Zach Freitas-Groff

This year was a pretty good crop of movies. It's the first year I can recall in which I actually enjoyed all of those nominated for Best Picture (except The Sound of Metal , which is still on my watchlist). Mank was a disappointment but still an enjoyable homage to Citizen Kane. Minari and Nomadland were well-done slices of life's bitterness and sweetness. Judas and the Black Messiah was a riveting political drama that I hope woke people up to the absolute treachery by the FBI against black power and civil rights activists in the 60s and 70s. And Ma Rainey was a dazzling, fast backstage drama. But my favorite historical picture this year was The Trial of the Chicago 7 . I could be biased, having gone to high school with one of the titular seven actors, but I don't think I am. It was a drama both fun and enraging with performances that bounce off the wall, especially Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen. The gagging of Bobby Seale was shocking and another historical wak...

In Human Compatible , Stuart Russell makes an argument that I have heard him make repeatedly (I believe on the 80,000 Hours podcast and the Future of Life Institute conversation with Steven Pinker). He suggests a pretty bold and surprising claim: [C]onsider how content-selection algorithms function on social media... Typically, such algorithms are designed to maximize click-through , that is, the probability that the user clicks on presented items. The solution is simply to present items that the user likes to click on, right? Wrong. The solution is to change the user's preferences so that they become more predictable. A more predictable user can be fed items that they are likely to click on, thereby generating more revenue. People with more extreme political views tend to be more predictable in which items they will click on... Like any rational entity, the algorithm learns how to modify the state of its environment—in this case, the user's mind—in order to maximize its own r...

  Learn something new every day. Today's piece of knowledge is this for me (from wikipedia): Eyestalk ablation is the removal of one (unilateral) or both (bilateral) eyestalks from a crustacean. It is routinely practiced on female shrimps (or prawns) in almost every marine shrimp maturation or reproduction facility in the world, both research and commercial. The aim of ablation under these circumstances is to stimulate the female shrimp to develop mature ovaries and spawn. Most captive conditions for shrimp cause inhibitions in females that prevent them from developing mature ovaries. Even in conditions where a given species will develop ovaries and spawn in captivity, use of eyestalk ablation increases total egg production and increases the percentage of females in a given population that will participate in reproduction. I read briefly about this in an update from the Aquatic Life Institute , which is engaged in the critical and radically neglected project of improving the lives...

I took a much-needed break from research in December and spent much of that time seeing classic movies I've always wanted to see as well as some new ones at the nearby drive-in. My reviews: New Releases: Promising Young Woman was amazing, and shocking. I recommend it far and wide to anyone with emotional fortitude.  The screenplay is a masterpiece.  The movie concerns a woman out to avenge a wrong. Played by Carey Mulligan, she's a brilliant and tough protagonist. It's a performance that could easily have been monotonous, but Mulligan has us guessing her every move. She's the star, but there's not a weak performance in the movie. The bright color pallet pops off the screen, and the sumptuous set decoration establishes each scene perfectly. The snappy pop soundtrack seals the deal. But please, please, make sure you are ready for something disturbing before you see it. News of the World , on the other hand, was as boring as could be. It's like watching someone el...

Might there be more unity? There are some more fundamental reasons than Biden or Trump why there could be more unity in the U.S. in the next few years: COVID-19 and the Capitol insurrection. Anecdotally, we all have stories of people coming together in times of crisis: families shifting roles to make ends meet in wartime or even just the surprisingly rapid change in social habits that happened last March as people in many parts of the country isolated nearly overnight. Some research backs up the anecdotes. Here I'll lump together work on both inequality and polarization since both involve a sort of unity in the population. First, a body of surveys and experiments finds that cooperation within local communities increases cooperation during wartime. Relatedly, the relationship between the rate of return to wealth and growth, which Piketty controversially tied to inequality, tends to flip during war time . 1   More recently, while we can all think of the COVID-19 crisis as being shar...

It's been a hell of a week since the despicable white supremacist riot and attempted insurrection at the Capitol. The event should have been unsurprising (not that this specific thing would happen, but that something like it would happen). It's not even clear to me that it's the worst we've seen the past few years (unclear if it's worse than concentration camps for immigrant children or banning people from the U.S. based on their religion, probably somewhat worse than declaring a fake emergency). Nevertheless, here we are. I unsurprisingly agree with the many Democrats, Never - Trumpers , and Until-Yesterday-Trumpers that we need consequences. BUT all consequences are not equal, and I worry there are going to be some serious mistakes with consequences. With that in mind—here's a rough, informal list of things that I think are good, bad, or iffy. Some are sure to be off, so please tell me why I'm wrong. Impeachment-ish things Impeachment : iffy/good (good if ...

Does democracy help people who don't get to vote? Democracy has a strong track record of peace and prosperity, but it's not obvious that it would help those who, as a class, do not participate in the political process, such as future generations and nonhuman animals. Two nice economics experiments suggest that democracy may help those who don't vote. (Specifically, elections help relative to everyone deciding for themselves.) The first is Hauser et al. (2014), "Cooperating with the Future" (I'm working with the first author on a new project): What mechanisms can maintain cooperation with the future? To answer this question, we devise a new experimental paradigm, the ‘Intergenerational Goods Game’. A line-up of successive groups (generations) can each either extract a resource to exhaustion or leave something for the next group. Exhausting the resource maximizes the payoff for the present generation, but leaves all future generations empty-handed. Here we show...

For my readers who are particularly interested in effective altruism and longtermism , Vaden Masrani makes "A Case Against Strong Longtermism" : Mathematicians tend to think of expected values the way they think of the pythagorean theorem - i.e. as a mathematical identity which can be useful in some circumstances. But within the EA community, expected values are taken very seriously indeed. 4 One reason for this is the link between expected values and decision making, namely that “under some assumptions about rational decision making, people should always pick the project with the highest expected value”. Now, if my assumptions about rational decision making lead to fanaticism , paradoxes , and cluelessness , I might revisit the assumptions. and Near the end of Conjectures and Refutations, Popper criticizes the Utopianist attitude of those who claim to be able to see far into future, who claim to see distant far away evils and ideals, and who claim to have knowledge that ca...

Why did Lucas and I split our donations, as I discussed in my post last week ? To some people this might be a dumb question—why not split? In fact I think it's generally best to allocate everything to the highest-impact option. See here , here , and  here  for arguments as to why, but essentially you can think of it in this way. If you're donating for altruistic reasons, you're trying to improve others' wellbeing. The first dollar and the last dollar you donate shouldn't have different effects unless you give a large amount of money, so large that the organization receiving it has less use for the last dollar than the first. Nevertheless, we split our donations this year, as he and I have in the past. I think in the past my donation-splitting was somewhat driven by making myself feel good. This year, though, I thought through it more, and I figured my reasoning could be helpful to others. 1. We donated to Animal Charity Evaluators and Mercy for Animals in the spir...

When we got married, Lucas and I set up a donor-advised fund. We did this because we plan to donate a large portion of our lifetime earnings, and we think that to a first-order approximation, it's best to save and donate later. (See Phil Trammell's persuasive argument for this in paper form  or on the 80,000 Hours podcast .) Nevertheless, we plan to donate a portion of our projected lifetime earnings each year, around 1% or so. This is essentially because of a mix of diminishing returns and the small chance that now could be an exceptionally important time. In line with that, we made our first grants from our donor-advised fund this year, and some donations that would have come from it except that we donated directly on Facebook to try to get matched. (We'll see what happens on that score.) I'm excited to announce our donations and encourage others to support these excellent organizations! First, we made an unusual donation for us to the Register 2 Vote fund at Block Po...

It looks like the answer is yes. It's been a while, but I'm back, and with a new paper with Doug Bernheim, Nina Buchmann, and Seba Otero : We investigate the effects of large group meetings on the spread of COVID-19 by studying the impact of eighteen Trump campaign rallies. To capture the effects of subsequent contagion within the pertinent communities, our analysis encompasses up to ten post-rally weeks for each event. Our method is based on a collection of regression models, one for each event, that capture the relationships between post-event outcomes and pre-event characteristics, including demographics and the trajectory of COVID-19 cases, in similar counties. We explore a total of 24 procedures for identifying sets of matched counties. For the vast majority of these variants, our estimate of the average treatment effect across the eighteen events implies that they increased subsequent confirmed cases of COVID-19 by more than 250 per 100,000 residents. Extrapolating this f...

It's time for my annual picks for Best Picture. This year (unlike in previous years), two of my picks are nominated, but my top one is not: The Farewell was in my view the best film of the year. The story was riveting, touching on hu man relations with a complexity that goes beyond words. It was provocative, sad, even funny at times, but what I think some may miss is that the camerawork was gorgeous too. (The beautifully-composed closing shot, above, is far from the most remarkable. Staircases, even medical machines receive a visually poetic treatment throughout.) My next-two favorites are, luckily, apparently top Best Picture contenders. First is 1917 . Some people thought the (illusory) one-shot visuals were a gimmick, but for my money they fit the story very well and captured the unrelenting intensity of trench warfare.  The actors and script did a solid job sustaining attention over that length of time. That's basically tied in my mind with Parasite , which had an ...

That's the question suggested by a new paper in the American Economic Review. Here's the abstract: We study the extent to which eminent scientists shape the vitality of their areas of scientific inquiry by examining entry rates into the subfields of 452 academic life scientists who pass away prematurely. Consistent with previous research, the flow of articles by collaborators into affected fields decreases precipitously after the death of a star scientist. In contrast, we find that the flow of articles by non-collaborators increases by 8.6% on average. These additional contributions are disproportionately likely to be highly cited. They are also more likely to be authored by scientists who were not previously active in the deceased superstar's field. Intellectual, social, and resource barriers all impede entry, with outsiders only entering subfields that offer a less hostile landscape for the support and acceptance of “foreign” ideas. Overall, our results suggest that on...

There's a new paper out by political scientists on support for animal rights. It's in line with most of the data I'd seen but bears repeating. High correlations with support for human rights and being female, and not much of a connection with wealth, but if anything wealthy people are less supportive of animal rights. The abstract: In this article, we empirically test explanations for variation in support for animal rights at the individual level and across the United States. We draw on a combination of national public opinion surveys and cross-sectional data on animal rights laws from the fifty US states. We find a strong connection between recognition of human rights and animal rights both at the individual attitude level and at the US state policy level. Our results demonstrate that support for animal rights strongly links to support for disadvantaged or marginalized human populations, including LGBT groups, racial minorities, undocumented immigrants, and the poor. ...

Effective altruism is now spending a great deal of time on improving prospects for the future. This is chiefly by avoiding extinction risks , but there are other strategies as well, e.g. moral circle expansion . In any case changing institutions looks like a promising way to improve the world. What are the longest-lasting institutions in the world? Certainly high among them is religion.  For this reason, it seems to me that expanding religions' moral circles (especially old religions with a tendency to grow) is a highly-neglected strategy for improving the world. I've seen posts in effective altruism (e.g. this one ) about outreach to religious groups, but I always saw them as a sort of diversity and inclusivity message: to grow a movement, you need to welcome all sorts of people. It's important to welcome and include people, of course, but this seems to be dramatically underselling the prominence of religion in virtually every society. The Catholic Church is around ...

NOTE: I would like to clarify that the post below and the published paper show that a result from 1995 does not hold, but they do NOT make the case for the 1995 model being correct. There are many reasons the models in both papers are likely to be deeply flawed: path dependency, dynamic ecosystems, philosophical problems with the definition of suffering and enjoyment, and so on. The primary point here is to treat the 1995 result and other work on wild animal suffering with caution. In 1995, Yew-Kwang Ng wrote a groundbreaking paper, "Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering"  that explored the novel question of the wellbeing of wild animals as distinct from the conservation of species. As perceptive as it was innovative, the paper proposed a number of axioms about evolution and consciousness to study which animals are sentient, what their experiences are, and what might be done about it. Among the many results in the paper wa...

It's common knowledge in urban areas that the availability of vegan options has soared in the U.S. and around the world in recent years, and it's nearly equally common to think that veganism has become more common as well, but the data on this raises questions. Gallup has been estimating the number of vegans and vegetarians for years and has repeatedly found no change . At the same time, the number of vegan options is clearly increasing in supermarkets and restaurants.  It's far from clear that Gallup is right, because other, sketchier statistics have some hint of the numbers of vegans increasing. I can't find the original data, but  GlobalData  apparently found a 600% increase in the number of people identifying as vegan, and there's a bunch of figures like this bouncing around online. This seems likely to be driven by the fact that in surveys, more people identify as vegan and vegetarian than actually are based on self-reported food choices, but Gallup’s trend...

Chiming once again in as the Oscars are announced with my picks for this year, which aren't always those that are nominated. My favorite movie of the year was A Star Is Born . I left that movie in awe: the way the camera moves during the concerts makes it feel like we are on stage, and Lady Gaga, the quintessential modern pop star, comes across as a totally normal person. The story and acting had my bawling as I left the theater. After that, I think the next-best movie of the year was Hereditary , which as a horror movie didn't stand a chance of being nominated. It's the scariest movie I've ever seen in theaters, easily, and probably the scariest I've ever seen. It draws with real-life issues as well in a way that makes it all the more unsettling. I think after that Black Panther takes the cake for me. It's a superhero movie made into an afro-futuristic epic, and despite all its popularity, it's not a bit oversold. It draws on all sorts of pop-cultur...

Rob Wiblin interviewed economist Tyler Cowen on the 80,000 hours podcast (“the show about the world’s most pressing problems and how you can use your career to solve them”) and as I would expect, it was a consistently stimulating conversation. Cowen presented on his new book, Stubborn Attachments , which argues that we should place dramatic importance on economic growth because most of humanity’s expected value lies in the future, and economic growth is the most reliable help we can offer future generations. I think the thesis is largely correct, and I'm glad he's making such a strong case for creating an economically prosperous future. I want to contend, though, that growth as conventionally measured does not always do justice to the sort of growth that matters for the long-term future. Cowen makes a good case for providing future generations with as many resources as possible, but economic growth is a systematically imperfect measure of resources. In particular, it's n...

Source: https://peoplespostng.com/news/when-churches-become-fetish-ritual-dens/ I asked a number of people at effective altruism global in June a question that came to my mind: how would a recession affect charities aligned with effective altruism? A lot of people seemed to me to have concerns, and many people I talked to seemed to think their organizations did not have a plan for if a recession hits and donations decrease. I think that’s a problem worth some thought. The effective altruism movement has now been booming for several years, with many EA-aligned animal organizations multiplying in size and achieving a cascade of long-sought cage-free pledges. EA-oriented meta organizations and those working on the long-term future of humanity have gained significantly more esteem. Evidence-based global development organizations have continued to be dominant in that sphere, even though they are increasingly less connected to self-described EA organizations. There is unmistaka...