My Solstice Speech

Seattle held it’s second secular solstice celebration tonight.  I was lucky enough to give the speech of darkness.  This is what I said.
The tradition for these speeches is to talk about death, which makes sense.  It’s the darkest day of the year, and when humans see darkness they see death.  I have a confession: death doesn’t bother me that much.  I assume because I’ve never had a person I was close to die. It’s not that I don’t fear death, but it’s entirely an intellectual fear.  I can do math around it.

So when I think about aging, it’s not death that haunts me.  It’s dementia. The slow eroding of everything I was into a broken shell that can only feel hurt and hurt others.    Forgetting everything I was, everything I worked so hard to make myself into.  That thought is what will make me break down.

You don’t have to wait until you’re 80 to lose yourself like that. I had several dental surgeries last year, resulting in serious nerve damage.  It hurt, a lot, but that wasn’t the worst part.  The worst part was what pain did to my ability to do anything else.  I had always defined myself by my intellectual abilities and suddenly I could.  not.  think.  I couldn’t work, I couldn’t make complex plans and trust myself to follow through.  The day the neurologist told me I was healing and there were things to do in the meantime was such a relief I almost couldn’t process it.

Humans are capable of such astonishing things.  We went from grunts, to speech, to storytelling, to books in monasteries, to the printing press, to this device in my hand that will show me most of the world’s knowledge instantaneously.  There are few places in the world I couldn’t get to in 24 hours, and fewer I couldn’t talk to someone in the same time.   A disease that wiped out half of Europe can be treated with a handful of pills and for the first time we live long enough for dementia to even be a concern.

The funny thing about everything I just listed is that they’re both fantastic technical accomplishments, and enablers of other people’s potential. Sometimes that lets people invent more marvels.  Sometimes it just makes them a little happier and a little safer.  For the former to have meaning the latter must too.  

But a lot of people who did have the potential to change the world are never able to use it.  And they didn’t lose it at 30 either.

Right now there are infants dying of parasites we know how to kill because their parents had to choose between food and bednets.

There are toddlers whose brains will never develop properly because an infection drew too many scarce calories during a critical phase.  There are others who will have the same problem because their food has too many calories and not enough folic acid.

There are children whose families scrimp and save to send them to school, which is taught in a language they don’t understand.

There are teenage girls dying in childbirth because they were born into a society where the genuinely loving choice was to sew their labias shut.  There are teenage boys being sentenced to a criminal justice system they will never be able leave because they did one thing wrong in a system that demands perfection from them.

There are adults who survived all of that with their intellect and health intact but will never be anything more than a slightly more prosperous farmer because their village is too poor to generate the resources that would let them leave for somewhere richer.

There are entire families dying at sea because their home was destroyed by a war they didn’t start and no one will let them in anywhere else.

There are people whose brains tell them they are worthless no matter what they do.

There are people who had every advantage in life and instead of propelling them further, it made them think effort wasn’t necessary.

There are people whose parents viewed them as a burden or a threat and did everything they could to break them down, or who loved them more than anything but lacked the physical or emotional ability to follow through on that love.

All of these things are going on all the time.  

Please join me in a moment of silence and darkness

(blow out candle, room is dark)

In the face of all of that, we are doing okay.  People in hell find friends and fall in love and raise families.  Parents change their society so their children will not face the same problems they did.  Smallpox is never coming back.    People who never should have survived use the deprivation and torture they experienced as fuel to help others.  People who were born lazy and selfish and never thought of others encounter a situation bad enough and find something heroic in themselves after all.  Not all of them, not even a lot of them, but enough.  They rise up, and they take the rest of us with them.  

The tradition here is to talk about humanity as one long glorious march of progress.  That would be a lie.   Rome fell and Europe saw infrastructure it no longer understood crumble around it.  Baghdad didn’t reach its pre-Ghengis Khan population density until the 20th century.  Agriculture led to a lot of the diseases we are so proud of vanquishing.

But every time that happened, we came back.  Roman aqueducts are toys compared to our sanitation systems.  We beat not only the diseases we created, but the injuries and opportunistic infections hunter/gatherers had no defense against.  We burned the library of Alexandria but invented the internet.

However bad things got, however far we fell, we held on to whatever let us make the leap the first place and we did it again.  Better.  At our core, we are resilient.  Right now we are taking incredible strides against every threat I just listed, including death itself.

(relight candle)

So here, two days before the shortest day of the year, we recognize the darkness we are facing.  And as I share this light with you, we recognize how we are fighting back.

(lights sharing candle, shares)

 

The Giving What We Can Pledge

On one hand, I think the  Giving What We Can pledge (10% of your income to the most effective charities) is an excellent idea and I’d be thrilled if me plugging it led to an additional pledge.  On the other hand, I haven’t signed it and don’t plan on doing so.  This makes me feel kind of awkward suggesting other people do.

I have many aborted paragraphs written about why I think the pledge is a good idea but not for me, but in retrospect they’re mostly fluff.  It boils down to: I have a strong need to create my own number.

Scott Alexander talks about how satisfying having A Number that he can reach and then feel done is to him.  This seems extremely valuable, and 10% seems like a reasonable number.  But it doesn’t do that for me.  If I had billion dollars I’d need to give more, and if I accepted a job that paid $20,000/year but saved the bottom billion, I would hang on to that $2,000, thank you very much.  Not just because I earned it, but because spending the money on myself would actually do more good for the world, by freeing up my time and energy.

In order to feel done, I need to exhaustively examine my income, spending, and choices. That means the pledge can’t possibly save me work or increase my emotional satisfaction.  But if I signed it and circumstances arose such that me giving less than 10% was the right thing to do, I would feel awful about breaking it.  To the point I might subconsciously prevent myself from even considering the option.*

The other common reasons I hear for signing are to push better behavior in future!you, to create a community of giving, and as a useful conversation starter.  These are all excellent goals.  In my particular case, future!Elizabeth has been so consistently smarter and kinder than past!Elizabeth that think she will make better decisions than me and I don’t want to constrain her.  Given that, I think I’ll do a better job contributing to a culture of giving by fostering a culture of deep thought around giving (which not everyone will or should participate in).***

So basically, signing the Giving What We Can pledge is incompatible with my version of scrupulosity.  But it might be extremely compatible with yours.  If the idea of having a target and then being done appeals to you, I highly suggest you consider signing.  But if having a hard target feels awful and spending  several hours thinking about exactly much to donate feels fun or satisfying, consider coming to Seattle EA’s donation decision day (in person, but we’ll create a virtual meeting room if there’s interest) or creating your own.

 

*I did in fact take a pay cut to work for Sendwave, which enables people to send money to their families in Africa cheaply and easily.  I am going back and forth on how that affects giving.  Last year I did 10% + offsets for things with negative externalities (eating meat and my bullshit patent).  This year I  took a way more than 10% paycut to do way, way more good than I could possibly have done with donations.  So in a certain sense I’ve already given 10% of my potential income and could consider that obligation met. On the other hand, I would have accepted the same pay from puppies-killing-kittens.org if it meant working from home**, so there’s a strong argument that doesn’t count against my born-lucky tax.  On the third hand, I’m starting with UI testing and I hate UI testing, so doesn’t that count for something?  On the fourth hand, in the grand scale of human suffering, no, it does not.

The plan I made last year means donations this year are against last year’s tax return, so for now I can just follow that.  Except some of it will be in January so I can use more employer matching.  But I don’t know what I’m going to do next year.

**Which is everything I ever dreamed it could be.

***Obviously they’re not mutually exclusive.  Unit of Caring has pledged 30% and contributes a fabulous amount to discourse.

Talk to me for an hour

Short version: do you have a thing you really like talking about?  Email me at elizabeth @ this domain name to talk about it.

Long version: some of my favorite conversations involve me or someone else sharing a thing they find really, really interesting.  Sometimes we both have expertise in the area and it turns into a discussion, sometimes only one does and it’s more like a lesson.  I love both of those, and I want more in my life.  As a reader of my blog you have already proven yourself a connoisseur of interesting information and analysis (and modesty), so you seem like an excellent candidate to have these conversations with.  If you would like to

  1. Talk to me in depth about a thing I’ve written
  2. Talk to me in depth about a thing you’re passionate about.
  3. Play double crux argument over just about anything

email me at elizabeth @ this domain and we’ll set up a time.  If you are reading this, it applies to you.  Some of the best discussions are about things people were really shy to bring up because they didn’t think anyone else would care.  I can’t promise to care when we’re done, but you’ll notice I find a lot of things interesting, and it’s worth an hour of my time to find out if your thing is.

Additional incentive: I have many interesting opinions I am too scared to write down.

Unquantified Self

Recently I did a CFAR workshop.  No one has settled on a good description of CFAR, but I think a good one would be “getting the different parts of your brain to coordinate with each other.”  The further I get from CFAR the more positively I view the experience, which suggests that I did the same thing with EA Global, which suggests I overestimated CFAR’s primary flaw (not being EA Global), which makes me view it even more positively.

CFAR suggests you go into the workshop with a problem to solve.  Fortunately but perhaps inconveniently, I went through a personal growth spurt right before CFAR.  It’s not that I was out of problems to solve, but the repercussions of the previous solutions had not yet worked their way through the system so it was hard to see what the next round would be.   Then I solved food.  For those of you who are just tuning in, I have/had lifelong medical issues that made food physically difficult, which made it psychologically difficult, which made the physical issues worse.  Clearing out all the anxiety around food in a weekend is not a small thing.  But to really achieve it’s full power I have to follow it up with things like “how do you choose food based on things other than terror?” and “stoves: how do they work?” So that’s a bunch more work.*

I left CFAR with some new things and some refinement on some old things.  I didn’t want to lose what I’d gotten at the workshop so I tried to do follow ups but I felt… full.  Defensive.  Like it was attempting to take up space in my brain and if it succeeded I would lose a lot of work.

My way of solving problems, which is either what CFAR teaches too or what I extracted from whatever CFAR actually does, is to understand them super well.  Eventually a solution just falls out and application is trivial.**  Some of this comes from focused thought, but there’s a lot of opportunistic noticing.  I store bits of information until suddenly they coalesce into a pattern.  As anyone who’s read Getting Things Done will tell you, storing information in your brain is expensive.  So I decided I needed a way to store all this opportunistic data, plus things from the conscious experiments I was running, to keep it all straight.

This is hard to do.  Take the comparatively simple “go to gym every day”.  There are 400 billion apps that will track this for me and I have never stuck with one of them, because they are boring and seeing the numbers go up doesn’t motivate me for more than a week.  More generally, I’ve never been able to get into quantified self because if I know what data to measure the problem is already solved.  I don’t really care how many calories I burned.  I do care what mental blocks inhibited me from going (bed so comfy, outside is cold, feeling like I stayed in bed too long and now I have to do Real Work) and how I maneuvered things so it didn’t take willpower to fight those (“remember how you feel much more productive after the gym and have an awesome job that doesn’t care when you work?”).  There is no app for that.

Then there are more difficult problems like “New information indicates I handled something 9 months ago really poorly, but I’m not sure what I’d do differently then with only the information I had at the time, without causing other problems.”  Or “My friend triggered an intense premortem that made me realize I’m ignoring information on project X just like I did with project Y last year, but I don’t know what that information is.”  I still don’t know what I’m going to do about the former, for the latter I tracked “things that feel like they’re hitting the same part of my brain” until a pattern emerged.  Tracking patterns for “things you are actively trying not to think about” is not cheap.

So I needed a system that could hold this information for me, that would show me information I didn’t realize was connected as I recorded it.  Without being cluttered.  The closest analogy I could come up with was an old timey naturalist.  They had a bunch of set things they knew they were looking for (what eats this flower), but also wanted to record cool things and then be able to connect to other cool things later (why are all these finches different yet similar?).    I don’t know how old timey naturalists did that with pen and paper because that did not work for me at all.  I tried workflowy and a google docs but just sat there frozen, unable to figure out how to sort the information.

My CFAR partner  Tilia Bell had a really good idea, which was to use a private wordpress blog.  I could give an entry as many tags as I wanted, and read tags when they felt relevant.  Or just the success tag, because winning feels nice.  This was a huge improvement, but wordpress is kind of clunky and annoying.  In particular, the tagging system does not flow at all.

I talked about it with Brian, who suggested a one person slack.  I could use channels for defined projects and tags for observations I wanted to connect later.  To be fair, this idea is three hours old.  On the other hand, in 20 minutes applying it I figured out what piece of information I was ignoring in that problem my brain didn’t want to look at.  I’m not saying it’s the sole cause, I’ve gathered a lot of information this past week.  But since “connecting things I already noticed” is pretty much its point, it seems promising.

*My nutritionist is finding me much easier to work with now.

**I’m exaggerating some but it’s more true than it has any right to be.

The Importance of Being Seen

My old dojo had a teacher who, no matter how many people were in the class, you felt was talking just to you.  She could explain anything and led people to completely understand things they’d been struggling with for months. You would think getting 1:1 instruction from her would be ten times as good, but actually it was exactly the same, which felt much worse, because it became clear that none of the positive body language was in response to what you were doing or saying.  The rhythm was wrong, like an out of sync dub.  And it was really demoralizing.

This is what I think of every time I read the advice to praise children for hard work rather than intelligence.  Most American parents go overboard praising their children’s intelligence.  But if you praise their effort every time, they either learn your praise has no relation to their choices (bad) or you’re training them to ignore their own evaluation of how hard they worked and substitute yours (worse).  The only thing worse than a very smart child who thinks they can coast through life encountering their first real challenge is a very smart child who has been gaslit into thinking they’ve been paddling hard encountering their first real challenge.

Mountains Beyond Mountains (Tracy Kidder) and the case against cost effectiveness

Mountains Beyond Mountains is a biography of Paul Farmer, an American doctor who founded a small clinic in Haiti and ended up saving hundreds of thousands of lives, possibly millions.  But that’s at the end.  The beginning is spent with him  doing obviously suboptimal things like spending $5000/year per patient treating AIDS patients in a country where people were constantly dying of malnutrition and diarrhea (average cost to treat: <$30), while baiting me by bragging about how cost ineffective it was.  I was very angry at him for a while, until it dawned on me that getting angry at a man for distributing lifesaving drugs probably said more negative things about me than it did about him.  Plus he did maybe avert a worldwide epidemic of untreatable tuberculosis, so perhaps I should stop yelling at the CD player and figure out what his thinking was.

Let’s take tuberculosis.  At some point in the story (it’s frustratingly vague on years), Farmer’s friend brings him to Peru, which had what was widely considered the world’s best TB containment system (called DOTS).  The WHO held it up as what the rest of the world should aspire to.  DOTS did many things right, like ensuring a continuous supply of antibiotics to patients and monitoring them to ensure compliance (intermittent treatment breeds resistance).    On the other hand, the prescribed response to someone failing to get better on drugs (indicating their infection was resistant to them) was “give them all the same, plus one more.”  This is exactly the right thing to do, if what you want is to make sure the bacteria evolve resistance to the new drug without losing its existing resistance.  The protocol specifically banned testing to see which drugs a particular patient’s infection was susceptible to, because that is expensive and potentially difficult in the 3rd world.

The WHO ignored the possibility of drug resistant TB because it was considered an evolutionary dead end.  Resistance had to evolve anew in each patient, and rendered the infection noncontagious.  I don’t know what evidence they based this on, but  at best it was a case of incorrectly valuing evidence over reason.  At worst, it indicates a giant sentient TB cell has infiltrated the WHO and is writing policy.

Hello fellow humans. I sure do hate death and suffering.
Hello fellow humans. I sure do hate death and suffering.

If your evidence says a contagious disease spontaneously becomes completely noncontagious at a convenient moment, your first thought should be “who do I fire?” because obviously something went wrong in the study design or implementation. If you check everything out and it genuinely is noncontagious, your next thought should be “wow, we really lucked out having all this extra time to prepare before it inevitably becomes contagious again.”  At no point should it be “sweet, cross that off the list”, because while you are not looking it will redevelop virulence and everyone will die.

Farmer’s response to the ban on treating multiple drug resistant TB was to steal >$100,000 worth of medicine and tests from an American hospital to treat a handful of patients.  When caught, a donor bailed him out.

Or take cancer.  A young child with weird symptoms shows up at his clinic.  He drops a few thousand dollars on tests to determine the child had a rare form of cancer.  60-70% survival rate in the US, no chance in Haiti.  He convinced an American hospital to donate the care, but when the child becomes too ill to travel commercially he spends $20,000+ on medical transport.

Both of these went against standard measures of cost effectiveness, as did Farmer’s pioneering work treating AIDS patients in the 3rd world.  But let’s look at his results:

  1. The WHO’s “yeah, it’s probably fine” approach to drug resistant TB worked as well as you would think.  Farmer proves it is contagious, is treatable, and drives down the price of treatment (to the point it is $/DALY competitive with standard health interventions). He goes on to change the international standard for TB treatment and lead the effort in several countries. Book gives no numbers but I estimate 142,000 lives and counting, plus avoiding an epidemic that could cost 2 million lives/year.*
  2. Kid’s cancer is inoperable, he dies in the US.  American hospital agrees to take a few more cases each year.

In retrospect his actions in the TB case seem pretty damn effective.  But he didn’t set out to change the world.  He stole those drugs for the exact reason he flew that boy to the US: someone was dying in front of him and it made him sad.  It’s possible you couldn’t correct his answer in the cancer case without also “correcting” his answer in the TB case. And while someone more math driven could have launched the world changing anti-MDR TB campaign, they didn’t.  Farmer did, and we need to respect that.

Lots of people in the philanthropic space, including Farmer and most EAs, say that it’s unreasonable to expect perfect altruism from everyone.  People need to spend money on themselves to keep themselves happy and productive, and constant bean counting about “do the morale effects of name brand toilet paper make up for the kids I won’t be able to deworm?” is counterproductive.   You put aside money for charity, and you put aside money for you to enjoy life, and you make your choices.  What if we view Farmer’s need to save the life in front of him as a morale booster that enables our preferred work (averting world wide incurable TB pandemic), rather than the work itself?  By that measure,  $150,000 on a single kid’s cancer and 7 hours doing a house call for one patient in Haiti is a steal.  Given that I pay my cats more (in food and vet care) than what 1/6 of the world survives on, I do not have a lot of room to judge Paul Farmer’s “saving children from cancer” hobby.

Farmer himself raises this point, in a way.  It turns out that effective altruism did not invent the phrase “that’s not cost effective.”  Lots of people with a lot of power (e.g. the WHO) have been saying it for a long time.  From Farmer’s perspective, it seems to be used a lot more to justify not spending money, rather than spending it on a different thing.  He also rejects the framing of the comparison: cancer treatment may save fewer lives per dollar than diarrhea treatment but it saves way more per dollar than a doctor’s beach house, so how come it only gets compared to the former?  Those are fair points.

It’s not clear he could have redirected the money even if he wanted to.  Most of the care for the cancer patient was donated in kind; there was no cash he could redirect to a better cause (although that’s not true for the cost of the medivac).  No one gave him $100,000 to spend on TB treatment, he stole drugs and got bailed out.  It’s not clear the donor would have been as moved to rescue him if he stole $100,000 worth of cheap antibiotics.

In essence, I’m postulating that Farmer operated under the following constraints.

  • Evaluating cost effectiveness is emotionally costly even in the face of very good information.
  • Low quality information on effectiveness
  • Financial discipline was emotionally costly
  • Some money was available for treatments of less relative effectiveness but could not be moved to the most effective thing.  But the money was not clearly labeled “the best thing” and “for warm fuzzies only”, he had to guess in the face of low information.

Under those things, evaluating cost effectiveness could easily be actively harmful.  Judging by the results, I think he did better following his heart.

Doing The Most Effective Thing is great, and I think the EA movement is pushing the status quo in the right direction. But what Farmer is doing is working and I don’t want to mess with it.  At the same time, his statement that “saying you shouldn’t treat one person for cancer because you could treat 10 people for dysentery is valuing one life over another.” (paraphrased) is dangerously close to Heifer International’s “we can’t check how our programs compare to others, that would be experimenting on them and that would be wrong.” (paraphrased), which is dangerously close to Play Pump’s “fuck it, this seems right.” (paraphrased) as they rip out functional water pumps and replace them with junk.  So while Farmer is a strong argument against Effective Altruism as “the last social movement we will ever need” (because some people do the most good when they don’t compare what they’re doing to the counter-factuals), he’s not an argument against EA’s existence.  Someone has to run the numbers and shame Play Pump until they stop attacking Africans’ access to water.

It doesn't even make sense as a toy. The fun part of carousels is the coasting, not the wind up
It doesn’t even make sense as a toy. The fun part of carousels is the coasting, not the wind up

And just like you couldn’t improve Farmer by forcing to him do accounting, you can’t necessarily improve a given EA by making them sadder at the tragedy immediately in front of them.  EA is full of people who didn’t care about philanthropy until it had math and charts attached, or who find doing The Best Thing motivating.  We’re doing good work too. I understand why people fear doing the math on human suffering will make them less human, but that isn’t my experience.  I cry more now at heroism and sacrifice than I ever did as a child.

Ironically the one thing I was still angry at Farmer for at the end of the book was his most effective choice: neglecting his children in favor of treating patients and global health politics.  I could forgive it if he felt called to an emergency after the children were born, but he had kids knowing he would choose his work over them.  For me, no amount of lives saved can redeem that choice.  Maybe that is what he feels about letting that Haitian child die of cancer.

*This paper (PDF) estimates 142,000 deaths averted 2006-2015 by the program Farmer pioneered, and the program is still scaling up.    I estimate a drug resistant TB epidemic would cost a minimum 2.3 million lives/year (math below), although how likely that is to occur is a matter of opinion.  That’s ignoring his clinical work in Haiti, the long term effects of his pioneering HIV treatment in the 3rd world,the long term effects of his pioneering community-based interventions that increased treatment effectiveness,  infrastructure building in multiple countries, and refugee care.  I would love to give you numbers for those but neither Paul Farmer nor PIH believe in numbers, so the WHO evaluation of the TB program was the best I could do.

MATH

Untreated TB has a mortality rate of ~70%l

TB rates have been dropping since ~2002, but that’s due to aggressive
treatment. New infection rate held steady at ~150 people/100,000
from 1990-2002, so let’s use that as our baseline. With 7.3 billion people, that’s 11 million cases/year. 11 million * .7 chance of death = 7.7 million deaths. Per year. 25% of those are patients with AIDS who arguably wouldn’t live very long anyway, so conservatively we have ~5.7 million deaths. If I’m really generous and assume complete worldwide distribution of the TB vaccine (efficacy: 60%), that’s down to 2.3 million deaths. Per year.

For comparison, malaria causes about 0.5 million deaths/year.

Thanks to Julia Wise for recommending the book, Jai Dhyani and Ben Hoffman for comments on earlier versions, and Beth Crane for grammar patrol.

EA Book Roundup

In the span of a few months, three intro-to-effective-altruism books came out- Peter Singer’s The Most Good You Can Do, Nick Cooney’s How to be Great at Doing Good, and Will MacAskill’s Doing Good Better.  After reading all three, my preference order is: How to be Great… > Doing Good Better > The Most Good…, with fairly large gaps between the three.  I actively disliked reading The Most Good….  On the other hand, if you measured the impact each person has had on moving money to effective charities, the order is most certainly Peter Singer >> Will MacAskill > Nick Cooney.*  This leads me to believe my preferences are not wildly predictive and shouldn’t be given much weight.   But I think I understand why I like How to be Great… best, and that information might be useful.

In a nutshell: Peter Singer tells you what to do, Nick Cooney teaches you a way to think about the problem.**  In particular: I hate the argument from a drowning child.  It works by evoking a primitive instinct that is almost impossible to translate to rigorous analysis completely separate from the part of my brain that plans effective giving.   The same instinct that tells you to ruin your suit to save a child will tell you to skip a one time opportunity to earn billions of dollars for charity to save a child.  We like saving children.  Meanwhile, Nick Cooney’s book is about building up the skills so you can look at tough choices without blinking.  To me, this came off as simultaneously less judgmental of my faults and yet a stronger push for me to do better.

[I suspect high scrupulousness plays a role here- I constantly felt like Singer was saying I was a bad person because I wasn’t doing the most goodest thing, and it made me want to think about giving less.]

As EA-the-movement grows, I think it’s going to have to have very different inward and outward faces.  On one extreme you have the very core- doing or planning on doing direct work, the kind of hardcore earning to give that depends on social support, organizing the movement, or spreading ideas outside it.   On the other extreme you have people who are going to donate a modest amount to charity and are choosing based mostly on warm fuzzies, but are influenced by EA to donate more, or more effectively.  I picture this group as slightly less rigorous than my parents, who I have convinced to donate to several EA charities, and who have done good research on charities themselves, but also still give money to my dad’s extremely well endowed alma matter.  How to be Great… is for preparing people to be core.  The Most Good… is for motivating people on the very fringe.  I would place Doing Good Better between them, but much closer to The Most Good… If one of my friends wanted to know about EA, I’d give them Doing Good Better, on the theory that my friends are a lot like me.  If a stranger wanted to know more I’d probably point them to The Most Good…, based on empirical results (unless they were highly conscientious).  If you enjoy my blog I suspect you’re a How to be Great type- even if you don’t want to drink the EA koolaid, you probably like being taught more than being ordered.

*Singer had major influences on Bill Gates and Dustin Moskovitz (funder of GoodVentures) and after he’s done that there’s no point even counting the other people he’s influenced.  Will MacAskill cofounded 80,000 hours and Giving What We Can.  Nick Cooney runs some relatively small budget animal charities.

** If I had to pick a description for MacAskill’s approach it would be “descriptive”, but it doesn’t contrast with the other books as much as they do with themselves.   Peter Singer also spends a lot of time describing the effective altruism movement but I found a lot of it to be wrong.

Special Tax Status for Non-Profits?

Non-profits in America get several tax benefits:

  • Contributions to them can be deducted by donors.
  • They do not have to pay sales or property tax.
  • Exemption from corporate income tax

Should they?

There’s a number of problems with this.  One, it makes deciding what is and is not a non-profit really important.  I’m fine with government subsidies (which is what tax breaks are) to help poor people eat, but not for rich people’s entertainment.  Those two are easy to distinguish, but there’s a lot of room between homeless shelters and operas, and I’m uncomfortable with the government drawing the line. Or what about charities that have beliefs you find abhorrent?  Bob Jones University lost its tax-exempt status in 1983 due to its ban on interracial dating, and fear of a repeat apparently drives a lot of the religious objection to same sex marriage.  I think people who oppose interracial dating or same sex marriage are wrong and should be shamed, but I’m really uncomfortable having that much money riding on values judgments by the government.

The sales tax thing isn’t that big a deal, as witnessed by the fact that a lot of charities don’t even bother with it.  But property tax is.  It starves the tax base of municipalities with a large percentage of land occupied by non-profits.  It’s something of a problem in DC and an enormous one in some university towns, especially if the surrounding area is poor.  That’s hard to stomach when prestigious universities have endowments in the billions and a good chunk of their work is making the rich richer.  Lack of property taxes pushes charities to buy property when they would otherwise rent (which means it benefits only those charities with consistent funding), and to occupy more valuable real estate than they otherwise would.

I like that I get a tax deduction for my donations, and I’d probably donate less without that.  OTOH, it creates a distinct gap between “people organizing to do some good things” and Official Charity, which creates a barrier to entry.  It’s not a trivial barrier either- I’ve served in the leadership on both official (my old dojo) and unofficial (Seattle EA) charities.  Among other things, official recognition forces a fairly specific kind of hierarchy on you.   In Utopia of Rules, David Graeber talks about the strain his autonomous non-hierarchical collective experienced when someone had the gall to give them a car.  It ends with them destroying the car with a sledge hammer.

Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
Now we see the violence inherent in the system.

Removing the benefits of official incorporation would let more organizations find their natural structure, rather than a one size fits all government imposed one, and also lead to fewer car destruction parties.

My opinion on the corporate income tax is a post in and of itself, so let’s put that aside for now.  I think there’s a very good case for not exempting non-profits from property tax, and not making charitable contributions tax deductible.  I also think it would be extremely disruptive to abruptly switch, so we should ease over gradually, and the change should be revenue neutral.*

*People say I’m cynical but then I write things like “the government should raise this tax and lower another one so they get the same amount of money” so I don’t know what they’re talking about.

Links 8/28/15

My feeling on “awareness” as a charitable concept is that it should arise as a byproduct of something else (read: doing actual work), and if I see a charity promoting awareness I assume it’s a self aggrandizing waste of resources and they don’t really care about helping people.  This is very true about, say, the Susan G. Komen lighting up a record-setting number of buildings to raise awareness for breast cancer.  But it’s not always true.  This 99% invisible is about the original AIDS ribbon, which started at a time when HIV was excruciatingly taboo.  The ribbon advanced the ability of people to talk about AIDS, and in doing so accelerated the development of treatment options and increased the emotional support available to tens of thousands of dying people and those that cared for them.  Breast cancer was never as taboo as AIDS, but for a long time it was literally unspeakable in polite company.  Awareness was probably a good idea back then.

So I’m amending my position to “spreading awareness: a good idea if people will literally not talk about your issue.”

Yes, diet and exercise affect your weight.  But lab animals are fatter than their equivalents of 30 years ago despite provably identical genetics, diets, and activity levels.  I think it is time we consider the concept of an environmental cause.

It never occurred to me to wonder how hummingbirds got nectar out of flowers.  I was nonetheless delighted to learn they do so by way of grooved, spring loaded tongues. They also fly weird.  Good job hummingbirds.

Do you do your best work or feel your emotional best when you wake up hours before you want to?  Turns out children don’t either and if we want to keep up the pretense that school is about teaching them it needs to start later.

One criticism of Uber in Seattle is that they abandon people in the suburbs, because they don’t follow the law requiring taxis to send a certain number of cars to the suburbs even when the bars are getting out in the city and everyone wants a taxi.  Despite this, Uber actually serves the suburbs better than taxis.  They also maybe prevent DUIs.

The Argument Against Incrementalism.

Sometimes there are fights where one group says “iterative progress” and the other says “no, it’s all or nothing” (my interpretation).  For example, people that don’t like GiveDirectly because it reinforces capitalism, or whale treadmills because the whales need to be in the wild, or humaneness standards for farmed meat because it reinforces eating meat.

Twice now I’ve gone through airport security while they were in express mode, which means you get an x-ray rather than the pornoscanner, you can leave your shoes on your feet and your laptop in its bag, and there’s a k9 unit, which I assume is looking for bombs.  This is great because it’s faster and more convenient and spares me my usual protest groping*.  As an incrementalist, I should be happy about this, but I’m not.

My ultimate goal is not just “not get groped or irradiated”, it’s “stop spending billions of dollars to waste people’s time with absolutely zero compensating benefits”, and beyond that “not have a government for which this kind of toxicity is standard.”  However much I’m enjoying not taking my shoes off, this change does not get us any closer to the latter two goals.  I suspect this is what the [people I previously categorized as anti-incrementalist] felt about the incremental improvements I approved of: that they were harm mitigation at best but did not move them closer to their goals.  So I’m a lot more sympathetic to them now.

*I don’t know if the pornoscanners are actually dangerous or not, but I do know the TSA doesn’t know either and I will punish them for their decision however I can.