Recent content on Seth Ariel Green's website
A friend is reading Manacled , already a Romantasy classic , and shared this excerpt: To quote a very different fanfic: “ Too many competing objections, that was the problem .” 1 But the next day, the excerpt continued nagging at my attention. I think there are two things I like about this. The first is its total lack of shame; as another friend put it, “it just… goes there.” The second is that…
It’s https://regressiontothemeat.substack.com/ . My first post is here . 1 Would be glad to hear your thoughts! My reservations about Substack notwithstanding 😃 ↩︎
In 2023, a Harvard professor was cancelled for having signed a brief for Obergefell stating that states can respect the “equal dignity of all persons” while also promoting “the distinct benefits of a male-female marriage scheme in law and culture,” and for having written some things that signal approval of abortion restrictions . From his own account , a few details stand out: At the Epidemiology…
In the news: White House Cancels $400 Million in Grants and Contracts to Columbia Columbia Agrees to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped Columbia President Is Replaced as Trump Threatens University’s Funding At my local cafe last week, some incensed folks asked: why didn’t Columbia have more courage? Why couldn’t the Ivy League band together and mount a hearty legal defense? I think…
In ‘Man in Search of God’, Abraham Heschel writes : The greatest hindrance to knowledge is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental clichés. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is, therefore, a prerequisite for an authentic awareness of that which is. One of many things that people like, and fear, about hallucinogens: they forcibly open the mind…
Two minor characters are meeting a third for the first time: “Let’s hope we can do as well for you this time,” Pétion said, with gallantry. “And yet you are a Parisian, my friend Brissot tells me?” You’re overdoing the charm, Jérôme, his friend Brissot thought. “Yes, but my husband’s affairs have kept us so long in the provinces that I no longer lay claim to the title. I have so often wished to…
I recently wrote a date me doc – see here for context. (I continue to be belatedly zeitgeisty .) To me, the case that single people should do this is self-evident: why not? what are the costs? But a few pieces of social context made writing one seem not just desirable but advisable: To dating apps — increasingly owned and run by one megacorp — we are the product, not the client . They dampen and…
I am co-author on a new meta-analysis about interventions aimed at reducing consumption of meat and animal products. We conclude that no theoretical approach, delivery mechanism, or persuasive message should be considered a well-validated means of reducing MAP consumption. Here is the paper ; a summary on the EA forum ; our code and data .
It’s a conservative trope that Hollywood hates Trump , Republicans , and all they hold dear . But we still get movies with fundamentally Trump-y themes animating them. Consider what we might call the ‘ bad hombres ’ genre: Silent Night , in which a (white) man seeks vengeance against (Latino) gangsters in southern California after they kill his son Peppermint , which has the same plot except it…
Of the many , these stick out: Harris got zero votes in 2020 because she has no natural constituency and isn’t good at campaigning. Why would things have been different this time? Trump is what McCain wanted to be, a true maverick. Getting Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. onboard — dominating the crank vote without alienating mainstream Republicans — is remarkable. Democrats have bungled governance ,…
According to readers of the New York Times , the top four movies of 1999 were The Matrix , Fight Club , Office Space , and American Beauty . I love this selection because I think they’re all basically the same movie, starring basically one character: The movie goes like this: An office schlub encounters a mythical stranger who teaches him that rules of reality are optional. He decides to stop…
When an I Think You Should Leave skit takes me a long time to warm up to, it’s usually because the situation for which it’s a perfect rejoinder hasn’t come my way yet. This week, I thought a lot about poor Howie from the charades skit. He wants to enjoy some Gazpacho, but Howie : This gazpacho soup just burned my lips. chorus: The gazpacho? Howie: Yeah, it’s been sitting out. It warmed up.
I would have enjoyed this movie a bit more with some tighter editing, less repetition, and more leavening humor. But I did enjoy it. Diana Stevens , who shares some of my concerns, didn’t. This movie is basically Fight Club with no good/bad distinction between the halves of the self. (Although Fight Club is also a little confused about this because it’s so horny for Brad Pitt.) Sarah Gorr makes…
I have noticed recently that I seem to be part of a distinct demographic group without a name. My friend Jacob and I came up with Spunk : Sporty Professional Urbanist, No Kids. We are: Ages 30-45 Living in Brooklyn, SF, etc. Thoroughly professional managerial class Possessed of omnivorous tastes Very physically active ( running , climbing , skating , etc. ) Readers (you can find us at book bars )…
Intel recently announced a plan to eliminate 15,000 jobs after historically bad quarterly results. It’s been rehearsed to death that Intel missed the boat on mobile and AI , but execution issues seem just as important to the story. When Apple ditched Intel for its own processors in 2020 to glowing reviews , the root cause was quality assurance . Even if Apple was a small, difficult customer , more…
I saw RJD2 spin a few weeks ago, and I was very pleased to hear him play The Who’s Eminence Front , a great, dance-y track whose keyboards evoke (for me) Steve Reich’s Four Organs or the opening theme to Nausicaä . Among great rock artists pivoting to dance music, I’d put this track second in my personal pantheon, behind only Paul McCarthey’s Temporary Secretary , which, as far as I know, sounds…
Something I wrote for the EA forum .
A new post on the EA forum .
I recently presented an in-progress paper at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab , where I will be taking a research scientist job starting on July 1st. The recording is on YouTube and the slides are here .
Bryan Caplan asks us to think about ending zoning , while Manville, Monkkonen & Lens (2019) advocate for ending single-family zoning. I share these priorities, but I think they sound disruptive. Here are five propositions about housing and construction that, I hope, sound more agreeable. If a single-family home is ok, a duplex , triplex , in-law suite , or cottage court are all probably ok too. 1…
Some thoughts. In Being Alive , Bobby enumerates deep and shallow reasons to stay single. Paul responds: there’s more than that. He’s right, but I also think: those things are important because they’re true, because they’re real. “ A person like Bob doesn’t have the good things and he doesn’t have the bad things, but he doesn’t have the good things,” I get it. On Adventure Time , Prismo says :…
I am a co-author on a new meta-analysis: Preventing Sexual Violence —A Behavioral Problem Without a Behaviorally-Informed Solution , along with Roni Porat , Ana P. Gantman , John-Henry Pezzuto , and Elizabeth Levy Paluck . The vast majority of papers try to change ideas about sexual violence and are moderately successful at that. However, on the most crucial outcomes — perpetration and…
In college I played chamber music and ran track and cross country (XC). While both were subsidized by the school, playing music has positive spillovers both for the community (people got to see our concerts) and into the future (e.g. something about how a meaningful life involves making art). Track & XC had, to a first approximation, zero positive benefits for the community at large. (Track meets…
Like many people , I am troubled by my relationship with screens, particularly my phone’s. I am trying three remedies. First, I use my phone in grayscale, like Lorde . Second, I avoid screens from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown . 1 Third, I deactivated my Facebook and Instagram accounts, logged out of LinkedIn and Twitter, and deleted Reddit from my phone. For LinkedIn and Twitter, I deleted…
I have a soft spot for movies that get away from their creators. 1 I don’t think that Tony Scott, for instance, intended Top Gun to be a quintessentially gay movie. I think instead that he longed for a richer set of homosocial relationships, where men can like, love, hate, compete, fight, make up, and simply be close to one another all the time. Ancient people would not have questioned this, nor…
I am reading Lord of the Rings again and, as always, there are many words , phrases and names I don’t know. But this time I am reading digitally, so when Denethor talks about “Vorondil father of Mardil” who “hunted the wild kine of Araw in the far fields of Rhûnm,” I can at least look up ‘Vorondil’ and cross-check his place in the appendix. Even better would be an easy way to pull up and…
When trying to explain a social problem, we might argue any of the following: Those people are bad , e.g. blame the capitalists for global warming , the poor for their predicament , or the Jews for “a whole range of things…from the world war to short skirts to jazz music .” That policy is harmful , e.g. a minimum wage might “ price working poor people out of the job market .” Those people are too…
Now published on the EA forum , aiming to publish in an academic journal next year.
An essay I just wrote for the EA forum .
I have been consuming a lot of SBF content lately, e.g. Zvi Mowshowtiz’s review of Going Infinite , David Morris’s comments on FTX’s lawyer, Molly White’s courtroom reporting , and a Bloomberg documentary . To summarize the story so far: someone(s) working at FTX and/or Alameda set things up to allow Alameda to gamble with FTX customer money. Alameda more or less burned that money on a bunch bets…
I have now worked in marketing and marketing-adjacent jobs at two startups , producing blog posts , social media , and external content under the tutelage of two directors of marketing, a head of growth, and a chief marketing officer. I’ve learned that marketing is a quasi-discipline with sacred texts , gurus , widely understood conceptual divisions (I mostly did content marketing , as opposed to…
A lot of writers I like have moved to Substack. I presume that some of them are doing it for a big payday, e.g. Danny Lavery was kind enough to tell the Times that his 2-year Substack contract was worth $430,000 . 1 Others say that it multiplied their readership . But as a reader, Substack is a big step down from (e.g.) blogspot, wordpress, or self-hosted content. When I click a blogpost, it’s…
My favorite moment in M3gan comes when Allison Williams says to the title character: “I know you think you’re maximizing your objective function .” it was fun to hear an explicit nod to the language of AI-alignment; someone who worked on this movie reads LessWrong, or talked to people who do. M3gan could serve as a great prequel to an AI apocalypse movie (though I think it’s unlikely). But…
An essay I wrote in response to GiveWell’s “ Change Our Mind Contest .”
An essay about my friend Danny , and our respective journeys on the Appalachian Trail, published in the spring/summer 2022 issue of A.T. Journeys. My original (more stylistically out there) submission is here .
An article in the Wall Street Journal documents LaGuardia Airport’s remarkable turnaround : It’s no longer appalling. It’s actually nice. In fact, when a panel of judges recently named the world’s best new airport building, the prestigious honor went to Terminal B. The design team ran some “clever experiments” see if things worked like intended: One was a live trial in which hundreds of friends…
A few years ago, a friend was doing a prestigious postdoc at a prominent law school. One time, a scholar who was in town for a seminar asked to be taken to a thousand-dollar-a-head restaurant, 1 and it was my friend’s responsibility to clear that with their department chair – who promptly said, more or less, “no problem.” So out they went, my friend, the visiting scholar, and a few others; and…
Contagion got a lot of attention these past few years for being eerily predictive and apparently inspiring some aspects of the UK’s pandemic response . I watched it last night, and it is indeed unnerving. I like the shots that lingered on high-touch surfaces; Sodenbergh knows that you’re thinking of all the times you’ve been in all-too-close proximity with a sick person, and all the residue they…
In The Vital Illusion , Jean Baudrillard writes: A sort of anticipation of cloning can be found in nature itself, in the phenomenon of twins and twinship (gemellité). We can perceive a kind of cloning in the hallucinatory redoubling of the same, in the primitive symmetry that makes the two twins seem to be like two halves of a single self, of the same individual—and we escape the phantasm only by…
My favorite Marianne Moore poems are generally the ones I understand right away, because they’re short, they rhyme, and they’re about animals. I like animals. I like the way she describes rats , chameleons , and talismanic seagulls . Those poems are lovely and easy to digest. It’s a lot more work to figure out what’s going on in, e.g., Diligence is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight , or To a Prize…
I: was a zoomtown-er in Park City in October 2020; left my job to pursue personal projects in April 2021; got an unsanctioned booster shot a few days ago. 1 I wonder if the trend of being trendy will continue? I also am prompted to think about how much the ideas that feel original or appealingly counternormative to me are just ‘in the air.’ This one I will explain. I got the J&J shot in April…
In late summer 2010, I was on a bus one evening in Philadelphia, returning to Swarthmore. A man came on who had the words ‘Fuck em all’ tattooed across his chest. I looked at that man, probably more than was polite or advisable, and thought about it. Every single day, that man woke up and had that attitude branded on his skin. By contrast, I could shave and put on a suit and look at home in a…
On an episode of Indian Matchmaking , our hero Nadia meets a potential suitor named Vinay at a restaurant and learns that he keeps to a vegan diet. “It was honestly just curiosity,” he says. “Are you ok if I get…” Nadia trails off. “Oh yeah yeah, of course!” he says. “Like, I grew up non-veg, like uh, thirty-five years of my life is non-veg,” and they laugh about it. It was an awkward moment, but…
In An Electronic Soundtrack for Spiritual Awakening , Kelefa Sanneh calls Jon Hopkins “one of the most celebrated electronic musicians of his generation.” Now, I like Hopkins’s music a lot – Collider , Light Through the Veins , Open Eye Signal , and Emerald Rush are all a lot of fun – but “one of the most celebrated”? I think not, at least, not the way Metro Boomin’s tracks with Future are…
(Spoilers for the whole show) because the show draws so obviously from conservative, christian beliefs about the purpose of life. One of the people I watched The Good Place with speculated that the show features zero children in the afterlife, where most of the action takes place, because no one wants to think about dead kids. I’m fine with that; it is, ultimately, a network sitcom, the kind of…
An article in the Times reports local opposition to redeveloping Industry City in Brooklyn . In Councilman Menchacha’s letter on the subject : I firmly believe housing is a human right and that no one should be forced to leave their home because they can no longer afford to live in their own neighborhood….I and my team are committed to working with everyone in the neighborhood to build on a legacy…
I would like to figure out when and how to engage with artists who are bad people. On the one hand, Richard Wagner did not much care for Jews – and not just in the way that was cant for 19th century Germans, but actively going out of his way to disparage Jews and Jewish composers . 1 This doesn’t bother me, and I think it’s because I don’t see any connection between his music and his beliefs. Ride…
Sixty-four in all! I had a sense of what some of these meant but included them if I wasn’t pretty sure, and a lot of the usages were archaic. The joy of putting together a list like this was both learning a bunch of fun words and also engaging with the people who have tread before me in understanding LOTR minutiae, e.g., the folks who wrote the Tolkien Glossary and Tolkien and the OED .
she imparts to the text the full weight of her celebrity. The words Finally taking flight I know you don’t think it’s right I know that you think it’s fake Maybe fake’s what I like become rich with the overtones of her many personas: badgirlriri , the world’s richest woman musician , the CEO of a huge corporation – a person who has lived half her life under unbearable scrutiny, here, acknowledging…
In the foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings , Tolkien writes: It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved. Allow me to cast a vote of special approval for…