deborah

They do buy mosquito nets, although it’s unclear that all malaria net charities do so in culturally-appropriate ways where they’ll be used as intended. I believe they’ve stopped with the large grants to deworming charities, which is good, because the effectiveness of deworming programs is extremely controversial. Depending on where you direct your money at that parent website, it might go to EA Funds, who send a lot of money at global development but has also paid a ton of salaries for people researching LLMs and AI. Or it could go to EffectiveVentures, which might have spent your money buying a castle. For reasons.

If you support mosquito nets, you can give to the mosquito net charity directly, cut out the overhead. Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières does good global development work if you don’t mind giving to a huge organization that by necessity has higher overhead. Avoid the Red Cross and you should be fine.

He also wants us to know that Hannania is much less right than he’s made out to be

Also he doesn’t grasp that people hate Hanania because he’s a racist, not because of where he falls on the forced left/right spectrum.

The more I look, the more I’m sure it’s just bad GenAI art. I mean, look at the random Big Ben with newspaper art extending into the ether behind it, the off-center knight-in-orb, the decomposed microscope thing, the physically impossible structural shadow on the disproportionate globe that simultaneously shows from Panama east to Borneo but somehow lacks India…

Is the header image on that page an intentional joke at the expense of GenAI, or did someone seriously make that and add it to the page? Do they autogenerate their pics?

This is part of a whole thing where the journalist keeps presenting their framing without question. Is it “allow their neighbours to live in the second house rent free, in exchange for childcare” or is it “they have unpaid live-in nannies in a staff apartment”? Do they “give everything they can spare to charity” or are they landlords who own property they don’t live in? Is she wearing a corset and chemise from etsy because it’s practical, or because these weirdos have put on staged cosplay performances for every journalist who’s ever interviewed them, and you’re no exception?

Oh, but you’ve provided us with statistics! Please, though, for the peer reviewers: we need the baseline measurement. How many women do you date who don’t break up with you? And are they all in Canada?

Ben Stewart:

Manifest’s decisions are and have been bad not in terms of PR, but bad for its own epistemics, the forecasting community, EA, and basic human decency.

TW:

“Basic human decency”? Jeez, mate. I understand not wanting to engage with right-wingers personally, but treating it as a deep affront when others choose to do so is off-putting, to say the least.

Ben Stewart:

Yeah that was a bit strong, sorry late here.

Ben, honey. You do not have to apologize for referring to platforming Hanania as an affront to basic human decency. That TW is successful in shaming you for accurately identifying what happened here is no credit to your own ability to recognize the dangerous epistemic bubble in which you find yourself, or the cultlike social pressures that persuade you to distrust your own correct judgement – not because TW challenged your facts or your interpretation, but because he – gasp! – called it “off-putting.”

Not everyone’s going to like you. Not everyone’s going to agree with you. Social stigma is a good and correct tool in your toolbox when a member of your community says that cites-the-Turner-Diaries, enforced-sterilization, anti-“miscegenation”, “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization” Richard Hanania has something valuable to add.

Isn’t this normal with jobs? That there is a month of tryout period?

I have never found this to be normal with jobs, no. But in the US, most employment is at-will, so you can be fired without cause at any time.

(I’ve encountered probation windows where benefits don’t kick in for 3-6 months, and that’s hideous in a country without single payer health care, but never a tryout period.)

One of the things that happened during the Great Low Interest Rates Decades is that it seems like anyone who fit a certain profile (millennial white guy with american citizenship, a computer, and at least a modicum of what passes for charm among the nerd elite) could convince both VCs and the US government that there was tons of money in disrupting the delivery of some legacy sector of society. Sometimes they were correct (eg. buying stuff without going to a retail establishment), sometimes it seems like they should have been correct and yet somehow have failed to make money anyway (Uber), mostly they were comical (Juicero). But the ones that are the most excruciating are all the places where you really, really can’t frictionlessly deliver at scale, because large-scale human intervention is necessary: education, health care, customer service.

The promise of the American tech boom is massive online delivery without people. Employers hate their employees, and government is always willing to be told that doing without employees is industrial progress.