Some Interesting Things I’ve Read Recently

On funerals keeping Africa poor, miracles, effective altruism, cancer, AI preparedness, telescopic altruism, data centers, Sam Bankman Fried, Dominion, fallacies, and love, plus a personal update

First a personal update: I’m in Oxford working for Forethought for the next several months, after which I’ll begin a philosophy Ph.D at Princeton. Let me know if you are in either location and would like to meet up! Okay, onto the interesting things I’ve read.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—David Oks has one of the best blogs on substack. In a recent piece titled How funerals keep Africa poor, Oks notes the bewildering fact that in many African countries, average expenditure on a single funeral is several times the annual income in the country. He explains that this is part of a broader cultural feature that impedes economic growth, whereby people are expected to make costly signals of kinship ingroup loyalty, preventing individuals from getting ahead. Thoughtful explanation of a deeply bizarre phenomenon. Particularly mind-blowing paragraph:

Out of 325 families that declined into poverty in western Kenya over a period of 25 years, 63 percent cited “heavy expenses related to funerals” as a major cause. And this doesn’t seem to be a new thing. As early as 1853, a visitor to coastal West Africa noted that “even the poorest will pawn and enslave themselves to obtain the means of burying a relation decently, according to the ideas of country.”

(edit: see here for claims that this phenomenon isn’t as widespread as Oks says).

His other articles are great too! Especially popular has been Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did. I also met Oks briefly and can attest that he’s a pretty cool guy!

How effective is effective altruism, you might wonder. Will MacAskill in his recent piece on EA successes answers: staggeringly effective. Since its inception, EA has saved around 300,000 lives, spared 100 million hens from a cage per year, and contributed positively to pandemic preparedness and mitigation of AI risks.

300,000 lives is about the population of Oxford and Cambridge combined, meaning that the number of lives EA has saved directly is equivalent to preventing a nuclear bomb from wiping both Oxford and Cambridge off the map. Pretty extraordinary for a small movement! And best of all, EA is rapidly growing! You’d think that EA critics would find that fact more worth mentioning than whatever random things that sound bad out of context Nick Beckstead said in his Ph.D thesis 12 years ago.

The link also has Will’s complete appearance on the Sam Harris podcast. Sam posed good questions, but I felt like Will extremely convincingly dispatched every objection Sam raised.

Ben Sasse was always one of my favorite senators from the other side of the aisle. He always seemed clearly to be a man of both principle and integrity. Tragically, he is dying of pancreatic cancer. His appearance on Ross Douthat’s podcast is an excellent example of how one should live on the brink of death—and he confronts his impending demise with humor, decency, and courage.

The organization I work for, Forethought, is constantly churning out hugely important pieces of research. In a recent one, Will MacAskill and Fin Moorhouse provide extremely specific and concrete projects for making a world of advanced AI go better. I would highly encourage some people to work on these projects which could make the difference between a post-AGI world that goes well and one that goes badly. The top five proposals:

AI character evaluation. Start an independent org to evaluate and stress-test AI character traits (epistemic integrity, prosociality, appropriate refusals), hold developers accountable against their own model specs / constitutions, and suggest and incentivise improvements to the specs.

Automated macrostrategy. Create evaluations and benchmarks, collect human-generated training data, and build scaffolds to improve AI competence at big-picture strategic and philosophical reasoning.

AI security assessment. Start an independent org that evaluates AI models for sabotage and backdoors, and makes recommendations about AI constitutions.

Enabling deals. Start an independent organisation to broker deals with potentially misaligned AI models in order to incentivise early schemers to disclose misalignment and cooperate with alignment efforts.

AI for improving collective epistemics. E.g. build an AI chief of staff that helps users act in line with the better angels of their nature.

See more of Forethought’s research here.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem How Do I Love Thee is very good! It manages to capture perfectly the kind of deep love involved in caring about another person as you do yourself, where they are like a part of you, distinguished from the immediate rush of affection that accompanies the beginning of romantic relationships. As C.S. Lewis says “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”¹ Insofar as your care for another person extends only as far as the fuzzy feelings they engender in you, your love is of the feeling and not of them.

Silas Abrahamsen writes very clever, well-written, and careful pieces. In a recent one, he gets to the bottom of the “are claims evidence?” controversy. His view, that claims are evidence, and their evidential status works just the same way as every other item of evidence, is clearly right. Silas’s April fool’s day post was also by far the funniest thing I read on April fools.

I’ve mentioned before that Ethan Muse is almost superhumanly persuasive in person. In his online debates, he’s generally pretty restrained, and sticks to dryly recounting the facts rather than doing much editorializing. Well, in his recent interview with Patrick Flynn, Ethan turned the persuasiveness dial up to 11—and you can see clearly why he’s a force to be reckoned with in arguments. I don’t think the case for Fatima being miraculous is very good, but man it sounds good when he presents it.

Speaking of Ethan, someone also cleaned up the audio for his debate about Lanciano with Stacy Trasancos, so that it’s listenable now. This Friday, he’ll also be debating with Sean Luke about whether apparently Catholic miracles are demonic deceptions (for once on Catholic miracles, I agree with Ethan—I don’t think Fatima was a demonic deception!)

In his crusade to defend Catholicism, Ethan wrote a piece arguing that the Lanciano relic was miraculous. Maxime Georgel wrote a reply, Ethan replied to that, and now Georgel has replied to his reply. The last reply is in French, but you can easily translate it.

Ethan also has a piece about Padre Pio that I haven’t yet seen a good response to. Someone should write up a comprehensive reply (there’s one reply but it’s very far from comprehensive, and the author mostly ignored Ethan’s objections)! It also seems like explaining apparent miracles is a good way to grow your blog.

(I thought this video was pretty good but not comprehensive).

Speaking of Fatima, Arthur T uncovers a Buddhist analogue of Fatima. Arthur’s substack is also cool for investigating a lot of apparent miracles and things that obviously aren’t miracles but bear suspicious resemblances to miracles. Scott Alexander also comments on the Buddhist miracle.

Speaking of Scott, here he demolishes the concept of telescopic altruism. Lots of people claim that caring about people on the other side of the world is a smoke-screen for neglecting those nearby—that supposedly compassionate liberals use sanctimonious rhetoric about foreigners to justify hating their neighbors and their countrymen. Scott explains why this charge doesn’t hold up—the whole thing is worth reading, but here’s a representative quote:

“Telescopic altruism” is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin “virtue signaling”, it usually gets used to own the libs. Some lib cares about people in Gaza - why? Shouldn’t she be thinking about her friends and neighbors instead? The only possible explanation is that she’s an evil person who hates everyone around her, but manages to feel superior to decent people by pretending to “care” about foreigners who she’ll never meet.

This collapses upon five seconds’ thought. Okay, so the lib is angry about the Israeli military killing 50,000 people in Gaza. Do you think she would be angry if the Israeli military killed 50,000 of her neighbors? Probably yes? Then what’s the problem?

“But vegetarians care about animals more than humans!” Okay, yeah, they sure do get mad about a billion pigs kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten. Do you think they’d care if a billion of their closest friends were kept for their entire lives in cages too small to turn around in, then murdered and eaten? I dunno, seems bad.

See also Being John Rawls from Scott which is one of the best essays I’ve ever read.

Recently, a ridiculous clown paper made the case that data centers were heating the surrounding area, which was then uncritically reported on by the media. Andy Masley takes it apart, noting that the methodology relied on comparing the temperature of the concrete the data center was made from to the surrounding cooler vegetation. See also his brilliant essay Animal Suffering Isn’t Pretend.

Chalmers solves the two envelopes problem.

Elliott Thornley explains, using fission cases, why even person-affecting views will imply some analogue of the repugnant conclusion. His papers are, without exception, very high quality, and his blog is good too!

Benjamin Samuels explains why the world should stop talking so much about Sam Bankman Fried.

If you spend more than five seconds in the bay area, someone will inevitably ask you what your timelines are—when you think artificial general intelligence will be developed. But Toby Ord rightly points out, you should have uncertainty about timelines. Rather than banking on either short or long timelines, you should have broad timelines, and favor actions that are good whether AI comes soon or later.

Drew Housman reviews Dominion, a book by George W. Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, making the case that our treatment of animals is an abomination. Scully’s book is excellent and so is the review—its end is particularly haunting.

Maarten Boudry has another great blog that I only started following recently. His article criticizing the concept of logical fallacies excellently distilled quite an important point. I also appreciated his review of Chomsky vs. Foucault. And over on Twitter, he posted a devastating and hilarious review of Anti-Oedipus.

Our World In Data concisely distills the evidence for human-driven megafauna extinction (see also my article on the subject). Since publishing my article, Paul Shapiro on Twitter gave me another strong argument for megafauna extinction being driven by human hunting: all the extinct species were land animals. This makes sense on the hunting hypothesis since humans mostly hunted land creatures. But if it was caused by warming, it should target the sea too. Especially because global warming has disproportionately harmed sea creatures.

Reasonable candidate for the best video on YouTube. Another good one.

Jack Symes recently appeared on Jubilee to debate veganism with 20 people. He humanely slaughtered them, showing a masterclass performance. The comments are unanimously on his side, even from meat eaters.

Insect farming is presently an economically non-viable dumpsterfire. But you might wonder: will it become viable in the future? A paper analyzed this question and concluded the answer is no—the problems just run too deep and are inherent to the industry. See also Kenny Torella’s article about the abject failure of insect farming.

Spencer Case has a great podcast. In a recent highly-informative episode, he brought on four philosophers to debate the Iran war. I thought the anti-war side made a better case.

Lots of people are pessimistic about philosophy. But in his book, freely available online, Herman Capellan argues convincingly that philosophy is great, among other things because it has uncovered the right answer to most of the deep questions. Of course, there’s not universal agreement on what the right answer is, but mapping out the terrain and identifying the true view is a pretty huge accomplishment.

Michael Huemer wrote a nice post on Valentine’s day about love. One of the more heart-warming things I’ve read. He also has a nice piece destroying Randian objectivism.

Nabokov’s Pale Fire is really good. It starts with a lengthy poem, and then things get a bit strange. I particularly loved this bit:

Retake the falling snow: each drifting flake
Shapeless and slow, unsteady and opaque,
A dull dark white against the day’s pale white
And abstract larches in the neutral light.

1. That definition cannot be quite right. I have a steady wish for the welfare of shrimp, say, but I do not love them. To love someone, you must have not merely a steady wish for their ultimate good, so that you care for it somewhere like your own ultimate good, but also a desire for some kind of unity with them. This unity takes different shapes—the kind of love you might have for a friend would lead you to want to spend time with them, the kind of love had for a lover comes with its own desired forms of unity that would be scandalous if directed at a family member. But in each case, to love someone requires that you want to maintain some kind of relationship with them all else equal.