A Valentine's Day Card

Giving something meaningful each Valentine's Day has become a sort of tradition between Katherine and myself.

This year, Katherine has truly outdone herself. Her handmade card quotes Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World, showcasing a principle that has guided my life ever since I first became a skeptic some twenty odd years ago. It's a principle that I've held close to my being and that has been at the heart of many conversations Katherine and I have about so many different things. She writes that the balance between openness to new ideas and ruthless skepticism is a dance where each of us often switch sides in our cooperative search for truth. Alongside the quote, she has made literal pinpricks of light, referencing the lone lights in the darkness that rational thinking helps us to uncover. These represent the deep truths that lie within the deep nonsense — the very same deep truths that we slowly aim to uncover as we dig through the arguments about the problems of our time.

Upon opening the card, we see that there is yet another layer to the quote on the cover. She says that I brighten her life, implying that, at a different level, the darkness of the card itself also represents our lives, separated, and the lights we have managed to uncover are the shining moments we have made in the course of our relationship. All of this is said within the confines of a Sierpinski triangle, a fractal shape of crystalline regularity that reveals yet another layer of meaning: here, the balance is in the construction of the shape, with its open spaces throughout (literally it has an area of 0) and the numerous lights that we nevertheless uncover via the application of strict logical rules within the triangle itself. It is a saga that shows us the things we can count on even within a field where nothing can be counted on. Here, she implies, is where our love resides.

On yet another layer of interpretation, we see that the lights themselves overwhelm the structure of the sierpinski triangle. The triangle itself is drawn in a dark color that is difficult to see on the black background even with the lights turned off — once they are turned on, it becomes impossible to see the logical order belying them. Only the front of the card, written in reflective ink, remains visible to the human eye when the lights wash out the scene on the dark void itself. Yet even then it is a difficult thing to make out: you must struggle to see the path before you. Ironically, it is the brightness of the lights, not the darkness of the background, that makes this so difficult. This, again, is in reference to our relationship: so many of our brightest moments sometimes overshadow our typical moments in life, and make it that much more difficult to see the structure beneath it all when we reside day by day.

I am completely taken aback at the various layers of meaning weaved into a single card. So many of our conversations over the past years point back to many of the points made on the card itself. I am sure that, to any other person, this must look just like a black card with lights embedded within. But, to me, I see the threads of our relationship here: the discussions and presented arguments, the successes within a background of seeming impossibility, and the simple joys that overwhelm even the lowest of lows in a relationship of this magnitude.

I don't know how I can top this, but I will have to up my game next year.

See also the Puzzle Portraiture she made for me, the screen print of The Tuft of Flowers, & her drawing of Jasper and the Amiibo. You can see more of her work at KatherineHess.com.

Puzzle Portraiture

Made by Katherine Hess.

In May of 2018, Katherine sent me a photo of a piece she was working on. "It's a puzzle portrait," she explained. "Do you think you can solve it?"

I was fascinated by the small photo she sent me. It was a portrait of me, all in orange (my favorite color), using Futhark and Greek characters. I don't speak any languages other than English very well, but I did spend two years in college learning koine Greek, and I know enough to be able to muddle through a Loeb Classical Library-style text, so long as it has the English translation on the opposite page. And in middle school I transliterated Futhark characters whenever writing in my personal journal; to this day, I am still more comfortable writing freehand in Futhark transliteration than in actual English, because whenever I write for others, it is on a keyboard; when I write in freehand, it is always in my journal, which uses no English characters whatsoever.

If you're interested in attempting to solve this puzzle yourself, it may help you to at least know a few more things about me, since the puzzle was created specifically with me in mind. I'm an amateur mathematician and I adore mathematical games, such as the ones that Martin Gardner used to post in his old Scientific American column. Katherine is a lover of art, and the combination of art and mathematics is a common theme that comes up in gifts that she gives to me. Books like Gödel, Escher, Bach are prominent due to that combination of themes.

You now have enough information to solve the puzzle. I encourage you to give it a try before reading on, as the solution will be spoiled below. Don't look at nor use anything below this line of text when solving the puzzle. Open the above image in a new tab if it helps.

At the time I received the above photo, Katherine was still working on the actual drawing. You can see that only some of the boxes are shaded. She was working on it in her studio, which means I couldn't see her work on it. Instead, I had only the above photo to go on. She said she would finish soon and bring it home to me, so I set to work on solving the puzzle immediately. I wanted to see if I could find the solution before she made her finishing touches and brought home the piece.

It took a while to notice the pattern. At first, it seemed like a jumble of Futhark and Greek characters. Writing them out provided a few clues, but nothing too substantial. I found myself writing things like "ITJPEKS", "SOFZ", "ZDTHATL", and "KSJUZDTT". Most of these didn't make much sense to me. But a few stood out: "NLURKS" looked a bit like "lurks". "TORDERS" looked kind of like "orders". It didn't fit with all of the words, but I decided to separate out the first character from the remainder, to see if anything might happen. That's when I realized that all the initial letters were Greek.

Once I hit on this pattern, I realized that also all of the ending letters are Greek. It wasn't obvious at first because there are some characters which look extremely similar in both Futhark and Greek. It wasn't clear whether "I" was a Futhark "I" or a Greek "I". But I made a hypothesis: what if all internal letters are supposed to be interpreted as Futhark? This would change a number of my initial transliterations. Suddenly, I started seeing several words in the banners.

The words came quickly: "tjpe", "of", "that", "turnz", "can", "just", "of", "a", "lurk", "bejond", "an" "kaoz", "out", "order", "it", "fakade". Some of these weren't quite correct, but it was easy to replace "z" with "s" and "j" with "y", especially after remembering that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where it is remarked that "j" is just "i", which also is just "y". Suddenly, I recognized the quote. It's from Douglas Hoftstadter's Metamagical Themas: "It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just beyond a facade of order."

But the word "eerie" is nowhere to be found in the puzzle. Nevertheless, this is clearly what was intended. I love Hofstadter's work, and I'm certain that Katherine chose this quote specifically because it would mean something to me. (The full quote is slightly different: "It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order -- and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.") 

Looking back at the initial Greek letters, I realize that they are now in alphabetical order. Gamma corresponds to "it"; delta corresponds to "turns". And the ending Greek characters are in reverse order. Interestingly, the missing word "eerie" ("ΘᛖᛖᚱᛁᛖΝ") would correspond to theta and nu, and theta is missing in the initial Greek characters, while nu is missing in the ending Greek characters.

This is it, I think. I'm onto the solution. Hurriedly, I texted Katherine: "ΘΝ".

While I waited for her reply, I tried to figure out what these letters mean. It can't just be two random characters as the solution to the puzzle. So I thought deeper.

Immediately, I am struck: written in Greek like this, I am reminded of Θέων ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς (Theon of Alexandria), a mathematician who edited and arranged Euclid's Elements. This fits! (ν is a lowercase Ν, so "ΘΝ" corresponds to "Θν", which consists solely of the consonants of "Θέων".) Theon was a great lover of order (which is why he edited the Elements), yet his additions to the text introduced new errors that persisted for thousands of years, before someone finally found a copy of Euclid's Elements from before Theon messed with them. This fits perfectly with the quote. It's natural to think of Theon, given that he was Greek, like the characters from the puzzle; he was a mathematician, which matched Douglas Hofstadter, the originator of the quote; and he was responsible for both the order and chaos inherent in Euclid's Elements, just like the quote suggests.

The answer, then, is Θέων, or perhaps Euclid's Elements. Or, perhaps, as my mind raced, the answer is Hypatia. She was Theon's daughter, a talented mathematician and philosopher in her own right. She lived an orderly life, working with astrolabes and hydrometers, and yet is most well known for her martyrdom, when chaos took hold and a mob of Christians murdered her. The 2009 film Agora portrays Hypatia as "the only woman who stands between civilization and chaos".

Here, I felt, we have finally found the true answer to the puzzle. I was certain that Hypatia was clearly the correct answer.

And then I received a response from Katherine. She was confused by me texting her "ΘΝ" a while earlier. I stopped in my tracks, realizing that something in my line of reasoning must have gone astray. She calls, and I speak with her.

It turns out that the omission of the "ΘᛖᛖᚱᛁᛖΝ" clue was an error. I had already solved the entire intended puzzle just by getting the Hofstadter quote. She said she would draw the missing clue before giving me the finished piece.

The final version.

I was flabbergasted. I had felt so sure, which, obviously, I should not have felt. But I had thought that everything made sense, and I asked her if she might not want to add in the final clue, so that its absence could be a clue in itself, as I had originally thought it to be. But she declined, and she finished the drawing.

I re-learned several valuable lessons that day:

• It's irresponsible to just assume that things have intended meanings beyond the first link in a chain. Each successive link in a chain of reasoning depends on all previous links, and so each has to be discounted proportionately.

• Even when someone makes something specifically for you, it is inappropriate to assume that it will have more than a half dozen properties that are intended to speak to you. Continuing to find more in each detail is nothing more than pareidolia.

• It's insufficient to just make a claim; one must also consider one's credence in that claim. And you should be properly calibrated to ensure that you're not putting more confidence in a low probability situation than it warrants.

Nevertheless, I adored the piece. It touched on many aspects of me, including my favorite color; the transliterated Futhark I've used all my life in journals; the Greek that I learned so long ago so that I could better appreciate Plato in the original; a quote by Hofstadter, who wrote so much that I enjoyed over the years, and which was about a topic I cared about deeply in mathematics; and a likeness of me that shows what I look like when I am uncombed, working my way through a puzzle just like this.

The framed drawing currently sits in our gathering room. It's one of my favorite pieces that she's done for me.

Post 5: nominate 10-day! I was nominated by the incredible found object sculptor and art education master Linda Popp and...

Posted by Katherine Hess on Thursday, April 22, 2021

The Choice to Be Good

[Note: This entry spoils plot points in Cobra Kai, The Sword of Good, and (maybe if you stretch it) My Little Pony. Please only read this entry if you don't mind casual discussion of spoilers or if you've already read the short story The Sword of Good and watched Cobra Kai to at least the first two episodes of the third season.]

John Kreese, Cobra Kai

In the final scene of season 3 episode 2 of Cobra Kai, John Kreese kicks out the weak members of Cobra Kai and gives a speech justifying why he did so.

"Your whole life you've been told to be good. But good is only a matter of perspective. Always remember your enemies think that what they're doing is right. They think they are the hero; you are the villain." —John Kreese, Cobra Kai

Kreese goes on to say that there is no good; there is no bad. Only strength and weakness. We've heard this sort of thing from fictional villains many times before. And while there is a level of truth to this if you buy in to moral antirealism as I do, that same level of skepticism can and probably should be applied to many other things. (For a frank example of this, listen to the final six minutes of Embrace the Void's interview of Jeff Sebo (starting at 1:01:01, though the rest of the interview is also excellent).) Ultimately, speeches like this are reserved for fictional villains. Yet with a small bit of tweaking, rational fanfic style, you can construct from here a position that is not only much more convincing, but which also may very well be true.

I have been told my entire life to be good. To do the right thing, to make the good choice. At first, this was hard for me. I was rather selfish as a child; I cared very little for others, except insofar as it affected me. Even when it did affect me a great deal, I still didn't take care to do well for others, because I incorrectly judged short term personal gains over the problems that I'd create for my then future selves. If I look back to those times, putting myself into the position of that younger me, I believe I would truthfully think: It is hard to make the choice to be good. I know that the choices I am making are bad, but I like what I get when I make those choices. Lying is bad, but lies help me to get sex when I want. Not being there for friends is bad, but I only enjoy these friendships when they make me feel good, and being around when they need me doesn't feel as good, and avoiding them doesn't have negative consequences because they are pushovers.

Yes, I really did learn friendship lessons from MLP.
Does that make me a brony?
Tyson believes that labelling causes people
to make unflattering untrue assumptions,
so I'll not label myself.

Putting aside the fact that I was a terrible person back then, I'd like to zoom in on the idea that choosing to be good was a hard choice for me to make back then. It took real effort of will to do. But somewhere along the line, that changed. At some point, the knowledge that eating animals was bad became a moral imperative for me to no longer eat animals. The idea that a friend needed me turned into me needing to be there for them. I can remember watching the first season of My Little Pony and learning some lesson about friendship, and then actually putting into practice that lesson by enacting that very lesson with my real life friends. By this point in my life, learning that X is good turned into me deciding that I had to do X. It was no longer difficult at all to make the choice to be good -- knowing that something was good was sufficient for me to actually go through with it.

Of course, I still improved over time, but it was more due to me learning what was good. I found parts of my life that I was morally deficient in and did my best to improve them. I learned from others what they thought about what was good or bad, determined if I agreed, and then changed my life accordingly. To me, the idea that making the choice to be good was a difficult choice to make had become alien and weird. It was hard to identify with my past self who had felt differently.

But I think I may have come full circle on this idea. The me of today, writing this now, once again believes that making the choice to be good is an extremely difficult choice to make. Not because I want to do bad, but because as time passes I become much less certain that I know what good even is. (Or, from the perspective of a moral anti-realist like me, I've become much less certain that I even know what I want good to even be.)

Image from the YouTube version of
Brodski's audiobook version of
Yudkowsky's The Sword of Good.

Our whole lives we've been told to be good. But good seems to be only a matter of perspective. We must always remember that our enemies think that what they're doing is right. They think they are the hero; that we are the villains. Yet if we have proper epistemic utility, we must allow that they may be right! The choice between good and evil is not to say "I choose good"; it is to look at a set of facts and to determine which choice is the good choice.

During Christmas, I skyped with family and we played a discussion game. On each person's turn, we were asked a question that we had to honestly answer, not in a kneejerk way, but to really consider and answer truthfully in front of our family. The card I was dealt asked me about mistakes I had made in 2020. The big one was obvious: I almost died because I had not been properly getting checked up medically. But the other mistake was potentially just as grave: I had not been properly considering the value of actively helping to enact social justice.

Those who know me well will understand that I am still very much thinking through these things. I do not yet know to what extent we should value free open discussion over the comfort of people experiencing social inequity. I know only that either extreme seems wrong to me and that I will likely end up endorsing some middle position between them. But figuring out what actually is the good... That is a question that, once answered, may potentially redirect large amounts of intellectual and financial capital in the EA movement and beyond. As a communicator, I feel that if I am able to find a good middle ground, I may be able to help convince a large proportion of the EA community to take that middle ground seriously. But it is important that I get this right.

I told my family that I was having this problem. That knowing that you want to do the right thing is not enough; the hard part is figuring out what the right thing even is. It's especially difficult when the arguments on one side are well written, competently organized, and internally consistent; while the other side purports to give its best face through a racial equity workshop where the trainer talked about their astrological sign, an insistence that marginalized people feel unsafe even among people who are doing their best to be considerate of racial equity merely because they publicly recognized the achievements of someone else who isn't considerate, and who continually push for the idea that direct impact dominates intent when it comes to support of white supremacist institutional structures, regardless of any other externalities. Quite frankly, it is difficult to take one of these sides seriously given how poor their most-often presented arguments seem to be. Yet (ironically) when I look past the impact of their arguments and instead look to their intent -- when I see their suffering and inability to construct a good argument as to why they are affected so much -- it makes me want to delve deeper, to look further, to seek out what I'm missing. Meanwhile, the other side seems so smug. So uncaring. It's as though on the one hand one side seems to be obviously true, and yet simultaneously the other side seems to also be equally obviously true. The contradiction is striking.

Good seems to only be a matter of perspective. To see clearly, we must disregard status quo bias. Imagine that you're starting from scratch. Look to the consequences. If you must aim solely for greatest utility, then you must properly value fairness to avoid utility monsters. Don't fall for Pascal's mugging. Don't overvalue pithiness. Notice confusion. Do check with someone you trust to see if you've made a mistake in your logic. Set aside how you feel when going through logic, but trust your feelings as an alarm bell if it tells you that something is wrong. Remember, though, that sometimes the error is in the alarm system, not the logic. If your conclusion will seem to harm your public image too greatly, then your temporal discounts are probably too high. Just because one of the sides claims loudly to be the good side does not make it so; but also if they can do so with a straight face then you should value that as evidence that they are in fact doing mostly good things. Overall, we must come to a decision eventually, so don't keep retreading old ground. It is difficult, but we must make the choice to be good. We must.

Cognitive Dissonance

It is perhaps the worst feeling I have ever felt. Constantly reviewing my own thoughts, balancing the requirements of those I call friends against the tenets of the enlightenment spirit that I have so long held dear. I feel...so wrong. I have cognitive dissonance.

Yesterday I experienced the most embarrassing moment of my life thus far. It was during a board meeting, where we were discussing the medium- to long-term strategic plan of the organization. I was already feeling uneasy due to both personal and medical issues preceding the call. Suddenly, right when I was in the middle of explaining something, my mind went blank. I faltered, mid-explanation, and just couldn't go on. It was horribly embarrassing.

And yet it isn't the most horrible feeling I've ever had. As embarrassing as breaking down mid-explanation in the middle of an important board meeting was, it is nothing when compared to the cognitive dissonance that constantly barrages my inner self. I loathe feeling this way. Yet it isn't going away.

On the one hand, we have a terrible miscarriage of justice. People of the global majority are held back in so many ways, and we must do something to stop it. This is completely and utterly true; I have no doubt on this issue.

However, it is not enough to say that something is wrong, that something is unfair, that something is a travesty, and that it should be changed. There is also the issue of triage.

One of the tenets of effective altruism is the concept of not just doing good whenever possible, but discriminating which actions should be taken so that we accomplish the most good. Sometimes, this means that we consciously choose to allow some to be hurt, so long as it helps substantively more in the long term. Sometimes it means that we sacrifice some good now in order to create far more good in the long term. Sometimes it means staying in Omelas, not because we are callous, but because Omelas is not a minor village, but instead a collection of individuals so large that it perpetually overwhelms any considerations of what is going on in the village center.

I believe that the benefit of better taste from a burger is not worth the harm done to a cow by harming it. Yet when Burger King, a fast food restaurant who is responsible for harming many, many cows decided to sell non-meat patties several years ago, I was ecstatic. I gave them patronage many times, and I encouraged others to try out their veggie patty. I did this knowing full well that they still harmed many, many cows -- but I was nonetheless outrageously happy that they were making it easier for people to abstain from meat and still be able to eat fast food. They were making it easier for people to eat less meat, which I felt would, in the long term, help to reduce overall suffering. When impossible burgers came out, I went even more gung-ho, taking many friends and family to Red Robin and to Founding Farmers, so that they could see it become even more normalized. It's been fifteen years since I stopped eating meat, and these outreach efforts have caused at least three others to go vegan and many, many more to eat substantially less meat.

I suppose that if I knew the cow hurt by Burger King, I might not make this decision to be happy with Burger King so easily. There's something about the fact that I don't really empathize with such an individual cow that makes it easier for me to say: I care about reducing suffering in the long term, and so I'm happy with Burger King introducing a veggie patty, since it accomplishes this, even while they still are directly responsible for killing many, many cows. I can know what the right thing to do is, even while I may feel not that great about supporting what amounts to a murderous company in my eyes. But this cognitive dissonance is very light. No matter the emotion involved, I know that it is worth it in the end, and so the dissonance does not bother me very much.

Then I read White Fragility, and I just feel wrong. The author even predicts that we will feel wrong, and points out that this is the titular situation itself: they claim that because I feel this way, it proves the thesis. And I don't think this is wrong, exactly. It's true that racism is everywhere, including in me. I can even cite specific racist situations in my own life where I've taken conscious action to ensure that my actions didn't unfairly prejudice others. It takes active, concerted effort to be antiracist.

But... it feels very weird to take a just-so explanation so seriously. It feels extraordinarily improper to take what amounts to be an unfalsifiable thesis as though it had to be true. It really, really bothers me that one of the main tenets of this movement is that intent is not as important as effect, and so it is improper to use the principle of charity when interpreting others' comments. Sure, it remains obvious that effect matters more when people take action. But my feelings about the core ideas of the enlightenment spirit -- open discussion, free speech, believing ideas based on evidence -- clash so strongly with the precepts held by so many advocates today. A part of me feels like I know that we have to have fair, open discussion, and so that means we have to have spaces where it is not improper to look at ideas that make us uncomfortable. And so I think, perhaps mistakenly (hence the cognitive dissonance), that we should allow space for this kind of thinking within the effective altruism movement. I don't want ideas to be verboten there; I'd much rather stomp out the racism by proving its worthlessness with open debate.

And then I turn my head behind me, and I see my friends of the global majority. They appear deflated. Beaten down. Just reading a facebook discussion where people question these things takes the energy completely out of them. They are tired. They are exhausted from dealing with uncharitable racists so often that they can no longer give people the benefit of the doubt. They continually have to take up the burden, and it hurts them. And I realize: these speech acts hurt. My beliefs in free speech, in open discussion of alternative ideals, in debate and the presentation of evidence being the ultimate arbiter of what we should agree to as truth... These things hurt my friends. And I am torn.

Because on the one side, I still really do believe in the ideals of the enlightenment. Yet I also simultaneously cannot deny that allowing free open debate unambiguously causes extreme harm to my friends. And thus the cognitive dissonance.

I don't know if the Burger King analogy holds here. In a way, it is like knowing that their introducing a veggie patty is good, and simultaneously turning to see my cow friend get brutally slaughtered by an agent of Burger King. Is this what I am feeling? Do I know that open discussion of ideas is best, and yet I falter just because I happen to know these cows? Is it because I have friends that are black, and pakistani, and native, and hispanic? Is it just that I can turn my head and see their faces that I have this feeling of cognitive dissonance?

Or is it the opposite? The position taken in White Fragility is unfalsifiable. But it is also true. I know it. You know it. All educated people know it. You can't stay neutral on a moving train. It's undeniable. And so maybe it is my faith in logic itself that is being shaken here. The author of How to be an Antiracist says that these actions we are all taking are either racist or they are antiracist. The author of White Fragility says that even if we rail against their conclusions, this just proves them correct. Anyone well versed in philosophical argument will know that these arguments are by no means fool-proof. They don't have rigor. And yet: they are nevertheless convincing because they are right.

I know that my friends are hurt by the open discussion of ideas. So where does that leave my strong belief in free speech? So far, neither side of me has toppled the other. And so I have extreme cognitive dissonance. It hurts. When I speak up in favor of free speech, I feel horrible. Because the people hurt by it are my true and genuine friends. And when I speak up in favor of limiting free speech, I feel horrible. Because I can't help but to feel like the best way to stop hatred in the long term is to openly show how utterly stupid it is. But then I look at social media. I look at Chapelle canceling his show because actual racists weren't taking his humor as enlightening, but as evidence that their inner racist feelings are correct. I look at a police chief stating that we need to warehouse black people to stop them from breeding, who claims that he's tired of hiding the feelings that he thinks all true americans have inside but which aren't openly said because everyone feels they have to be politically correct. Free speech ain't working. These people are not being shamed into being less racist. They only hid their racism to fit in -- up until Trump was elected, and now they're coming out of the woodwork. The enlightenment ideals I have held so dear for so long... is it possible that the pendulum has swung so far into the direction of hatred that it actually would make sense to ban open discussion of these ideas in EA spaces?

This is, by far, the worst feeling I have ever had. It is far, far worse than the feeling of embarrassment I had yesterday when I froze mid-explanation during a board meeting and had to just abandon the floor. And that was the most embarrassing incident of my entire life.

My Great Aunt Margaret

Yesterday, I learned that my great aunt Margaret died.

According to my sister, who has taken care of her recently, Margaret had not been doing well. She was disoriented often, and angry most of the time she spent with my sister. But this is not how I remember my great aunt Margaret, because the last time I saw her was 2007 (or maybe 2006), nearly a decade ago.

At the time, she was kind and nice. We had a cordial relationship. When I saw her, I'd give her a hug and say hello; she'd return the greeting, and then I'd go sit elsewhere in the house. It was a neutral relationship.

It wasn't always like that. I have fond memories of being close to my great aunt Margaret. I remember being so excited to go to her house in Pensacola, Florida, and listen to the waves on the beach. I remember sleeping upstairs in the guest bedroom and reading The Lord of The Rings for very first time. I remember how she'd buy her meats and cheeses sliced much more thinly than any other person I know, and how I adored the sandwiches she'd make for lunch. I remember the strange-looking ashtrays she had in her house, and the air purifier that ran constantly. I remember the organ I used to play on, and the deck from which my uncle Michael threw me into the Gulf against my screaming protestations, all while he claimed that this was the best way for me to learn how to swim. I even remember watching my sister crawl for the first time while my great aunt Margaret sat looking on in her rocking chair with a smile on her face.

I have all these great memories. But at the same time, I can't be sure that any of them are really true.

They certainly feel true. They feel as real to me as when I ate at a restaurant yesterday, or as the time that I first went to The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas.

But I have good reason to doubt my older memories. I have a clear vision in my head of a wishing tree in my backyard as a child, through which I threw coins and made wishes that inevitably came true. I only ever wished for small things, like getting to go out to eat that evening, or getting some small toy that I wanted (I was a kid, after all), but I have a very clear memory that after dozens upon dozens of secret wishes I made at that tree, every single one came true. This seems unreasonably accurate, so my current guess is that I'm misremembering the times when my wishes did not come true.

When it comes to my great aunt Margaret, I have even stronger evidence that my memories are faulty. Every memory I have as a kid involving her is exceedingly positive. I recall going to her house and having fun every time. I remember it clearly as something that happened repeatedly and always positively.

So, in my teenage years, when I began to have very strong negative feelings about life and did not know where to turn, I found myself retreating to the family member for whom I had the most positive associations: my great aunt Margaret.

I came to her doorstep in tears, hoping for affection, love, and understanding. I don't know exactly what I needed back then, nor even what I wanted, but I did know that whatever it was, I needed it badly. My life felt like it was tumbling down around me at the time, and I was starting what would turn out to be a lengthy (but temporary) bout of depression.

I knocked on her door. She greeted me. I think she was uncomfortable with my tears. I just asked for a hug.

After a short while, she asked: "Why have you come to me?" She was wondering, I think, why I would choose her company over others. So I explained how I had so very many memories of being around her. Of coming to her house and enjoying her company. Of the board games we would play on her glass table, and of all the times that family would come and visit all at once, for some holiday or another.

She looked at me strangely as I said these things. By the time I stopped talking, she looked like she was scared for me -- or maybe scared of me. She told me that we had only met two or three times, because she lived in Florida, and I had lived in Alabama. She told me that my memories were wrong, and that I was expanding a few short visits into the mistaken idea that I had come to see her often as I grew up.

Today, when I relate this story to others, they ask: "Did she have dementia?" or "Maybe she just wanted to be mean." But no, she was not like this. She had a sound mind at the time. She was a nice person. It was my memories that were at fault here, not her.

So I don't even know what to say about my relationship with my great aunt Margaret. On the one hand, I have such strong memories of so many happy times with her. But when I think of them, an image of her from my teenage years beckons, telling me that I am wrong, that we are not close, that it is weird for me to come to her crying in such a state as I was in.

I am sad to know that she has died. I feel like I loved her as a close family member. But maybe it was all in my head. I don't know how to tell the difference. Either way, I mourn her passing.

The Double-Crux Game

One of the greatest joys I've personally experienced is that feeling you get when you genuinely change your mind. It's especially rewarding when you can feel the dominoes falling as each step in a logical sequence causes you to change your mind on increasingly complex lemmas after a basic premise's truth value switches.

In everyday life, this kind of thing is somewhat of a rare occurrence. But it doesn't have to be.

The double-crux game originated at CFAR.

I first learned about the Double-Crux game when McKenzie Amodei and Andrew Critch of the Center for Applied Rationality taught a workshop on it at EA Global 2015 in Mountain View. The idea is to get you and someone you disagree with into a situation such that hopefully one of you will be able to change your mind. It is genuinely one of the most awesome experiences I've ever had, and it is well worth the amount of effort that is involved in really and truly thinking it through.

1. First, you need a friend who's willing to do this with you. It only works if you're both intellectually honest, willing to change your mind if presented with sufficient evidence, and excited about the progress of getting closer to truth, even if that means that one's current view is incorrect.
2. Second, you need to identify an intellectual disagreement that you have between the two of you that you'd like to focus on. The process doesn't always work, but if it does, one of you will be changing your mind on this issue. The first time you try this, it will work best with a binary boolean of the form A or ~A. But once you get the hang of it, you can also use it for non-binary disagreements, like believing A is true with 90% confidence or 60% confidence.
3. Third, you might want some paper to write down your thoughts. It's not strictly necessary if you have a good memory, but it's definitely helpful at least the first time you attempt it.

To start, write out statement A, for which the two of you disagree. For your first attempt at this game, one of you should think A is true; the other should think A is false.

From Richard Acton.

Now you must find a double-crux of A. Let's say that you think A is true. Then you need to find a crux B of A such that you also think B is true, but if you could be persuaded that B were false, then it would also cause you to change your mind about A. Meanwhile, your partner will be trying to find her own crux, where they will believe B to be false, but if they could be persuaded that B were true, then they'd change their mind about A. Your goal is to find the exact same statement B that serves as a crux for both you and your partner, hence the term "double-crux".

If you've done this correctly, then you will find that there are now two statements that the two of you disagree on. You think both A and B are true, while your partner thinks both A and B are false. Further, you honestly believe that, if B were false, then A would be false, too -- and your partner believes that, if B were true, then A would be true as well. This means that if either of you were to change your mind about B, then that person would also change their mind about A.

Now we can recursively go through the above steps, replacing A with B. The two of you find a double crux for B which will be called C. Then a double crux of C called D. And so on. At each step, write down the double crux statement. Each time you do so, make sure it is a genuine double crux. This doesn't work if you grudgingly accept a statement as a crux; it only works if you honestly believe that the truth value of the crux is causally related to the truth value of the former statement.

Eventually, the two of you may reach a double crux statement Z for which data can be looked up. This is the goal of the cooperative game. It should be an issue that is easy for the two of you to agree upon, perhaps because you can look it up directly in Wikipedia, it might be easily computable in Wolfram Alpha, or it might be easy to simulate on Guesstimate. Once this happens, the two of you will agree on statement Z. For one of you, this means that you have effectively changed your mind on Z.

Because Z was a crux of Y, that person should also change their mind on Y. And X, W, V, U, etc., all the way to A.

If you are both intellectually honest about what really does consist of a double crux each time, then once you reach the end condition of finding a checkable statement Z, it means that one of you will correspondingly change your mind about A.

The experience of changing one's mind through this method is absolutely breathtaking. Being able to watch as your brain goes through each step, legitimately changing your mind on increasingly complex lemmas until you reach the main statement of disagreement is literally awe inducing. It is one of my favorite feelings, and I highly recommend trying it out for yourself.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work. I've often gotten into situations where my partner and I can each find a crux, but not a double crux. And sometimes when working with people new to the double crux game, we run into the issue of someone claiming something is a crux when it actually turns out not to be. But even in these "failures", I've found the double crux game to be an immensely rewarding experience, because it usually helps both sides to understand the perspectives of each other much more.

Amodei lists a few additional hints on how to play the game:

• It can be easier to look for your individual single cruxes first, then to check with your partner to see if it might be a double crux with them.
• You can find your single crux by asking "what things could, in principle, change my mind on this topic?"
• Cruxes are better when you make the claim concrete and specific. Vague claims might be legitimate cruxes, but it will be very difficult to recursively work with something too vague. Be specific; quantify your claim; put a percent of likelihood on your predictions. That way you won't run into a situation where you won't be able to find a double crux for a too-vague statement.
• Once you understand how to do this with a boolean statement, feel free to move on to more complex disagreements. If you believe A is 90% likely while your partner believes it is 60% likely, that disagreement can be resolved by the double crux game as well.

From Regex.

The games flows more smoothly if both people are familiar with Bayesian priors/posteriors, and if every statement has a degree of belief listed, but I've successfully played the game with non-Bayesians using Boolean statements with only 100%/0% degrees of belief and it has nevertheless worked well.

If you're having trouble finding double cruxes, Regex has come up with something called the Duct Tape Contention technique that helps to identify a double crux by explicitly graphing out the reasons for each of your beliefs. It takes a long time to do it this way, but it can be helpful if you find yourself stuck without knowing how to find a double crux. You may want to check out this sample duct tape graph that Regex provides to show how the technique can identify double cruxes.

Richard Acton has created a presentation that gives a great example of two players playing the double-crux game. It's short, but it can be helpful to see a real life example of finding a double crux from a statement of disagreement. [EDIT (July 2018): Acton now has an updated prezi that's formatted better.]

Once you're familiar with the double crux game, PeteMichaud points out that you can use the game to resolve cognitive dissonance by examining your internal epistemic rationality, or even to build deep, sustainable caring by playing between the parts of you that thinks some part of the world matters and parts of you that are afraid to look in that direction. Of course, this requires that you first know how to notice and parse out these parts of yourself, and it might not be helpful to people who believe they have an intuitive grasp of value. But for those of us who are moral anti-realists that wish to construct value anyway, this seems like a promising technique to get the entirety of your brain on board with a consistent ethical position.

If you want to learn more about the double-crux game, or if you want to experience it first hand in a setting with others that are similarly interested in better navigating intellectual disagreement, you may be interested in going to one of the Center for Applied Rationality's workshops. Or, you might want to invite me to work through a mutual disagreement. Regardless, I heartily recommend playing the Double-Crux game. It's well worth the effort needed to work through each level with a trusted friend.

EDIT (Dec 2016): Duncan Sablen has posted a high quality introduction to Double Crux on LessWrong. I highly recommend that people not only read Duncan's post, but also the several high quality comments left by users of LW.

EDIT (July 2018): Richard J. Acton has commented below with a link to an updated prezi he's created that has some additional rationality techniques added. On LessWrong, deluks917 has posted a concrete multi-step variant of double crux. Both are worth checking out.

My Favorite Podcasts

I subscribe to a lot of podcasts. I use podcasts to keep up with the news, learn more about the world, and expand my mind generally. As such, I've sampled and stopped listening to more podcasts than most people have even heard of. According to some of my friends, this makes me a fairly good judge of which podcasts are worth investing a bit of time in. Thus, I decided to start maintaining this list of my favorite podcasts.

Strong recommendations are in bold, and should be seriously considered. Non-bold recommendations are good enough to cause me to download and listen to every episode they release, but maybe do not quite stand out enough for me to give a full recommendation. All podcasts recommended on this page are rated five stars by me on itunes; the distinction between bold and non-bold recommendations is slight at best.

Note that I am a man of very specific tastes. I adore philosophy and I have a strong tendency toward rationalism, skepticism, and mathematical rigor. This certainly affects what I consider to be a worthwhile podcast to subscribe to. YMMV.

The Best Philosophy Podcasts

The field of philosophy is blessed to have so many exceedingly good podcasts available to choose from. Some are short bite-sized chunks while others go moderately in-depth on philosophical topics. For serious users, there are even a few excellent full course podcasts available on iTunes University; listening to such a series takes many, many hours, but it can be well worth the time investment if you're fully interested in the topic.

Short-form philosophy podcasts:

• Philosophy Bites (itunes, blog): 15-20 minute weekly interviews of philosophers on philosophical topics by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton.
• The 10-Minute Puzzle (itunes, site): 10 minute sporadic introductory discussions on philosophical puzzles by Federico Luzzi and Aidan McGlynn.
• Ethics Bites (itunes, site): 15-20 minute sporadic interviews of philosophers on ethical dilemmas by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton.
• Morality in the Real World (itunes, site): 20 minute sporadic episodes on desirism by Alonzo Fyfe and Luke Muehlhauser. Shows the thinking process of specifically explicating a theory over time, making changes along the way. (Note that desirism is not a theory I subscribe to.)
• The Big Ideas (itunes): 10 minute sporadic mini-introductions on the main ideas in philosophy.

Medium-form philosophy podcasts:

• The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (itunes, blog): 20-30 minute weekly discussions on the history of philosophy by Peter Adamson.
• Elucidations (itunes, site): 25-45 minute weekly interviews of philosophers on philosophical topics by Matt Teichman and Mark Hopwood.
• The Moral Maze (itunes, site): 45 minute weekly heated debates on practical moral issues by non-philosophers.
• The Philosopher's Zone (itunes, site): 25 minute weekly discussions on philosophical topics by the late Alan Saunders. (A replacement host has not yet been chosen; episodes resume in 2013.)
• The Public Philosopher (itunes, site): 45 minute sporadic talks by Michael Sandel. Includes a lot of audience participation.
• Minerva (itunes, site): 30 minute monthly episodes on major philosophical topics.

Long-form philosophy podcasts:

• The Partially Examined Life (itunes, blog/forum): 2 hour weekly discussions on philosophical readings aimed at a moderately informed audience. Their forum includes reading groups where listeners can discuss topics more in-depth, which is perhaps the most awesome thing ever.
• Why? Philosophical Discussions About Everyday Life (itunes, site): 1 hour bi-weekly interviews on philosophical topics with Jack Russell Weinstein. The host is very good at asking great questions of guests that cut to the heart of philosophical positions.
• Philosophy Talk (site/forum): 1 hour weekly discussion on philosophical topics with a call-in audience. Their podcast feed goes through iAmplify, which is terribly confusing and irritating, but each week's episodes are free to download if you can figure it out. Be aware that past episodes are not freely available, making this show impossible to use with philosophy discussion groups.
• New Books in Philosophy (itunes): 1 hour biweekly interviews with authors about their newly published books on philosophy. These are easily the most dense of all podcasts listed here, as they go fairly in-depth on specific topics — but every episode is accessible to a moderately well-informed philosophical audience. Unfortunately, the audio quality is not ideal.
• Philosophy Now (itunes, site): 1 hour sporadic interviews on philosophical topics.
• Such That Cast (itunes, site): 1 hour monthly interviews with philosophers. Does not focus on specific philosophical problems, but just consists of a freeform conversation between the interviewer and interviewee. This sounds terrible, but is actually really good.

The Best News Podcasts

I don't always agree with the viewpoints expressed on the following programs, but I listen to all of them regularly. I feel it's important to expose oneself to alternate viewpoints on a regular basis as a method of keeping one's political bias in check.

Straight news:

• Democracy Now! (itunes video or audio, site/blog): 1 hour daily news program that gives proper air time to voices on the far left. Amy Goodman often raises issues most news sources do not.
• NPR News Summary (itunes): 5 minute daily morning news summary. This is easily the best source of headlines each day.
• NPR Story of the Day (itunes): 3-10 minute daily stories on various topics. The best story of the day is usually interesting, though you never know what it will be about in advance.
• C-SPAN Podcast of the Week (itunes): 1 hour broadcast of the best event that week on C-SPAN. Topics vary widely but are always worth the download.
• C-SPAN Newsmakers (itunes): 30 minute interviews with people currently in mainstream political news stories.
• Frontline (itunes): This is perhaps the best in-depth news reporting available today. They consistently put out great investigative news stories.

(I should also mention The Daily Show and The Colbert Report here, although neither is available as a podcast. Links are to rss EZTV feeds. See my follow-up post on my favorite television shows for more information.)

Financial news:

• Planet Money (itunes, blog): 15-30 minute biweekly financial stories. Episodes can be funny, insightful, alarming, or all of the above. Worth a listen even if you don't like financial news in general.
• Marketplace (itunes, blog): 30 minutes daily financial news. Fairly in-depth information for those interested in financial topics. Not worth a listen if you aren't into financial news.
• Marketplace Morning Report (itunes): 7 minute daily morning financial news summary.
• Motley Fool Money (itunes): 45 minutes weekly discussion of stocks.

Sunday Morning Talk Shows:

• This Week (itunes): 45 minutes weekly political discussion with George Stephanopoulos. They're consistently late on putting these out, but the content is worth it.
• Fox News Sunday (itunes): 45 minutes weekly political discussion with Chris Wallace. Despite Fox's deserved reputation for lying, Wallace does an almost respectable job of asking tough questions to those on the right.
• Meet the Press (itunes): 45 minutes weekly political discussion with David Gregory. They're consistently late on publishing each episode, and past episodes are not available for download.
• State of the Union (itunes): 45 minutes weekly political discussion with Candy Crowley.

Note that I do not approve of the Face the Nation podcast and cannot recommend that anyone subscribe to it. Each episode is one hour long, with a full third of it being nothing but commercials. Of the 40 minutes of content, some 5-10 minutes is wasted on sports commentary rather than political discussion. Listening to this show might be worthwhile if you watch it live on tv, but in podcast form, it is completely unbearable.

The Best Science Podcasts

I adore science. If you do, too, then you'll enjoy these excellent podcasts.

• Freakonomics (itunes): 30-45 minute weekly episodes on unusual economic topics. Some 5-minute weekly mini-segments are also in this feed.
• Radiolab (itunes): 1 hour weekly episodes on science and culture.
• Science Friday Video (itunes): 5 minute weekly videos on a science topic. While I don't make time to listen to the hour long radio show regularly, their five minute videos are well worth watching.
• Nova scienceNOW (itunes): 5 minute sporadic videos on a science topic.
• StarTalk (itunes): 1 hour sporadic episodes on comedic takes of science topics with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Uses a lot of comedy.
• Social Science Bites (itunes): 15-20 minute weekly interviews of social scientists on topics by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton.
• 60 Second Earth (itunes): 1 minute weekly mini-episodes on earth science topics by Scientific American.
• Minute Physics (itunes): 1-5 minute weekly mini-episodes on physics topics.
• Brain Science Podcast (itunes): 1 hour monthly interviews on recent discoveries in neuroscience and how they relate to our philosophy of mind. These can get pretty technical at times.

The Best Skepticism Podcasts

The skeptic community has a lot of podcasts out there, but unfortunately the quality is a bit lacking in many of them.

• You Are Not So Smart (itunes): 1 hour monthly interviews on rationality. This is one of the best skeptic podcasts currently being made. Far too many skeptic podcasts are aimed at dealing with absolutely ridiculous claims like bigfoot, ghosts, or homeopathy; but the YANSS podcast deals with dubious claims that even established skeptics may still fall for.
• Consequence (itunes): 30-45 minutes biweekly interviews with people harmed by pseudoscientific claims. These are first-hand accounts of the harm caused by belief in false things.
• For Good Reason (itunes): 45 minutes sporadic interviews on skeptical issues.
• Skeptic's Guide to the Universe (itunes): 1 hour weekly episodes on skeptical issues.
• Reasonable Doubt (itunes): 1.5 hour bi-weekly episodes on roundtable discussion of atheism and skepticism.
• Rationally Speaking (itunes): 1 hour bi-weekly episodes on rationality.
• Reality Check (itunes): 1 hour weekly roundtable discussion on skeptical issues.
• Point of Inquiry (itunes): 45 minute weekly interviews with scientists on skeptical issues.
• The Randi Show (itunes): 5-10 short conversations with James Randi.
• Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot (itunes): 1 hour sporadic interviews with Christians and atheists on the divide between the two.

In any list of the "best" skeptic podcasts, there must be at least some mention of Skeptoid and Skepticality, due to their wide popularity among skeptics. Neither has made my list.

Skeptoid focuses on stories about false claims. It feels like a podcast that tells ghost stories and little more. Meanwhile, Skepticality has some great segments at the beginning of each episode, but the main part of the podcast is just terrible. I really dislike the main host. His voice is not appropriate for radio, and his interview style is more hurtful than helpful in learning about guests' positions. Not as important (but notable enough to mention) is the very, very, very bad theme song. Seriously, Skepticality has perhaps the worst theme song of any popular podcast I've ever heard.

The Best History Podcasts

I wasn't very interested in history as a child; I was more of a science and math person. That's why these podcasts are so very exciting to me — my prior lack of knowledge in the field means I always learn something new in every episode. Your experience might be different if you're already well versed in these topics.

• The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (itunes, blog): 20-30 minute weekly discussions on the history of philosophy by Peter Adamson. Perhaps it's unfair that I've listed this podcast twice in two different categories, but it's just that good.
• In Our Time (itunes, site): 20-30 minute weekly episodes on the history of ideas by Melvyn Bragg.
• The History of Rome (itunes): 30 minute episodes on the complete story of the Roman empire from beginning to end. This podcast series is complete, with no newly published episodes.
• The History of Byzantium (itunes): 30 minute weekly podcasts on the history of the Byzantine empire. This series starts where the History of Rome podcasts ends; I strongly recommend listening to the History of Rome series first.
• A Brief History of Mathematics (itunes): 15 minute short introductions on the history of mathematics. Series is complete with no new episodes.

Other Podcasts I Enjoy

Not everything I listen to is easily categorized, but I still recommend them just as strongly.

• This American Life (itunes): 1 hour weekly episodes on various topics. If you only subscribe to one podcast recommended on this page, let it be this one.
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (itunes): 25 minute weekly audiobook episodes of Eliezer Yudkowski's fanfiction epic. I know the idea of fanfiction may sound silly at first, but this will blow your mind.
• The Dice Tower (itunes): Hour long weekly episodes on board game reviews.
• Ludology (itunes): Hour long weekly episodes on board game design.
• Smiley and West (itunes): 1 hour weekly episodes on political and other issues with Cornel West and Tavis Smiley. Gives a far left viewpoint.
• State of the Game (itunes): 2.5-3 hour sporadic episodes on issues in the StarCraft 2 professional gaming community.
• This Week in Tech (itunes): 1.5-2 hour weekly episodes on technology news with Leo Laporte.
• Oyez Project Arguments (itunes): 1-4 hour sporadic recordings of Supreme Court oral arguments. Link is to 2012 term; Oyez creates a new podcast feed for every year for some reason.
• Facing the Singularity (itunes): 5-10 minute episodic lecture on what taking the singularity seriously means. Podcast series is complete with no new episodes.
• Reith Lectures (itunes): 5 single hour long yearly lectures by significant cultural figures.
• Flack Check (youtube): 1 minute daily episodes showcasing the lies politicians tell with an element of humor. Link is to youtube because their itunes feed is not out yet.

Final Notes

Obviously, I consume a lot of content. When you add to this list the other media I regularly consume like television shows and movies, it becomes obvious that I spend a LOT of time on consumption in general. While this may make me good as a judge of comparing different media types for others to better know what they should spend their scarce time upon, it does highlight the sheer percentage of time I dedicate to items that most people think is (mostly) a waste of time.

Honestly, I do not mind others making this judgment. It's a judgment I sometimes think I agree with. But, overall, I'm fairly happy with my current level of consumption. While I might change these habits in the future, I would require an equal level of intellectual stimulation on a broad range of topics to really make up for the content I now consume everyday. I might be committed to the cause of optimal philanthropy, but focusing on only one area is just not something that I ever think I could do while maintaining my current levels of happiness. That's why I fully expect to continue to consume such a large amount of content like this on a regular basis.


Edit: Commenters have brought two additional philosophy podcasts to my attention: Public Ethics Radio and The Thirst. I've yet to listen to them, but they appear interesting.

Why Ada Lovelace Day is Important

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, where writers across the blogosphere celebrate women in the STEM fields. For the uninitiated, Ada Lovelace is the world's first computer programmer. (She literally wrote the first algorithm intended to be used on Charles Babbage's analytical engine.)

On Ada Lovelace day, bloggers generally write about a woman in the field of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics. It's relevant because even today, in 2012, we have far, far too few female STEM professionals. I'm not sure if the reason has anything to do with people thinking women can't succeed as well in these fields, but if so, it makes sense to celebrate feminist scientists on at least one day each year. And today is that day.

However, I wanted to do something a little different this year. Instead of telling the story of someone significant in one of these fields today, I'd like to share the results of a study that was published only a few short months ago: Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, John F. Dovidio, Victoria L. Brescoll, Mark J. Graham, and Jo Handelsman).

This study is perhaps the most depressing study on sexism in science academia I have ever read. It is so distressing that upon first encountering it, I thought that it was surely wrong, and that a quick glance through their methodology would show why their findings were wrong. But, after careful consideration, I have to admit that this study is completely legit. I couldn't find even a single flaw in their approach.

As Scientific American reports, this study has conclusively proven that significant gender bias exists in science academia. They used a double-blind randomized controlled experiment -- and when I say, controlled, I mean controlled. They even made sure that the names used (John & Jennifer) were pretested as equivalent in likeability and recognizability. They covered every conceivable base. And the results are horrifying.

They created a single fake resume/application that was good enough to warrant a hire, but not so good as to necessitate it (as established in a prestudy). They then sent this application to 127 science faculty as though it were real. (After the study was done, they went back and asked these people if they suspected it was fake; none did.) The 127 faculty chosen had demographics corresponding to both the averages for the selected departments and faculty at all United States research-intensive institutions, meeting the criteria for generalizability even from nonrandom samples. Not only was their sample representative of the underlying population, but they specifically chose 127 as the optimal sample size needed to detect effects without biasing results toward obtaining significance.

These 127 science faculty judged the applications on competence, hireability, and whether they would offer to mentor the applicant. Males were significantly preferred over females on all metrics. Furthermore, the faculty were asked to estimate what salary would be appropriate for the successful applicant. Males were offered far higher salaries.

The sexism in today's science academia is real. While this doesn't mean that science faculty are overtly sexist, nor even consciously sexist, there is a distinct significant privilege that exists for male newcomers to science academia.

So today, on Ada Lovelace Day, when you read stories of female success stories in science across the web, realize just how hard it was for those standouts to achieve what they did. Even in today's world, being female in science is tough.



EDIT: After writing this article, commenters pointed out problems with the graphs used. In particular, satt pointed out that the use of dynamite plots here is possibly misleading, and unnecessarily obfuscates the actual data points at best.

Unfortunately, the charts were taken directly from the original paper, and so I do not have access to the actual data needed to create better plots for this article review. I have e-mailed the lead author, Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, to see if they have any violin plots with better axes that they could use to alleviate these concerns.

Maximizing Our Power

Each year, I try to write a post for Blog Action Day that gets to the heart of the topic. This year is no different.

The theme this time around is The Power of We, and most people are discussing just how much power we collectively have toward accomplishing social good. However, I want to focus on something that most altruists seem to ignore: the massive potential power that we miss out on when donating to the wrong causes.

Not all nonprofits are equally good at effecting positive change. The differential in outcomes created between two random charities is likely several orders of magnitude. This is why it is so important to analyze which charitable cause is more capable of turning your donated dollar into additional social good. Thankfully, there are a few organizations that do this analyzation work for you.

GiveWell does an extraordinary job of ranking highly effective charities by how confident we can be that donating to them will result in good outcomes. Unfortunately, it only does well with ranking certain types of charities; specifically, it only ranks those charities that are already known to be highly effective (they do a good job of distinguishing #1 from #2, but not #10 from #11, if you're interested in knowing that kind of thing), and when a charitable need is not served well by any particular charity, it fails to give recommendations for that field, even if the (bad) charities in that field might result in higher potential gains. (The field of existential risk, for example, has no recommended charities.) Further, it focuses on being able to match small incremental gains with additional funding and so misses out on identifying larger gains accomplished that can't be verified step-wise. In other words, GiveWell places a high priority on knowing that their recommendation is accurate, and refuses to recommend charities which potentially are effective but which have so far not been proven as such.

For all these qualifiers, GiveWell ends up doing extremely well at what it means to do. Although it is missing out on some potential giving opportunities which might be more effective, you can always feel confident that if GiveWell recommends a charity, then that means there is reason for very high confidence that donating to them will accomplish serious social good.

An alternative to GiveWell's recommendation is Giving What We Can. Unlike GiveWell, which attempts to provide highly effective donation choices in a variety of fields (on the assumption that donors are more likely to give to projects which perform well in a field they're interested in), Giving What We Can has much more of a bottom line approach. GWWC breaks things down to the bare utilons and determines a sheer top recommendations list, so that donors can truly maximize good overall rather than in a specific field.

Lastly, there are two major fields where GiveWell does not give out recommendations, yet these fields might be some of the most effective ways of achieving good through donations. The first is existential risk, which GiveWell is currently working on; the second is animal welfare, which GiveWell explicitly stays away from. While no organization is currently fit to be rated highly in terms of existential risk, charities which focus on taking the moral status of animals seriously can be examined through Effective Animal Activism. While they do not rank animal charities against human-focused ones, they do a good job of determining which animal welfare oriented charities accomplish the most good per dollar donated.

Analyzing the effectiveness of nonprofits is not easy; there is far more subtlety involved than you might at first think. This is why I highly recommend going to one of the above sites before making any large giving decisions. If we want to maximize the power of we, we first must maximize the amount of good we accomplish with each dollar we donate.

My Sense of Ethics

Perhaps the most interesting conversation I have when meeting new people is when they start to ask me about my ethical views. It generally comes up pretty early on when I meet people, as so many of the things that set me apart have a basis in my morality. I don't do this on purpose; it just naturally turns out this way.

I'm vegetarian (largely vegan), so if they happen to see me when I'm eating or otherwise ordering food, this is an early entry point into the ethics discussion. But far more often are the oft-asked questions: "what do you do?" or "what are you into?", both of which go straight into a description of optimal philanthropy. In either case, it isn't long before they start asking me why I speak so strangely when it comes to ethical issues.

If you haven't had the ethics conversation with me in person (or if you knew me before I fully fleshed out my views), then it would help to explain what I'm talking about. A typical exchange might go something like this:

New acquaintance: "So what kind of stuff are you into?"

Eric: "My main interest at the moment is in optimal philanthropy. I strongly prefer a world where charitable contributions get distributed rationally, so I do what I can to try and help determine which organizations have aims that make sense."

New acquaintance: "Oh, I get it. So you're into figuring out which charities are better than others. I've heard of that."

Eric: "I wouldn't put it exactly like that, but yes, I think you have the basic idea."

New acquaintance: "How would you put it?"

Eric: "I just wouldn't use the word 'better'; that's all. I mean, obviously some charities are indeed better at accomplishing their goals, but that doesn't make them better in the moral sense of the word."

New acquaintance: "Surely if they're better at accomplishing Good, then they're better morally speaking."

Eric: "For moral realists, yes; but I'm not a moral realist."

And this is where the vast majority of people will try to find a polite way of ending the conversation.

My moral anti-realism stance has caused countless numbers of otherwise rational competent people to think I'm nuts. To many educated (but not philosophical) people, moral anti-realism is just code for nihilism. Hell, even among anti-realist philosophers, the specter of nihilism informs many of their arguments. (Mackie, Blackburn, Timmons, Joyce, and even Rawls all endorse moral anti-realism while doing their damnedest to be dishonest about it, just to stay as far away from nihilism as they can.) So I guess it's understandable if the average new acquaintance I make will also make the same mistake.