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: Important Between-Cause Considerations: things every EA should know about, published by jackmalde on the AI Alignment For Overview Choosing a preferred cause area is arguably one of the most important decisions an EA will make. Not only are there plausibly astronomical differences in value between non-EA and EA cause areas, but this is also the case between different EA cause areas. It therefore seems important to make it easy for EAs to make a fully-informed decision on preferred cause area. In this post I claim that, to make the best choice on preferred cause area, EAs should have at least a high-level understanding of various ‘Important Between-Cause Considerations’ (IBCs). An IBC is an idea that a significant proportion of the EA community takes seriously, and that is important to understand (at least at a high-level) in order to aid in the act of prioritising between the potentially highest value cause areas, which I classify as: extinction risk, non-extinction risk longtermist, near-term animal-focused, near-term human-focused, global priorities research and movement building. I provide illustrations of the concept of an IBC, as well as a list of potential IBCs. Furthermore, I think that the EA community needs to do more to ensure that EAs can easily become acquainted with IBCs, by producing a greater quantity of educational content that could appeal to a wider range of people. This could include short(ish) videos, online courses, or simplified write-ups. An EA movement where most EAs have at least a high-level understanding of all known IBCs should be a movement where people are more aligned to the highest value cause areas (whatever these might be), and ultimately a movement that does more good. Note: I am fairly confident in the claim that it would be good for the EA community to do more to enable EAs to better understand important ideas, and that a greater variety of educational content would help with this. Any of my stronger claims are more speculative, but I hold to be true until convinced otherwise. Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Michael Aird for some helpful comments on a first draft of this post. Illustrations of the idea Here are two fictional stories: Arjun is a university student studying Economics and wants to improve health in the low-income world. He has been convinced by Peter Singer’s shallow pond thought experiment and is struck by how one can drastically improve the lives of those in different parts of the world at little personal cost. On the other hand, he has never been convinced of the importance of longtermist cause areas. In short, Arjun holds a person-affecting view of population ethics which makes him relatively unconcerned about the prospect of human extinction. One day, Arjun comes across a blog post on the EA Forum which summarises the core arguments of a paper called “The Case for Strong Longtermism” by Greaves and MacAskill. He’s heard of the paper but, not being an academic, has never quite felt up for reading it. A blog post however seems far more accessible to him. On reading the post, Arjun is struck by the claim that longtermism is broader than just reducing extinction risk. He is surprised to learn that there may be tractable ways to improve average future well-being, conditional on humanity not going prematurely extinct, for example by improving institutions. Whilst Arjun doesn’t feel the need to ensure people exist in the future, he thinks it an admirable goal to improve the wellbeing of those who will live anyway. Over the next month, Arjun reads everything on longtermism he can get his hands on and, whilst this doesn’t convince him of the validity of longtermism, it convinces him that it is at least plausible. Ultimately, because the stakes seem so high, Arjun decides to switch from working on global health to researc...