Smartphones Are Now Good Enough
The first iPhone was amazing for what it could do, but now it's remarkable for what it can't. With ⅛ the RAM, ⅙ the processing power, 1% the network speed, and ⅕ the...
View ArticleWould I pay for someone else to?
Perhaps my computer is too slow. A faster one would be more pleasant to use, but would also increase productivity, earnings, and so potentially donations. Would buying a new one be altruism or...
View ArticleRationing with small reserves
When you're close to your limits you have to ration, and rationing sucks. It's not as bad as actually hitting your limits, but the pain of having to make the tradeoff adds to the pain of the tradeoff...
View ArticleHow Much Can a Webpage Inflate?
When your browser loads a page it's probably using gzip compression. When it asks for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage it adds a note telling the server that it understands gzip: GET /wiki/Cabbage...
View ArticleAliens Don't Play Chess
If human culture were to develop again from scratch there would probably still be games, but most of them would be different. The space of possible games is very large, and I don't know any examples...
View ArticleSimplest Interesting Game
Yesterday in the discussion on aliens don't play chess people suggested various contenders for the title of simplest abstract game that's interesting enough that a professional community could...
View ArticleImproper Adjectives
In English we capitalize proper nouns [1] and we also capitalize adjectives that are derived from those nouns: I'm going to London. He's a Londoner. This leads some people to want to call them "proper...
View ArticleDouble Echo Calling
At outdoor contras where you're not using amplification you can manage the music with a mix of lots of people or unfashionably loud instruments, but what do you do about the calling? Multiple people...
View ArticleAutomatically Updating Apartment Map
I've set up my apartment price map to update automatically. What did this entail? (Warning: boring programming stuff.) There are two scripts involved: $ crontab -l ... # fetch the data at 2:02am on...
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Sketches of Bicycles
Bicycles are at once complex technology and quite simple. Unlike a computer or car, the main pieces that make a standard bicycle work are immediately visible. You don't need to memorize the workings...
View ArticleMy Effective Altruism Timeline
How did I get into this "effective altruism" thing? Summary: first altruism, then effectiveness. I met Julia in early 2007, but didn't end up talking about altruism until some time in the fall. She...
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Saving lives for seven cents each
As a kid I remember being very impressed with Trick-or-Treat For Unicef because they could do so much with so little money: When my Quaker youth group was deciding who to raise money for, we chose...
View ArticleAvoiding hyperbolic discounting
Given the choice between $50 now and $100 in a month many people will take the $50 now. This is almost always a bad decision, in that you don't get twice as much value for your money today so later...
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Apartment Prices Over Time
How do Boston apartment prices change month-to-month? When I updated my apartment price map in January I set up a monthly cron job to log apartment prices: $ crontab -l 02 02 18 * * python...
View ArticleDonating and Tax Breaks
People often put down others as donating "for a tax break". Sure they look generous, but they really just want to save money. But that's not how it works. In the US you can report money you donated,...
View ArticleWhat fixed my knees?
About two years ago [1] my knees got so bad I couldn't walk more than about ten minutes. This wasn't new to me; in Spring 2009 my knees started hurting a lot after morris dancing, so I stopped doing...
View ArticleMoney vs Talent: Ratios
GiveWell has eight full time employees and has identified good charities with room for around $25M for additional annual funding. [1] Naively this is $3M of giving opportunities per employee, but most...
View ArticleIt's not fair to settle for "good"
Occasionally people will say things like: "What matters is doing good things, and obsessing over exactly what charity is best isn't what altruism is about.""These people are doing their best to help,...
View ArticleConsistency in OntoNotes
OntoNotes is the product of humans marking up a large amount of text with linguistic details, to produce examples for computers to learn from. For example, we might have this sentence, transcribed from...
View ArticleThe Argument From Marginal Cases
The argument from marginal cases claims that you can't both think that humans matter morally and that animals don't, because no reasonable set of criteria for moral worth cleanly separates all humans...
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