My birthday is December 11. Christmas, my December holiday of choice, is December 25. I’ve heard that some people want to get me gifts for these two holidays. If you’re one of these people, here’s a list of things I would like, in my order of preference!

1.) Donations to GiveDirectly. GiveDirectly is a new charity that will take any cash you donate it and give it directly, no strings attached, to extremely poor families in Africa. Surprisingly, they’ve found that such transfers result in useful spending like buying food, investing in their homes, paying school fees, or increasing their savings. Very few recipients use it on alcohol or tobacco.

GiveDirectly has been thoroughly vetted and is supported by multiple studies and is currently one of the three top recommendations of GiveWell, a very selective independent charity evaluator. Additionally, the foundation Good Ventures has promised to match any donation to GiveDirectly up to $100K, so any donation you give will be doubled!

To be honest, I already have lots of the things I need or the means to get them for myself. I’m really excited about the opportunity to make a true difference in the world via GiveDirectly and would greatly prefer a donation here more than any other gift.

If you don’t want to donate to GiveDirectly, here are some books I really would like to get:

2.) The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism by Olivia Fox Cabane. I like receiving books and don’t mind if they’re used, as long as they’re still legible!

3.) Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath.

4.) The Copywriter’s Handbook, Third Edition: A Step-By-Step Guide To Writing Copy That Sells by Robert W. Bly.

5.) The Science of Giving: Experimental Approaches to the Study of Charity by Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Christopher Y. Olivol.

Last year, two readers of my blog reached out and bought me a book from my list. I totally don’t expect that, but if you do want to do this for some reason, feel free to contact me for shipping information.

Think you have what it takes to make good predictions? Since 2011, the Good Judgment Project (GJP) has been making predictions on issues of international relations and foreign affairs, recently winning the IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) prediction contest. Predictions from the GJP have been startlingly accurate, outperforming prediction markets, and exceeding even optimistic expectations. It’s run by Phillip Tetlock, the famous predictor of “foxes and hedgehogs” fame.

From the Monkey Cage article:

How does the Good Judgment Project achieve such strikingly accurate results? The Project uses modern social-science methods ranging from harnessing the wisdom of crowds to prediction markets to putting together teams of forecasters. The GJP research team attributes its success to a blend of getting the right people (i.e., the “right” individual forecasters) on the bus, offering basic tutorials on inferential traps to avoid and best practices to embrace, concentrating the most talented forecasters into super teams, and constantly fine-tuning the aggregation algorithms it uses to combine individual forecasts into a collective prediction on each forecasting question. The Project’s best forecasters are typically talented and highly motivated amateurs, rather than subject matter experts.

But the good news is that you now have a chance to get involved with GJP Season 3 if you think you’re a great predictor:

If you enjoy world politics and appreciate a good challenge, consider joining the Good Judgment Project, which has openings right now for Season 3 forecasters. The Project will give you the opportunity to receive training, to get regular feedback on your forecasting accuracy, and to test your forecasting skills against those of some of the most accurate forecasters around. Interested? To find out more and to register, go to www.goodjudgmentproject.com.

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This was also cross-posted on LessWrong.

Follow up to “My Strategic Plan” and “What Have I Been Doing? II”.

I do weekly reviews to make sure that I’m prioritizing my daily tasks well. I do monthly reviews to track my adherence to important habits. However, now I’d like to do something still a bit new – a six-month review that basically checks to make sure everything is going to plan from an even higher, more abstract level of review.

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You may (hopefully) have noticed that this blog has died out again. Maybe you’ve even come to miss it. After all, in past years, I’ve spent November doing NaNoWriMo for my blog (see 2011 and 2012), but this year I’ve done nothing blog-wise.

So what have I been doing, behind the scenes, while not blogging? I’ll tell you!

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Follow up to “New Years Resolutions: Octember Edition”

Another month, another opportunity to review how my life is going and make sure I’m doing everything I want to do, the way I want to do it.

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An interesting way to use variable pricing to allow trade-offs between time and money: “Mary puts up three signs on the side of the truck: $2, $3, and $5. As people come for pizza she asks them to make three lines, one for each sign, based on how much they want to pay. […] The $2 line is long[. …] Some people would rather have pizza sooner than money and wait in the $3 line. […] Mary makes more money, the people who can afford to pay less get cheaper pizza, and the people in a hurry now have an option to trade off time and money.”

When saying there’s “no evidence” for something, keep in mind that there are actually two kinds of “no evidence” – either no evidence has turned up despite looking really hard with the right methods or no evidence has come up yet because no one has bothered to look. Only the first one is necessarily damning to a hypothesis.

The Kaye effect is pretty cool: “They have made a video of leaping shampoo, in which they explain the so-called Kaye effect. Kaye in Nature magazine in 1963 wrote ‘I can offer no explanation for this behaviour.’ At high-speed recording of 1000 frames per second the following observations were made in 300ms interval: 1) a heap is formed, 2) a streamer ejects, 3) the outgoing jet rises, 4) hits the incoming jet, 5) ends the Kaye effect.”

Cal Newport writes about how you can find pretty amazing-sounding accomplishments by just doing something interesting and follow through.

If you have a hard problem, one way to solve it is to hack away at the edges, working on subproblems until something comes up.

Factory farming doesn’t actually reduce the price of meat. While factory farming does reduce the cost it takes to produce meat, producers are keeping the extra savings as profit and not reducing prices.

From the department of audacious philanthropy, this family sold their house and donated half of the proceeds and bought a smaller house.

The Battle of Hoth proves that both the Rebels and the Empire are complete, total idiots when it comes to military strategy.

Google Correlate Does Not Imply Google Causation. Hilarity + statistics.

Can We Stop Worrying About Millennials Yet?

Jeremy Lauer is a researcher at WHO-CHOICE, a project of the World Health Organization to encourage cost-effectiveness via both research and communication with policy-makers Rob Wiblin and I sat down to interview Jeremy and learn about WHO-CHOICE, a potentially promising career path for 80,000 Hours members interested in promoting cost-effectiveness research - one of our high priority causes to investigate.

Jeremy’s main points were:

• WHO-CHOICE is about giving countries the tools needed to establish priorities in the health sector and make good, high-impact-for-money policy.

• The landscape of global public health is starting to shift to a time where, more and more, “best buys” and “magic-bullet solutions” such as vaccines are fully funded. This is exciting because it means people are getting important treatments, but it is also daunting because the next generation of interventions will involve more complex technical work and clearer communication with the public.

• If you have a strong economics background, are quantitatively minded, and also have interests in epidemiology, biostatistics, or computer programming, a career at WHO-CHOICE or a similar organization could be rewarding and impactful.

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Follow up to “What is Morality”.

What is this?

This is an essay where I explain my opinions on meta-ethics through a guided discussion with a hypothetical inquisitor. It seemed like a much easier, more efficient, and more fluid format than writing a dozen tinier essays. The only downside is at 4797 words, it’s a bit lengthy…

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I’ve had some very strange swings in my personal opinion on “fair trade” throughout my life. At first, I thought it was a silly concept for reasons I no longer recall. But then I read Peter Singer’s take on it, who suggested that it basically is just the consumer being willing to pay a little extra in order to ensure that the farmers have a better quality of life and the idea of fair trade made sense to me and I wanted to participate. But then I stopped being sure that fair trade actually was substantially improving the quality of life of farmers. And I realized that if the extra price is essentially a donation to improve the quality of life of farmers, shouldn’t I be concerned about how that donation could go further? (See also.) Now I avoid buying fair trade things, but personally donate the difference between a free trade and fair trade good to the best non-profits I can find.

Overpopulation is not a problem because innovation continues to increase the carrying capacity of Earth. With our pre-agriculture technology, we probably could only have sustained a few million humans at most. Reminds me of how, if everyone lived in a New York City level population density, we could fit the entire world population in Texas. Also, that thing with people living inside or outside this circle.

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Follow up to “What is Utilitarianism?”.

I’ve talked about what utilitarianism is and why you might like it. But what would it look like in practice, in the real world? A few people have been suggesting that in order for utilitarianism to actually work we have to be utility calculating robots with no desire except to maximize utility in every situation.

However, there’s are two big problems with that: first, you’re an error-prone human, not a perfect utilitarian robot, so you’re prone to make mistakes and therefore accidentally cause things to be worse. Second, you’re a human with normal human psychology, not a perfect utility robot, so you’re prone to care about things other than working a 120 hour work week solely dedicated to, say, ending malaria.

So what gives? Is utilitarianism over? Doomed to be something nice but impractical? No. Instead, you should take your human nature into account and do the best you can. In fact, doing the best you can instead of trying to be a perfect utilitarian actually better maximizes utility, because if you try to be a perfect utilitarian robot, you’ll fail, and the consequences of failure will be worse than if you tried hard.

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