Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1115
Jane is still sick, thoughts on Moskowitz's essay on EA, Callimacheanism, Halo's NCO POV, sad sauces poised for battle, why Scotty can type.
Good morning! Tuesday! Jane still sick! Woo! Well, not sick. But still has pink eyes. The school’s document on such topics says that one can return to school after 24 hours from starting your medication. But improvement does not look especially substantial today, and then we read this impassioned tweet from an educator friend of ours who pleaded to not send kids with pink eye back for a little little while longer, so Jane is staying home one more day. She and I made the decision together. We feel good about it. She is climbing on my chair right now. Now she is sitting next to me, reading as I type. Hi, Jane.
PJ Harvey is coming to America and not playing anywhere around here and none of the cities where she’s playing that i might go to have shows on the weekends and the tour is during the school year and that sucks. I feel like seeing PJ Harvey is an educational experience, right? Her last tour she played “Man Sized” and “Dress” and that seems educational enough to me.
Man. Second “Man Sized” reference in GMMHAY this year.
After a thrilling journey into the arm of the internet housing OEM parts suppliers for appliances, and the heroic obtaining of a replacement refrigerator door tray on the part of yours truly, my wife has decided to reorganize the fridge. All of my Asian sauces, which one took up an entire tray on the door, have been moved to the back of the fridge, trayless. They line the back wall like little glass soldiers ready for culinary battle. But they have no battle to fight. This reorganization makes sense on paper, but is giving me unexplained anxiety. These sauces seem adrift, lost, homeless. I feel for them.
Jane wants to say something:
Hello, it’s Jane! I’m getting into the lego organization these days.
“I have stuff to do,” she says. “So I am going to go and do that stuff.” And off she wandered. Her typing skills are solid for a six year-old. Especially since no one uses Mavis Bacon these days. Kids don’t learn to type on keyboards, it’s all touch screens. It is the beginning of an answer I have long sought since 1986: How and why was Montgomery Scott so proficient with the keyboard when no one used them anymore? The answer is because he came from a long line of parents who taught their kids how to type, because it was “something they needed to know.” It was not, as I previously assumed, forced upon him in Star Fleet engineering school.
This morning I read an essay by Dustin Moskowitz. Dustin Moskowitz could have been relegated as a footote in Silicon Valley, Zucks’ co-founder who was lost to the sands of time (ahem Andrew McCollum). But he proved his mettle by the co-founding of Asana after Facebook and, though personally I find Asana too complex, people seem to really like it. Great business, great product. Anyway, dude’s worth like eighteen billion and is a pretty solid Threads follow: mostly funny, quick with the wit, and generally on the right side of most political questions, the right side being my side, of course. At least usually on the right side compared to other Silicon Valley dudes.
One area where we disagree, though, is Effective Altruism. I don’t follow the ins and outs drama of that movement much, but apparently Moskowitz is a key player in EA’s focus on AI and mitigating the risks of AI. I don’t know. It’s not my bag anymore. I mean, I am not interested in “harnessing” the “positive” effects of AI, while “mitigating the risks,” which as far as I can tell seems to be the EA AI posse’s aim. I am not into that because I do not believe AI has any positive societal benefits. I see no evidence of them, and I suspect they are pretty much like crypto: fun to tinker with, academically interesting, a solid, meaty thing for engineers to sink their teeth into, but ultimately useless and potentially harmful. Thus, in my book, there’s no point to AI, because all you are doing is taking on a ton of risk with no benefit, which is folly.
BUT we are not here to discuss AI. What I was reading was a piece by Moskowitz about his approach to charitable giving, and his journey to find the best and most “effective” areas to give money. Here is the essay. It is too long. It is good. It shows someone grappling with the complexities of charitable giving.
What I find interesting, though, are the implicit first principles of the essay. The priors. The unsaid stuff. For example, there is a passing comment, early on, to the desire to avoid bureaucracy. People fucking love dismissing bureaucracy, just eat that shit up. Just start from a base assumption that bureaucracy is bad, even as this generally leads them to founding yet another org, with more people doing the same freaking job.
Do I think bureaucracy is great? Um… I guess not? Probably not? But maybe! I have seen far, far more examples of bureaucracy being good than bad. And I have never, once, seen someone in Silicon Valley even pause to ask themselves how they are so sure it’s bad, and what if they’re wrong? What if bureaucracy can be good? What if it’s always good? How do you even know it’s bad all the time? I fucking LOVE environmental reviews. I love that you gotta get a permit before you can fill in a wetland. I fucking love audit trails. I love multiple layers of approvals from different perspectives. I love the Checklist Manifesto. I love being in compliance with laws. Why is all this shit bad? I will grant for the sake of discussion that there may be bad bureaucracy. But in return, I would like acknowledgement of its goods, and I profoundly question any decision that is predicated on the assumption that bureaucracy is all bad.
Except when writing the word over and over. Too many fucking vowels.
Next: hubris and scale? Where in any of this discussion is the possibility that any single entity deploying cash on the scale of billions is fundamentally problematic? Like, hear me out what if any single person choosing where billions of dollars are spent inevitably leads to more pain than gain.
I will approach this with a few very high-level-but-specific examples that may appeal to capitalists and EAs: Keynesianism. When a recession hits and a government needs to offset a recession with government spending, fun fact! By and large, Keynsianism doesn’t care how the government spends the money, just that it spends it. By the same token, what if the most effectively altruistic thing a billionaire can do is stop being a billionaire? How do you know it’s not? How can you ever know?
Another example: Bostrom. In reading his “seminal” work Superintelligence, the most compelling defense he came up with to keep the robot overlords from destroying us, was to put their mission statement in an envelope which they can never open. Then you tell them “your mission statement is in that envelope.” The uncertainty of the AI knowing exactly what the mission statement is keeps the AI from doubling down on unintended consequences of the mission statement. For example, the classic AI mission statement of “make all people happy” leading to the Matrix. Put the mission statement in an envelope and the AI can never be 100% sure.
The point of this example is the uncertainty is the thing keeping it good. Maybe billionaires aren’t supposed to obsess over where to give their money away! Maybe that obsession just leads to more damage? We know it’s impossible to have a perfect answer, after all.
And I don’t say these things as, like, made-up what-ifs. I am not saying something like “what if there is a secret Bird God and he can only make humanity better if you spend all your money on Paas easter egg kits?” These are not gotcha questions. They are questions fundamental to the process. Moskowitz himself acknowledges that there are always other factors.
But put simply: what if hubris and too much influence by any single individual are, gasp, harmful to all charitable giving? There is no shortage of evidence of this theory.
What if the most effective thing a billionaire can do is not start another org not try and make “the biggest difference” and not maintain control over their billions? Indeed, to me, the evidence seems to point to this being the most likely case.
Not that there is some all-calculating Good Place god, but if there were, I’d put good money (not all my money, mind you, because who knows!) that the plan for spending a billion dollars which was made up by the average ten year-old (buy everyone a sandwich, throw a big party) would yield more goodness points than any plan made by an EA billionaire.
A thing I have never intellectually batted away is hubris. It cannot be batted away. Hubris exists, it is in all of us, it does untold damage. And the scale of your actions directly correlates to the potential amount of hubristic damage.
Had another dorm room dream last night. I have a lot of dorm room dreams Concrete, dark dorms, like Warren Towers at BU or the Greuning building at UAF (not a dorm, I know). Dark and labyrinthine and made of cinder blocks. In this one, Simone Biles was a classmate and she told me I was her new best friend because I was as different from her as could possibly be and I wasn’t going to try and sleep with her. Paula from BU was my roommate. She took up more space in the room than I did. I had a CRT TV. I was back on Diet Coke.
Wait, where you going, dreams fucking rule, they are so interesting to read about. Come back.
My final thought: I think I like the Halo TV series because it is an NCO view of space war. Lower Decks meets Foundation or something. The war told through the eyes of the combatants on the ground and the displaced citizenry. Military brass is rarely seen, the actual governments not at all. I like that. I stand with the grunts. Even though I got into Annapolis. But at least I turned them down.
Finally started True Detective Night Country and it sure doesn’t look like Alaska but we will watch one more episode before I give my thoughts.
OMG Jane is filming a video for her Journal app on OSX. SO CUTE.
Today’s media of the day is the new EP from Laudadio. No, this is not the new EP from a few weeks ago, this is this week’s new EP, Callimacheanism. I had to Google that word, but boy is it relevant to today’s GMHHAY. Wikipedia calls it “The aesthetic philosophy of the Ancient Greek poet Callimachus, favoring refined works dealing with small-scale topics over large and prominent ones.”
Shit yeah.