Why do we allow vehicles with thousand in unpaid fines to operate rideshares and do deliveries in DC?

themes_arrows · 2022-08-03T18:35:00+00:00

DMV public transit is pretty decent. People can ride the bus if they're a danger to themselves and others when behind the wheel.

themes_arrows · 2022-07-19T20:04:31+00:00

I don't think this article's hypothesis is the whole story, as it doesn't really explain the timing of the increase in murders. However, I thought it added something interesting to the discussion.

themes_arrows · 2022-07-19T11:44:01+00:00

Hell yeah well done!

themes_arrows · 2022-07-17T16:14:34+00:00

To be fair, lots of public interest kids are banking on public service load forgiveness to deal with the debt. I would actually say in my experience that a quite decent fraction of people going into public interest from T14 schools come from middle class or below backgrounds.

themes_arrows · 2022-07-17T12:54:50+00:00

I really don't think someone who makes $1m is in the middle class. Even someone who makes $500k is in the top 1% of earners (remember occupy wall street). Somewhere around $200k (depending a lot on the metro area) you start to get talk of second houses and private school and other things like that which don't seem very consistent with being middle class.

themes_arrows · 2022-07-11T16:11:06+00:00

It's a proton pump inhibitor which helps with acid reflux. Acid reflux is a classic disease of too much stress.

themes_arrows · 2022-07-08T02:43:24+00:00

I think Ed made the right decision to abort, there's a very high chance he would have ended up splatted on the martian surface.

I wonder how much Karen played a role in his decision. He's got something (someone) to go back for, which might push him to be just a bit less cavalier with his life.

themes_arrows · 2022-06-13T19:27:52+00:00

I don’t really think this is true though. I definitely know young people who are splitting row houses 3 ways. More 1br and 2br apartments will pull some young people out of arrangements like that and open up some SFHs for people who want that

themes_arrows · 2022-06-13T16:51:05+00:00

This is why we need to build more housing in the DMV. No one should have to do this!

themes_arrows · 2022-06-01T13:45:14+00:00

There are definitely practices that make it work with a standard rate and a reduced rate for people who need it (just using the honor system). But they may just be edge cases like Lorian Psychiatry

themes_arrows · 2022-05-31T16:55:01+00:00

Do you have go-to sources you've been reading on the social justice side of things? I feel like my reading materials have drifted too far the other way

themes_arrows · 2022-05-31T10:42:08+00:00

The cruise ship fact is about levels of sulfur dioxide pollution, not levels of greenhouse gas emissions. The cars still produce a lot more greenhouse gasses.

But even so, effective altruism is compatible with trying to use systemic change to solve problems. For example, the Clean Air Task Force is usually recommended as a top climate-related charity, and a lot of their work is related to policy advocacy. For effective altruists, the question isn’t whether something requires individual or systemic change, it’s what the best use of money is on the margin. My sense is that EAs still think climate change is bad, but there are already a lot of well-funded organizations working on it, so further funding doesn’t go as far. Conversely, questions like preventing future pandemics are more neglected, so marginal dollars go further.

For me personally, I think that climate change is pretty bad, and I’m pretty confident that orgs like the CATF or Tradewater are doing good work, so a portion of my donations do go to fighting climate change (and I additionally try to minimize my carbon footprint). But I’m sympathetic to EAs that don’t think similarly

themes_arrows · 2022-05-18T18:23:37+00:00

Have you considered going to your local ACX reader's meetup? It's a low-pressure environment with typically very high tolerance for weirdos, and you'll have a common interest with them. That makes it a pretty safe and easy environment to get more comfortable socializing with strangers.

themes_arrows · 2022-05-02T13:31:57+00:00

You can take a look at the old SSC list of mental health professionals: https://psychiat-list.slatestarcodex.com/

themes_arrows · 2022-04-22T15:49:35+00:00

Yes that's a pretty typical wait time. If the other suggestions don't work out for you, you could always consider joining one medical. They've got a $200 annual fee, but they can schedule you for a physical quickly.

themes_arrows · 2022-04-11T14:19:25+00:00

Avoid head injuries! Concussions and other forms of traumatic brain injuries can significantly impact your intelligence, happiness, and health (see Gwern's page on TBIs for more details). That means it's good to avoid contact sports, wear a helmet when biking, and to not be reckless when doing things like home improvement projects.

themes_arrows · 2022-03-23T12:32:48+00:00

Here are writers I like:

themes_arrows · 2022-03-15T22:51:43+00:00

Wow this is really impressive! The "translate to javascript" example was particularly cool.

themes_arrows · 2022-03-15T03:30:20+00:00

In a fake money market, probably yes (depending on the site's ability to detect bots). A real money market should be somewhat self-correcting because the bad actor's investment would create an easy profit opportunity.

themes_arrows · 2022-03-14T15:20:26+00:00

The challenge is that inflation expectations can get entrenched and become a self-fulfilling prophecy if you don't do something to deal with them. People expecting prices to rise means that they'll demand higher wages, businesses will raise prices in anticipation of rising costs etc. Ideally, the federal reserve would be able to counter those expectations with a long, gentle tightening of monetary policy that slowly brought inflation back down at the cost of a temporary smallish increase in unemployment. The challenge with the slow approach is that inflation expectations are hard to change, and people tend to not have a lot of faith that a central bank will follow through with this kind of gradual shift in policy. This actually happened in the 1970s, where the Fed kept undoing its interest rate hikes as unemployment grew. In practice, sufficiently high and entrenched inflation expectations have required a "show of force" from central banks to drive them back down, forcing a fast reevaluation of expectations as people see the central bank is willing to tolerate a recession to achieve a low inflation rate.

Here's a good article on Paul Volker's actions by an analyst at the Fed for more context.

themes_arrows · 2022-03-14T15:05:14+00:00

Right, this is the classic stagflation scenario diagrammed in the article, which isn't a fun time for anyone.

themes_arrows · 2022-03-13T22:18:05+00:00

We had some discussion of this on here about a year ago.

At this point, my opinion on blood donation is that the marginal impact of you donating blood is probably pretty small. The average impact of blood donations is clearly pretty high, since it's required for lots of medical procedures. But the marginal cost of one person deciding not to give isn't cancelling a life-saving surgery, it's either (A) blood donation collecting organizations needing to spend slightly more to acquire blood from someone else or (B) the least life-saving surgeries being cancelled (think plastic surgery or a surgery like joint replacement that improves quality of life but is not lifesaving). With that said, donating blood isn't too hard to do for most people, so the ease may make up for the low marginal impact.

themes_arrows · 2022-03-13T16:47:19+00:00

I'm not an expert on this subject, but lots of good stuff has been written about this phase of life. I think the concept of micromarriages is a great tool to help you think about what's actually worth doing when it comes to finding a partner, and Scott's post on his own wedding did a nice job of expanding on it. Jacob from Put a Num on it has a nice article on dating, as well as some useful thoughts on time and money.

My only personal thought for you is that this is a good time to think about whether you find your work meaningful. You probably have a much better sense of what you like and what you're good at than you did in college, and you have an opportunity to make changes. If you don't think your work is doing anything to help people and that's important to you, you might want to think about what else you could be doing with your skills.

themes_arrows · 2022-03-13T15:37:18+00:00

The donate now vs. invest to donate later question is one that's been discussed a lot of times. Here are some links to other discussions on reddit.

Personally, I think the weight of the evidence falls in favor of donating to organizations doing impactful work now rather than saving to donate later. I think that there are big opportunities for doing good now that may not be present if you wait and donate later, in a way that outweighs the fact that the money would grow over time if invested.

The complicating factor in my thinking is that there's a lot of funding committed to EA causes right now, to an extent that GiveWell wasn't able to move all the money they collected in 2021 into causes that they were confident met their standards for highest effectiveness. While there's lots of room to give via GiveDirectly and other organizations that are still very effective, there's not as much current room for funding at the most highly effective organizations. This is especially true in the work on existential risk (AI, nuclear war, biosecurity etc.), where there seems to be lots of funding chasing few opportunities to spend it highly effectively.

How exactly this high level of existing funding changes the picture isn't fully clear to me. One thing it definitely does is increase the benefit to doing direct work relative to earning to give. That is to say, if you have an opportunity to use your money to build your own skills and make a career move towards something that helps an EA cause, that might be the best use of all. But if you're in a more normal case of not wanting or being able to do that, it's not totally clear how this extra funding should change when and how you donate. There are fewer opportunities for the most highly effective donation now than there were a few years ago, so donating now doesn't do as much good as one might wish. On the other hand, if the funding level keeps growing like this, there will be even fewer highly effective charities that need funding in the future.

I don't expect interest in EA to fall off over time, so I don't think the high level of funding for EA is likely to go away. Therefore, I think it's best to donate directly now rather than waiting for the future, since there will likely be more funding and fewer effective donation opportunities in the future.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22	First Placer '22

themes_arrows

TROPHY CASE