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All of Pesto's Comments + Replies

What is the most effective anti-tyranny charity?
Answer by Pesto2-15

Ukrainian Army, e.g. Army of Drones. They're a funding-constrained little guy fighting back against a big guy who's also one of the world's top few tyrants.

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3rbv
Fight the tyrant, not the Russian army. I believe the sort of thing that the OP is asking for, if we restrict ourselves to just Russia for the moment, is: is there any way to assist with getting rid of Putin, reducing the harm he causes, or preventing the next Putin after he's gone? Focusing in further on the first of those: Is it helpful to donate to democracy-enhancing initiatives in Russia? (Is it possible to help get Putin voted out? The answer is apparently no.) Can one help to get him overthrown? It seems possible, if he were to become unpopular enough. Is supporting independent media in Russia possible and helpful? There are plenty of rich oligarchs Putin has wronged, so a priori expect that more money is probably not going to help. Clever initiatives to help people see past state propaganda and get around censorship could. The harms created by Putin are vast and the hopes to do anything about them are minuscule. This makes it exceedingly difficult to estimate what the expected value of any intervention is.
6lc
I think this is probably an example of a really ineffective intervention on a per dollar basis, given how much money is being spent already, unless it's to some organization filling gaps Ukraine's MoD isn't filling
Signaling Guilt
Pesto21

I've felt exactly this way. A tactic that kept me going for another few CV-like things was to pick something orthogonal in my writing to optimize, so I could focus on that while writing what I needed to: writing without the letter 'e', conforming to a meter, writing sentences in alphabetical order, etc.

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Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)
Pesto200

I'm a 22-year-old mathematics graduate student, moving to Boston next year.

I was recommended HPMoR by another Boston math grad student, followed the authors' notes to read most of the sequences, and then started following lesswrong, although I didn't create an account until recently.

I can't say how I came to actually be a rationalist, though---most of the sequences seemed true or even obvious in hindsight when I first read them, and I've always had a habit of remembering "x tells me y is true" instead of "y is true" when x tells me y ... (read more)

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0Alicorn
I like your username!
5orthonormal
Impressive if true- the best way to test this might be playing a game like The Resistance... The last one I remember started off with a really confrontational post, and ended up being an angry discussion; I don't think I'll find and link it. I think you could write a better one, and I'd comment on it- I think your points are good reasons to cut back on meat and to strongly prefer small farms over industrial-scale meat (at least for pork, since pigs are the most sentient of our livestock), and I do both of these, but I don't find it worthwhile to go completely vegetarian.
0beoShaffer
Welcome to Less Wrong. There is conversation that touches one it further down in this intro post. There was also a discussion article a while back, I'll see if I can find it. -edit I was thinking of this but there are actually a ton of results if you just search for vegetarian. This also looks like it might be of interest.