Five Myths about the Minimum Wage. The minimum wage actually (1) doesn’t cover everyone, (2) doesn’t stay the same unless Congress changes it, (3) obviously increase unemployment when raised, (4) or help the working poor when raised. It also (5) isn’t a partisan issue.

Need more myths? Ok. Here’s 10 Stubborn Exercise Myths That Won’t Die. Turns out things like “No Pain, No Gain” is false, soreness after exercise isn’t caused by lactic acid building up in muscles, exercise doesn’t have to take long hours and isn’t worthless if you don’t do it regularly, you don’t need a sports drink or supplements, you actually shouldn’t stretch, you will lose weight but you won’t lose weight quickly. Furthermore, exercising when you’re old is still fine even if you didn’t do it when young, and working out in your home isn’t better or worse than working out at the gym.

If you pay them money, partisans will tell you the truth. There has been a surprising finding that political partisans don’t just disagree on the issues, but also basic facts like the level of unemployment. However, this theory suggests that they don’t actually disagree, they’re just essentially lying to show support for their preferred side. If you offer them money to give a correct answer, this partisan effect disappears. …At least in one study.

“Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided”: “Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.”

“Optimal Philanthropy for Human Beings”: “The psychology of charitable giving offers three pieces of advice to those who want to give charity and those who want to receive it: Enjoy the happiness that giving brings, commit future income, and realize that requesting time increases the odds of getting money.”

General tip: advertisements for non-profits should include a specific call to action.

Writers of Reddit explain some exceptionally simple tips that make a huge difference in other people’s writing. The tips are generally for fiction, but are good all around.

Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe! It’s fun!

Nine Lies to Learn Before It’s Too Late

Why Selling Kidneys Should be Legal. Yes.

Do Not Be Quickly Persuaded

I’m interested in an idea called effective altruism” which is about not just doing things to make the world a better place, but about thinking about what can do to make their helping go the furthest. For example, if I could spend an hour and help a person cross the street that would be cool, but if I could spend an hour and cure blindness in three different people, that would be even cooler.

Generally, it seems like people either immediately get “effective altruism” or they don’t. Evidence from Giving What We Can member surveys plus other anecdotal evidence seems to support this. But as the “effective altruism” movement is going to grows, we’ll eventually run out of those who find the idea intuitive and we’ll need to start pitching to people who find the idea unintuitive. How do we do this?

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I’m trying to read more books. But it’s important to actually learn from the books I read, and a great way to do that is to take notes. Therefore, I’m aiming to also publish notes on the books I read, from now on. These notes are mainly for my own recollection, and they were not constructed with the intention to be a thorough summary. The notes are probably more helpful to those who have already read the book, rather than those trying to get an overview of the book without reading it.

Today’s book notes are on “Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them” by Joshua Greene. I give this book an A.

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I like to think that I get a lot of stuff done. I write on this blog nearly four times a week, I volunteer for both local and distant non-profits I like, I’m active in student organizations at college, I study a lot, and I still get my homework done. Other people have noticed this and asked me how I’m so productive. This essay is where I try and “share my secrets”, so to speak.

The real secret is that, in the past, I wasn’t nearly as productive. I struggled with procrastination, had issues completing assignments on time, and always felt like I never had enough time to do things. But, starting in January and continuing for the past eight months, I have slowly implemented several systems and habits in my life that, taken together, have made me productive. Productivity is not a talent I have – I’ve learned to be productive over the past several months and I have habits in place where I basically cannot fail to be productive.

Hopefully these systems will work for you. I’ve seen some people adopt them to some success, but I’ve never seen anyone do it exactly the way I do. And perhaps it would even be bad to do it exactly the way I do, because everyone is just a little bit different. I’m being aware of other-optimizing and letting you just know what’s worked for me. I make no claims that these systems will work for you. Your mileage may vary.

So what are the systems? To get you to be productive, we’ll need to get you to organize, to prioritize, then to do and review. Have those four things down and you’ll have everything you need to be productive.

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Focus on chickens to knock down the most animal suffering: “Imagine you’re standing in a dining room before a massive table set with 100 plates. Spread among the plates is all the beef, chicken, and pork an average American consumes in one year. Since Americans eat so much meat, the plates are piled high with animal flesh. If you tally up the plates, you’ll find that 44 plates contain chicken, 30 contain beef, and 26 contain pork, since Americans eat slightly more chicken than beef or pork. [But i]n place of the table, picture all the actual, live animals who were farmed and slaughtered to produce the meat you visualized on the plates. Looking upon this crowd of animals, you notice something strange: there’s a sea of chickens and . . . that’s it.”

The costs of crime are higher than people think: “Even if a burglar only causes $400 worth of damage, I’d pay far more than $400 to prevent a burglary — the loss of privacy, the sense of violation, the disruption of my normal order, the distraction of having to deal with police and repairmen and insurance agents, etc. […And] we also have to count the harm to the criminals! Going through lengthy court proceedings, spending years in abusive prisons, having to deal with officious parole officers and the loss of liberty they cause are all serious costs and we can’t wave them away just because they happen to the bad guys.” Plus, the link includes discussion of game theory of crime prevention.

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An idea I had while talking to Xio Kikauka and Joey Savoie is to run a jobs board for people interested in effective altruism. It seems like it actually would be relatively easy to have a script automatically monitor various job pages and synthesize them all into one area that looks nice.

Would this be useful to create? And if so, where should we get jobs from?

Some potential ideas:

• The Humane League (Jobs, Internships)

• Effective Animal Activism

• Giving What We Can

• 80,000 Hours

• GiveWell

• Innovations for Poverty Action (Jobs, Internships)

• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

[Added 19 Aug:

• Oxfam (International Secretariat, Affiliates)

• Nyaya Health

• The Hunger Project (Jobs, Internships)

• Population Services International

• Good Ventures

• Farm Sanctuary (Jobs, Internships)

]

I’d be willing to make this happen if people were interested.

-

Update 30 Jan 2014: I’m now maintaining the list of jobs over at the .impact Project page instead.

This was also cross-posted on LessWrong.

This is an interesting idea to increase the trustworthiness of self-reporting on survey results – let the respondent roll a die and mandate that they lie if they roll a “6”. This way people can tell the truth and then claim they rolled a “6” if their response was ever called into question.

Scott Young’s Little Book of Productivity contained some useful and novel insights in productivity. Here’s a good summary of the book.

“Morality As Though It Really Mattered”. If moral realism is true, it seems like the most important thing to do is to spend a significant amount of time studying moral realism to make sure you’re doing the right thing.

What about using a universal basic income as a way to reduce inequality and poverty?

Simulated people are people too.

Bruce Schneier’s analysis of the “court of popular opinion”.

How to Not Multitask (and why multitasking is bad)

Was Jane Austen good at game theory?

An interesting move toward more productivity: hiring someone from Craigslist to slap you in the face when you are off task.

Ten things everyone should know about time.

Follow up to “Why I’m Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too)”.

Previously, I wrote “Why I’m Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too)” and a follow up essay “What Would It Take to Prove a Speculative Cause?”. Both of these sparked a lot of discussion on LessWrong, on the Effective Altruist blog, and my own blog, as well as many hours of in person conversation.

After all this extended conversation with people, I’ve changed my mind on a few things that I will elaborate here. I hope in doing so I can (1) clarify my original position and (2) explain where I now stand in light of all the debate so people can engage with my current ideas as opposed to the ideas I no longer hold. My opinions on things tend to change quickly, so I think updates like this will help.

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Follow up to “Giving Now Currently Seems to Beat Giving Later”.

Quite a few people have talked about whether or not it’s better to donate money or donate time now rather than save and donate more money later. While there’s lots of nuance on these positions, there does seem to be roughly these two camps – weighing in (mostly) on the give now side includes GiveWell, Giving What We Can, Scott Alexander, Matt Wage, and me. Weighing in (mostly) on the give later side include Paul Christiano, Robin Hanson, and maybe Brian Tomasik.

The general idea in favor of giving/working now is what Matt Wage calls the haste consideration, or the idea that we can spend resources now to get additional people involved in the movement, and doing so multiplies our impact substantially – getting just one person to pursue altruism with the same effectiveness we would have done doubles our impact for the rest of our life.

This haste consideration, if true, has strong implications. It means not only would we want to donate as soon as possible, but we’d want to make sure we earn money as soon as possible as well, meaning opportunities like law or medicine that have high incomes but also significantly more schooling may be less appealing from an altruistic perspective. It also would mean we should be donating higher percentages of our income instead of saving, even if this would lead to giving less money over the long term.

However, I think the haste consideration might not be as powerful as it might appear, for three reasons I haven’t seen discussed much:

1. Money and talent seems to encounter some bottlenecks in their usage and it seems difficult to make good use them at the rate they could be given.

2. There could be significantly better opportunities in the future that need funding and talent, and we need resources around to take up these opportunities as well.

3. If we take the haste consideration to it’s logical conclusion, we face a potential reductio ad absurdum that we should be taking out large loans to finance the effective altruist movement.

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Follow up to How Much Does it Cost to Buy a Vegetarian?

Naïve cost-effectiveness estimates suggest that if we assume (a) a pamphlet costs 20 cents, (b) 2% of people who receive a pamphlet go vegetarian for (c) an average of four years each, and (d) the average meat eater would eat 40 animals a year, then it costs a mere seven cents to avert a year of nonhuman animal suffering on a factory farm. That’s a pretty good deal.

The problem is, however, that more work needs to be done on making these assumptions accurate – particularly (b) and (c). While more studies are on their way, it’s interesting to think just how low (b) and (c) can be while still being better than our current best option.

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