good as doubling that child’s income” is very abstract, and my intuition doesn’t have a lot to say about it. If I imagine a parent holding their alive child, and a person who can afford an iron roof and enough food, my intuition has very strong opinions about both of these situations. Through this method, I connect my donations with all parts of my brain, instead of just the ‘explicit verbal thinking’ part.

Some charities are easier than others to visualize. GiveDirectly is particularly easy to visualize, because of GiveDirectly Live. I can scroll through GDLive and take credit for cash transfers up to 83% of the value of my donation (the rest goes to overhead). The life-saving GiveWell charities are also particularly easy to visualize: you can divide your donation by the cost per life saved and get an estimate of how many children you’ve saved.

Life-improving global poverty charities other than GiveDirectly, animal charities, and existential risk charities are harder to visualize. The GiveWell cost-effectiveness spreadsheet suggests that deworming is about ten times as good as GiveDirectly, so if you donate to a deworming charity you can do the GiveDirectly Live thing but multiply your donation by ten.

Animal charities and existential risk charities are more difficult to motivate. I suggest studying what the charity you’re donating to does, coming up with some reasonable thing that your donation is buying, and then following the chain of how it winds up improving the world. For example, a ten thousand dollar donation to the Good Food Institute might pay for an eighth of the salary of a person specializing in outreach to startups, and they identify funding opportunities for cultured meat startups, and that makes it more likely that cultured meat is developed.

I think it’s important, when you visualize, to make sure that a larger donation gets you a more rewarding visualization. People do not in general do this on their own. If your donations save five children’s lives, then you should make a particular effort to imagine five separate children that you saved and give yourself credit for each of them.

I haven’t explored this personally, but I’m interested in thinking about ways to bring the effects of my donations to mind more often. For example, I’ve considered making a collage of the benefits that come from my donations: a picture of a child for each child’s life saved, an iron roof for each GiveDirectly-cash-transfer-equivalent increase in consumption, a chicken for each donation equivalent to a year of veganism, a criminal for each person saved from the US justice system, a star for each appropriate unit decrease in the chance of human extinction, etc.

This, except with a bunch of pictures of African children.

Does anyone else have any thoughts on how to make the effects of one’s donations more ‘real’, or other methods to increase warmfuzzies from donations and align warmfuzzies with effectiveness?

A Response To Making Discussions In EA Groups Inclusive

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effective altruism, ozy blog post

Recently, an article was posted on the Effective Altruism Forum about making members of marginalized groups feel more included in effective altruism. It was written by more than twelve anonymous contributors. It argues that, because it is important that underrepresented groups feel welcome in effective altruism, we should be particularly cautious about certain conversations that risk making members of underrepresented groups feel uncomfortable. It suggests a long list of topics that effective altruists should think carefully before bringing up in effective altruist spaces, perhaps to the point of de facto banning them.

I agree that it is important to make marginalized people feel welcome in effective altruism, for several reasons. Some categories of people (women, people of color, people with certain disabilities, religious people, poor people) are underrepresented in effective altruism compared to the general population. Something about effective altruism may be driving those people away and causing us to lose out on talent and unique perspectives. Other categories of people (LGBTQA+ people, people with certain other disabilities) are over-represented in effective altruism compared to the general population. If the effective altruism community is homophobic, transphobic, or ableist, these people will experience stress and unhappiness, which is bad for its own sake, as well as perhaps making them less capable of doing good.

Unfortunately, I am afraid that the approach this article is taking sacrifices important effective altruist values while not necessarily succeeding in being welcoming to members of marginalized groups.

I am not against the idea that certain discussion topics should be unwelcome in effective altruist spaces. I myself have argued repeatedly that effective altruism should be secular, which is to say that effective altruist discussions should not touch the subject of religion in any way. Even if the most effective intervention is to convert everyone to your religion, that is not on topic in an effective altruist space, and you should talk about it elsewhere. (That is, of course, separate from supporting a religious organization which happens to implement a program that is highly cost-effective from secular premises.) Even if your true reason for believing something is that God commanded it, you must either come up with an argument that people of all religions can accept, or say “I believe this for religious reasons, so I won’t argue it.” Religious conversations are notoriously heated and hard to resolve, and a lot of progress can be made on animal advocacy, global poverty, and existential risk without resolving whether God exists or not.

Many of the items on the list seem similarly off-topic in effective altruist spaces. For example, I see no reason why effective altruist spaces should host discussions of whether having sex with men is a moral obligation, whether trans people are trying to trick people into sleeping with them, or indeed of sex in general. Similarly, I see no reason for effective altruist spaces to discuss corporal punishment, whether we should kill severely disabled people who are unable to consent to euthanasia, or whether gay people contribute to the survival of the species. These are simply not on topic, and they’re conversations that are likely to get heated and to alienate people.

However, certain of the topics discussed seem crucially related to effective altruist causes. For example, I do not think it is true that we should value people in the developing world less because they are less productive, or that people in the developing world are poor because of character flaws. But if these were true, they would be vitally important crucial considerations for how we direct effective altruist effort. And there are claims which reasonable people believe that an uncharitable person might round off to one of those claims. For example, poverty in the developing world might be related to corrupt and extractive institutions, as economist Daron Acemoglu argues; some people might strawman that position as “people in the developing world are poor because they have character flaws such as corruption.”

Of course, no one is suggesting that the causes of poverty in the developing world should be off-limits as an effective altruist discussion topic; that would be absurd. Instead, it appears that– at least on certain topics– the article is arguing for a one-sided silencing of certain positions on a topic. We can attribute poverty in the developing world to colonialism, inadequate institutions, or the simple absence of economic growth; we can’t attribute it to character flaws. We can argue enthusiastically that people in the developing world matter as much as people in the developed world; we can’t argue that they don’t matter as much.

So the article is not arguing that certain topics should be off-topic; it is arguing that certain topics should be on-topic, but that certain positions on certain topics should be forbidden.

There are several serious issues with one-sided silencing. Obviously, it does not let us self-correct if the forbidden position is right. But even if the forbidden position is wrong, there are serious costs. People who believe the forbidden position can’t bring up their arguments and have them debunked. People who believe correct positions can easily start to strawman their opponents, becoming less persuasive to those who believe incorrect things. The aura of forbidden knowledge may make those positions paradoxically enticing.

I don’t mean to imply that one-sided silencing is always wrong. For example, it would be derailing to bring up in the comments of a post about strategies for measuring diet change that you don’t think animals matter morally. Some conversations have to work from certain shared premises. An Effective Animal Altruists Facebook group could, quite reasonably, ban people for saying that animals don’t matter, because this is in fact not on topic for any discussion they have. But it is very important to sometimes talk about whether animals matter morally. An effective altruism movement in which that was never discussed would be critically impoverished.

The authors bring up that it would be “exhausting and counterproductive” for EAs to always have to discuss whether EA is a good idea in EA groups. But this is an argument against their thesis. It is vitally important that effective altruists consider whether EA is a good idea and engage with the best arguments of their critics. Certainly, it would be derailing to post “I think we have a special obligation to those close to us” in the comments of a post about educational interventions in sub-Saharan Africa. But if effective altruists were very hesitant to discuss the idea that effective altruism is fundamentally misguided, we would be perilously close to being a cult.

I am concerned that, not only will this effort make it more difficult for effective altruists to seek truth, but it will also fail to make effective altruism more welcoming to members of marginalized groups.

I think it is easy to confuse the views of marginalized groups with the views of people who consider themselves to be advocates for those groups. For example, many people believe abortion is an issue where men are generally pro-life and women are generally pro-choice, but in reality women are only slightly more likely than men to believe that abortion should be legal in all circumstances, and are equally likely to believe it should be illegal in all circumstances. While I don’t have polling data about many of the topics the authors of the article suggested should be generally off-limits, I personally know several disabled people who feel very strongly that they should not have children because of the risk of passing on their disabilities. They would feel very unwelcome if forbidden from expressing this opinion in a relevant discussion– especially if the policy were created with the specific intention of making them feel welcome!

The authors failed to address that, while forbidding one topic might be welcoming to one group, it might be unwelcoming to members of other groups. For example, most black people spank their children, at least sometimes; would a black woman who spanks her children feel unwelcome if an overwhelmingly white community is telling her that she can’t defend the parenting practices she chose because she believes they are best for her children? Similarly, many Muslims are socially conservative; is forbidding the expression of socially conservative beliefs unwelcoming to those Muslims? As far as I can tell, this question was not considered.

According to the article, the list of potentially upsetting topics was formed through asking marginalized effective altruists what topics make them feel unwelcome; none of the names of the effective altruists consulted are public. Of course, I understand why people might prefer not to speak under their own names. But I am concerned that this group may not be representative of the groups they’re from. Effective altruists tend to be different from people who aren’t effective altruists in many ways. Unless effort was made to combat this, the group that wrote the questions was probably richer, whiter, more educated, less religious, and more liberal than the groups they’re speaking for. All of these will affect what beliefs they tend to find offensive.

Further, I don’t actually think limiting discussion in this way is the lowest-hanging fruit for making effective altruism welcoming to marginalized groups and groups that are underrepresented in effective altruism.

I believe a more promising approach is the approach I took in my article about how effective altruists can be welcoming to conservatives. I do not suggest that we shouldn’t criticize Donald Trump. I do suggest avoiding jokes that have “conservatives are stupid” as a punchline, highlighting the effective altruist achievements of conservative politicians, using examples from both sides of the political aisle, and remembering that conservatives are in your audience and are listening.

Obviously, not every marginalized or underrepresented group will have similar low-hanging fruit. But I think this sort of approach is very promising, and a lot of it can generalize. Avoid jokes that hinge on a particular underrepresented group having negative traits. Highlight the effective altruist achievements of poor people, less educated people, women, LGBT people, and people of color. Remember that members of marginalized groups are in the audience.

There are other potential sources of low-hanging fruit. I’ve talked to local group organizers who said that they found the best way to attract new female effective altruists is to have two women commit to show up to every meeting, so that new women didn’t feel alienated by being the only woman in the room. I suspect a similar approach could be useful for other visible marginalizations, such as race and some physical disabilities.

Some advice is specific to the marginalized group in question. For example, disabled people often have a difficult time participating without appropriate accommodations. Local effective altruism groups might want to work towards being wheelchair-accessible and fragrance-free. Effective altruist websites might be built using accessibility best practices, such as image descriptions.

I believe that taking this sort of common-sense steps will make effective altruism more inclusive without compromising the ability of effective altruists to seek truth.

If You Believe In Short AI Timelines And A Positive Outcome You Should Consider Donating A Kidney

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effective altruism, ozy blog post

Many effective altruists of my acquaintance expect an artificial general intelligence (AGI) to be created within our lifetimes. They expect its abilities to far outstrip our own. Many of them believe there is a high chance of a very positive outcome: the creation of a post-scarcity society where people live for hundreds or thousands of years (if not indefinitely) and no longer suffer from human limitations.

I have occasionally seen people suggest that effective altruists who focus on the far future should not donate kidneys. I think this is a true claim for some sets of beliefs that far-future EAs sometimes have: for example, if you think there is a high chance of human extinction, donating a kidney is less good. But for the beliefs I outlined, I think donating a kidney is a thing more people should consider doing.

Kidney donation increases the patient’s lifespan by about nine years. For people who do not expect a post-scarcity society to be created in the relatively near future, the benefits of donating a kidney are, well, about nine years of life, plus the improved quality of life from not having to be on dialysis.

However, for people who expect a value-aligned superintelligence soon, kidney donation significantly increases the chance that a person will live a very very long lifespan in utopia. (Many people expect that the superintelligence will be able to upload minds or 3D print kidneys or similar.) Rather than a mere 14 QALYs, kidney donation produces hundreds if not thousands of expected QALYs.

Short AI timelines also reduce the costs of donation. Many risks are at the end of life, such as the increased risk of kidney disease; if you have short AI timelines, those risks are irrelevant (either because you’re dead or because the superintelligence has cured kidney disease). While you might have to avoid ibuprofen, you only have to avoid it for ten years or so, at least if you timed your kidney donation correctly.

I am uncertain about when to time your kidney donation relative to your AGI timelines. On one hand, you don’t want to risk overshooting and wasting your kidney; on the other hand, you want to maximize the chance that your recipient will survive until the creation of AGI.

There are certain people for whom it is not the right decision to donate a kidney. An incomplete list:

• People who are not allowed to donate a kidney by the medical establishment.
• People who wish to save their kidney to increase the chance that family members or friends make it to the creation of a superintelligence.
• People who are unusually scared of needles or hospitals or for whom this is otherwise an unreasonably large request.
• People who are doing direct work, if they expect three weeks of their work to produce more QALYs than donating.
  • It may be worth considering whether the enforced rest from donating a kidney would have some of the benefits of taking a vacation for you.
• People who do not get paid medical leave or vacation and who either are paid enough that their donations outweigh the benefit of donating a kidney or would suffer financial difficulties from taking three weeks off.

But in general, I think more EAs who are concerned about AGI should consider kidney donation as part of their portfolio of altruistic behavior.

Book Post for April (Global Poverty and Misc)

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effective altruism

Global Poverty

The Gender Effect: An ethnography of the Nike Foundation. The author cannot write, which is very unfortunate, because she has some amazing data; reading between the lines, she wound up volunteering at a bunch of Nike-Foundation-associated NGOs until they forgot she was doing research and were perhaps more candid than they really ought to be.

“Women in development,” “women and development, and “gender and development” are apparently three different paradigms for studying gender and international development. Why. (“Women in development” is the liberal economics-y one, “women and development” is the Marxist one, and “gender and development” is the intersectional, postmodernist one.)

At the time the data was collected, the Nike Foundation prioritized economic empowerment for adolescent girls. Their implicit definition of “adolescent girl” was constructed on a Western and developed-world line– the adolescent girl is unemployed, in school, not pregnant, etc.– which doesn’t match the concrete reality on the ground. Adult women were explicitly excluded, on the grounds that they were already married and employed and had children and therefore their position in life is set and they could not be meaningfully economically empowered.

Girls specifically are prioritized because, the Nike Foundation believes, women are selfless and invest in their communities, unlike men. There’s this appalling anecdote where a staff member at an NGO says “we want to help girls, because when you go to the beach and no one has any money, who pays? the girl.” This is a remarkable example of sexist pedestalization wearing a feminist hat, and puts an enormous burden on marginalized teenage girls. Not only are they responsible for their own well-being and flourishing, they’re responsible for lifting their entire community out of poverty? There’s an assumption that of course women are responsible for the wellbeing of everyone around them, which honestly is incredibly sexist! Perhaps we should be empowering women to set reasonable boundaries about what things are and are not their personal problems.

One of the NGOs studied provides job education to teenage girls. At the beginning of the program, the girls had a variety of different aspirations: vet, architect, doctor. At the end of the program, literally all of them wanted to become administrative assistants. The researcher asked the NGO why it channeled them into becoming administrative assistants, instead of encouraging them to go to college, which they would probably be able to do for free; the answer is that they were poor black girls from the favela and being a secretary was pretty much the best the NGO felt they could hope for. Not only did the “economic empowerment” charity reduce girls’ aspirations, it also failed to particularly economically empower them: most of the participants were unemployed and most of the employed participants had menial jobs.

The Nike Foundation made a bunch of investments on the theory that economically and educationally empowering teenage girls would pay off. The Foundation did not want to have to switch to a different cause area. This, naturally, caused their monitoring and evaluation division to nudge the grantees to get certain results. To quote one informant:

 They have this M&E [monitoring and evaluation] framework into which the grantees’ work is supposed to feed. The reason we are supporting you is because we want to say this after we fund you. It is really particular and really easy for them to be disappointed. . . . They have big plans for the messaging around the M&E, which is why they are trying to set up the M&E so carefully. It is almost pre-messaged. Let’s see. Its engagement with grantees is set up in such a way that their findings are already anticipated. Can we say this, can we say that?

In particular, the Nike Foundations M&E programs tended to prioritize things the evaluators considered important (age at first marriage, age at first pregnancy, assets, income) rather than things the participants considered important. This creates perverse incentives. One NGO pressured its participants not to have children so their funding wouldn’t be revoked. Delaying pregnancy and marriage were used as metrics even when studying women in their late teens and early twenties, many of whom may prefer to marry and have children. The Nike Foundation’s messaging around “if a woman gets pregnant, she can no longer become economically empowered” fails to engage with on-the-ground realities, such as some women who go back to school after their children are born in order to create a better life for their kids.

Doomed Interventions: I object to the premise of this book. There is very little evidence about whether HIV/AIDS interventions in Africa are succeeding or failing. The evidence that does exist often suggests that they’re succeeding: for example, new HIV infections are dropping in Africa. The author insists she is not making any claims about whether HIV interventions are working or not, but the literal subtitle of her book is “The Failure of Global Responses To AIDS In Africa.”

Africans, as a group, tend to deprioritize HIV/AIDS. This is a major mismatch with donor funding: in many years, more aid money is spent on HIV/AIDS than is spent on all other health programs in Africa combined. HIV-positive Africans and those who lost a loved one to HIV were not much more likely to prioritize HIV spending. It seems like some of what is going on is that people with HIV benefit from public health measures that help everyone: for example, people with AIDS are particularly likely to die from opportunistic infections, so they benefit from clean water.

The author discusses aid spending from the point of view of principal-agent problems. This causes her to combine two distinct situations in her analysis. First, sometimes aid money is just stolen, which is obviously bad. Second, sometimes headmen (village leaders) redirect money earmarked to HIV for causes their constituents care about more, such as clean water or improved agriculture. The latter seems… fine? Unless we have some specific reason to believe that we know better than the headmen what the village’s needs are– which does happen, headmen do not have Sci-Hub access and cannot read the latest economics papers about the effect of deworming on development– it is a good thing for headmen to redirect money towards more pressing needs.

A baffling fact that was shared without any explanation whatsoever is that, in Malawi, the highest-risk groups for HIV infection include primary school teachers. (Malawi has essentially no blood-related transmission of HIV.) Why do primary school teachers have such a high rate of HIV? What the fuck? Does anybody know the answer to this?

Further interesting facts:

• Traditional healers typically give accurate information about how to reduce your risk of HIV. At least one peddler of a quack HIV prevention medicine claims it only works if you and your partner are monogamous.
• The Chichewa word for “white person” translates as “wonder maker.”
• Village headmen are not typically elected in Malawi. However, if they do a poor job, they will be driven out of the village by a group of women jeering and hurling insults.
• People in Malawi seem to get a lot of divorces, to the point that a major source of a village headman’s power is the fact that he typically is a mediator during divorces. I would be interested in reading more about how this works.

Portfolios of the Poor: The subtitle is “How The World’s Poor Live On $2 A Day” and I bought it hoping that it would tell me about how you get food, shelter, and medical care if you live on $2 a day. This is not actually the topic of the book. Instead, Portfolios of the Poor is about how the global poor do financial management and budgeting.

The global poor have “triple whammy”: their incomes are low, their incomes are unpredictable and uneven (some days they earn a lot of money and others none at all), and they do not have access to financial instruments designed to deal with their unique problems. They must figure out how to smooth consumption, raise lump sums when necessary, and deal with emergencies. The global poor use a surprisingly sophisticated array of financial techniques to manage this triple whammy. In fact, the amount of money saved, loaned, or borrowed over the course of the year is often many times the family’s income.

From the perspective of the global poor, there isn’t necessarily a difference between savings and loans. The global poor often pay money to save: for example, they may pay a person to stop by their house every day and bug them to give the person ten cents, of which they will receive $2.50 at the end of the month. The global poor often also pay off their loans and then immediately take out a new loan. It is easy to see how, from the perspective of a member of the global poor, these may be considered the same financial instrument. While it may seem economically irrational, it actually makes sense: you can buy many more things with $2.50 than with ten cents every day, you can’t procrastinate on saving money, and no one is going to steal your savings.

For this reason, it’s important to design financial services for the global poor that reflect the needs of the global poor. It’s a mistake to assume that the global poor are going to use their microloans to invest in a small business and move out of poverty. Instead, microfinance should strive to provide a convenient, reliable, flexible way to access lump sums of money that doesn’t require the global poor to exercise an inhuman level of self-discipline.

Miscellaneous

Who Could That Be At This Hour?: I generally found the VFD sections of the Series of Unfortunate Events books rather tedious and uninteresting, and Who Could That Be At This Hour is literally nothing but VFD content. If it is the sort of thing you’re interested in, you may be interested in it, but I was not.

The Dialectic of Sex: The Dialectic of Sex is an incredibly frustrating book. On one hand, it is one of the few feminist books that presents a utopia that I find exciting. Many feminist utopias are bland and don’t really question the nature of society (“what if… there was still day care… but it was 24 hours a day and free”). Others lack specifics (“everyone loves their bodies and racism is over”). Still others are just really really unappealing (“everyone lives in harmony with nature and respects their moon cycles,” “we have finally eradicated the scourge of kinky sex from the world”).

But Shulamith Firestone’s vision is a place where I want to live. Increasing automation frees both women and men from the burden of unchosen work, allowing them plenty of time for art and play. Contraceptives, artificial wombs, improved formula, and similar technological advancements will give women and men an equal role in all parts of the childbearing and childrearing process, except by personal choice. Coercive education is abolished, children are integrated with all of society as full citizens, and children’s rights are massively expanded, including a right of children to switch households. People have complete sexual freedom, and all consensual sexual decisions are unstigmatized. It is no longer assumed that everyone wants a monogamous, committed, romantic-sexual life partnership or that romantic relationships are more important than friendships. The fundamental unit of society is the household, a group of adults who have agreed to share their lives and build a family together; it is not assumed that a household must consist of two people in a romantic-sexual relationship, or that people must limit their romantic or sexual relationships to their own household. The last chapter of The Dialectic of Sex describes the feminist world I want to have.

I also think the core of Shulamith Firestone’s analysis is accurate. Women’s oppression is related to their biology: that is, as long as men are physically stronger than women, and women spend much of their lives pregnant or breastfeeding, there will be a division of labor between men and women. The division of labor will produce gender roles which do not necessarily serve the flourishing of either men or women, and because men are not constrained by taking care of small children they will generally wind up with political and economic power. The sensible and practical solution is to minimize biological sex divisions through, most importantly, contraceptives and artificial wombs.

Unfortunately, the Dialectic of Sex is fundamentally marred by many of the weaknesses of second-wave feminist theory. It assumes Freudianism is an accurate model of human psychology, which is responsible for many of its most baffling claims (in an ideal feminist society people would no longer have the incest taboo) and simple factual inaccuracies (children raised in gender-equal households will all be bisexual). This is hardly Shulamith Firestone’s fault– the book was published in 1970– but it means much of the work is not useful for a modern feminist thinker.

I really want someone to take Firestone’s basic framework and update it to create a powerful vision of a liberatory, sex-positive, anti-work, pro-children’s rights transhumanist feminism.

Without You, There Is No Us: A fascinating, powerful memoir about a woman who taught English to the sons of North Korea’s elite. By far the most interesting part of the book is how many questions it leaves unanswered. Even living in North Korea does not give you a lot of information about what North Korea is like. Her students lie thoughtlessly and constantly, about easily observable facts: saying they partied with their friends at other schools on summer break when all their friends were doing forced construction labor; saying they slept in till 8am when they were clearly doing drills at 6am. The author goes on a trip to a Christian church full of North Koreans; she wonders, uneasily, whether the church was made up as a show for her. The book tells you very little about what North Korea is like, but makes you acutely aware of how little you know about it.

The Only Harmless Great Thing: In an alternate history with sapient elephants, after a radium company had to stop using human women, it used elephants. Sometimes you get a feeling that the author has read the same viral Tumblr text posts you have. I enjoyed it fine– the radium girls are a very interesting historical setup– but it didn’t feel deep or well-thought-out. It really felt like the author’s engagement with history consisted solely of Tumblr text posts.

Why I’m An EA

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effective altruism, ozy blog post

In January, over the past few years, I’ve sometimes written a post about why I’m an effective altruist. Sometimes that went along with the Giving What We Can pledge drive, but the GWWC pledge drive has been deemphasized as effective altruists have learned more about the best ways to do good. But I think January is still a good time to stop and reflect and think about why I’ve chosen the goals that I have.

My husband and I could have saved ten children with our donations this year.

We didn’t end up saving ten children, because we didn’t donate to the Malaria Consortium. Instead, we split our donations between Evidence Action and the Animal Welfare Fund, both of which have results that are harder to easily summarize.

But. We could have saved ten children this year, and we didn’t, because we thought we could outperform saving ten children’s lives.

“Ten” is an interesting number of children. It’s large, but it’s understandable. I’ve seen ten children in a particular location. It’s a small birthday party’s worth of kids. Not quite one a month.

It’s hard to think about hundreds or millions. When I try to think about millions of children, it turns out actually the whole time I was thinking about maybe six. But I can, in fact, wrap my brain around ten.

Next year, we’re aiming to donate fifteen percent of our income instead of ten; by coincidence, that means we would be able to save fifteen children instead of ten. Half a classroom. You’re a hero, if you rescue half a classroom from a fire.

And we can do that next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. My husband will get raises, so we can save more; the low-hanging fruit is (slowly, wonderfully) getting picked, so we can save fewer.

I won’t ever know her name. It’s impossible even in principle to know which person I saved. But somewhere out there in the world there’s a mother kissing her child’s forehead while she tucks them in at night, and if it weren’t for me she would never be able to kiss her child’s forehead again.

When I donated to GiveDirectly, I used to scroll down GiveDirectly Live and take credit for things. A woman got her own house instead of having to live with her abusive cowife, thanks to me. A family has a cow and their two children have milk, thanks to me. A man paid for a dowry and he could get married and they’re very happy together, thanks to me.

I am a very, very privileged person. My husband is a programmer, which makes me one of the richest people on Earth. I don’t mean to deny that. Saving ten lives a year is out of reach for the vast majority of people.

But… I think it’s an important thing to let people know that you don’t have to be a firefighter or a doctor or Spider-man to save a person’s life. The cost to save a person’s life is the same as the cost of a vacation, or a year of Starbucks coffees.

Effective altruists often talk about effective altruism as a sort of obligation, something you have to do or you’ll be a bad person. That isn’t what this post is about. I don’t think there’s anything you have to particularly do with this information. I think the act/omission distinction, or something close to it, is an important part of living sanely in the world. If you’d rather have the vacation, I’m not going to criticize you.

I just… in case you’re feeling like your life is meaningless or worthless, that no one would notice if you died, that you’re going to be born and work some bullshit job and watch a bunch of TV and never leave any mark on anything, that nothing you do matters, that there’s nothing you do that you can really be proud of…

If you make the average American household income and donate ten percent of it, your household can save three children’s lives a year.

Whenever that voice in my head that talks about how I’m a worthless stupid failure who doesn’t deserve to exist gets too loud, I count up the children I’ve saved.

I’m a worthless stupid failure and I’ve saved a dozen kids and nothing and no one will ever be able to take that away from me.

In terms of a purpose in life and a sense of accomplishment, you could do worse.

Bounty: Guide To Switching From Farmed Fish To Wild-Caught Fish

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effective altruism, ozy blog post

Various effective altruists have suggested that avoiding farmed fish is one of the most important things you can do to reduce the amount of suffering caused by your diet. Fortunately, an almost perfect substitute for farmed fish exists: wild-caught fish. It is very unclear whether eating more wild-caught fish is good or bad for fish. Replacing a food that’s very bad with a food that might be good or might be bad seems like progress.

However, it does not seem like there are any guides for how best to replace one’s farmed fish consumption with wild-caught fish.

I am offering a bounty of up to $500 for a well-written, easy-to-understand guide to replacing farmed fish with wild-caught fish. Questions that might be addressed by this guide include:

• Which, if any, species of fish are always farmed?
• Which, if any, species of fish are always wild-caught?
• How likely are farmed fish to be mislabeled as wild-caught? Are there heuristics to use to avoid mislabeled fish?
• If you don’t know whether a fish is wild-caught or farmed, how do you figure it out?
• How likely is a fish of unknown origin to be wild-caught? Farmed? What factors affect whether it is wild-caught or farmed?
• What are the cheapest ways to buy wild-caught fish?
• What are the best wild-caught substitutes for commonly eaten farmed fish?
• Which fish oil pills, if any, use wild-caught fish?

The full $500 will be paid out for a complete, well-researched, well-copyedited, easy-to-understand guide that is ready to be given to interested reducetarians. Incomplete or poorly edited reports will receive a portion of the bounty depending on my judgment of their quality. Reports with factual errors or which are otherwise very low-quality will not receive any money.

People interested in the bounty are encouraged to email me at ozybrennan@gmail.com so I can connect them to other interested people, for coordination and to avoid duplication of work.