On a road trip there are a few common options for food:

• Bring food
• Grocery stores
• Drive throughs
• Places that take significant time to prepare food

Bringing food or going to a grocery store are the cheapest (my preference!) but the kids are hard enough to feed that we often buy prepared food when we're traveling. [1] And they often prefer food that takes a while to make (usually pizza) over what you can get in a drive through. A couple years ago I realized there's another option: calling in an order for pickup to where you'll be soon.

Summary: Anthropic has many employees with an EA-ish outlook, who may soon have a lot of money. If you also have that kind of outlook, money donated sooner will likely be much higher impact.

It's December, and I'm trying to figure out how much to donate. This is usually a straightforward question: give 50%. But this year I'm considering dipping into savings.

There are many EAs and EA-informed employees at Anthropic, which has been very successful and is reportedly considering an IPO. The Manifold market estimates a median IPO date of June 2027:

It can be hard to get the kids to practice their instruments. Sometimes they're having trouble focusing, don't like their assigned piece, or are just grumpy. One thing I'll offer them in these cases is "busking practice".

The idea is, we'll pretend we're busking together. I'll start playing a tune they know, and they should do something that sounds good. That could be playing the tune with me, making up a harmony, or just figuring out a single note that sounds ok and playing patterns on it. If they make a mistake, we keep going. If they can't figure out what to play, we keep going. We're practicing performing. It helps that they're pretty motivated to get good at busking, because they know they can earn money that way.

When the next pandemic hits, our ability to stop it will depend on the infrastructure we already have in place. A key missing piece is clean indoor air. An airborne pathogen can be very hard to contain, and we would want to move fast to limit spread. But how quickly we can get measures in place, and how thoroughly they would work, depends critically on the base we have to build up from.

Indoor air today is dirty by default. The air you breathe in is air others have breathed out, complete with a wide range of viruses and bacteria. It's a little gross if you think about it, and people do get sick a lot, but most of the time we just accept the downsides.

If something really serious were going around, though, this isn't a risk we'd accept. We'd need clean air: some combination of replacing infected air with outside air (ventilation), physically removing pathogens (purifiers, masks), or inactivating pathogens (far-UVC, glycol vapors).

I wanted to link an explanation of how far-UVC works, why you might want to use it to clean indoor air, and what we know about its safety. I didn't find anything I liked, so I made something: faruvc.org.

Let me know if you have ideas for making it better! My goal is to have something anyone can understand, without simplifying so much that it's misleading.

Per the Atlantic's A 'Death Train' is Haunting South Florida:

According to Federal Railroad Administration data, the Brightline has been involved in at least 185 fatalities, 148 of which were believed not to be suicides, since it began operating, in December 2017. Last year, the train hit and killed 41 people—none of whom, as best as authorities could determine, was attempting to harm themselves. By comparison, the Long Island Rail Road, the busiest commuter line in the country, hit and killed six people last year while running 947 trains a day. Brightline was running 32.

Trains running people over is obviously bad, but people also die from being hit by cars. Reading the article I was wondering: are we making a big deal about Brightline because it's big and new, but actually we're better off overall now that there's a train because fewer people are driving and so fewer people are dying? And is this actually counterproductive fearmongering? Nope! Brightline is just really deadly, not just for a train, but even relative to driving.

While Brightline is of course much safer for occupants than driving, what I care about is the overall social impact: are there more or fewer deaths than in a non-Brightline world? This means counting everyone, including occupants, drivers, and pedestrians. Ideally we would compare fatality rates directly: how many deaths are there per passenger-mile for Brightline vs cars? These stats don't exist, but we can get decent estimates: