welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio. this is: Shallow evaluations of longtermist organizations, published by NunoSempere on the effective altruism forum. Introduction This document reviews a number of organizations in the longtermist ecosystem, and poses and answers a number of questions which would have to be answered to arrive at a numerical estimate of their impact. My aim was to see how useful a "quantified evaluation" format in the longtermist domain would be. In the end, I did not arrive at GiveWell-style numerical estimates of the impact of each organization, which could be used to compare and rank them. To do this, one would have to resolve and quantify the remaining uncertainties for each organization, and then convert each organization's impact to a common unit [1, 2]. In the absence of fully quantified evaluations, messier kinds of reasoning have to be used and are being used to prioritize among those organizations, and among other opportunities in the longtermist space. But the hope is that reasoning and reflection built on top of quantified predictions might prove more reliable than reasoning and reflection alone. In practice, the evaluations below are at a fairly early stage, and I would caution against taking them too seriously and using them in real-world decisions as they are. By my own estimation, of two similar past posts, 2018-2019 Long Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do? had 2 significant mistakes, as well as half a dozen minor mistakes, out of 24 grants, whereas Relative Impact of the First 10 EA Forum Prize Winners had significant errors in at least 3 of the 10 posts it evaluated. To make the scope of this post more manageable, I mostly did not evaluate organizations included in Lark's yearly AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison posts, nor meta-organizations [3]. Evaluated organizations Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters Epistemic status for this section: Fairly sure about the points related to ALLFED's model of its own impact. Unsure about the points related to the quality of ALLFED's work, given that I'm relying on impressions from others. Questions With respect to the principled case for an organization to be working on the area: What is the probability of a (non-AI) catastrophe which makes ALLFED's work relevant (i.e., which kills 10% or more of humanity, but not all of humanity) over the next 50 to 100 years? How much does the value of the future diminish in such a catastrophe? How does this compare to work in other areas? With respect to the execution details: Is ALLFED making progress in its "feeding everyone no matter what" agenda? Is that progress on the lobbying front, or on the research front? Is ALLFED producing high-quality research? On a Likert scale of 1-5, how strong are their papers and public writing? Is ALLFED cost-effective? Given that ALLFED has a large team, is it a positive influence on its team members? How would we expect employees and volunteers to rate their experience with the organization? Tentative answers Execution details about ALLFED in particular Starting from a quick review as a non-expert, I was inclined to defer to ALLFED's own expertise in this area, i.e., to trust their own evaluation that their own work was of high value, at least compared to other possible directions which could be pursued within their cause area. Per their ALLFED 2020 Highlights, they are researching ways to quickly scale alternative food production, at the lowest cost, in the case of large catastrophes, i.e., foods which could be produced for several years if there was a nuclear war which blotted out the sun. However, when talking with colleagues and collaborators, some had the impression that ALLFED was not particularly competent, nor its work high quality. I would thus be curious to see an assessment by independent experts about how valuable their w...