I clicked on Revue, because I use Twitter and Revue is Twitter’s own newsletter thing. I have a Substack, however, not a Revue, so while I drafted this in the Revue editor I’m actually going to be sending it over Substack.
Revue seemed strangely insistent on making me say that my newsletter was weekly, even though I'd set the title to "sporadical" ahead of time. Maybe having a weekly newsletter would be good for me; I once wrote a blog post in a day because I had to write the blog post in that day, because I'd told some other people that I was going to write a blog post.
(Here was the blog post: You Can Do Futarchy Yourself. It inspired this Metaculus question! A job well done.)
Presumably having to write one blog post a week would lead to some incredible magic, and I'd be able to express my Opinions in some longform way that lends itself well to real discussion, and everyone would be good upon downloading the top-level insights that I deploy and we'd achieve a cybersingularitarian utopia by 2022.
On the other hand, it would be inconvenient, and also these claims of the high impact might be slightly exaggerated. Heck, I've half a mind to write a blog post that's like "Don't Do Futarchy Yourself," which would go into problems with Goodhart's law and stuff and generally cover why I haven't done futarchy myself, though I'm not entirely sold on the elegance of that thesis. It feels like a tool from a bigger toolbox or something. It feels like kind of a postrat thing, except I also haven't found where the postrats keep their mathematical proof that postrationalism is correct. Anyway just spitballing here. There might be a lot of that. There might not. I haven’t decided yet.
(Sidebar on postrats: QC writes that
the esoteric meaning of "postrationalist" is a person who is recovering from the totalizing memes in the rationalist ecosystem. it is a trip. especially because you can't just refute them by saying AGI is impossible
and the rest of the thread which you should totally read. Objections to the thread bubble up in me but then there's an internal conversation like
A: :0 how could they not act as the totalising memes command
B: you also dont do that
A: yes but I call it "akrasia" so its fine
and it peters out a bit. I'm too inherently chill to be eaten by totalising memes and I can buy that people who aren't inherently chill might need to explicitly not get eaten, and that this might be good even by the standards of the totalising memes or something.)
Anyway in terms of things that are actually good, Project For Awesome is happening. People make videos for charities and the charities with the most total votes across videos get grants (roughly; probably the vlogbrothers pick them personally with the vote totals as a guide), so more videos mean more possible votes. The EA community coordinates around making videos to get money to EA charities. This year they’re coordinating on these eight charities:
GFI
Wild Animal Initiative
GiveWell's Maximum Impact Fund
The Humane League
AMF
Clean Air Task Force
Compassion in World Farming USA
GiveDirectly
There’s a Facebook group for it if you still use Facebook.
new substack just dropped 👍