Rapid fire of the most amusing things I saw in China

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I just traveled there for 2 weeks:

  • Lotso Huggin’ Bear, the (spoilers) villain from Toy Story 3, is omnipresent. T-shirts, backpacks, stickers on motorcycles. You cannot escape him

  • At dinners with my girlfriend’s family, my main method of communication was through drinking

  • Beijing is the best city I saw, and the people there have the best t-shirts of any city in the world

  • China is the worst food country in the world if you are vegetarian

  • Fewer foreigners than I expected. I learned to introduce myself as “a foreign devil”

  • Upon seeing me, one child said to her family “I just saw the funniest person I’ve ever seen”

  • My girlfriend - who is from China but has lived for ~8 years in the US - was told by a driver: “you act like you have freedom and individualism”

  • The ride-hailing app Didi has a preset message for “The pin is correct. Please follow the map.” Uber Kenya – take note

  • At one dinner, my girlfriend’s friends spent a lot of the conversation talking (in Mandarin) about how “it’s better to date a Chinese”. (apparently one friend was dating a Japanese but they broke up because “she was too polite”)

  • One Chinese friend said the part of America that surprised him most was that “you can’t drink on the street”

  • There was a billboard video ad giving motorists examples of tons of drivers who had gotten into accidents. In every case, the explanation of the accident concluded by saying “they died immediately on the spot”

I’ll do a follow up post with some of the most thought-provoking things from my trip.

Some thinking on charity interventions vs. direct cash donation

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I live every day knowing that I live such a comfortable life compared to most people alive now (and compared to almost everyone who lived in the past). It is extremely unfair.

Donating money to charity is truly one of the most meaningful things I do in my life. It’s a way for me to take advantage of the extremely lucky life I live and help other people. Every month I know that - even if other things aren’t going well - I made the world a little better that month by donating a little bit.

Since it’s so important to me, it’s a topic I think about a lot about. This post is about some thining I’ve been doing recently.

A note: You can help people in extreme poverty! If anyone reading is interested in talking more about topics like this please let me know.

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Sometimes when I talk to people about donations I hear an argument that charities are by nature paternalistic and that the best way to help others with your money is to give money directly to the poor.

There’s a lot to be said for this. I think direct cash transfers to the extreme poor (e.g., by GiveDirectly) are among the most effective charities out there, and I would love to see many many more people sending their charitable dollars directly to the extreme poor - or even directly to the poor in their own communities.

But I think it is a mistake to say that we should avoid other charitable interventions because they take agency away from the poor and that that they imply the poor don’t know what’s best for them. People don’t always do absolute the best thing for themself with the cash they are given. Sometimes it is better to give someone a $2 bednet than to give them $2 in cash.

I myself often benefit from such policy interventions. For example:

  • In undergrad, a group came to campus to give people free flu shots. I think this was more impactful than giving all the students $20 and the option to buy a flu shot

  • Similarly, during COVID the US government gave us free COVID vaccines rather than selling vaccines for $20 and giving everyone $20 cash and the option to buy the vaccine if they wanted

  • My company gives me health insurance rather than extra pay - I am glad they give me the insurance

I don’t feel I am being condescended to as a result of these policies. Neither should we think we are condescending to poor people if we donate to charities that provide malaria medicine or incentivize childhood vaccines (1).

I would never want to argue against people giving cash directly to extremely poor people - I think that it is an extremely good and generous way to help people. But I don’t buy that donating to another (highly effective) charity instead is automatically insulting and paternalistic.

—

1. There are systemic questions to wrestle with about why it is necessary for charities to provide these health services rather than governments, but in the near term if governments do not provide such effective services than it is good for charities to step in

How did China's life expectancy increase?

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I was all ready to write a very different blog post than this one.

I recently learned that in the early 50s, the people of China and India had similar health outcomes, but now China is much much healthier. For example, China’s life expectancy is 78, compared to 70 in India. On the basis of this, I was ready to write a post saying “do you see how important economic development is? It’s not just about having nicer clothes and cares - it’s about saving lives!”

But it turns out that the evidence from the China-India case actually goes largely against that narrative. Because China’s biggest improvements in health outcomes came between 1950-1979 - before its economic growth, not as a result of it.

As Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen say in book I’m getting most of this information from:

“The Chinese level of average opulence judged in terms of GNP per head, or total consumption per capita, or food consumption per person, did not radically increase during the period in which China managed to take a gigantic step forward in matters of life and death, moving from a life expectancy at birth in the low 40s (like the poorest countries today) to one in the high 60s (getting within hitting distance of Europe and North America).”

So what did China do to make its people so much more healthy compared to India? To the best of my understanding from an hour of Googling, it was largely a result of:

  • Improved education: Apparently experts don’t know exactly how a population being better educated leads to being healthier, but it is accepted as a general trend. In 1949, Chinese primary school enrolment was 20%. It was up to 80% in 1958 and then 97% in 1975.

  • Relatively egalitarian distribution of food: This was possible because rural people had land and urban people had jobs. The work communes also seemed to help ensure the poorest people had access to food (1).

This is a corrective my general assumption that to drive the most important outcomes for a poor society (health, security, happiness), it’s best to just focus on economic growth. Turns out those commies did a great job improving health by focusing on health, education, and food.

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1. This access to food in China has the notable exception of the famine of 1958-61 where 17-30 Million people died. But for perspective, Drèze and Sen claim that that many people die in India every 8 or so years from malnutrition.

Democracy in India may have protected it from famine, but it does not protect it from chronic malnutrition:

“as India's experience shows, open journalism and adversarial politics provide much less protection against endemic undernutrition than they do against a dramatic famine. Starvation deaths and extreme deprivation are newsworthy in a way the quite persistence of regular hunger and non‐extreme deprivation are not.”

A restaurant in Lahore teaches me the importance of names

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Once I was in Lahore. I was jonesin’ for some Qawwali.

I had heard there was a part of town with one or two hopping Qawwali joints. My lovely lady friend and I stumbled into one place called 89 Taste. They had a swinging Qawwali ensemble. But the place was nearly empty.

Ah, well, I thought. What a pity that the young people don’t appreciate the fine arts any more.

We got the menu and were overwhelmed! There were indeed 89 different dishes. More options than any one man or woman could process. Paralyzed with choice, my lady love and I ordered a simple chai and sat back to enjoy the melding of voice, harmonium, and tablain praise of the Lord.

Having had our fill of chai and Qawwali (and having sampled none of the other 87 tastes on offer), we ventured over next door and saw another joint called simply: “Chai Qawwali”.

We chanced a look inside - and Lo! - immediately our faith in the current age was restored. For here were women and men of all ages joined together in enjoying fine chai and music performed by another fine Qawwali group.

Clearly the proprieter of this establishment had keenly seen that folks out and about Lahore at night would have exactly two things on their minds: chai and Qawwali. After acting on this insight, the wise proprietor had reaped their due reward: “Chai Qawwali” had 10 times as many customers as the unfortunately named “89 Taste”.

It was thus that I learned the importance of names.

It was thus that I learned the importance of core competencies.

"We just need a good leader"

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I was in Pakistan for a wedding a few weeks ago (1) and was talking to someone about Pakistan’s history. I asked “Wo do you think is the best leader Pakistan has had?”

He answered that other than their founding father, Jinnah, he didn’t think Pakistan had had any good leaders and that this was one of the main reasons Pakistan had troubles.

This reminded me of something I’ve heard people say in Kenya: “the problem with Kenya is that our politicians are greedy.”  I’ve heard Americans say a similar thing.

If a country 1 out of 5 leaders who does a really bad job, then maybe that person is just a bad leader. But if a country has 5 bad leaders in a row, then you have a systemic issue, not a personality issue.

So why do we focus so much on the individual leader, and try to pin our hopes and assign blame to them?

It’s not a big mystery: It’s much easier to think at the level of individual narrative and blame rather than think about the drivers of a system of societal governance.

I don’t think it’s bad to think about the virtues and defects of individual leaders – those traits do matter, they are interesting to explore, and that exploration can teach us about a person’s ability to maneuver within a political system. But it’s helpful to keep in mind that we overestimate the importance of individual traits, and underestimate the importance of the overall system.

Why else would I have asked him who he thought Pakistan’s best leader was without asking anything about the political system overall?

So next time I ask someone about their favorite political leader, I will follow up with asking “and what about the political environment they operated in allowed them to do good where others did bad?”

 —

1.       The Pakistan trip was awesome and I’ll have another post soon with more about what I saw and learned

Beauty in Physics and Paul Dirac

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I like to listen to audiobook biographies of physicists. The frustrating thing is that I’m always confronted with how much physics I’ve forgotten since I studied it in undergrad.

Recently I listened to a biography of Paul Dirac. Before listening I definitely knew his name, but the only specific thing I could have connected him with was the Dirac Delta Function.

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One of the best memories I have from college was going with a couple of my friends to the office hours of our favorite physics professor and having him teach us about the Dirac Delta function. The Dirac Delta function is a very weird and beautiful function.

Imagine a spike on a graph that is infinitely tall and infinitely thin, but somehow has an area of 1.

Imagine being told that this function:

  1. Contains deep insights about the universe

  2. Is hated by pure mathematicians (1), but us physicists who want results know better

  3. Will save you hours of work on your homework

  4. Is not necessarily something that will be covered in lecture, but you guys can handle it

Imagine being told all this by a radiant and brilliant theoretical quantum physicist whose only goal is to get you excited about physics.

It’s just a little bit of an exaggeration to say that’s the day I decided to become a physics major.

--

When Dirac did physics, he sometimes seemed more focused on the aesthetic beauty of his models than their truth. He said “it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.”

I’ve usually been pretty skeptical of this argument. It’s seemed to me that because beauty is so subjective, it’s better for us to look for truth in science than for beauty.

--

I learned in reading that Dirac also came up with the notion of a magnetic monopole (2). No magnetic monopoles have ever been verified. If they exist at all, some theories predict there may only be one in the entire universe.

In another class, our favorite professor explained to us that somewhere in a lab in California, was a sensor meant to detect magnetic monopoles. One day, shortly after being set up, the sensor registered a spike. Since then, it has never registered anything.

Most likely the machine malfunctioned that day. But just maybe that was the one day when the one magnetic monopole in the cosmos happened to wander through California.

--

Part of the fun of studying physics is learning beautiful arcane notation.

In quantum mechanics the most fun bit of notation is bra-ket notation, which is things like this:


Learning bra-ket notation felt like gaining the ability to understand a foreign script that quantum wizards use to describe nature’s secrets.

I hadn’t known Dirac came up with bra-ket notation too (3).

--

Dirac had faith that sometimes the beauty of an equation could tell us something that experiment could not.

Dirac came up with 3 of the most inspiring physics concepts I encountered during undergrad. Moments like learning about possible existence of magnetic monopoles are what made me want to keep studying physics.

I now think the search for beauty is intertwined with the search for truth. You need to have the beauty in order to keep you motivated to find the truth. And we’re lucky enough to live in a world that when you find one, the other is often not far.

 

--

 Footnotes:

1. In fact, they like to say things like that it’s technically a “distribution”, not a “function”

2. We all know magnets always have a north end and a south end. But what if you had a magnetic particle that was all north and no south? That’s the basic idea of a magnetic monopole.

3. He also came up with the Dirac Equation. I never made it far enough in physics to learn it, but my physicist friend tells me that it is very beautiful – it compactly describes every electron in the universe

The Past is Just a Foreign Country

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 “There are young people today who feel that we shouldn’t have developed the atomic bomb, that it was a mistake. And I believe that this is because – through no fault of their own – they don’t have this sense of history. They didn’t live through this almost terrifying period when we thought we were losing the race with Adolph Hitler.” Chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, who worked on the Manhattan Project

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” ― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

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How should we feel about people in the past who did bad things? It’s a question all of us who have too much time on our hands like to overthink about.

I think I’ve solved it: Just think of the past as a foreign country.

You don’t judge people in a foreign country the same way you judge your own. You understand they have a different culture.

I live in Kenya. The moral lens I apply to issues here is different than the lens I apply in the US.

  • I just don’t have opinions some issues: Some men (mostly from the countryside) practice polygamy (1). If I met someone espousing polygamy in the US I would say “don’t do that.” But in Kenya, since I come from such a different culture, it just feels like I don’t need to have an opinion on the matter.

  • Some issues I am fine to express judgement on: A minority of people illegally practice female genital mutilation (2). It is seen as tradition in the culture of some tribes. I think this is very bad and the fact that I am not from those tribes does not stop me from saying so.

I’ve been thinking about this while learning about people working on the Manhattan Project (3). It’s been helpful to be able to say to myself “I have not lived with a fear of Hitler. The context I live in now is very different from what they lived in. So I don’t always need to morally judge their actions.”

I am confident it was morally wrong to drop atom bombs on Japan. I am not sure if it was morally wrong to develop the bomb in the first place.

Learning lessons from history is different from morally judging people’s actions in the past. We should try to learn as much as we can from the mistakes and successes of people who lived before us. But in judging them, try thinking of them like people living in a foreign country.

--

1.      Allegedly 10% of married people

2.      Prevalence of 21% as of 2014)

3.      Questions around the early development of nuclear weapons feel very relevant to today’s issues around AI – should the US develop AI quickly to stay ahead of China and Russia?

Also I’m an Oppenheimer prepper.

The value of "front-line DNA"

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At Kapu, the company I work at, we have this value called “front-line-DNA”.

It’s the idea that every week you need to go to the market and talk to our agents and customers. Sometimes it’s to answer specific questions you have, but sometimes it’s just to experience what things are really like, and notice potential issues.

There are three main benefits of front-line DNA:

  1. It allows you to test specific ideas quickly: “Can we give you a sign to display prices?” “No, I don’t have time to update the sign.” Ok, we’ll move onto the next idea.

  2. It lets you understand the problems people face better: For example, certain parts of our app flow take a long time to load on agent’s phones which are way slower than mine

  3. It builds your instincts about how things work in our business. Two I’ve built are “everything has to be 10x simpler than I initially think it should be” and “agents do not read text messages - unless they are about their commissions”

This has changed how I approach problem-solving outside of this particular job. Some examples:

  • Last weekend, my girlfriend and I had an idea for a business doing importing of goods from China to sell to petty traders. Instead of thinking about it in the abstract for too long, we just went downtown and talked to 6 traders and realized most of them already had quite efficient supply chains. Scrap that idea.

  • If I move into an administrative role later in my career, I will be sure to make time each week to talk directly with the end beneficiaries (e.g., customers)

  • If I were to start a charity working in a particular country, I would move to that country (sounds obvious but not everybody does this)

It’s not a universal golden rule though. For example:

  • The more similar your product is to other things already on the market, the less important front-line DNA is

  • Sometimes testing your product with one set of users might be enough to be sure it works with another set.

    • For example Meta has hundreds of millions of users in Africa (especially WhatsApp), but does not do any UX testing on the continent. Maybe they would have a better product if they did user testing in Africa, but they seem to have done alright basing decisions on input from users in other countries.

On balance, “spend a lot of time with the people whose problems you’re trying to solve” seems like super obvious advice, but I think it is still underrated in the worlds of “development”, philanthropy, consulting, and Effective Altruism.

Which presidents were born closer to Lincoln's presidency than to their own?

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When Joe Biden was born, America was closer to Lincoln’s presidency than to Biden’s presidency.

The man is very very old.

Upon learning this fact, I (and I assume all of you) wondered: For which other presidents is this true?

In fact, there have only been 6 presidents since Lincoln who were born closer to their own presidencies than to Lincoln’s (1).

It is unlikely that get another president born closer to Lincoln than their own presidency. The only remote possibilities (based on 2 minutes of googling) would be if Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren became president. We are truly moving into a post-Lincoln era.

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1. Of course, everyone who was president before Lincoln was born closer to their own presidency than to Lincoln’s. And for Lincoln himself, the question is undefined.

Source for data

Update on high-skill immigration work

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In September I wrote that I was trying to work on high-skill immigration into the US as my political cause of choice.

I’ve decided to stop focusing on this, after spending a few weekends digging into the topic and concluding that realistically there’s not much a person can do to make progress on this by spending a few hours a weekend - especially if that person lives in Kenya as I do.

I had hypothesized 3 ways to have an impact on high-skill immigration, and have concluded that none of them are too effective right now.

1. Convincing / bothering my representatives or people in the state department to change things

  • I’ve written a few emails to my senators and representatives (congress is the most likely place to make big progress on this issue). I got stock responses. Always hard to say with things like this, but likely these emails had no impact.

  • One of my senators, Chuck Grassley, has been one of the biggest opponents to actual immigration reform in the Senate. I tried to get a meeting with him (he makes it relatively easy for Iowans to meet him) but wasn’t able to. If I moved back to Iowa, I would spend some time at political events to see if I could get a meeting with him, but it’s not a feasible option while I live in Kenya.

2. Growing my blog to hundreds of thousands of readers and then using it as a soap box

  • Getting tons and tons of readers was a joke, but the general idea of trying to mobilize activism myself was something I thought a little bit about. But 1) it’s hard to do, and 2) if I mobilized a bunch of people to act on high-skill immigration there is a chance this would actually backfire. Raising the profile in public discourse of “high-skill immigration” specifically (which has less public attention on it than low-skill immigration) could attract anti-immigration people to the issue

3. Getting involved with activist organizations that know how to be effective much more than I do:

  • There aren’t any good volunteer activities I could find on high-skill immigration. If I was German I could volunteer with Malengo. If I was looking for a full-time job, I could try Formally or the Institute for Progress. But other than those, options are limited.

If I move back to the US in the next few years, I may try to get involved in political activism on this issue with my senators and representatives. But for now, I’m going to put this time and mental energy elsewhere.

Improving my traveling skills

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These are the kinds of sites I used to prioritize when traveling. I had a lot of room to improve

I foolishly used to think that traveling was kind of boring. “Places are all the same” I thought. “They all have people, and trees, McDonalds.”

But actually I just sucked at traveling.

In my defense, I was a child and had no money and no power to make the decisions myself when I traveled. But also there is a skill in traveling well. Now I am a man and developed this skill a bit. So I have put childish things like disliking travel and having no money behind me.

These are reminders for myself of what I have learned, so I can refer back to it next time I go to a new country.

Let me know if you have any additions from what has worked well for you!

Preparation:

  • Learn some history and culture: Start with general history to get a foundation, and then focus on whatever is interesting about that country (famous people, industry, trade, religion, art)

    • Follow up by watching YouTube videos on the most interesting bits

  • Listen to music of the country beforehand: especially traditional, pop, indie

  • Find books / movies from the country

  • Browse the country’s subreddit: Interesting to see how people talk about themselves!

  • Prepare lists of:

    • At least 3 places of historical / economic / cultural interest to visit

    • At least 3 foods to try

    • 1 interesting church to go to

    • Topics I want to learn more about by talking to people in the country (1)

While there:

Now I see things that are very interesting to me, like 500-year-old ruins and trees

  • Accept invitations (2)

  • Ask people what they think of history, world events. Cross-interrogating a topic like “Do the police help people?” across different countries can be super interesting

  • Ask people how they get along with other peoples. E.g., asking Somali-Kenyan driver if he feels discriminated by other Kenyans

    • Remember not to take answers at face-value

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1. As an example, here’s how I’ve prepared for a trip to Istanbul in late April:

  • Learn some history and culture: Read a general history of the Ottoman empire, a book on the Ottoman’s maritime power (related to another book I had read about the Portuguese empire), and a book on current events. Of particular interest to me are the whirling dervishes, Ottoman architecture, trade throughout the empire, and the interaction between Islam and Christianity (especially the Armenian Catholic church)

  • Listen to music: Their “traditional” music (not sure how authentic it is) weirdly reminds me a lot of progressive rock. Also found a few cool indie bands

  • Find books / movies: Read half of The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk

  • Browse the country’s subreddit: Lots of it was in Turk so I coulnd’t understand, but a few jokes about Turks and Greeks not getting along

  • Prepare lists: I’m unusually prepared and have a whole notion document of things to do and foods to eat. Especially excited to go to an Armenian Catholic church.

    • I’m particularly interested to ask any Turks who will talk to me about if they have a sense of connection to the Ottoman empire, how they feel about joining the EU, what they think of Erdogan, if the police help people, and their views on religion

2. One fun example of this: In Lamu town in Kenya, some guys invited us to eat barbeque on the street. We joined them, and got to participate in the chill night neighbourhood streetlife of Lamu - a lot of old men just sitting aorund, talking, heckling each other.

One of the old men told us about the history and mythology of Chinese sailors who got stranded on Pate island nearby, 500 years ago. He gave us a book recommendation on the topic, and said 20 years ago he had given a tour to a New York Times writer working on a story (presumably when working on this article)

I’ve been working at Kapu for the past 10 months!

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For the past 10 months I've been working at Kapu. It was in “stealth mode” until December last year, so I couldn’t tell people much about it.

I’m excited to tell everyone about it now! Here are the basics of how Kapu works:

An example Kapu order - lots of greens! Foot for scale

Example of the neighbourhood shops our customers usually buy from

  • How do we make money? Kapu is a group-buying e-commerce company. We sell things people use every day at home, mostly food but also things like soap and diapers.

  • Who do we sell to? Our customers are poor Kenyans who usually spend 50% of their money on the types of products we sell - so they are extremely price sensitive. These customers place orders with agents, and we deliver to the agents the next day (saving last mile delivery costs because one agent might order for 10 customers, and we only have to make one delivery to that agent for all 10 customers).

  • How are we competitive? Our customers are extremely price-sensitive. For some products, they will buy from us if we are only 2 cents (2 Kenyan shillings) cheaper than their neighbourhood shops. We can be cheaper than these shops because we cut out a bunch of middle-men.

  • Kapu is 1 year old, and right now we are only active in Nairobi, Kenya. Hopefully we will grow to new cities soon

To chart my thinking a little bit as to why I decided to work at Kapu:

  • I want extreme poverty to end within my lifetime (from a post I wrote 2 years ago)

  • I think I have the strongest chance to have impact in on people living in extreme poverty by working for a company that is sustainably creating jobs, decreasing prices, and driving economic growth (from a post I wrote a year ago)

So when I decided to leave BCG, I started looking for great startups. I decided on Kapu because:

  • Kapu makes people’s lives better in a very straightforward way: It saves them money day-to-day. A lot of companies I looked had a lot more complicated theories of change, which made me less confident they would be as impactful as they claimed

  • The team at Kapu is super strong and experienced - meaning I’ve had lots more coaching and mentorship than is typical at a first-year startup

  • Kapu has strong funding - $8M seed round

  • The day-to-day work sounded like fun - and it has been. My role has shifted every few months, but the most consistently fun thing has been going to neighbourhoods in Nairobi I normally wouldn’t and understanding how I can help solve people’s problems.

I’m planning to be with Kapu in Nairobi for the foreseeable future. When we grow out of this city, and maybe eventually this country, I may move out of Nairobi to help grow Kapu elsewhere. But for now I’m focused on making Kapu in Nairobi as successful as possible.

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If you want to learn more about Kapu, startups in Nairobi, or anything, shoot me a message or an email at ljeure@gmail.com. If you’re reading this and are curious, then I’d love to talk!

Pascal's roulette wheel, or how I won $20

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I was at a casino last week. I was down on my luck, having lost $20 at the 7-card poker table.

Then I remembered when my friend Jesse had told me about the Martingale system which guarantees you to win at roulette! It goes like this:

  • First bet $20 on red. If red comes up, you’ve won. Quit

  • If you lose, double your bet to $40 and put it on red. If red comes up, you lost $20 the first round, but then won $40 the second round, so in total you won $20. Quit

  • If you lose again, double your bet to $80…

  • …and so on. Just keep betting red, doubling your bet each time, and eventually you are bound to win, taking home $20

This was clearly the only way to climb my way out of this $20 hole I was in. Given the table limit, the only way I could lose was if I lost roulette 5 games in a row (1). The odds of this were 4% - practically zero!! (2)

So I cashed in with $100 worth of chips and put $20 on red. I lost the first bet, but then bet again at $40 and won. I had won back at roulette the $20 I had lost at poker!

Jesse was a genius! I was half considering simply quitting my job and moving into a mattress in the corner of this casino to make my way as a roulette player.

Before making any final decision on my career and housing, I decided to crunch some numbers and calculate the expected value of carrying out the Martingale strategy into infinity.

As I should have expected given that casinos remain in business, the house still wins in the long run even if you use a Martingale strategy. This wasn’t a viable career option for me

The thing I hadn’t really considered was that if I lost 5 games in a row, I would have been losing around $600. Even with only a 4% chance of losing that much, this potential loss outweighs the 96% chance that I win $20 (3).

In my mind, 4% rounded down to “basically zero”. But in real life, things with 4% probability happen about 1 in every 25 times. In finance / probability, these are known as “tail risks”. And this tail risk had a disproportionally large consequence - losing more than $600.

—

DALL-E’s interpretation of Blaise Pascal playing roulette with God in a Chinatown casino

Even if there was no table limit and I could play the game infinite times, I still would be expected to lose. This was super hard for me to intuitively understand. The odds that red loses 20 times in a row are 0.0002%. If I had enough money to double my bets 20 times, that feels like that’s basically a guaranteed win, right?

No. What feels like a “guaranteed” win is actually only a 99.9998% chance. This is a small tail risk but with a huge consequence - if I did lose 20 games in a row, I would be losing $20M (4). Which, despite my lucrative recent side hustles in forex and casinos, is more money than I have.

I was falling victim to failures in thinking about tail risks that Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes in The Black Swan: “just as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to overestimate it in games of chance.”

Also created with DALL-E

This is the first time I’ve been confronted with tail risks in a way that feels salient. I think having played roulette will help me when thinking about things like existential risks, risky but high-impact ventures, and the existence of aliens.

So now I have a good excuse to keep going to the casino. I’m not throwing my money away. I’m on an epistemic quest to sharpen my intuitions about low-probability events.

It also makes me think of Blaise Pascal, who I think would have happily taken my money as I played roulette over and over again, delighting in the small chance of winning huge amounts from me.

—

Thanks to Binx for co-writing this post!

—

1. the table had a maximum bet of $500, so if I lost at $20, $40, $80, $160, and $320, I would not be able to double my bet again to $640

2. it was a single-zero roulette table, so the odds of winning on red were 18/37. Odds of losing 5 in a row were (19/37)^5 = 3.6%

3. Expected value: $20 * 0.96 - $630 * .04 = expected loss of -$6

4. $20 * 2^19 = $10M lost on the last bet, then another $10M for all I lost cumulatively on the previous bets

What I learned from two mosques in Mombasa

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Indian ocean trade routes, with Mombasa marked with a red star

The Kenyan city of Mombasa has been an important port city for over 2000 years, connecting Africa to the Middle East, India, and China.

I visited for a couple days in February, and on a whim bought a book on Swahili architecture. I was struck by how much I could learn about the city just from learning about two mosques (1).


Mnara Mosque (also called Basheikh/Tangana). In a back alley, not clearly labeled, and you would miss it if you weren’t specifically looking for it

Mandhry Mosque - still powerlines but on a main thoroughfare. Has a gift shop attached, not visible here.

More modern Konzi Mosque in Mombasa, It’s not as much in the Swahili style and does not have the rounded Swahili-style tower

1. Swahili architecture is distinctly African - not just imported Arab culture. British colonialists claimed that Swahili architecture was simply Arab (the implication being that Africans did not have such advanced culture). It is certainly Arab-influenced, but it has core features that come from building history on the African continent. This is illustrated by the minarets (towers) on these two mosques - they are simple, rounded, white, and very solid. There are four mosques with minarets like this in the world - all of them on the Swahili coast: 2 in Mombasa, 1 in Lamu (Kenya), and one in Stone Town (Zanzibar, part of Tanzania) (1).


For example, see the picture of a non-Swahili mosque in Mombasa for reference. The tower looks quite different.

2. British colonizers wanted to give prominence to the “Arab” factions rather than the “African” factions in Mombasa. The mosques were given attention and prominence accordingly: The Mnara mosque was more associated with Swahili people, while the Mandhry was more associated with Arabs. I’m sure there are other factors as well, but this seems like it has trickled down to today where the Mandhry mosque is labeled as a great tourist site, with a gift shop, while the Mnara mosque is not well-labeled and is hard to find (1).

3. Islam was super culturally important in Indian ocean trade. Indian Ocean trade was dominated by Muslim merchants, and mosques in a port city would serve as a beacon to arriving travelers. The Mandhry mosque was one of the most prominent buildings on the Mombasa coast, and was available to Muslim visitors as a place to rest, and even sleep.

I had never really appreciated architecture as a lens for learning about history and culture, but I’m sold now (2). I think that this lens might be especially valuable in African cultures. I’ve found fewer analytical, interesting, well-researched writing on Kenyan culture/history/art compared to other foreign countries I’ve tried to learn about (China, Japan, India, Persia). My guess is that this is partly because there hasn't been written culture in east Africa as long, so there aren’t written records to dive into. But buildings have existed for a long time, which gives architectural study a comparative advantage.

That’s my hypothesis anyways. I’m now paying much more attention to the architecture of the places I visit to try to understand the place and people in a different way (3).

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1. Unfortunately I couldn’t see the thing I most wanted to see in Mombasa, which is the alley that Cob gets stuck in in Inception. As I learned 2 days before departing, that chase sequence was actually shot in Tangier Morocco

2. Anecdotally, it seems factionalism is still a significant factor in Mombasa - as my guide was taking me around he specifically pointed out how “this mosque is Shi’ite”, “this mosque is Sunni”, and when prompted that another mosque was for Indian muslims.

3. I was convinced by this one experience to buy a couple volumes of the Sub-Saharan Africa Architectural Guide (h/t Tyler Cowen).

People in Kenya can now travel to the US in a more reasonable time frame

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Visa wait time in the US embassy in Nairobi is down to 63 days from 365+ in July. 63 days is still too long but it’s a great improvement!

The embassy, under the new Ambassador Meg Whitman, has made some significant changes such as getting more people to perform interviews and waiving the interview requirement for people who already had visas in the past 4 years.

I doubt that my annoying emails to the embassy and state department contributed at all to this change.

I wrote an EA forum post sharing what I’ve learned from this, and giving an update on an an earlier post arguing (a bit naively) that it would be relatively easy to badger embassies into doing things.

As I say in the post, I’ve since learned that in this case at least, "not enough advocacy from Americans" was less of a limiting factor on visa interview wait times than "political capital within the embassy".

How do people enter the US to live there?

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I was in New York City last month and wanted to learn about US immigration policy I went to Barnes and Noble to see if I could find any books describing how the system works.

In the sociology / politics section, I found at least 10 books on immigrant experiences. To varying degrees, these books were all trying to convince you that immigrants were good and we should have more of them. But I found 0 books that actually explained how the immigration system works (1).

Lots of people are focused on making you feel nice about immigrants - not so much focus on the nuts and bolts of how it actually works now and what has to change (2).

I assume most Americans (reasonably) don’t know what the main mechanisms are by which immigrants enter the country. And I couldn’t find a super clear, concise explanation of what I wanted, so decided to write one for myself (3).

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Around 1M people immigrate to the US each year. There are three main reasons you are allowed to immigrate - because of family, work, or being a refugee. The yearly breakdown is below.

A couple observations

  • The system is not optimized to bring in people who will most contribute to the economy, it is optimized to bring in families of people here already (5)

  • We don’t invite people in to live and work in the US long-term. Instead we invite them to work temporarily, then later they ask to change their status to be a full immigrant (represented by the blue section of thee “work” bar) (6)

Most common work visa types (potentially leading to changing status to get a green card):

(Note that this is total entries into the country - not total number of people granted these visas. A person can enter and leave more than once).

Immigration caps: Family immigration is capped based on a complicated formula that seems like it is about 500k people per year (immediate family of US citizens are excluded). Work immigration is capped at 140k per year. And no more than 7% of immigration between these two categories can come from more than one country (7).

H1B visas - the kind wanted by most of my non-American peers from MIT/consulting who want to move to the US - was capped at 85,000 each year. Since more than 85k people apply each year (last year 300k+ people applied), acceptance is determined via lottery.

Biggest opportunities to increase high-skill immigration from my understanding:

  • Congress could simply lift green-card caps - particularly for high-skill workers under H1B visas which wouldn’t be super politically charged (relative to low-skill immigration at least)

  • The US could make a direct-to-green-card path for people who study in the US (students - not included in charts above). This would be a significant policy change, may require a change in the US immigration framework

  • The executive branch can grant more O1 visas to people. Not very many people apply for these visas right now, and it has not been super clear just how extraordinary you need to be to get one of these. Do you need to be a Nobel prize winner? Or just a well-known scientist or entrepreneur within your field? The executive branch has a lot of discretion with who gets let in under this visa, and could clarify and expand their policy to let more smart talented people in

  • The Biden admin has started a IEP entrepreneurship program - currently it does not have a path towards permanent residency but the program could be developed

Things I still don’t understand that well:

  • Where does OPT fit? I think it is just an extension of student visas

    • update: yes, a 1-3 year extension on the F-1 student visa

  • Does the 140k cap apply to those changing status as well as those entering directly?

    • update: confirmed yes

  • What % of people on different work visa types end up wanting to and being able to get permanent residency status?

  • Since there is a skilled labor shortage, why aren’t big powerful companies advocating for immigration reform?

    • update: see footnote 6



Summary: It’s very complicated, and I have a lot to learn. But this at least gives me a starting knowledge of how it works, and the context to know where to look next.

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1. It turns out that the place in NYC to buy fact-filled books on immigration is the Tenement Museum gift shop. Let me know if you know of other places.

2. The notion that pro immigration have nice feelings but don’t do much about it feels like it is in line with the finding that people who are anti-immigration care much more than people who are pro-immigration. (as a matter of epistemic hygiene I must admit that I have not read the linked paper, but am relying on the Institute for Progress’s reading of it)

3. This is not at all authoritative - it’s just my current best understanding of how things work. I may update it later as I learn more.

Data comes from the Department of Homeland Security and is based on 2011-2020

4. Surprising fact #1: The same number of people got permanent lawful status under Trump as in Obama’s second term. It’s actually even slightly higher under Trump if you exclude 2020, during which there was a pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus

5. Historically the reason for this was that in the ~1920-1960s, WASP Americans didn’t want inferior types like Southern Europeans (Catholic) or Eastern European (Jewish) entering (not to mention Asians/Africans/Hispanics). By accepting mostly people who already had family in the US, they hoped that it would mean more people who were - like the majority of Americans at the time, WASPs

6. There are 5 preferences for employment-based immigration: 1) extraordinary ability 2) advanced degrees or exception ability 3) skilled workers with 2 years experience + unskilled shortage workers 4) religious / US government workers 5) investors investing $900k-1.8M in the US

Obtaining these employment based immigration usually requires that an employer petition on your behalf (similar with family visas). So there are very few ways for you to initiate immigration yourself. This gives a lot of power to companies hiring people. Workers are dependent on them for their visa and if they quit/are let go, they lose their visas.

This is why big companies don’t particularly advocate for immigration reform (according to an expert I talked to). They like the status quo insofar as it gives them a lot of power. They may argue for increased immigration caps so they can get more workers, but don’t really want to see an systematic immigration overhaul that might reduce their power.

7. There is a 55k limit on “diversity” visas awarded via lottery every year (included in “other” bar of the first chart)

If your immigration petition has been approved by USCIS (part of DHS who oversees the process), but the immigration cap for your country or overall has been exceeded, you get added to a visa queue. Currently the queue is 3.8M people for family immigration, and 1M for employment immigration

Updated 8 October 2022: footnotes 6-7


Further reading:

I'm working on high-skill immigration; or, being a doer, not an opinion-haver (at least trying)

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I recently switched from working in consulting to working at a startup (1).

This has forced a general mindset shift from “I want to sound smart about the stuff I’m talking about” to “do things”, that affects how I think about political issues.

It’s easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking I should have smart political opinions so I can have intelligent conversations about nuclear energy, police reform, or zoning laws. But a lot of this is just posturing. I look smart, my friends look smart, we pat ourselves on the back, nothing changes.

I want to focus on being a good citizen by actually achieving things.

In politics though? There are so many problems though! And they are so big and complicated and difficult! It seems hopeless.

So I’m trying out a new rule for civic engagement: Everyone should have one political cause of choice.

There are lots of important political problems. You can’t work on all of them. Pick one that is important, that you care about, and that you think you can reasonably make progress on (2).

I have decided that my political cause is: The US should allow many more highly-skilled people to immigrate.

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Why high-skill immigration?

I have a strong belief in the importance of immigrants to the US, both as a matter of fact (economically/ culturally/ scientifically) and as a matter of what the US should aspire to be.

Living in Kenya makes this especially salient - it was so easy for me to move here and I think I am doing good. There are so many people here who can’t move to the US, and I think that they would do good.

I think allowing immigration of skilled workers is pretty indisputably good for the US, those individuals, and (more disputably) for the world. This article captures arguments for high-skill immigration quite well.

There are lots of arguments I could make, but I find this Tweet to be the most concise and emotionally effective argument:

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Smart hardworking people from all over the world (3) want to come to the US to build things, and we should let them (4).

What do I actually want to do?

Turns out it’s hard to find actual productive things to do on big political issues. It makes sense that it’s easier to just have opinions.

At root what needs to happen is that congress or the executive branch needs to change the law or the enforcement of the law to make high-skill immigration easier. This means that the avenues to affect change are:

  • Convincing / bothering my representatives or people in the state department to change things

  • Growing my blog to hundreds of thousands of readers and then using it as a soap box (5)

  • Getting involved with activist organizations that know how to be effective much more than I do

A pre-requisite to this is knowing exactly what things I want changed. So the first step is learning a ton about how immigration to the US actually works, and where potential avenues for change are. Get ready for a blog post on that soon!

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It’s been a fun journey so far, trying to transform from an opinion-haver to a doer (6).

Let me know what political cause you are working on, and if you disagree with me or if you have any suggestions on how to make an impact through activism.

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  1. Stealth mode, can’t talk about it, going to change the world

  2. For those of the Effective Altruism persuasion, I think it should pass a gut check on Importance, Neglectedness, and Tractability. Don’t need to be too rigorous because a) it’s pretty hard to really quantify on-the-margin effects of activism, and b) intrinsic excitement is more important for hobbies than for jobs - the fact that you are doing this activism in your spare time (as opposed to a career) means you really need to be motivated on a weekly basis to work on it

  3. You know, people like Albert Einstein

  4. The issue is important and I’m excited about it. It may be the case that I find it is impossible for me to take any useful action, outside of becoming a senator, but I’m optimistic.
    I personally would be much more in favor of lots more immigration of all kinds - low-skill and refugee as well. But I’m focusing on high-skill immigration since those are politically much tougher issues, high-skill immigration is more important from a scientific / economic progress perspective, and the fact that it seems likely that increased high-skill immigration makes countries more receptive to immigration of all kinds.
    A further clarification that I’m saying “immigration” here for simplicity, but I am including temporary residence status that enables people to work (e.g., H1B visas) in the scope of what I am working on.

  5. I could pretty well believe that long-term my best shot at having impact is being a top-level executive at a super successful company and then lobbying from a position of power

  6. Though I haven’t actually accomplished anything yet

Anti-eugenics research in 1930s Iowa

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I came across the book The Orphans of Davenport: Eugenics, the Great Depression, and the War Over Children's this week, and thought it would be interesting especially to the Iowans who read my blog. It tells the history of psychological research in Iowa in the 1930s that unsuccessfully (at the time) tried to to overturn beliefs about eugenics.

In the 1930s psychologists thought that IQ was fixed by genetics, that environment didn't matter that much, and that maybe people with low IQs should be sterilized. Biologists had largely dropped these views, but they persisted in psychology.

Then some researchers at University of Iowa realized:

  • hmm, when we put kids from intelligent parents in orphanages where they are neglected, they get less intelligent

  • hey, when kids who don't seem smart are taken from neglectful orphanages and put with loving families, they get smarter

  • wow, the longer a kid is exposed to neglect, the less intelligent they seem to be

Turns out that the environment a kid is raised in has a much larger effect on their intelligence than their genetics.

These were wild and surprising findings at the time and caused an uproar in the US psychology community. They were essentially buried, the researchers reputations' tarnished, and everyone went back to thinking that genetics were all that mattered. Then the Nazis made that super unfashionable, and psychology finally moved away from eugenics post WW2.

A very interesting book if you're interesting in the history of psychology, Iowa, or attitudes towards intelligence/eugenics. I skim-read the book in ~2 hours. It's nice that someone cataloged all this detail about the personalities involved, but it wasn't what I was interested in.

This book is probably more pro-Iowa than any other book I have read is pro any state. I'm from Davenport and have a brother with Down Syndrome, so there's definitely wishful thinking on my part to believe that historically Iowa has been at the front of anti-eugenics and nurturing children who would otherwise be left behind. But from what I can tell based on what is presented in this book, there is some truth to this view.

Other interesting bits to me:

  • Basically none of rural Iowa had no electricity in the 30s (tracks with what my grandma has told me)

  • Babies in the Davenport Home (now Annie Wittenmeyer for any Davenportians) were just put in cribs and left to sit there for months. They were fed and changed, but the only stimulation they had was the sunlight on the ceiling: "Light to shadows to darkness and then light again would have been everything she learned about the world."

  • The culture of the Iowa Station (research station at University of Iowa) was critical to allowing the truth-seeking - rather an accepting given psychological dogma. Great management and institutions really matter!