I’m pretty sure it’s way less than 2%, but I definitely notice running into the same bugs many times.

To go from 10% to 30% in ~5 generations, the median-artery-having population would have had to expand by (30/10)^(1/5) = 25% more than the non-median artery population over each generation. It just seems totally implausible that median artery carriers could have that much more offspring.

This makes me pretty suspicious that the paper may be wrong.

Genes do not necessarily propagate in a population because they enhance reproduction. They can have no or very little influence but still propagate by chance. (Similarly, beneficial mutations can disappear from the genetic pool by chance). Lookup "genetic drift".

By the time the environment does change (which can happen as quick or slow as one wants), the lucky genes are already spread in the population and may turn useful or detrimental to the individuals after that environmental change.

Also, genetics is not the only driver for evolution.

(You need a standalone mic since most headsets, even really nice ones, have really bad mics because most headset buyers don't care about or even know how good their mic sounds. The one I linked is wired because wireless is evil[3] and in particular, Bluetooth will silently degrade your audio quality. If you want a pair of wired headphones, I like these[4] which are "open back" and therefore sound more natural + cool your ears better, although the open back also means they "leak" sound and are only suitable for working without people next to you. But you shouldn't be having calls with people next to you anyway!)

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/V-MODA-BoomPro-Microphone-Gaming-Comm...

[2]: https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/#get-a-better-microphone

[3]: https://www.benkuhn.net/wireless/

[4]: https://www.amazon.com/Philips-SHP9500S-Precision-Over-ear-H...

It baffles me that some people don't seem to care about their audio quality on calls. The most obnoxious are those who use speakers and you get echo on all your talking, and despite telling them, they still never bother to get a decent mic.

Another common offender are the Bose QC35s: they have a terrible mic - I wish people would stop using them.

All the Apple things have great mics. I always keep an old pair of 3.5mm earpods in my bag as a good, portable laptop mic.

[1]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ModMic-GDL-1420-UNI-Mute-Switch/dp/...

I see comments along these lines here all the time, and I don't get it. I'm on zoom a majority of my day, and have maybe two colleagues that don't just use the laptop mic/speakers and have a headset. I almost never have trouble hearing or understanding or listening to background garbage. In fact, those with headsets will sometimes be worse because they're making a lot of mouth sounds close to the mic.

Maybe it's just that Zoom is good at this? TBH, when we used to use Webex on dedicated phones I felt like I couldn't ever hear or understand anything. Maybe that's where this microphone feedback comes from?

Some people have a hard time realizing that they're interrupting someone else because that other person's audio is getting ducked while the laptop prioritizes mic input over speaker output - with the intent to reduce echo.

Basically, of all the ostensibly unmuted mics, only the one with the loudest human is truly unmuted.

It's closer to half-duplex than full-duplex. Full-duplex with no artifacts requires no echo cancellation which requires headphones.

It's easy to have conversations with friends on discord where 3-4 people are talking at once all with headphones. However this has never worked on a zoom or hangout with less techy family members or work colleagues using ext. speakers.

I'd say if you're dealing with difficult people who really don't want to do more than point at an icon on a screen and go, the most bang for the (effort) buck is to ask if they have a set of headphones. Most people still have some earbuds around from when their phones still had headphone jacks. Just getting rid of the speakers makes a huge difference when folks refuse to mute while not speaking.

I was lucky enough to have an old Shure vocal mic and a cheapo XLR-USB interface sitting in a box of electronic stuff, so I typically put on my headphones and speak into the mic (on a desk stand). For camera...I tried the phone thing and while it does look a lot nicer, the phone gets warm and has to run for an hour or two at a time. Eventually just got a Logitech C920 once they dropped back to non-scalper prices.

A couple of clamp lights with parchment paper clipped over the end made more of a difference than buying a mirrorless camera would've (and they were way cheaper). My DSLR doesn't (and wasn't meant to) run for hours as a video cam so I didn't bother with that.

Also, using OBS and its virtual camera plugin means I can tweak and color correct the cam feed without having to dig into the OS webcam configuration. Plus, real chromakey beats crappy Zoom/Webex background removal when I do just want to goof around with cool backgrounds and overlays.

Until you spend 1/2 hour talking to a certain family member, the one who calls from Burger King and sits right next to the soft drink machine so you can hear the ice being dispensed, you haven't fully lived.

Yes this also freaks me out. Also when people use headsets in a room with lots of background noise, it sounds as if they use an open mic.

I'm also quite convinced that the Mac with just the internal mic/speaker is quite good for most cases. But I definitely want to look further into the issue. Also I certainly don't want to use a dedicated external mic, that seems total overkill to me.

I don't know of a way to check how I sound without bothering anyone.

I know in Webex you get this option before you are connected to the actual meeting, but Zoom may have it somewhere else I haven't bothered to look for. I make a habit of testing my mic every time I connect to a meeting, just in case I mucked something up or there's some other issue I wouldn't have known about. It's a minute of checking to save several minutes of embarrassment and delay later on.

one more damn thing to get

one more damn thing to research

one more damn thing to fit into your budget

one more damn thing to acquire that you maybe hope to never ever use again after the Year Of Videoconferencing is over and will have cluttering up your life forever after unless you find someone to pass it off to

(if you are really passionate about it: cut the gordian knot of all those problems by convincing whoever holds the purse strings that it would make all these interminable meetings much better if everyone had a nice mic, and get the company to buy a bunch and send them out.)

Here's the thing about perception: A lot of it happens without your conscious knowledge.

One of the things about using Audacity as one's cheap studio software, is that you have to adjust for recording latency for multitrack. It's really easy to see how a part of perception is unconscious with the delay.

Almost no one is going to notice 5ms or below. At 20ms, many musicians are going to have this definite sense that something is off, but they can still hang. In between, it's a spectrum.

In order to introspect enough to notice things that are below conscious perception, some people require some training. This is also why audio snake oil works.

I use the wireless ModMic myself.

Reminded me of this article, easily one of the top 20 I've ever read (Brian Eno, Francis Crick, Italo Calvino, roller coasters, trepanation, time, death, drumming)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia...

> “I was working with Larry Mullen, Jr., on one of the U2 albums,” Eno told me. “ ‘All That You Don’t Leave Behind,’ or whatever it’s called.” Mullen was playing drums over a recording of the band and a click track—a computer-generated beat that was meant to keep all the overdubbed parts in synch. In this case, however, Mullen thought that the click track was slightly off: it was a fraction of a beat behind the rest of the band. “I said, ‘No, that can’t be so, Larry,’ ” Eno recalled. “ ‘We’ve all worked to that track, so it must be right.’ But he said, ‘Sorry, I just can’t play to it.’ ”

> Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullen’s satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. “The thing is,” Eno told me, “when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to come back a bit.’ Which I think is absolutely staggering.”

Some of the hardcore FPS players in the group could definitely tell!

This is with a beyer dynamic microphone extension for a studio headphone. And I have the gain fixed.

Everyone else in our comp keys team sessions has keyboard sound, plops, distortions. But in general it pretty well understandable at the cost of having to spent effort to understand. So maybe software is doing a hell of a job here.

Philosophically it is also why would you go with something big and cumbersome for a feature you seldom use? You don't carry a glass bed scanner in your laptop bag - you take a photo if you really need to get a digital copy of a printing. Plus not all are equally enthused or know how to filter through the crap without a large /in person show room/ that would be either filthy or a pain in the ass to disinfect before a pandemic.

Not helping matters are audiophiles being infamously placebo connoisseurs and walking proof that it is easier to fool someone than convince them they were fooled. That market is flooded with bullshit and specious claims so the default assumption for people claiming you need new more expensive audio equipment has been "ignore them, they are gullible idiots who think you need gold cables for digital connections to reduce low level noise for digital signals".

Exactly that. I've been working for 5 years in more or less noisy open offices. Some of them so noisy that there were regular arguments between the self-proclaimed quiet ones and the noisy phone callers. I followed this with amusement.

So yes, it is quite an exaggeration to now ask for Hifi audio quality during meetings. Apart from that, I think a little noise makes the lockdown in the home office a bit less boring, the majority of people worked on-site before the pandemic.

1. It is a bunch of extra work and expense for something I probably do not really want to be on. Easy audio communication is bound to induce more audio communication.

2. I have to maintain a bunch of infrastructure for it, manage configuration, and deal with all the wires. It is far from a free and easy improvement.

3. I rarely speak in meetings anyway.

Alternatively: if you you are going to be hassled with an online meeting, get it over with quickly and with the least stress. It is very slow and stressful to fumble around with “Can you repeat that?” or worse, people not mentioning that they didn’t actually understanding you and then dragging out the meeting with their misunderstanding.

“If you have to eat a shit sandwich, take big bites.”

Most folks I know recommend the Samson Q2U or the Audio Technica ATR2100 instead as easy mics to deal with for untrained users; shameless plug, but I wrote an article for Mux about this not long ago which explains in some depth why one mic may be preferable to another for untrained users: https://mux.com/blog/zoom-like-you-mean-it-1/

Something like the Audio-Technica AT2005 also supports USB plug and play, is half to two-thirds the price, and is a dynamic mic so will reject a lot more of the undesirable sound before it even gets into the computer.

It's easier to not capture undesirable sounds than it is to try and clean it all up after.

I have a ModMic 4 and I am disappointed. I used it for voice calls with my Sennheiser Momentum headphones.

- Accidentally pulling on the wire will cause it to turn on the magnetic handle and create unpleasant noise for others. - It picks up signal from the phone trying to connect and transmits it to the listeners as buzzing sound. So I had to put my phone far away to avoid that. - The mute switch does not really mute, it’s more like turning the volume to 10%. Learned that the hard/awkward way. - Sound quality is mediocre, to me it always sounded like any generic mid-range headphones+mic combo.

If I could test ModMic before buying it, I would pass. I’d rather put the money towards a standalone mic (e.g. yeti) + boom arm. It’s expensive, but the quality is way better. I now use Røde PodMic with Scarlett Solo. It’s whole other price tier, but I do not regret spending that money, which I cannot say for the ModMic.

They might care but have no idea it is bad. You can’t hear yourself on a call.

I actually have both a wired (very old, wire kind of broken because I treated it poorly) and a wireless modmic, and both work fine with my QC35s.

Also, being electret capsules directly wired up to your soundcard, the soundcard has quite an influence on the quality of the audio (mostly in terms of noise and hiss). Meanwhile the digital versions don't suffer from bad microphone inputs.

The only real downside to it is the cable is sort of flimsy and the 3.5mm termination is not great quality. That's how my last ModMic perished, although it lasted a few years.

As an aside, it's been interesting as someone who knows things about audio to realize how much I've unconsciously internalized that most people apparently don't know. Like more gain != more better or what a plosive is.

I would suggest recording yourself using different microphones and comparing them to see how bad Airpods mic is.

I suspect it's because the wired earbuds had a mic near my throat whereas the Airpods' mic were up near my ears. The difference is very noticeable.

Looks like I'll be keeping my wired earbuds around for future conference calls.

So, either you'll get a lot of ambient noise, the signal is quiet or Apple will do some algorithmic trickery that tries to approximate some kind of echo cancelation on the audio signal, but compared to a simple dynamic microphone that just has a more favorable position and form factor, it'll always lose.

Also, it's worth noting what the goal is here. The aim is not to capture the most accurate sound period. I've had calls with people who clearly have very expensive setups, but I end up hearing pen clicks, keyboard sounds, breathing, swallowing etc. The Airpods seem to do a great job of making my voice sound good in general. I've gotten compliments on my audio (so it can't be that bad) and the Airpods don't seem to pick up my breathing, typing, etc so I'm happy.

It's also similar to the anti-mask problem, frankly. Even if you don't care, you should realize that others do and not abuse them for your own convenience.

If you don't have a dedicated microphone port then you may have to purchase an adapter because some input ports are wired tip ring ring sleeve (TRRS) and a microphone will just be tip ring sleeve (TRS).

It amazes me how, even now with so many people working remote, how few of us take audio without even a modicum of seriousness.

The pickup pattern dictates which direction(s) the microphone is sensitive to: see https://ehomerecordingstudio.com/microphone-polar-patterns/ as one example. You'd want a cardiod mic turned so that the least sensitive part of the mic faces your keyboard.

Secondly you'll need to get the microphone close to you so you don't need a ton of gain to be heard well. You can put the mic 10 feet from you and with enough amplification people will hear you, but they'll hear every chair squeak and you shuffling your feet and the ac coming on as well. Get it close and you don't have to increase gain nearly as much.

Finally the greater the distance between the mic and keyboard the less likely your tapping will be heard. But again if gain has to be used to pick you up, you're more likely to hear the keyboard even with a cardiod mic because sound still reflects and echoes. Consider something like the Blue snowball as an intro microphone or call up a supplier and have a conversation with a real audio tech, which I am not.

The issue is once you get off into mics then you have to ask yourself which input type(s) do you want, what sort of pre-processing you may want, etc.

Good luck.

I use a chaepo Plantronics £40 for work but for my steaming I use a Focusrite claret and a separate cheap dynamic mic (plus an exciter).

I do need to upgrade that mic to a sm58b or a AT 3035.

I have thought about buying a focusrite scarlet and use a separate dynamic mic for work as well.

In my previous life I was a recording engineer, and this microphone was what I used in just about every session. It is one of the most versatile and best bang-for-the-buck condensers on the market, and has been for a lot of years. Very highly recommend to anyone wanting a microphone that can do just about anything.

Also, regarding the AT3035, I've recently purchased an AT2020 on a park since the price was insane (like $90 US), and it sounds great! I used it on a remote recording session as the second mic on a guitar can and it was the perfect complement to the other mic (sm57).

I just used some 15 year old entry level Shure's I had from 15 years ago - massive self noise.

I think I was tending to the 30 as its a slightly hotter mic

That might have nothing to do with the microphone. For a headset mic it is important that it's placed completely outside the airstream of mouth and nose, otherwise all mics will sound atrocious and full of wind and popping noises. Look at how headset mics are rigged by pros on talent, they're quite a bit back from the mouth.

Got a wired Plantronics headset with USB-C that I'm happy with. Not sure if the above products have this feature, but I recommend checking for it.

I had a headset with that feature, and sure enough, it failed me on a sales call. I groaned at something our salesperson said, and despite the button having been pressed and the light being on, everyone heard me.

And yes, there are many ways to avoid this problem. I think adding a resistor and capacitor to form a high-pass filter for the shorting option would work fine. If there is already a PCB for the switch, adding these two components would cost practically nothing.

XLR switches are easier, just short hot and cold, done. Works with all microphones and doesn't produce a pop, because XLR uses phantom power instead of T-power.

There is a microswitch in the mic boom, so that it is disconnected when you lift it away. I mean, you can't get more simple: when it is in front of your mouth, it is on, when it isn't, it is off. No need for a LED. Also, the headset is passive, with a good old jack connector, I consider it a plus.

the problem is that you dont know if the other people are actually paying attention and human interactions need that feedback

I recently setup a camera pointing down at my keyboard/mouse instead of my face for demonstrating a keyboard that I built (analog hall effect--from scratch!) and I think that's good enough to let people know, "I'm here" without being super distracting (assuming I turn off the LEDs and the gigantic LED matrix display haha).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nCYWhYagqk

There are also a lot of homebrew DIY versions of the same device:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AecAXinars

I'm currently using the HD58X but I might look into getting the SHPs as a "beater" pair with the VModa mic.

I'm living in a really old house with no ground for most rooms (yes, I know), with only a bootleg ground to prevent _really_ bad noise and occasional static zaps. Though I've read of many people having the same issues with properly grounded machines (as far as it goes for domestic use. I'm not talking about studio-grade grounding).

My Macbook, on the other hand, doesn't have any static, even though its charger doesn't even have a ground pin, nor does my Steelseries Arctis 1 wireless (which uses a non-bluetooth dongle. Might be because it's wireless, or just because it's an external device.

In any case, I don't feel comfortable shelling out upwards of 400$ for an audio setup.

Depends on the country. Over here protective earth is entirely separate from neutral, and there's a separate earth stake for each consumer. This is the TT system.

(I haven't "saved you a click" because you should watch the video anyway. It's not just about how to get better sound when recording or broadcasting. About ten minutes.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D85HmR825wM

Ideally, the camera is as far from you as possible, and zoomed in on your face. "Zooming in" is really just increasing the focal length, and zooming out is decreasing the focal length, producing an effect best known as "fish eye".

This is one of the first things people will tell you about photographing a human being for a portrait (which is essentially the same problem as a video conference). Get rid of distortion on the face. Use a focal length of at least 50mm (zoomed all the way in on the lenses mentioned in your article). Otherwise, the nose gets blown up and everyone looks worse.

Thanks to some people, everyone can experience speech jamming for free! https://arxiv.org/vc/arxiv/papers/1202/1202.6106v1.pdf

I don't disagree, but the results are widely variable with different TRRS I/O across different soundcards. E.g. on a MacBook, the EarPods probably sound great, with a good level of gain and plenty of headroom. On a Lenovo Thinkpad, they sound hissy and terrible because you have to turn the gain all the way up.

> I think my yeti actually sounds worse at it cost 3 times as much.

Something is probably wrong if this is the case. Which is understandable; a USB microphone that's not attached to your person requires some positioning and mic technique that you don't have to think about with the inline mic on the EarPods.

The mic even have to be that expensive. I use a cheap dynamic mic from ebay with a windscreen and a mic arm and it sounds fine.

How do you know what it sounds like?

How do you know how good you sound to other people compared to if you were speaking through a good condenser mic?

Plus multiple services now offer test calls/contacts where you can open a voice call, say things, and then listen back to how the other side hears it.

Hypercardioid "shotgun" works too as long as its back is placed far enough off a wall, however these tend to have sound coloration.

It just so happens that most microphones are the less directional cardioid. Or worse, omnidirectional.

One of the worst aspects of listening to a great interview is when the guest is in a space with tons of audio reflections. You want the sound of your voice, not the room.

Many podcast hosts climbed into closets with sound dampening clothes on hangers during the pandemic. It worked out reasonably well.

If you’re doing audio professionally, consider treating the recording space. If you don’t want to put panels on the walls, get free-standing panels that can be stored when not in use:

https://auralex.com/

Get a pop filter:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_filter

Control sibilance:

https://urm.academy/death-to-sibilance/

No use having a great mic if you don’t control the things you don’t want it to capture.

For other headphones you can use the various flavors of Antlion ModMic, but it’s more expensive and less convenient because you have two cables.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzGPyekZE7w

https://www.amazon.com/Sony-ECMCS3-Omnidirectional-Stereo-Mi...

You do need one of those TRRS splitters though.

Does this matter for gaming or calls? Not really, as it will definitely sound better than crappy laptop or headphone mics. But there is a marked difference. The AT2020 usb mic doesn't even go up to 20khz. Not to mention the A-D conversion from a dedicated unit and the mic preamp are going to be better than the onboard electronics of a usb mic.

In nearly every case, a dedicated usb interface is going to have better quality ADC and mic preamps. High-quality sound cards are not prioritized by consumers, so they remain rather poor quality in most laptops and pcs. Even something like a focusrite scarlett is going to improve the signal chain immensely (plus you get the added bonus of a decent DAC as well).

I did of course mean a real external sound card.

And a usb mic is not going to have as good a mic capsule at the same price point which was my point.

Another thing people forget about is the noise canceling and other filters that are applied to your audio by default. If you're in a reasonably quiet place, it's probably reasonable to put "noise canceling" in Zoom on low. This will make your audio less garbled. If you have a really solid audio setup with headphones, you should try turning on "use original sound," which can make your audio really nice (unfortunately not available in Linux).

I highly recommend Fifine's mics. They have a USB condenser mic with a boom arm for $60 (~$35 for just the mic) [1], and a lavalier (lapel) mic for $20 [2]. The audio quality is really quite impressive.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/FIFINE-Microphone-Adjustable-Instrume...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Lavalier-Microphone-Cardioid-Condense...

I have multiple professional level microphones SM57, Neumann(s), BlueYeti and also tried some of the cheaper USB mics. I spent well over 60 to 80 hours doing research on how to get good audio quality online and would like to offer the following recommendations:

DO NOT rely at all on YouTube recommendations from specialized channels, even the ones with high reputation. They have a business running, and a bad review for a product will make sure they will not get another “sample” from the same vendor. I had instances where I ordered professional level headphones in the 300 to 400 US dollars price range, reviewed by several of the high reputation channels as the best out there. Within minutes of receiving the product would realize how uncomfortable they feel, or how bad sound they offer. When I would return to re-watch some of these YouTube “reviews” I would quickly realize the reviewer had skillfully omitted to mention any of these failures within the product. If there is an issue, these reviews just “omit” any comments around problematic areas of a product. On a second though … Maybe there is a business opportunity here.

Recommendation: Choose a reliable online vendor that can offer returns on the product. Be ready to order several products and do your research.

You also have to take into account a couple of things:

- What OS are you using ? If you are using a USB mic some vendors have great mics but terrible drivers ( ex BlueYeti Windows drivers ) and they do not seem willing to put the effort in. Windows is particularly terrible out of the box, with energy-saving OS plans that pause USB ports configurations. It took me hours to get Windows 10 to sound good and reliably for online meetings. This is a good starting point: https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207355205-Op...

- Do you want to sound good while doing Podcasts, creating YouTube videos OR during via WebMeeting platforms like Webex, GotoMeeting, Zoom, Jitsi? From my experience, due to internal audio processing done by many of the online conference platforms you are going to need different solutions for each use case. Some of the Studio level Condenser mics used for podcasts do not sound very good during online conferences. Its also the case they are too sensitive and your conference participants can hear you with great audio quality but they will also hear you neighbor dog barking.

Warning: I am not associated with any of these companies in any way but I would suggest the following:

- Do you want to sound good for Web Meetings ? Get two V-MODA-BoomPro and Philips-SPH9500S . One set to use and one as backup. It will be relatively cheap compared to other solutions and the price/quality ratio of this recommendation is exceptional. The mic has good quality and the headphones are high quality. You won’t feel them if you use these for 8 hours. You can spend more if you are willing to put the research effort. Just do not settle for any first choice.

OR

- Do you want to sound good while creating YouTube Videos ? Always get a Pop Filter and a Mic Stand with isolation from vibrations. Get a BlueYeti ( but use the XLR port not USB ). The BlueYeti USB drivers on Windows will randomly cause distortion and I given up on the Company putting the effort to fix the issues.

You can also

Get an SM57. Sounds great for voice and its not by accident it’s the official mic of the US President. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shure_SM57

Be careful where your order, the SM57 and the SM58 are some of the most frequently counterfeited mics by Chinese or Taiwanese vendors. Then get one of the Focusrite Scarlett interfaces and you will be sorted.

If you don’t use Mac or Linux but Windows be ready to spend some effort troubleshooting driver issues. This solution will not be cheap but still manageable and save you hours. You welcome !

[Edit] Spelling

If your environment is noisy, you would likely be better off getting a shotgun or cardioid style microphone with some directionality to it.

Also important and already mentioned in the original post. Avoid any Bluetooth based mics or headphones. Avoid Wifi connections and go for cable based connections.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QVNXBDL

It was ~$50.

On Zoom I look a little goofy with the phones on but better that than missing what people say and getting echoes.

so if it's almost as good how smart does each one make you sound?

Generally speaking, there are many good condenser microphones but I'd recommend a dynamic microphone if you can get close to the mic, your room is not treated, or there is outside noise.

[1] I'm in no way affiliated with Røde, just happened to like their mics. There are many other good choices in the same price ranges.

For the record, I'm trying to use Google Meets and it seems to be the culprit in what is doing the "push it to 100%".

For example:

> The most charitable explanation of Singer’s dismissal of political action is that he is trying to sell being an altruist and he thinks a consumer -hero version is the one people are most likely to buy. Singer and other effective altruist philosophers believe that their most likely customers find institutional reform too complicated and political action too impersonal and hit and miss to be attractive.

Interestingly, the author quotes part of Singer providing an argument against the effectiveness of institutional reform, but does not himself provide an argument for it, just an assertion that political change is "the most obvious and powerful tool we have." (I think that's far from obvious!) Instead, he jumps straight to accusing Singer of arguing in bad faith. This is actually the opposite of charitable.

For another example, I'm deeply confused about how the author of this piece could cite Will MacAskill and Toby Ord, then write:

> The underlying problem is that effective altruism's distinctive combination of political pessimism and consumer-hero hubris forecloses the consideration of promising possibilities for achieving far more good.

Ord and MacAskill co-founded an organization, 80,000 Hours[1], which advocates mostly not for effective giving (which the author derides as a "consumer hero" approach) but rather for spending your career working on one of the world's most pressing problems; notably including for instance several types of policy change.

EDIT: and I missed this one the first time around:

> One could spend at most a few tens of millions of dollars on anti-mosquito bed nets before returns start dramatically diminishing because everyone who can be helped by them already has one.

A single bednet charity, the Against Malaria Foundation, has literally already raised 10x this amount without substantially diminishing returns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Malaria_Foundation

That’s not a universally true statement about 80,000 hours. I took their career choice questionnaire and was told to work as a well paid Software Engineer and to donate a percentage of my income (which is what I was already doing — I’m fond of some of Effective Altruism). You could argue that is classic Consumer Hero advice.

I know you qualified your statement but I just want to emphasize it as I think it leaves room for criticism.

This post[2] suggests 80k's key researchers think about 15% of people interested in EA would be the best fit for earning to give, while 10% of people attending an EA-themed conference were perfectly planning to.

I don't think criticizing effective altruism based on the assertion that it's mostly about earning-to-give is reasonable given those numbers or the framing in 80k's "key ideas" post.

[1]: https://80000hours.org/key-ideas/#career-categories [2]: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LrKFNQxjETPvzXQcv/...

The good thing about earning to give is it works no matter how niche your skill sets are.

What's an efficient way to deploy an expert microchip designer, when so few global poverty NGOs need microchips designed?

It's still there mind you, but research and policy are prioritized higher. I'm not sure what else they would recommend to someone who is ill suited for these other careers.

> > One could spend at most a few tens of millions of dollars on anti-mosquito bed nets before returns start dramatically diminishing because everyone who can be helped by them already has one.

That's a feature. It's half of what makes "effective" part of "effective" altruism effective. The fact that charities aren't infinite money sinks allows everyone to donate by a simple algorithm of:

  do {
    let charity = runQuery("
          SELECT *
          FROM charities
          ORDER BY effectiveness DESC
          LIMIT 1;")
    donateTo(charity);
  } while(charity != null && hasMoneyToHelp());

(People may have slightly different definitions of "effective", or one may prefer to do e.g. LIMIT 5 and pick one of the top 5 at random - the idea still works, the slight variance is a hedge against uncertainty.)

It's an obvious idea, and it's how people approach other aspects of their lives if they care about the outcome, so why not donating too?

The article continues:

> > This points to the limits of the individualistic consumerist approach to ending poverty. The best – most beneficial – choice you can make as an individual spending $50 or even $5,000 is different from the best choice you should make if you have several hundred billion dollars to spend.

There's only one entity with several hundred billion dollars to spare, and that's US Government. Other than that, this is why people donate to charities: charities exist to pool money, to turn ten thousand $50 donations into a single $500 000 force that can be better used than if everyone tried to apply their $50 directly at the problem.

- Don't invest more than you can comfortably lose.

- Don't throw away the entire concept just because it's not perfect.

- Get better at telling who's full of shit, or delegate it to someone you trust.

#2: Just because there are charities or companies that do bad things, doesn't mean the concepts of charities and companies, or philanthropy and markets, are fundamentally broken. There are good and bad charities/companies, even though it may be hard to tell which is which.

#3: You can make your donations more effective if you get better at telling which charity is good (same for investments and companies). There are diminishing returns on effort here - particularly if you aren't planning to specialize in charity evaluation. In that case, you can convert this problem into an easier problem of finding trustworthy specialists in charity evaluation, and donating to places they consider good/effective.

Argentina, Venezuela and Zimbabwe are basically nations that destroyed themselves through bad political reforms. If there had been a way to prevent those reforms you could have prevented millions of people from slipping into poverty and needing micro interventions.

But in the case of despotic or otherwise terrible leaders, the problem is that it's unclear what to do to stop them even if you have control over a large military, let alone if your only resources are a relatively small amount of money and the time of a relatively small group of people.

It remains an unsolved problem how to evaluate causes like political advocacy that have very long-term or very uncertain effects. Combine that with the rancor and division that talking about contemporary politics causes and its no wonder EA as a movement chooses to eschew political advocacy for the most part. I guess the overall sentiment is that the money some people donate to feed the Democratic or Republican party machines could probably be spent better.

That said, I've have seen (relatively) small EA grants given to organizations advocating and acting to improve governments in undeveloped countries. For example, the first one I came across was this: https://www.givewell.org/research/incubation-grants/innovati...

Then, Argentina is working extremely well, except for themselves, that is.

They are in a treadmill of unpayable debt that works in the following way:

- The left is tasked with buying people's complacency with borrowed money.

- The right is tasked with giving away sovereignty: privatization and military bases.

People are expected to pick a side and stay busy fighting over which side is right. Meanwhile, the country is taken over. Divide and conquer.

It is working extremely well. There are now US military bases near Ushuaia, Neuquen and the Guarani acquifer, the 3 most strategic locations in Argentina. Everything that can be privatized has been privatized, and provisions have been made so that Argentineans can never pay off their debt, so that they can continue to lose their sovereignty. What should they privatize next? the sky is the limit.

Author makes extremely strongly claim and expects to believe it without any support.

Now imagine if the people championing those bad reforms had simply stayed out of politics? The more powerful a tool is, the more cautiously it should be wielded.

You have not actually engaged with the actual argument, you simply assert that change through political activism is not the "obvious most powerful tool we have". I think you need to back that up, I would say history at least tells us that the largest changes in wealth distributions have come through (often violent) political action.

Regarding the bednet argument, you are simply nitpicking on the numbers. The argument still stands at some point you end up in a position of diminishing returns, i. e. When everyone has a net giving nets is not helping anyone.

I disagree that this article give an accurate impression of the EA. The main point of effective altruism is that people should use evidence in choosing which charitable causes to devote their time to. I don't feel like the author sufficiently engages with this point; instead he attacks Singer for not coming up with a satisfactory standard for what percentage of one's wealth to donate, and laments that EA isn't political enough.

EA arose based partially based on the observation that people do most of their giving to, for example, local churches and schools than to truly desperate people in other parts of the world. People also tend donate their effort to local and relatable causes. The argument isn't that buying Malaria nets is going to eliminate all the evil in the world, the argument is it's a better use of money than other charities, and that we should use evidence to determine how to expend our resources.

Now if we are donating to charity should we follow the principles of EA? The answer to that is probably yes, but that's a different question and is not the point raised by the author.

(I'm assuming "I disagree" was meant to be a separate sentence)

I think Singer would say that it's often but not always hard to change things through the political process. But he hardly shuns politics entirely; he often speaks and writes about political issues, and he ran for Australian Senate in 1996.

But anyways Singer's beliefs about the effectiveness of political causes isn't the central point of Singer's EA advocacy, it's just one piece of his beliefs.

It's a simple and obvious system. I'd say the only two things to potentially quibble about is whether or not one likes their sorting function, and the lag time between resorting.

Effective altruism boiled down, is getting the most value out of altruistic work as I understand it. Obviously if every child in malaria endemic areas had a net, donating to malaria foundations would not be the most effective thing to do. If we discovered an asteroid that would destroy 20% of the population, EA would probably dictate channeling of all resources to that cause.

And nitpicking the numbers is incredibly important if said nitpick happens to span orders of magnitude.

History shows just the opposite. The largest changes in wealth distribution in history have come about through industrialization, starting in Britain and then spreading to other parts of the world. Purposeful political action has most often been harmful to these developments, with limited exceptions (such as 19th-century Japan, and other East Asian countries in the 20th century).

The general version of the point doesn’t work very well, and many of the other OO use-cases the author discusses actually work much better than alternatives.

For example, on abstract base classes: if you replace this with a bag of functions I think you end up reinventing virtual dispatch—that is, each function’s top level is a bunch of `if isinstance(...)` branches. This is much harder to read, and harder to add new implementations to, than abstract methods. It’s also no easier to understand.

(There is a subset of this advice that I think does improve your code’s understandability, which is “only ever override abstract methods,” but that is very different from “don’t use OO.”)

For impure classes, the author suggests e.g. using `responses` (an HTTP-level mocking library) instead of encapsulating these behind an interface. This is a fine pattern for simple stuff, but it is not more understandable than a fake interface. The hand-written fake HTTP responses you end up having to write are a lot less readable than a mock implementation of a purpose-built Python interface. (Source: I once mocked a lot of XML-RPC APIs with `responses` before I knew better; it was not understandable.)

This argument seems to come up for every criticism of OO. The criticism is invalid because true OO would never do that. It seems like a No True Scotsman. Notably, when you whittle away all of the things that aren’t true OOP, you seem to be left with something that looks functional or data-oriented (something like idiomatic Go or Rust). There isn’t much remaining that might characterize it as a distinct paradigm.

Its a big problem I have with ORM's. Every time a discussion about what's bad about ORM's is brought up, there's a multitude of people saying that its just used wrong, written wrong or otherwise done wrong, yet that's basically my experience with every non-toy codebase I've ever worked on as part of a larger team. Telling me that its just done wrong is useless because its out of my hands. Is it the ORM's fault? I argue yes because it encourages that kind of programming, even though its not technically the ORM's fault.

I see it the same with OO or anything else. Is this "bad OO" the type of OO people tend to write? If yes, then OO is the problem. If no, then OO is not the problem.

Personally, I like a mixed approach where I use some OO and a lot of functional. I'm writing a little toy game in C++ from scratch and I have a very flat design, preferring functional approaches where I can, but I have a few objects and even a little bit of inheritance where it makes sense. Sometimes dealing with an object-based API is just more convenient and I won't shy away from using OO principles, but I also don't default to them just because either.

As software engineers I have seen that we usually make two mistakes in these cases. We focus only on our craft without taking into consideration the real business objectives of the customer and what he really cares about. We introduce unnecessary complexity just for the sake of it, often adding unnecessary abstractions. In a few words we often make the sin of believing that software is the objective while in most of the cases there is a business objective for which software is just the enabler and because of that we lose focus on what is the right thing to do.

In software product companies code is part of the final product and code quality directly impacts costs and the core business of the company.

If you want to build a bridge, I’d assume there’s a set of standards it has to comply with. If it doesn’t meet the spec you could explain in very objective terms why the quality isn’t sufficient. If you had to sit in front of the board and explain why you think a piece of software wasn’t built to a sufficient standard of quality, you’re going to really struggle to do that in objective terms. The best you could really hope to do is present a well articulated opinion. Anybody who disagrees with you could present their own opinion, and unless they have a high degree of technical competence, they’re not going to have any objective approach for making judgements about that.

Sure lots of companies prioritize feature velocity over code quality. But I doubt most of them a very well informed about what quality compromises they’re actually making.

In other fields it can be easy to say when a job is done well. There can be clear guidelines. That said, other fields cut corners and do a “bad” job, too. Construction for example. It is probably possible to explain to average Joe why a damp proof course wasn’t installed properly or the insulation used is dangerous and flammable.

Programming as it exists now seems often in service of something else. So a deadline causes cut corners. So in this context a cut corner is fine and “we’ll fix it later”.

I suppose programming differs from a physical thing like construction. Sure you can replace the wiring and install a mezzanine but it’d be insanely impractical.

I’m going off on a tangent now...

Hell, I moved into a house built 3 years ago by a major firm and the ceiling fans were ALL wired wrong, and many of the electrical plugs are upside down.

This is a house that had a specific design model. My presumption is that unskilled labor was brought in to complete work and just did a shitty job.

You can see this sometimes with outsourced programming work or local work that is poorly designed and inadequately tested.

Going back to the ORM example, I'm cool with just using SQL. The language encourages a style of thinking that fits with databases and it being a separate language makes it clear that there's a boundary there, that its not the same as application code. However, I'd also be ok with an ORM that enforced this boundary and clearly separated query logic from application logic.

As for OOP, I don't know what the solution there is. Maybe there isn't one. I like to use OOP, but sparingly, and at least in my personal code (where I have control over this), its worked out really well. A lot of code is transforming data structures and a functional approach maps really well to this, but for overall architecture/systems and even for some small things that just map well to objects, its great to have OOP too. In my toy game, I use inheritance to conveniently create external (dll/so) modules, but inside the engine, most data is transformed in a functional style. Its working quite well. I'm not sure how you could redesign the paradigms to encourage this though, outside of designing languages to emphasize these things.

The separation is orthogonal to the data access style used, and you really have to make sure the engineers you're working with understand separation of concerns. I have seen many applications with controllers filled with loads of raw SQL, just as I have seen them filled with lots of ORM query building. If the programmers don't get why that's bad, they will do the wrong thing with whatever tools they have in front of them.

    result = []
    for frob in Frob.get_all(where=something) {
        if frob.foo = expected {
            result = {
                frob: frob,
                quux: Quux.get_all(where=some-query-using-frob)
            }
            results.append(result)

The only reason there's a separation of concerns here is because some of this is done in the database and some in the application. Logically, its still part of the same calculation.

But the ORM hides this distinction and makes both the part that runs in the database and the part that runs locally look the exact same and super easy to intermingle. Worse still if you access properties on your ORM-result-object which actually trigger further queries to get. It looks like a field access, but is actually a database query. I've seen this cripple performance.

In many cases, if you step back and don't think about it in terms of application code, but rather the data access and transformations that you want to achieve, then it can be rewritten as a query (joining related data in as needed etc). At the very least, it makes you aware of what the boundaries are.

I'm not saying that scrapping the ORM will magically make the problems go away and I know people also write terribly intermingled application and database logic when using SQL, but at least the boundary is more explicit and the different sides of the boundary actually look different instead of just looking like application code.

My point isn't that there's a silver bullet, but that we can nudge and encourage people to write better code by how the languages/libraries/tools structure solutions.

I'm also not necessarily saying that we have to use SQL instead of an ORM, that's just one possible suggestion that I personally find works due to the mental separation. I'm sure you can design ORM's that make the boundaries more explicit, or design frameworks that encourage thinking about application boundaries more explicitly. Same as how I'm not actually suggesting to get rid of OOP, just... if most people's OOP is so-called "Bad OOP", then we need to think about how to improve OOP, because changing "most people" is just not going to happen.

For me, ORMs become a problem when they're an excuse to avoid learning SQL. If you understand SQL, you will probably understand why the example you give is a bad idea. If you don't, you won't. I'm speaking from the point of view of having written, at this point, thousands of lines of SQL at minimum, and having decided that it's not how I primarily want to access data in the applications I write. The ORM queries I write are written with rough knowledge of the SQL they generate, and I try to be very careful with query builders to avoid the exact case you bring up.

I think LINQ in C# does a pretty good job of bridging this gap, actually. It could be better, but it discourages looping and encourages the declarative style that efficient SQL requires.

If you give a novice developer an OOP assignment, they’re likely to struggle with the learning curve, and likely to ultimately create something that has a lot of unnecessary complexity. If you give a novice developer MEAN assignment, they’ll create something that “works” a lot easier. But it’ll likely be full of bugs created by not understanding the underlying problems that the framework is simply not forcing you to address.

Which is what I think these “simple” frameworks do. Allow you to create working features without necessarily considering things like consistency and time complexity. I also think it’s why things like Mongo have been slowly adding more ACID consistency, and schema design features. Because people are coming to realize that those are problems that simply can’t go unaddressed. And why ORMs and things like GraphQL have become so popular, which to me look remarkably similar to the structured approach of OOP design patterns.

I think that’s just a problem of dogmatism, which doesn’t necessarily go away with experience.

He was recently asked to fix a rather simple bug in a C# project, a language he doesn’t use very often, but he was certain this would be an easy task for him. The project used a small amount of unmanaged resources, and he just couldn’t figure out how the ‘using’ keyword worked. He spent a few days trying to get to the bottom of ‘using’ before demanding to be sent on a C# course, which everybody thought was a great idea because it would keep him busy for a while. Maybe he’ll have “21 years of experience” by the time he gets around to fixing this bug.

Learning is difficult; maybe because it starts with admission of ignorance.

Most of my work, these days, is a ghastly chimera of techniques, from 30 years ago, grafted onto patterns from 30 minutes ago. Real Victor Frankenstein stuff.

It seems to work, though.

But not insurmountable. In my own experience, all it takes is a small amount of consistent effort each day. I've learned a few programming languages that I use regularly like this, I learned sleight of hand card magic like this and most recently, I've learned to play guitar like this. This year, I hope to learn Spanish like this too. Many people don't want to put consistent regular effort in and are looking for shortcuts. That doesn't work.

> a ghastly chimera of techniques

Well, yeah, the right tool for the job, right? But it does work, so...

The skill of experiencing trumps the amount of experience.

Bad programmers need to hone their skill to experience in order to become good programmers. The most popular way is to provide them a safe environment to make mistake and learn from it. But the most important way is actually knowing that skill of experiencing and getting out of biases are important, like in this case "if OOP is indeed bad, why is it invented in the first place", and the rabbit hole actually gets interesting from here.

At least that's my take after a few years in the industry.

I mean, sure, you can just say most developers aren't very good, aren't disciplined enough, don't think things through. Maybe its true. But that doesn't solve the problem, it just shifts the blame. You can't fix the people, because its a never-ending problem: move team or company and you're back at square one. Good luck trying to change all the university courses to try and teach better practices.

So if you can't fix the people, the only thing left is to take a long hard look at the tools and see if we can't improve them in a way that encourages better code.

Except rails ActiveRecord there is probably no one.

Even though AR also has some issues.

Also it's maybe notably by a (former?) maintainer of ActiveRecord, though, I haven't really used RoR but I think the design is probably quite different - Diesel is very much just the SQL with a veneer of Rust, almost FFI wrapper like.

Why should I have to remember to use '.values' instead of 'GROUP BY'; '.filter'/'.except' instead of 'SELECT'? It's not helpful. I frequently have a clearer idea of the SQL I want (I'm certainly no DB expert) and have to make it at least twice as long, install a plugin, or in some cases just can't mangle it into Django. For what?

If you want to do something more OLAP-ish or insert data in bulk, you have a huge problem. SQLAlchemy is far better, even though SQLAlchemy also has its own share of limitations (dealing with jsonb_to_recordset and functions like it for example).

https://twitter.com/arundsharma/status/1338596939600781313

This is a problem, because there is a real boundary, typically including a network round trip. I've been on way too many projects where ORM-using code would pull some stuff from the database, do some application logic to filter or process the results, then loop and do another query for each result. Instead of doing it in the database query itself using joins (and possibly being able to use indexes for the filtering).

Even when people are very disciplined about this, I find that once you get to non-trivial queries, they become a lot harder to read in ORM code. I tend to have to think in terms of SQL, then translate between that and the ORM code on the fly. Its not so easy.

Sure, you could say all the teams I've ever worked on that did stuff like this are just bad at using ORM's, but after a few experiences like this on different teams, in different companies, with different developers, its time to stop blaming the people and maybe take another look at the tools.

There is just no good ORMs out there.

Except ActiveRecord (and maybe mongoose for mongo). And even these 2 are not the best choice for all use cases.

He has a lot of info on high performance Hibernate and particularly the n + 1 issue.

It should be mostly avoidable.

For anyone else interested, here’s one post he has on the problem: https://vladmihalcea.com/n-plus-1-query-problem/

I haven't been there for a while but I'm fairly sure there should be a few more.

Some would say this makes them a bad abstraction, but to me, data mapping is going to have to happen somewhere, and I would rather be building on someone else's work to write the data mapping for my applications than do it from scratch. You have to know when the ORM is the right tool to use, and when to drop into plain SQL for your querying, because they do not eliminate the need to write SQL, just reduce it significantly.

Only if that's more true than “bad <foo> is what most developers write in paradigm <foo>” where <foo> is the presented alternative paradigm, otherwise we’re comparing the platonic ideal of <foo> against real world OO.

Sturgeon’s Law may not be quantitatively precise, but it addresses a real qualitative issue that must be considered.