Legality as a Career Harm Assessment Heuristic

A question many people in the effective altruism movement have struggled with around earning to give is how to handle potentially harmful careers. It's obviously self-defeating if you cause more harm in earning your money than the good it does when you donate it, but we want a higher threshold than that. As humans we need to have approaches that account for our self-serving biases, where we tend to underestimate the harm we cause and overestimate the good we do. Additionally, some kinds of harm (ex: murder) do not seem like the kind of thing you ought to be able to "cancel out" through donation, even if the donation clearly has larger benefits (ex: saves vastly many lives).

Unfortunately for most jobs, even questionable ones, the social impact is very hard to work out. Consider someone deciding to go into the oil industry: how much would they contribute to carbon emissions, after considering the oil company's elasticity of labor and the elasticity of production? Does cheaper oil displace even more carbon-intensive coal? How likely are extreme climate outcomes? Is the benefit of cheaper energy in lifting people out of poverty enough to make it positive on its own? Making a high-quality impact estimate for a career is a huge amount of work, and there are a lot of potential careers, especially when you consider that some roles in the oil industry might be far more replaceable than others.

What should we do in cases where the benefits seem much larger than the harms, but the harms are still significant? A potential rule I've been kicking around is, "don't do work that is illegal, or that would be illegal if the public knew what you were really doing." The idea is, we have a system for declaring profitable activities with negative externalities off limits, one that is intended for the more common case when someone is keeping what they earn for their own benefit. But we can't just use "don't do work that is illegal" because our legislative system can be slow to react to changes in the world or information that isn't yet widely available. For example, if most people understood the cost-benefit tradeoffs in research to assess the pandemic potential of viruses or create very powerful AI systems I expect both would be prohibited.

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Photo Curation Approach

I take a lot of pictures, maybe 10k annually. Most of them aren't that great, but if you take enough you'll get some good ones, and even the discards can be a useful reference. How do I handle these?

I have an Android phone, set to automatically upload any pictures to Google Photos. My wife does as well, and we have it configured to use a shared camera roll, which is super useful. As soon as a photo or video either of us has taken uploads, the other one can see it as well.

The Photos interface struggles a little with this many photos, but mostly does a good job. I like that I can search by text descriptions or people, and not just scroll back to a certain date, though I wish I could combine these with some sort of "see in context" option after finding a picture in a search.

As I take pictures, if I get an especially cute or funny one I'll share it in our kids FB group, but mostly I leave pictures for one big page at the end of the year with my favorites.

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Mandolin Harp Sensor Placement

One of my goals in adding electronic "harp strings" to my mandolin is that I don't want to change anything about my normal mandolin technique when I'm not using them. I've been playing for decades, and like how I normally play. This means I can't place these "teeth" anywhere my hands normally pass through. With a bit of testing, I think these are the available areas:

I don't normally pluck the strings that close to the fretboard, but after some experimenting I realized that I do sometimes when I want a different sound, so I need to keep that whole area open.

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Prototyping Pluck Sensors

Harp guitars are a neat weird instrument that never really took off:

You play it like a normal guitar, with six fretted strings, but there are also some number of extra harp strings you can pluck.

I see four main downsides:

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Where are the Contra Dances?

About ten years ago I made a heatmap of contra dances, which I've kept up to date. I recently had a request from someone who'd like to print out a copy for a poster, and while the one I built on the Google Maps API doesn't have a way to generate a high-resolution version it seemed like fun to make one from scratch:

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Parent-Friendly Dance Weekends

We just finished the 2024 edition of Beantown Stomp, a contra dance weekend I helped start (but no longer organize!) in Boston. There are a lot of things I like about the weekend, but one thing I especially like is how parent-friendly it is.

The big thing here is childcare, during the day on Saturday and Sunday. It's included with registration, and typically staffed by one paid person and one volunteer. Several families brought books and toys, and it also served as a nice place for families to hang out. Some feedback this year:

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who helped out this weekend. My kids had a great time, and it allowed both me and my partner to go to this dance weekend. I haven't been dancing much since becoming a parent, and it always feels like a rare and wonderful treat whenever I do.

Thank you for making Beantown Stomp inclusive and accessible to families!!

My understanding is it used to be somewhat common for events like this to offer childcare, but most weekends stopped after the children of the initial organizing cohort didn't need minding anymore? The only other dance weekend I know of that includes childcare is Sugar Hill, on an all-volunteer model.

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