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: Some EA Forum Posts I'd like to write, published by Linch on the AI Alignment Forum. I decided to write a list of posts I’d like to write, on the hypothesis that perhaps I can crowdsource interest or pre-emptively get people’s takes on goodness to a) prioritize my writings better and b) to develop better intuitions for which systems/processes can preemptively determine what research/writings are valuable. Note that I’m currently quite unlikely to write >2 of these posts unless I get substantive feedback otherwise. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, names/links/quotes of other people are referenced for partial attribution. They should not be construed as endorsements by those people, and on base rates it should be reasonable to assume that in this post I misrepresented someone at least once. This post is written in my own capacity, and does not represent the position or output of my employer (RP) or past employers. After the Apocalypse: Why Personal Survival in GCR Scenarios Should Be Unusually High Priority For Altruists/Consequentialists I think if your ensemble of beliefs include substantial credence in both urgent and patient longtermism, this should lead to a fairly high credence in the importance of the survival and proliferation of certain key ideas One way to ensure the survival of those ideas is through the survival of individuals with those ideas This is especially relevant if you have high credence in the probability of large-scale non-existential GCRs, particularly ones with a population fatality rate of closer to 99.99% than 50%. An alternative way to frame this is to consider the analogy to the Hinge of History hypothesis. All else equal, individuals are more likely to live at the hinge of history if there’s 6.5 million other humans than 6.5 billion. Shelters MVP: A Concrete Proposal to Robustly Mitigate Global Catastrophes I haven’t yet seen shelter designs with all the desiderata that I’d like to see. I’ve seen preliminary discussions that analyzed shelter intervention viability/cost-effectiveness in the abstract, but not stuff that looked at a specific well-defined target to aim for (or decide it’s not worth doing). I think that while reducing GC risks is of utmost importance, for longtermist goals, a potentially important part of the web-of-protection/defense-in-depth story should involve substantial work on catastrophe mitigations. I claim for a number of GCRs (with the notable exception of AI or other agent-heavy risks), certain shelter designs should robustly reduce the overall harm. I suspect (without yet having done the numbers) that this may not end up being worthwhile to implement at the current margin, however it is still worthwhile to have a blueprint ready as a robust baseline for GCR mitigation, so we have a direct comparison class/bar for what marginal Open Phil/EA longtermist dollars necessarily must beat. (I’m currently more excited about this as a baseline for “last longtermist dollar,” akin to GiveDirectly for global poverty, than the clean energy funding that others in EA propose). Moral Circle Expansion: Is it Highly Overrated? Many EAs (myself somewhat included) believe in some form of moral circle expansion as something that a) descriptively happened/is happening, b) is worthwhile to have, and c) is plausibly worth EA effort to ensure happening. I think I (used to?) believe in some version of this, at the risk of simplifying too much: The story of moral progress is in large part a story of the expansion of who we choose to care about. From only individuals to family members, trible, nation, race, etc, and expanding outwards to people of other races, locations, sexualities, and mental architectures. Future moral progress may come from us caring about more entities worthy of moral consideration (“moral circle expansion”). However, ...