Zach Freitas-Groff

http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article171385947.html In the annals of social movements, one of the ones that most clearly achieved its objectives was the wave of U.S. anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s. Across the U.S., those who lived near nuclear power plants picketed, blockaded, and disrupted construction of plants, including taking strategic advantage of the Three Mile Island incident to effectively end nuclear power across the U.S. Nuclear power in the U.S. now has a monumental stigma against it quite unlike other developed countries—nuclear power is even a primary source for France's energy infrastructure . (U.S. policy is likely mistaken, as nuclear power is relatively safe ). This week, Kansas offers some inspiration for animal advocates on a model we should consider. Tyson is being forced to back out of a huge new chicken facility after 2,000 out of 5,000 residents of neighboring town Tonganoxie protested last Friday over environmental concern

http://lukemuehlhauser.com/three-wild-speculations- from-amateur-quantitative-macrohistory/ Luke Muelhauser at the Open Philanthropy Project has a thought-provoking post  arguing that  most of human history is roughly the same plodding along in boring conditions until the industrial revolution, in which productivity exploded, countering what people have gotten in history. You can see a visual illustration of this in the graph on the right. I think this gets a whole lot right about the way history has gone. It irrefutably gets a lot right when you talk in terms of sheer magnitude of living conditions: the amount of good things multiplied many times over in a short period of time. https://mathbitsnotebook.com/Algebra1/ FunctionGraphs/expgaphtrans3.jpg As one of the commenters pointed out, there could still be importance to earlier eras of history–potentially as much importance as in post-Industrial Revolution history. The reason is this:  if our interest is in relative pr

Here are some recent things I've been following and would recommend: Books: Pillar of Fire - The second part in a fascinating three-part series on the civil rights movement. Tales of the City - Serialized fiction by Armistead Maupin in the 1970s on countercultural life in San Francisco. Articles: The Unilateralist’s Curse: The Case for Principle of Conformity  - A philosophy paper that hits on a surprising dilemma and argues for a conclusion most philosophers would not like. The Resegregation of Jefferson County  - A disheartening New York Times Magazine feature on the state of the South. We need to nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s why  - The title speaks for itself, but I think this is a topic that has had surprisingly little discussion relative to its importance. How bosses are (literally) like dictators  - A Vox piece on workplace democracy, or the lack thereof. Another rarely discussed issue with real importance. Films: Hacksaw Ridge - Mel Gibson's

I watched Hacksaw Ridge this weekend, Mel Gibson's movie about a literal Christian soldier during World War II who becomes a medic after completing basic training without picking up a gun. He's a Seventh Day Adventist, which makes him a pacifist (as well as a vegetarian). I found myself empathizing and sympathizing with him more than I'd expected, including in moments that pertained less to his pacifism than to his religion–a puzzling predicament for me as an atheist Jew. Faith is the opposite of how I try to operate. I try to be skeptical of everything and believe things based on proof (all while knowing that this is unattainable). Yet once I have arrived at a conclusion, and pending further evidence forcing me to revise my beliefs, I believe strongly in acting: whether it's direct activism as I've done in the past, research, or donating money. Acting requires commitment. Even when the evidence points one way, social norms often point the other way. Those soci

Many of us grow up questioning conformity. Even those who don't go through a teenage rage phase get a good deal of anti-conformity in school thanks to the Enlightenment. It turns out some of the human tendency toward conformity may be rational, and for fairly subtle reasons. Australia has a large population of wild rabbits from someone acting unilaterally. I read up last week on the Unilateralist's Curse , the problem covered in a brilliant philosophy paper by Cambridge's Nick Bostrom (h/t Buck Shlegeris). The Unilateralist's Curse occurs when a member of a group sharing a common altruistic goal takes an action that hurts the goal because that member mistakenly believes the action to be helpful. If members of a group are each appraising the likelihood of an action being helpful and choosing whether to take the action independently, the action is more likely to happen than it should be. Via https://nickbostrom.com/papers/unilateralist.pdf An example is this:

I asked a question last week about whether efforts to ensure that artificial intelligence is developed safely should include public outreach. This goes significantly against the grain of most people working on AI safety, as the predominant view is that all that is useful right now is research, and even outreach to elites should wait. While I'm still not persuaded that public outreach would be harmful, I was moved toward seeing why it might be a bad idea from a few answers I got: 1) On the core issues, the policy asks  have yet to be worked out  for ensuring safe development of artificial intelligence. Nobody knows how we actually program AI to be safe, yet. We are so far from that there is little to say. 2) Regulation could tie the ethical AI developers' hands and let bad actors be the ones who develop AI. This argument closely resembles arguments about other regulations: industries flee countries with the most regulations, causing industries to move to less-regulated

Insect populations are rapidly declining according to scientists (and our cars' windshields) : An amateur German group called the Krefeld Entomological Society  has been monitoring insect numbers at 100 nature reserves in Western Europe since the 1980s. Although there were the annual fluctuations they discovered that by 2013 numbers began to plummet by nearly 80 per cent. Most people likely see this as a huge loss, particularly animal advocates. Environmentalists will of course see this as a huge loss given the effects on many ecosystems. There's a growing body of literature, however, that suggests a different reaction (for instance, see Simon Knutsson ). Much of it is done by lay people, but I hope to be able to study this question academically before long. If insects do feel pleasure and pain, then their lives look pretty lousy. In the vast majority of cases, "being an insect" means being born and promptly starving, being eaten alive, or dying in another h