15 Do's and Don'ts of Living in the Costa Rican Jungle

General note: Don’t bring cheaply made stuff, it will break and you’ll be stuck dealing with it. In particular, the jungle will easily dispose of low quality shit that relies on cheap adhesive.

Do's

1. Download offline versions of everything before: The Internet will be way too slow to stream and load data. Here are some recommended apps:      
   1. SpanishDict (awesome, free Spanish/English Dictionary)                 
   2. Flashlight (being blind in the jungle is extremely disconcerting)                                   
   3. Dictionary.com (it sucks when you don't know what words mean)                           
   4. MAPS.ME (great downloadable maps with navigation capabilities) 
2. Download audiobooks: They are kickass for long car/bus/train rides, as well as when you’re just walking around or doing menial work. 
3. Bring rechargeable batteries (AA, AAA): Don’t expect non-rechargeable alkaline batteries to last in your headlamp. The heat will make the batteries deplete faster and you’ll find yourself using your headlamp more than you think. Don’t expect to buy rechargeables here, they’ll be a pain in the ass to find and will be more expensive.
4. Bring your favorite condoms, a lot of them. They will almost certainly not have them in Costa Rica, and, astonishingly, they won’t have them in the jungle either. My favorites are Trojan Ecstasy and I’ve never seen them here. Fun fact for super young folks: condoms are not something you want to cheap out or compromise on. Also, keep them out of the sun and heat. I ruined my first pack by leaving them in my tent--find a dry room. Weakened condoms can equal babies, which, by most accounts, are more expensive than condoms.
5. Bring antibiotic ointment – It has saved my ass when I’ve sliced myself up. There are all varieties of nasty parasites and gnarly shit that will infect you, so bring plenty of it.
6. Bring all of the electronics that you’ll want. If you even manage to find what you want here, it’ll be 25-50% more expensive.
7. Bring floss. Lot’s of people don’t for some reason.
8. Bring an e-reader. If you don’t have one and plan on reading, get one. Physical books are heavy and take up space. I was lucky with Verde and they had a lot of quality stuff in their library, but I imagine most places would not. I love being able to update my Kindle and get my New Yorker copy.
9. Bring at least one large hard drive, two if you care about saving the stuff on it permanently. I work professionally in media production so I’m pretty OCD about that kind of thing. If you plan on taking pictures or video and don’t want to risk losing your stuff, back it up. Remember, with hard drives, it’s only a question of when they’ll fail, not if. Get a nice size one (1 TB+), as you will need enough space for large movie files because you will not be able to steam movies here.
10. Runners: bring high quality, durable trail running shoes. Heat and humidity will tear apart poorly made stuff (see my Pearl Izumi's below).

Stores ~1 jillion books.

Forget the cloud.

Root canal anyone?

Cheaper than babies.

Stay charged.

Nuke those parasites.

I don't mean to spam you here, but by buying through these links, you allow me to provide more tip posts like this one. Thank you!

Don'ts

1. Run or jog past large animals. Stop and walk. On a recent run, I had an encounter with a cow where it first just started running away from me, then I caught up to it on a steep grade and it got pissed, turned around, and charged me back down the hill. I got out of the way, but not before slicing up my body pretty nicely on a rocky, gravel road. Be especially careful if there are young animals with their mothers, they are not to be fucked with. Just stop and walk and they’ll be chill.
2. Leave food in your tent. None. Don’t do it. The ants will find a way in. I assure you. They ate three nice holes in the bottom of my tent. So no, keeping it zipped up will not keep insects out if you have food in it (they might get in anyway, but don’t give them an incentive).
3. Stay in the sun for any longer than you have to, even if you’re not sensitive to the sun. My skin doesn’t burn (I somehow got Mediterranean genes from a Russian and a Brit, go figure), but it will get really irritated and itchy after a few days of extended sunlight.
4. Bring a lot of warm clothes if you just plan on staying in the jungle area. Anything more than a light flannel will be overkill. I brought Merino wool stuff and it’s basically been useless.
5. Bring a lot of extra shit. Only bring stuff you really think you’ll use. Part of the fun and learning experience of living out here is figuring out how little you really need.

Write here...

Book Review: Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Transcript:

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is about the wealth distribution that we have currently in capitalism, and how we've arrived at that current wealth distribution, and some of the fundamental flaws within our current system that will perpetuate wealth inequality indefinitely.

The fundamental thesis of the book is that the rate of return on capital, which Piketty calls, "r", is greater long-term than the rate of return on "g", which is the rate of growth of income and output. So what that fundamentally means is that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than wealth currently accumulated by people doing actual work. So what this inevitably results in is that workers will end up making less money no matter how hard they work than the owners of the means of production. So as Piketty puts it in his book,

“The inequality r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future.”

— p. 571

Piketty also states,

““When the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth of output and income, as it did in the nineteenth century and seems quite likely to do again in the twenty-first, capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based.”

— p. 1

He goes on to say,

“The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying, especially when one adds that the return on capital varies directly with the size of the initial stake and that the divergence in the wealth distribution is occurring on a global scale. ”

— p. 571

“The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relevant actors combined.”

— p. 20

Piketty does offer some solutions to this problem, that are specific. And the entire book is extremely thorough and specific, he looks at history, Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, he looks at Marxist thought, he looks at free market economics, and the analysis is extremely impressive and dense. That being said, he still makes the ideas accessible to a layperson audience. You do not have to be an academic in economics, or have a Ph.D. in economics to understand it. So the solution he offers is a progressive annual tax on capital. He says in the conclusion of the book,

““The right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital. This will make it possible to avoid an endless inegalitarian spiral while preserving competition and incentives for new instances of primitive accumulation. For example, I earlier discussed the possibility of a capital tax schedule with rates of 0.1 or 0.5 percent on fortunes under 1 million euros, 1 percent on fortunes between 1 and 5 million euros, 2 percent between 5 and 10 million euros, and as high as 5 or 10 percent for fortunes of several hundred million or several billion euros. This would contain the unlimited growth of global inequality of wealth, which is currently increasing at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long run and that ought to worry even the most fervent champions of the self-regulated market. ”

— p. 572

Piketty really does an extraordinary analysis of concepts such as capital, income, private wealth, public wealth, and he explains things in a very clear and precise manner, and does not try to obscure things for the sake of sounding intelligent, which is a common problem that he points out amongst economists is that they argue over obscure minutiae and mathematical details that the layperson wouldn't and shouldn't care about.

I did not take any courses in economics in college, I'm not someone who had a lot of previous knowledge of economics, and I found the book very understandable, very clear, and extremely incisive and thought-provoking, and I recommend it for anyone who wants to understand these concepts of private and public wealth, of capital, of return on capital. A lot of progressives don't like to talk about money because they fear that it'll make them sound greedy or consumerist but we need to understand these concepts in order to make a more fair and just society. We need to take it upon ourselves to understand what these ideas are, and use them to form a more fair society, which is ultimately Piketty's goal.

The book is quite long, and pretty dense, but there are sections of it that I think you can skip and not lose anything totally essential to his argument. He is extremely thorough and because he's also writing for an academic audience, he needs to go into detail in terms of statistics and analysis but I think a layperson could thumb-through a bit of that and still get the essentials out of the book.

The Salience of the Protestant Work Ethic

Even as an atheist, the Protestant work ethic persists in my unconscious.

Overcoming Rejection and Finding Strength in Surrender

Life After the Goalposts - Getting Over the Sham

Show Notes:

Alan Watts

Chris Hedges

Transcript: 

Today I wanted to talk about the concepts of arriving at a place in life and what happens when you reach that point of arrival and realize that you are sort of there, and then what to do from that point, cause we all have these goalposts that we set in life, some far point in the distance and when we get to those goalposts, we wonder what to do. So I just wanted to talk about those concepts more broadly, and how they're applied to my own life.

I grew up in the US in a typical upper-middle class, suburban environment, got a lot of messages about the Protestant Work Ethic ideal of tolerating an unpleasant present for the sake of a future reward, delayed gratification, doing well in school, taking classes that are really boring, miserable, for the sake of this goodie down the road, this prize of a well-paying job in the future.

In kindergarten they tell you you need to pay attention so you can make it to 1st grade, and then in college they tell you to get good grades so that an employer will give you a good job, and then when you ask why should I get a job, they say so that you can make money and get a nice lifestyle and have a family, and of course, to purchase consumer products for myself and my family, and give us the good life. Two cars, a garage, pool in the backyard, and this is what's going to make you happy.

So this is a very trite myth that we're told, and most people are at least, aware of it in the abstract. Even though we're sort of aware of the vacuousness of this hoax, it still is so ever-present that I think it still affects me and affects us in ways that are unconscious. It's all socially reinforced all the time by advertising and mass media. As well as more accepted forms of influence like the universities...and this is a distinctly American dream, I've found.

I've been in Western Europe, I've been in the Czech Republic and other countries in that area, as well as spent some time in Costa Rica and Central America. And this dream of the lucrative career, the house, two cars, bedrooms, smiling kids and that imagery, as the ultimate justification for your life, for your work--it's an American idea in particular. When I was in Prague, people there don't necessarily want so much the big house and the expensive car and the career. So these are not innate, human dreams. These are things that are products of certain societies.

And in a certain sense, this can be seen as sort of a tool of the corporation, or the capitalist, to extra unpleasant labor from people that would otherwise be unwilling or uninterested in doing it. People tolerate miserable jobs so they can get a check and they think that eventually they'll pile up enough money to sort of buy their way out of their misery. Maybe at first we do sort of buy into this ideal, there comes a certain point when we realize that purchasing consumer products is not going to make us happy, that the next series of Volkswagen is not what's going to make us happy.

We don't just need a larger television or any of these things, are really going to change our things in a meaningful way. But after this disillusionment with the initial dream, there comes sort of a replacement goal, of at least putting up the appearing of happiness, as if pretending that the dream works, or the dream is still compelling, makes it somehow compelling. In the book, "Empire of Illusion", by Chris Hedges, he says,

“The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we show ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness.”

— Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, p. 23, Kindle Edition

I think the ruling class understands when the masses realize that this dream is fraudulent--it's not going to be rewarding--that that is a dangerous place for the ruling elite, for the current systems of power. And that's why they work so tirelessly to assure us that the Garden of Eden is around the corner, if we would only just work a little bit harder. And I think that what's so damaging and so sad about this fantasy, distracts us from what can actually be enjoyed in life, which is simply enjoying life as it is, and enjoying the task currently at hand.

I think that especially in the West, we're really quick to discard the inherent value in doing something, in exchange for an external object or an abstraction. So throughout school, I was successfully sold on the belief that my reward for being an "A" student would be well worth the price, and the effort involved. And on some level, it definitely has been--the prestige carried from my career at Northwestern is going to help me meet my material goals--it does carry a lot of intellectual and social capital in the world, but what's really made me happy and fulfilled is my joy in learning and improving, and that's what makes me excited to live. Not just wondering how far up the totem pole I'm going to climb. And I've also found that all loving relationships that I've been in, that have been worthwhile, the person cares about who I am, not how far up the ladder I've made it.

This has been really relieving because I grew up in an environment that really praises achievement, that told you, you need to be on top of the ladder, you needed to win, you needed to be the best, and realizing that those things don't really matter that much, and what's more important is how I feel about what I'm doing, and how much self-worth I gain from that, not how others evaluate me. Having been a few years out of college and been successful in business for a few years, doing what I like, I've just realized that my enjoyment is going to come from within the work that I'm doing, not from whatever I get from the work. But this is exactly the opposite of the way we're taught to think about why we select careers. We're told being a doctor and a lawyer is a good idea because they make a lot of money and retire early, you can pick a lot of vacations. So it's all about ways that you can get out of doing the work, versus enjoying the work itself. And we're told at the time that doing a humanities or arts major is risky because those careers aren't as financially rewarded, of course, as being a doctor or a lawyer. And that's true--but what's often avoided in that conversation is, "What is it worth to be a wealthy doctor or lawyer if you're miserable doing it?"

And I don't mean to grandstand, go on a tirade here about the failures of consumerism but I really do believe that those things won't make me or anyone really happy in a meaningful way. I've earned money, I've bought nice things, and of course you get a little bit of a boost from that new toy or that new piece of clothing, but it's so, so fleeting. And of course there's something to be said for working hard, to earn something, getting it and feeling that sense of accomplishment, those are very meaningful things. But what we've actually evolved into is a culture of fetishization, where the item itself is what is seen as the route to happiness--not those larger concepts of accomplishment.

So I really am thrilled that I've come to this realization now, I enjoy my life a lot more than I used to, I feel a lot more calm, a lot more secure. But at the same time, I do kind of wish that I had figured this out sooner or somebody had told me more about this way of thinking, earlier in life, because of how much anxiety and pressure comes from this mythology and from believing that your income and your achievement is what's going to make you happy in life, and make you feel like your life is worth living.

We're taught that school and life is a race, it's a race to the top, where we're all running and working to reach a certain finish line--but what it really is, is a dance--where you're supposed to enjoy each and every moment of the dance, instead of worrying about how fast or how far you're going to make it in the race. Also, going to Northwestern, I thought at the time that that would put me in a place where there was a lot of respect and interest in learning, in and of itself. But that's not actually what I found. Most people were interested in learning merely for the sake of doing well, the practical of value of doing well in the class, and therefore gaining the intellectual capital and social capital to get a high-paying job. Very few people I found were genuinely intellectually curious, genuinely wanted to learn things for the joy of learning them, and using the knowledge in a positive way. It was mostly about achieving.

I was on some level aware of the fact that I was getting enjoyment from learning, for purely the pleasure of just learning something at the time. I think it would've made school a little bit more fun and a lot less stressful, if I realized that what I was really going to care about in a few years was whether I found something I was interested in, and something I was passionate about, not what my salary was going to be, or how others we're going to view my level of successful.

Here’s a great blog post on college as a thinly-veiled charade to perpetuate existing class structures, particularly the Ivy League, primarily for this rather than as a place of actual education. 

I think it's easier to arrive at this place after you've allegedly reached the end of the race, which I guess for me, was the end of undergraduate. So I graduated summa cum laude, and I had two years of professional success and I'm doing what I like, I really don't have this obvious master, or figure that I need to please, or some institution that I need to please. Currently I've been living in a Costa Rican jungle, and I can just pickup a book now, not to show-off or use as some kind of intellectual or social capital, but to really be interested in what the book actually says--the ideas within it. A lot of people, they own books, to have on their shelf and impress people at dinner parties about how much they've read. Of course, they probably haven't read half the books, or they don't really even care what's in the books, they just want to get the social and intellectual capital from having the book.

It really is such a relief to not have to live your life to impress other people, and to chase these abstractions in the future and chase these goalposts that set for each other. Once we become self-aware about the goalposts being illusions, it's much easier to just enjoy whatever you're currently doing and just completely engage with it. And on my own terms, I've arrived at success. I really like my career, I like the work that I'm doing, I think I'm good at it, I think that it's useful to people, but I've also realized at the same time that the initial goals that I had, or the initial promise that was given--was a sham. But it's ok because that's not what life really needs to be about. And this promise of this blissful future down the road, when we've arrived in life, is a fraud, and we don't have to stress out about it anymore. We're going to be so much happier if we just cherish what we have, and what we're currently doing. Rather than get out the scorecard and realize that we're three points short of this impossible, illusory ideal that we set for ourselves.

I really had the good fortune of finding a profession that I enjoy and can make money off of, and just enjoy the fact that I have a career in something I find interesting and worth doing--rather than wondering if I'm going to get the next promotion, if I'm going to be able to get a job at another firm, another company that I perceive to be the marker of success.

If you read Pascal's Pensées, he says that life without God, as an atheist, is little but a series of increasingly elaborate distractions and pleasures to ward off thoughts of our inevitable annihilation. And of course this is in some sense true. The secularists would often answer that we won't really experience death, because we won't exist to experience it, and we're just better off concentrating on the lives that we do have, and living in the present. And Pascal finds this answer unsatisfying, for in some sense it deflects the undeniable truth that we will eventually be annihilated. And Pascal insists that man cannot enjoy the present with the thought of his definite future in his mind. Alan Watts, coming a couple hundred years later, has an answer for Pascal. Watts would say that Pascal has fundamentally misplaced his expectation of what makes life worthwhile. It's definitely true that our bodies, egos, and accomplishments will eventually turn to ash--and we will likely all be forgotten. But in what sense does this really rob us of our enjoyment? Or the warmth of close friendship, or the excitement of a new romance, or the appreciation of the community you live in?

Death only eliminates those things if we demand that they be eternal. We aren't eternal. We are not eternal. But what we do in our lives will echo into eternity, regardless of whether we are written about in history books or quickly swept away. It matters to our children and grandchildren whether we do something about climate change, global poverty, and other enormous problems facing the world. And no, none of our children will live forever either, but of course we should still be concerned with whether they're going to live fulfilling lives or not, or ones of deprivation and squalor. And what I've found for myself, as somebody that used to really fear death and think about my own mortality and how grim and sad it made everything seem. The solution is in surrender. It's in unequivocal acceptance of our powerlessness to achieve it. Our lives are definitely finite, and we will eventually be forgotten--that's no reason to try and fight for the time we have, and fight for a better world.

How Effective Altruism Can Give Your Life Meaning

The 7 Things to Know Before Filming in the (Costa Rican) Jungle

A nice rest stop on a 9 mile hike from VerdEnergia, to the bus stop, Bar Caballo Banco

1. Don’t rely on anything with adhesive. The heat and humidity is a bitch and will kill all adhesives. The frame for my Zacuto Z-finder came off after a few days of shooting, so find another solution if any part of your kit relies on adhesive.

2. Bring rechargeable batteries for every part of your kit, batteries will die fast in this heat and you’ll want to keep them at a full charge.

3. Get a nice, lightweight tripod. The Benro Aero 4 has been excellent for me, nice balance of lightness and durability.

4. Download all updates, fonts, music, and other assets before and store them locally. You will not want to have to use the Internet here to download anything but a small PDF.

5. Bring a lens cloth and lens cleaner. Watch out for lenses fogging up in the humidity, I was out in the fields here shooting in the morning and I lost a few shots due to fog.

6. Bring a backup battery charger for your camera’s batteries. I was an idiot and somehow forgot my LC-E6 for my Mark III before I got here and it took me a week to find a place in San Jose with one. There are relatively frequent power surges and low flows here than can kill electronics, and if you find yourself down here without a charger you will be SOL.

7. Get a nice lav mic if you don’t have one, like the Sennheiser G3 kit. They are pricey but so worth it and so durable (it’s been dropped tons of times and is still in great shape).  The cicadas here are really, really loud and even a well-placed shotgun mic doesn’t do a great job of knocking them out. Bad video footage can be overcome but bad sound makes stuff unwatchable. Spend the money and get the quality.
    

Maybe the best investment per dollar I've made in my entire kit

The Terror of New Age Dogmatism

This past February, I traveled with my permaculture ecovillage VerdEnergia, to Envision, an alternative, transformational festival, located on a Pacific coast beach in Costa Rica. The vibe of the festival would feel familiar to anyone who has experienced the alternative festival circuit on the West Coast of the United States. Lucidity Festival is a pretty close comparison, and I was excited to attend Envision, although I was a bit skeptical of the quality of the workshops I would find. To my surprise, most of them were quite compelling, including Alex Lightman’s talk on energy and ketosis, Ian McKenzie and his partner’s vulnerable discussion of polyamorous and non-traditional relationships, Vicki Rox’s techniques to achieving effective connection and persuasion in business and personal settings (see photo below), amongst others.

You can spot me in the front row here of Vicki Rox's presentation.
Photo by Andrew Jorgensen

But there was one workshop that terrified me in much the same way that a Jerry Falwell congregation would. Gwen Olsen, author of Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher, gave a talk titled “Alternative Health Solutions”, which focused primarily on the dangers of prescription drug use and the moral bankruptcy of the pharmaceutical industry. Many valid criticisms and objections to our current culture of overprescribing arose, and I enjoyed hearing from someone who had years of experience inside the industry. However, when she opened up the discussion to the audience for questions, a woman asked about the link between vaccines and autism, and Olsen was unequivocal in her response that, despite all available scientific evidence to the contrary, vaccines do indeed cause autism. I somewhat naively expected that this claim would have roused significant controversy in the audience and prompted numerous follow-up questions, but literally no one else in the audience appeared to have any objection to the claim. While I am irritated by contrarians and pontificators, I am relentlessly disputatious, particularly when I suspect anti-science woo-woo quackery to be concealing a baseless belief. At first, I kept my questions somewhat indirect, first asking for specific evidence and scientific research that supported her claims that vaccines cause autism. She referenced Andrew Wakefield’s discredited MMR study, which quite ironically, given Olsen’s claims regarding the essentially exhaustive corruption of scientists by the pharmaceutical industry, was proven fabricated for the sake of financial interest. Undoubtedly, Olsen would argue that this debunking is itself an action initiated by pharmaceutical industries and executed by a bought-off scientific community.

It has thus dawned on me that despite the New Age Movement claims to openness, new ideas, and the questioning of authority, the movement is hugely distrustful of scientific research, organizations, and perhaps scientific methodology itself as “reductionist”. I asked Olsen whether she believed in the science behind climate change, given that there is similar consensus there as there is amongst the enormous benefits and hugely overblown risks of vaccination. She was suspiciously dodgy of the question, and seemed to hide behind ignorance of any such consensus, quite likely to disguise her climate change skepticism at an event that purports to believe in the necessity of combating climate change with changes in human behavior. She hinted at some kind of corporate conspiracy behind the movement for the carbon tax, despite the monstrous financial behemoths working to avoid just such a tax.

Upon later reflection, it became evident to me that Olsen and others at the event have little interest in scientific investigation and will believe anything that fits their narrative that everything released by major scientific and regulatory organizations is a lie, that we are all naively led astray by an unspeakably vast army of paid shills. To shield ourselves from these lies, we should instead ascribe to the naturalistic fallacy, the various dogmatisms of astrology, tarot card readings, chakras, positive thinking, tribalism, and all other baseless claims of New Age cults.

A New Age Rainbow Gathering in Bosnia in 2007.

What I find far more disquieting than Olsen and other anti-vaxxers (she denied being an anti-vaxxer, but after refusing to acknowledge that vaccines have ever, in any case, been a net benefit to humanity, I think she’s earned the title) claims themselves is the mass of people who are ready to accept them as truths as undeniable as the roundness of the earth (I’ve met insufferable flat earth theorists in my time here as well). It is a disheartening irony that a culture that prides itself on its cool alternativeness, and its questioning of authority and the mainstream, peddles just as many mythologies and dogmatisms as the culture they claim to stand against. There was someone at Envision who referenced “The Age of Aquarius” as if it were a tautology like all bachelors are unmarried. Fortunately, the movement does possess a small minority with the self-awareness and modesty to realize that many of their claims lack evidence or a plausible correlation with reality. 

While at first I believed that this New Age movement offered an alternative to the indoctrination of religion and mainstream thinking, much to my disappointment, I have just found it in another form. After many in this movement have assured me that I must distrust scientific research and conclusions of scientific organizations, I’ve asked them whom or what I should trust instead: myself, they say. Very well, but what of topics in which I have no expertise or experience, am I simply to believe whatever fits my preferred narrative? This is why we have science and why I will continue to believe in it, while yes, acknowledging its limitations and that scientists can be influenced by political and financial interests. Science has led to enormous improvements in the quality of human life, and is the best methodology we have ever come up with for disentangling our own biases and assumptions from the truth. As Freud put it nearly a century ago,

“The riddles of the universe reveal themselves only slowly to our investigation; there are many questions to which science to-day can give no answer. But scientific work is the only road which can lead us to a knowledge of reality outside ourselves. It is once again merely an illusion to expect anything from intuition and introspection; they can give us nothing but particulars about our own mental life, which are hard to interpret, never any information about the questions which religious doctrine finds it so easy to answer. It would be insolent to let one’s own arbitrary will step into the breach and, according to one’s personal estimate, declare this or that part of the religious system to be less or more acceptable. Such questions are too momentous for that; they might be called too sacred…We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase our power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous and important successes that it is no illusion…No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.

”

— The Future of an Illusion

Read The Future of an Illusion

Why You Should Stop Using Charity Navigator and Start Using GiveWell

Charities ought to be evaluated primarily on their effectiveness, not merely on their financial health and administrative costs. We ought to care much more about how many are helped and how much they are helped than the charities allocation of resources used to achieve such help.

I have been extremely fortunate in my life and I make a decent living (I make a middle-class salary in the US, but since the US is so wealthy, I am ranked in the top 1% in the world based on my current income),  so I give a portion of my income to charity every month. Like most people today, I am bombarded with requests for donations by various nonprofits, NGO's, and charities. Who we give to can seem arbitrary, and many people's attitude is that all giving should be commended and to question the choice of organization to which one is giving can be seen as any combination of miserly, cynical, and callous. This attitude strikes me and many in the effective altruism movement as irrational and harmful. 

When we choose to invest in a company or buy a product, we are interested in its performance and impact, and we scrutinize its quality before making a decision. Why would a charity be any different? Don't we want to see the greatest possible impact for our dollar? Charity Navigator attempts to answer this question, but does a very poor job of doing so. While attempts to examine the financial health and overhead costs appear to stem from a reasonable position, this is the wrong metric to focus on. William MacAskill, in his new book, Doing Good Better, presents the scenario in which he creates a charity which gives donuts to hungry police officers, and manages to get the overhead down to 0.1% of the charities expenditures, which would earn it a high rating with Charity Navigator. This is of course absurd, since the charities mission is itself absurd, not to mention that no data is known about whether the donuts efficiently reach the donors, or more importantly, how the donuts impact their quality of life. Many people, including Charity Navigator, would conclude that comparing charities is impossible or meaningless, but this position is senseless. Research shows that U.S. citizens typically give about 3% of their annual income to charity, and people's total ability to donate is of course finite. Wouldn't it then make sense to ask whether it is better to donate $40,000 to teach a dog to assist a single blind person, or to distribute 16,000 insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria in impoverished villages in Africa? Some might respond that both are good, or that society ought to encourage both, but we know that resources are finite and that a dollar donated to one charity is one less dollar donated to another. Thus, we are faced with a question of triage, whom should we help first? Any reasonable person would concede that the bed nets will have more impact, particularly given the strong evidence of their cost-effectiveness.  It might seem strange to think of charities as competing, but they are after market share just like any for-profit business. And although Charity Navigator takes transparency and accountability into account in their ratings, they admit that, "The final limitation to our ratings is that we do not currently evaluate the quality of the results of the programs and services a charity provides." They present this limitation is if it were some minor omission, but this is much like evaluating Apple as a company by only focusing on it's financial health, not on how well its products work or how much they help people.

Givewell.org has a much more sensible approach to evaluating charities. It subjects charities to independent investigation and demands evidence-backed research from credible third parties. They provide rigorous analysis of top-performing charities and provide the highest quality evidence possible that their programs are not only effective, but extremely cost-effective. For instance, their top-rated charity, the Against Malaria Foundation, distributes insecticide-treated nets to some of world's poorest people, whose communities are often decimated by malaria. These nets cost $2.50 and GiveWell estimates that $3,000 in donations will save a life, and the evidence essentially assures that this is the case. Of course, the benefits of reducing the incidence of malaria go much further than saving lives, it prevents needless suffering and devastating economic damage, as well as many other benefits. When you compare these benefits to say, marginally improving the wing of a museum in an already wealthy community, the most basic moral assumptions should make this an easy choice.

While many will find this approach callous or unemotional, I insist that it be given a fair hearing. For those interested in learning more I highly recommend reading Doing Good Better for a far more thorough presentation of this argument. Or, for those looking to quickly gather some info on the effective altruism movement, you can check out their website.

AMF's distribution of nets to a school in Tanzania.

Tips and Tales from a Macho Chegan: My Misgivings with the Environmental & Vegan Movements

Most of my life I've eaten like your typical jockish, macho dude--tons of red meat and proud of it. However, about six months ago my girlfriend began to push me on the ethical inconsistency of eating truckloads of meat and dairy while also believing that we should do our best to conserve water, reduce our carbon footprint, and reduce the suffering of non-human species. Much to my astonishment, six months later I am a non-strict vegan (chegan is a term used for vegans who "cheat" occasionally and eat animal products) and feel totally healthy (and even a bit less lethargic after meals). For those interested in making a change, I thought I'd share a few of my misgivings with the environmental/vegan movement, and a few tips on how to move towards a less animal-intensive diet. Not to suggest that I'm some kind of authority or expert on the subject, just that I'm your typical dude who has always loved a nice steak and physical competition, not the effeminate/hippy/tree hugging wimp that most people think of when they think of vegan dudes. Anyway, on with it.

At the 2014 SB Marathon, you can totally see how macho and self-serious I am about the whole thing

While many people think the choice to become vegan almost always comes from some empathetic connection with animals and animal cruelty, and that certainly is the main motivator for many people (definitely a significant motivator for myself), but veganism has a huge environmental impact we often don't address. Often, the scale of the impact our activities and choices have on the environment is radically misguided. For example, living in Santa Barbara, I frequently receive mailers urging me to fight the drought by agonizing over my shower time. In reality, when looking an how we actually consume water, this is almost laughable compared to other changes we could make, like consuming less meat. Animal agriculture accounts for about 50% of water usage in California and non-industrial use accounts for only 4%.

The (often willful) ignorance of animal agriculture's impact on the environment is hugely problematic, and the undue attention paid to negligible contributors surely results in moral licensing. Most of the major environmental organization's websites omit all mention of animal agriculture, while focusing on ridiculous hand-wringing about driving to the farmer's market and unplugging your microwave when it's not in use. Yet, even the most conservative estimates say animal agriculture is responsible for ~10% of all GHG emissions, with some putting it at over 50% of emissions (my inkling is that the number probably falls somewhere between the two estimates). But regardless of the precise number, it's a significant contributor and it's something most of us (especially in the U.S.) are promoting in our everyday lives."

Now I know what you're thinking, here comes my guilt-inducing plea for you to see the error of your ways and become a vegan this very minute. Although that seems to be a common strategy amongst vegans, I believe it is likely a poor one, and far more likely to cast vegans as pushy extremists than actually get anyone to change their behavior. Research would suggest that asking for something far smaller first will have much more success , but unfortunately, I've found that many vegans are more concerned with moral grandstanding than actual outcomes (see video on the right), as if any kind of compromise is a reproachable moral failing. Instead of trying to make you feel guilty, I'll say that heavily reducing my consumption of animal products has added to my self-esteem, in that I'm using discipline to try and live out my moral values.

If you do feel motivated to make a dietary change in view of these statistics, I'd suggest starting with something modest. Maybe reduce your meat consumption by 20%, or cut only beef (which causes the highest level of emissions and uses the most water), I suspect you'll find that it's easier than you think (at first, I thought I didn't stand a chance of ever being anything close to vegan). One strategy is to substitute the surprisingly delicious Beyond Meat or Sweet Earth for your meat once a week. Yes, they're actually tasty and quite convincing when mixed into pasta or rice & veggies. Daiya is awesome vegan cheese when you melt it into a burrito or burger. Also to my surprise, I've found soy milk to actually be tastier than cow's milk. 

I'd also recommend trying to cook at home more rather than going out, as I found that putting myself in social situations without vegan food was the most common way I would cave (which I of course still do). My girlfriend got me into using a vegan cookbook, which helped to make the change seem like more of an exploration than an ascetic deprivation.  

Most of all, I'd say to take it slow and remember that you are looking for a sustainable, long-term change, not just a flash in the pan diet. Vegan recidivism rates are high, and not everyone can maintain the diet without serious nutritional deficiencies, perhaps making animal products a necessary evil for many people. So take it easy, and congratulate yourself on every small step that you take.