Pew recently commissioned Gallup to run a poll in Israel on attitudes to social media censorship. They found high support for banning various kinds of speech:

The fourth question, especially, is disturbing: 59% want to ban publicly expressing sympathy for civilians in Gaza? Since the polling was conducted in Hebrew and Arabic, however, this got me wondering whether translation might be contributing. I went to check, and Pew did publish the questions:

Q123c. Thinking about the war between Israel and Hamas, do you think people should or should not be allowed to post each of the following on social media sites? c. Posts that express sympathy for civilians in Gaza

A friend of a friend, Robert Herr, guessed they might have used סימפטיה ("simpatia"):

Every so often (2022, 2017, more 2017, 2015, 2011) Julia and will track how we spend our time for a week. This is useful for seeing whether how we're spending our time matches how we think we're spending it (and how we would like to be spending it) while also avoiding a pattern where one of us ends up putting in substantially more hours on childcare or other shared responsibilities without us noticing.

We tracked one week, starting the morning of Saturday August 3rd. We'd tried to pick a relatively normal week: neither of us was traveling for work or gigs, we had childcare all five weekdays, no big house projects, etc. There are always some unusual things, though:

I maintain a Boston apartment price map, scraping Padmapper's listings to make a heatmap. Each month I run a script to update it, but last month it failed due to an API change. It had been impressively stable: I'd been running the same code unmodified for three years, with only minor modifications since a big rewrite in 2016.

The changes to get it working again this time were relatively small. When I look at the most recent results, however, I don't know whether to interpret the decline in my only post-fix data point as real:

One of the things I like about playing for contra dances is that you have a lot of freedom about what to play. As long as you meet the minimum requirements for danceable music (108-122bpm, contra phrasing) you can do almost anything. And then if you're a bottom left corner band you might want to play some pop covers.

While lots of pop music has a tempo in the right range, it's much less common for it to have the right phrasing. Without dancers who will be messed up if you shorten a section or add a few beats, pop composers have no reason to write songs with this structure. But many songs come pretty close! So the first part of preparing a pop cover is picking a song that won't be too much work.

Getting ready for this Friday's Spark in the Dark I've modified my rhythm stage setup to support a new way of doing more things at once. I have four velocity-sensitive pedals, which I initially used for drums. Then I added bass as an option, and then year ago I got them set up for drums and bass at the same time. I've ended up using this a lot to accompany mandolin playing: I really like adding bass, especially rocking octaves, but I almost always still want the kick drum.

The biggest problem was that I wanted more chords: choosing between I IV V for major tunes, i bVII vVI for minor, and I bVII V for mixolydian was very limiting. I also noticed that I was almost never using the snare (left toes) in this mode, just the kick (left heel). Let's reallocate the left toe pedal from drums to bass: one pedal for kick and three for bass.

While the effective altruism movement has changed a lot over time, one of the parts that makes me most disappointed is the steady creep of donation matching. It's not that donation matching is objectively very important, but the early EA movement's principled rejection of a very effective fundraising strategy made it clear that we were committed to helping people understand the real impact of their donations. Over time, as people have specialized into different areas of EA, with community-building and epistemics being different people from fundraising, we've become less robust against the real-world incentives of "donation matching works".

Personally, I would love to see a community-wide norm against EA organizations setting up donation matches. Yes, they bring in money, but at the cost of misleading donors about their impact and unwinding a lot of what we, as a community, are trying to build. [1] To the extent that we do have them, however, I think it's important that donors understand how the matching works. And not just in the sense of having the information available on a page somewhere: if most people going through your regular flow are not going to understand roughly what the effect of their choices are, you're misleading people.

Here's an example of how I don't think it should be done: