Study Notes: Sep 13-19, 2015: "Effective altruism and mistakes of globalization"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading in this time: 

• Post, "Effective Altruism and mistakes of globalization", by Topher Hallquist
• Article, "You Ain't Seen Sustainable Dining Until You've Eaten Here", by Rebecca Flint Marx
• Article, "Origins", by Jacob Mikanowski
• Post, "DBT Sequence: Radical Acceptance", by Ozy
• Post, "Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers", by Scott Alexander
• Article, "A happy state", by Benjamin Radcliff
• Post, "Artistic greatness, according to my brain: a first pass", by Luke Muehlhauser

Homework for the future:

• Read the posts linked to by "Responses to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.". Eventually. 
• Still on the to-do list: studying the Austrian School of Economics.
• Finish the reading for "Notes to: Anarchy: Never Been Tried?"
• Finish the reading for "Notes to 16 Articles on Writing"
• Read Fenrir's Shrine. 
• Also on the to-do list: All of those themes that I decide I want to play with, and cool bits that attract me, and things like that? Let's get systematic about that, put them into a single document (might be public, might not) and work with at least one of them every week. Systematic. Systematic. I do it best when I do it systematically. 
• Also, don't forget to flesh this section out a bit more with goals in general, and maybe include a section on which of those goals were accomplished since the last update.

"Effective Altruism and mistakes of globalization"

• "Most people in the effective altruism movement are not economic radicals. You're unlikely to hear them talk about the evils of capitalism, but you're also unlikely to hear them say that taxation is theft and anarcho-capitalism is the only way to go." 
• "Normally, a country like Greece would deal with its problems by devaluing the currency. This would be painful, but would boost exports and tourism by making both cheaper, which would in turn bring down unemployment. Greece can't do this, though, because of the Euro. Greece could solve this problem by leaving the Eurozone, but it hasn't because lots of people are ideologically committed to the Euro."
• "It's relevant that it's widely taken for granted that Eurozone economic policies are really set by the richer Eurozone members, particularly Germany. So seeing the Greece crisis unfold got me wondering about other accusations of rich countries had imposed terrible economic policies on poorer ones. Was there any truth in them? It turns out that among informed people, this isn't terribly controversial." 
• "It matters a lot how free-market policies are implemented. Pacing and order matters. For example, Stiglitz contrasts the bungled transition to capitalism of former members of the Soviet Union--where outside experts pushed for rapid changes, and the result was plundering of national resources by corrupt oligarchs--with China's slower and more successful transition to more market-oriented policies." 
• "Foreign technocrats...may be tempted to ignore what they know of economics if it makes them look like responsible adults. Or if it seems likely to protect them against charges of irresponsibility later. Or if it serves the interests of whoever's paying their salary." 
• "This also suggests a possible direction for EA policy advocacy: advocacy for making the governance of certain global institutions more democratic." 

"You Ain't Seen Sustainable Dining Until You've Eaten Here"

• "For the founders of San Francisco restaurant The Perennial, farm-to-table isn't enough. They're hoping for farm-to-table-to-farm-to-table, repeating." 
• Karen Leibowitz: "When we got started, we focused on energy and transportation efficiency. But we discovered that food systems and agricultural practices are a huge part of the climate-change equation." 
• "At a 3,400-square-foot facility in Oakland, The Perenial's leftovers will be turned back into food with help from some fix. A mix of Pacific sturgeon and channel catfish convert all that biomass into ammonia-rich waste, which bacteria eventually convert into nitrates."
• "Perennial crops stay alive from one year to the next and can be harvested numerous times. That reduces topsoil erosion, agricultural runoff, and carbon released into the atmosphere. The restaurant hopes to create a test plot for a perennial wheatgrass called Kernza and work with Chad Robertson, of San Francisco's Tartine Bakery, to develop bread made from Kernza flour." 
• "The Perennial's beef supplier, Stemple Creek Ranch, captures and sequesters atmospheric carbon--by growing plants. The ranch spreads a 1/2-inch layer of compost over farmland, which increases growth, helping the plants pull more carbon from the atmosphere Good grass is given enough time to grow deep, while cattle graze on invasive species--sequestering even more carbon." 

"Origins"

• "Professional historians can't help but pity their colleagues on the prehistoric side of the fence." 
• "In the annals of prehistory, cultures are designated according to modes of burial such as 'Single Grave', or after styles of arrowhead, such as 'Western Stemmed Point'. Whole peoples are reduced to styles of pottery, such as Pitted Ware, Corded Ware or Funnel Beaker, all of them spread across the map in confusing, amoeba-like blobs."
• "In recent years, archaeologists have become reluctant to infer too much from assemblages of ceramics, weapons and grave goods. For at least a generation, they have been drilled on the mantra that 'pots are not people'. Material culture is not a proxy for identity." 
• "William Jones, a Welsh jurist and philologist, arrived in Calcutta from London in 1783, to take his seat on the Supreme Court of Bengal. As part of his duties, Jones had to familiarise himself with the precepts of Hindu law; to do that, he had to learn Sanskrit. Jones promptly hired a pandit--a Hindu religious scholar--as a tutor, and immersed himself in ancient Sanskrit texts. After three years of study, Jones arrived at a startling conclusion: Sanskrit, the classical language of India, was linked, in its grammar and vocabulary, to Greek and Latin, the classical languages of Europe. Not only that, all three were further related to Germanic, Celtic and Persian languages." 
• "In the more than 200 years since Jones announced his discovery, linguists and philologists have painstakingly reconstructed what PIE sounded like and what grammatical rules it followed. We can write in it, and some have even composed short stories in PIE, about things such as sheep, wolves and gods. Thanks to the work of students of comparative mythology and reconstructed word lists, we have some idea of Proto-Indo-Europeans' lifestyle and what they believed. They lived among oak and beech trees, and savoured mead. They rode in wagons. They cared more for fathers and brothers than aunts and sisters-in-law. They thanked the Sky Father for sons, fat cattle and swift horses. They might or might not have been acquainted with salmon." 
• "The manufacture of bronze required two metals--copper and tin--which necessitated long-distance trade. Agents from the temple cities of Mesopotamia spread far and wide to acquire copper and tin, reaching all the way east to Afghanistan and north to the Russian steppes. They took with them new ideas about property, wealth and war." 
• "Bronze enlarged the world, tying different parts of Eurasia together in a network of trade. The horse shrunk it down, enabling a new, mobile lifestyle." 
• "Coming down through an ice-free corridor in the Laurentide ice sheet (which covered most of what is now Canada and the northern US), they [the Clovis People] stumbled onto an empty continent, full of game. They dispersed quickly, pursuing megafauna as prey. When the megafauna became extinct, the culture vanished too, fragmenting into the hundreds of successor groups that eventually became today's Native Americans." 
• "Scientists who examined him [the 9,000 year-old Kennewick Man] said that his skull morphology was clearly unlike that of modern Native Americans, and more consistent with Ainu or Polynesian descent." 
• "Another theory though suggests that the first Americans didn't come overland, but by boat. They followed the Ring of Fire across the Northern Pacific, jumping from island to island, from the Kurils to the Aleutians, and then down the Pacific Coast all the way to Patagonia. This would account for some of the odd skull morphology seen in Kennewick and other bodies, as well as the early arrival on the west coast of South America. And seafaring on this scale so far back in the past no longer seems impossible. We now know, on the basis of archaeological and genetic studies, that Aboriginal Australians crossed the Torres Strait more than 40,000 years ago."
• "The genome of the Kennewick Man, published this June, showed him to be unmistakably Native American, with no trace of Ainu, Japanese or Pacific Islander ancestry." 
• "While Clovis people are ancestors to most Native Americans, at some point soon after their arrival on the continent, a population bottleneck cut off gene flow between North and South. Southern Americans preserved a direct line of descent to the first Paleo-Indians. In the North, the connection was slowly diluted by the arrival of later migrations, such as the one that brought Inuk's ancestors to the Arctic."
• "In July, researchers at Harvard and the University of Copenhagen announced that they had independently found signs of a faint, but definite kinship between Native Amazonians and Aboriginal Australians and Papua New Guineans... The Danish team suggests that Australasian DNA travelled to the Americas in the somewhat recent past, after the initial peopling of the Americas, but before European contact. According to them, the genes could have hopscotched across the Aleutians and then across North and Central America through chains of interbreeding individuals. By contrast, the Harvard team proposes that it was brought to the Americas by a 'phantom' population, nicknamed Y, who were another founding member of the group of pioneers who initially settled the Americas. If this is true, the people who first crossed the Bering Strait start to seem unexpectedly diverse and cosmopolitan." 

"DBT Sequence: Radical Acceptance"

• "The most obvious form of not radically accepting something is denial... Another form is throwing a tantrum about the way reality is... Getting angry won't actually get you anywhere faster. All it does it make you miserable."
• "You can tell you're probably throwing a tantrum if your internal monologue starts sounding like the lyrics to a Simple Plan song: 'How could this happen to me? I made my mistakes! Why me? This shouldn't be this way! This is so unfair!' Sorry. The universe is not fair. You are going to have to deal with it." 
• "Lying down and letting the world walk all over you is also a form of tantrum-throwing." 
• "A third way that not radically accepting something manifests is thinking 'I can't stand this, I can't endure it, nothing will ever be good again.' If the entire history of humanity has shown anything, it is that people can endure anything... Call it the hedonic treadmill, call it 'if eople got hit on the head with a baseball bat every week pretty soon they'd be okay with it', it does a lot of bad shit, but when you're facing down a catastrophe, it's your best friend... Normal life continues. Your cat is hungry. The weather will get colder and you will need a jacket. Tomorrow morning, you will have to pee." 
• "Radical acceptance is perhaps poorly-named, because it definitely doesn't refer to somoe of the things people think when they see the word 'acceptance'. It doesn't mean refusing to try to change things. In fact, you can't change things unless you radically accept them. If you don't acknowledge that something is there to be interacted with, how can you interact with it to change it? And isn't it a lot easier to change something if you aren't wasting a ton of energy on denial, throwing tantrums, and catastrophizing?" 
• Epictetus: "Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own activities." 
• "First, notice that you're not accepting reality... The next step is to say to yourself 'I am going to accept reality as it is.' It can help to have mantras: you can say the Litany of Gendlin or the Litany of Tarski or 'rejecting reality doesn't change reality' or 'the path out of hell is through misery' or 'this is what happened, I can't change it' or 'life can be worth living even with pain.' You can do a little doublethink here: you can say to yourself 'I don't actually have to accept it right now. Right now I'm just promising that I will accept it.'"
• "Let yourself feel the feelings that naturally arise from what you're accepting. It can help to pay attention to what's going on in your body: your pulse, your stomach, your breath, the feel of your feet in your shoes." 
• "Ultimately, you want to do something DBT calls 'willingness'. Willingness is active participation in reality, playing the hand you're dealt, doing the best you can given the circumstances. Willingness is doing what you need to do in each situation without dragging your feet or being reluctant." 
• "Another common failure mode is to find ourselves accepting something that isn't actually true. If you find yourself accepting that you will never ever ever find someone who likes you and you are doomed to die alone with your cats, you might have a problem." 
• "The opposite of radical acceptance is avoidance." 
• "Don't assume that just because it doesn't feel like you're avoiding anything that you aren't avoiding anything. A lot of avoidance is very subtle, sophisticated, and deniable." 
• "Avoidance is often caused by fear. And we know how to deal with fear: you do the thing you're afraid of, over and over again, until it no longer frightens you. So if you are avoiding a truth, and it's the bad kind of avoidance, you need to make a special effort to look the fear in the eye, to not flinch away, to think about it, again and again, until it is no longer frightening." 
• "One [technique for allowing radical acceptance] is half-smiling with willing hands. The idea behind this one is that smiling makes you happier, because bodies are absurdly poorly designed. To half-smile, relax the entire face, then let the corners of your lips go slightly uo--ideally, only you should be able to see it. To have willing hands, relax your hands and adopt an open posture--palms up, fingers relaxed, hands turned outward, no tension in your arms. Imagine you are a monk meditating and you'll get it." 
• "[When being mindful of your thoughts] remember that your thoughts are not reality, and that in other times you have thought very different thoughts.We are very smart people who come up with very persuasive, elaborate rationalizations about our thoughts, but that still doesn't mean they're necessarily true. They might be true; they might not be. Right now, we're just watching them. Do not judge your thoughts; instead, try embracing them or adopting a gentle, curious mindset about them. Do not analyze your thoughts. Do not try to block thoughts."
• "If you are having problems with radical acceptance, it can be wise to put aside a few minutes each day to practice half-smiling with willing hands and/or mindfulness; after enough regular mindfulness practice, you will find yourself suddenly becoming mindful during everyday activities, including when you're upset and need to accept something." 

"Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers"

• "It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing." 
• Scott Alexander then brings up a lot of really bad cases of cardiologists, well, being bad folks. Unnecessary surgeries, sexual harassment, drug use, murder, and so forth. And not just one or two of each, but a lot. 
• "Given the recent discussion of media bias here, I wanted to bring up Alyssa Vance's 'Chinese robber fallacy', which she describes as: '..[.]where you use a generic problem to attack a specific person or group, even though other groups have the problem just as much (or even more so).'"
• "I originally didn't find this too interesting. It sounds like the same idea as plain old stereotyping, something we think about often and are carefully warned to avoid. But after re-reading the post, I think the argument is more complex... Most people think of stereotyping as 'Here's one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,' and then you correct it with 'But we can't generalize about an entire group just from one example!' It's less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype." 
• "If we're really concerned about media bias, we need to think about Chinese Robber Fallacy as one of the media's strongest weapons. There are lots of people--300 million people in America alone. No matter what point the media wants to make, there will be hundreds of salient examples." 
• "When politically convenient, it is easy to make Americans believe in a war on police simply by better coverage of existing murders of police officers. Given that America is a big country with very many police, even a low base rate will provide many lurid police-officer-murder stories--by my calculation, two murders a week even if officers are killed only at the same rate as everyone else." 
• "We all hear anecdotes about terrible police brutality. Suppose, in fact, that we've heard exactly X stories. Given that there are about 100,000 police officers in the US, is X consistent with the problem being systemic and dire, or with the problem being relatively limited?... But wait--what if I told you that number was a lie, and there were actually 500,000 police officers in the US? Suddenly the rate of police brutality has decreased five times from what it was a second ago. If you previously believed that there were 100,000 police officers, and that the police brutality rate was shameful but that decreasing the rate to only one-fifth its previous level would count as a victory, well, now you can declare victory. What lif I told you the 500,000 number is also a lie, and it's actually way more cops than that? Do you have any idea at all how many police there are?"
• "By now you've probably figured out the gimmick, but just to come totally clean--cardiologists are wonderful people who as far as I know are no less ethical than any other profession. I chose to pick on them at random--well, not quite random, one of them yelled at me the other day because apparently contacting a cardiologist on call late at night just because your patient is having a serious heart-related emergency is some kind of huge medical faux pas." 

"A happy state"

• "Most of us are Stoics. We think that happiness is something that individuals find for themselves: the key is to work hard for a good life, and to face adversity with defiance. This 'rugged individualism' might fit the American ethos, but it is at odds with a growing body of empirical research that shows that some kinds of societies produce a great deal more satisfaction with life than others. Happiness, in other words, is more social than psychological. If so, then the obvious step, as Albert Einstein put it, is to 'ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible'."
• "The policies most conducive to human wellbeing turn out to be essentially the same ones that Einstein himself originally suggested: those associated with social democracy. In reviewing the research in 2014, Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, a political scientist at Rutgers University-Camden in New Jersey, found that 'societies led by leftist or liberal governments (also referred to as welfare states)' have the highest levels of life satisfaction, controlling for other facts." 
• "In the abstract, a welfare state means a society that has created a system of protecting people against the insecurities of everyday life by socialising risk and reward."
• Olof Palme, former Primer Minister of Sweden: "With all its faults, the welfare state remains the most humane and civilised system every created." 
• "Happiness is not chemistry or algebraic geometry, fields where lay views have little impact. But social science research on happiness is based on asking people if they are happy. Thus, we are not interested in deciding what happiness is--an undeniably difficult problem--but only in knowing if people are happy."
• "Economists have tended to focus on the importance of 'consumption' or income, and are much vested in the idea that happiness is relative. Thus, the Easterlin Paradox, named for the US economist Richard Easterlin, who first described it in 1974: at any given time, people with higher incomes are happier, since they judge themselves to be relatively privileged compared with those on lower incomes. But, over time, rising levels of national income do not raise the average level of happiness, since the consumption norm by which people make comparisons also increases. The implication is that a narrow focus on just raw economic growth is a mistake, given that what people need more of are the social goods that are judged absolutely, not relatively--of which financial security, access to health care, and dignity are prime examples." 
• "The market has much to recommend it. It is one of humanity's greatest achievements, providing both a greater degree of human liberty and a higher standard of living for more people than any other readily achievable form of economic production. As a system, it contributes to human happiness by successfully meeting basic human needs in vital and unique ways. But the internal logic of capitalism contains elements that are destructive to the common good. Externalities, such as such as pollution, are the most familiar of such problems, but there is a deeper, even foundational characteristic of such capitalism that warrants our attention. It is arguably the single most important concept in the entire logic of capitalism: commodification, more specifically the commodification of labour. A commodified world is one in which the vast majority of the population is dependent for their economic survival on the sale of their labour power as a commodity in the form of wage or salary work. In other words, to survive, people must sell their ability to work in the same kind of market that exists for any other commodity." 
• "When people become commodities they become subject to pitiless market forces beyond their control. They face a world characterised by chronic insecurity, since the market for the sale of their labour is, like the market for any commodity, subject to uncontrollable fluctuation... To survive and try to flourish, people adopt the values and norms of the market prison--competitive individualism, egotism, a focus on short-term material gain. In practice, these values detract from a satisfying life." 
• "Commodification has another, equally destructive aspect. When people are reduced to commodities, they lack the ability to make moral claims on society. Just as we have no moral responsibility to bushels of wheat or consignments of mobile phones, we have no moral responsibility to workers who are conceived of as commodities, labour units instead of people." 
• "If commodification is so harmful to humans, while the greater market system itself contributes so much to human society, the obvious solution is to maintain the essential features of the market while introducing public policies that serve to 'decommodify' workers and their families. Simply put, a society is decommodified to the extent that individuals can maintain something like a middle-class existence if they are unable to successfully sell their labour power as a commodity due to illness, old-age, disability, the need to care for a family member, the desire to improve one's position through further education, or simply the inability to find (good) jobs when times are hard... the creation of a social safety net (the much-maligned 'welfare state') is essential to decommodifying people." 
• "The strongest support is for those kinds of 'big government' programmes we can see working: you like social security when you get a payment, or your parents receive one. It is harder to like food stamps if you and the people you interact with don't rely on the programme; the tangible benefits to you come obliquely, in the form of more social capital and less violent crime."

"Artistic greatness, according to my brain"

• Luke Muehlhauser rates "great works of art" according to Innovation, Cohesion, Execution, and Emotionality. 
• "Rite of Spring. Citizen Kane. Young Ladies of Avignon. If someone produced a ballet, film, or painting very similar to these today, critics would not be impressed, and neither would I. But these works were innovative at the time, and pushing on the boundaries of an art form--in structure, subject matter, tone, concept, etc.--feels artistically impressive to me, all else equal. Among innovations, I think I'm most impressed by complex, non-obvious innovations." 
• "Influence's lack of direct impact on my judgments of artistic greatness might constitute one of the largest differences between what I intuitively think of as artistic greatness and what many others intuitively think of as artistic greatness." 
• "An art work is 'cohesive' if many or most of the artist's choices in composing the work are united in serving a particular artistic purpose."
• "It's difficult to say fully general things about my execution criterion, because it's the 'devils in the details' criterion." 
• "Finally, my brain's artistic greatness function seems to think that (human) art is greatest when it can be innovative, cohesive, well-executed, and also engage the human being emotionally." 

Miscellany

• Philip Sandifer, "Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and his Supporters": "One does not simply 'wind up' allied to Josef Stalin. This is a process that requires some effort. It is a process during which one is afforded many opportunities to stop and say 'wait a moment, I seem to be allying with Josef Stalin, maybe I should reconsider my life choices." 
• Chuck Wendig, "Dear Any-Kind-Of-Published Author: Write As Much As You Want": "You you do, penmonkey. YOU DO YOU." 
• Genghis Khan: "After us, the people of our race will wear garments of gold; they will eat sweet, greasy food, ride splendid coursers, and hold in their arms the loveliest of women, and they will forget that they owe these things to us." 
• Matthew Yglesias, "All politics is identity politics": "The implication of this usage [of the term 'identity politics'] (which is widespread, and by no means limited to people who agree with [Jonathan] Chait) is that somehow an identity is something only women or African-Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal." 
• Eliezer Yudkowsky: "'A fantatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.' I endeavor to at least be capable of changing the subject."
• Eliezer Yudkowsky, "How to Seem and Be Deep": "If you want to sound deep, you can never say anything that is more than a single step of inferential distance away from your listener's current mental state. That's just the way it is." 
• Cenodoxus, replying to the thread "Historians' take on Noam Chomsky": "Humans are too complicated for any one ideology to explain, and you need to understand and accept that any ideology is your brain's attempt to impose a pattern on, and thus make sense of, the world. Any neural researcher will tell you that brains are notorious for trying to find patterns where none exist. Let the believer beware."
• Cenodoxus, " ": "Any system that is easily corrupted is not, by definition, a good system, and it doesn't matter what the intentions behind it were."