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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: Fanatical EAs should support very weird projects, published by Derek Shiller on June 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary: EAs who accept fanaticism (the idea that we should pursue long shots with enough expected value) should favor some pretty weird projects. E.g. trying to create quantum branches, converting sinners to the one true religion, or researching other out-there cause areas. This is unreasonable, if not irrational. We should be somewhat wary of expected value calculations for supporting such weird projects. Fanaticism Fanaticism is the idea that we should base our decisions on all of the possible outcomes of our actions no matter how unlikely they are.[1] Even extremely unlikely outcomes may sway what we should do if they are sufficiently good or bad. Traditional decision theories tell us to maximize expected utility in some form or other. This is fanatical, for it may be that the actions that maximize expected utility produce inordinate amounts of value at extremely low probabilities.[2] There are other ways to be fanatical, but I'll assume here that EA fanatics take a roughly maximize expected utility approach.[3] Fanaticism isn't a weird idea. It's a sensible and straightforward way of building a decision theory. But it has weird implications in practice. The weirdness of what fanaticism suggests that EAs should do should make us suspicious of it. Potential Fanatical EA Projects 1.) Quantum Branching[4] Some simple versions of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics say that the universe regularly branches during quantum events, producing multiple universes that differ from each other in the behavior of the state of some particles. If the universe branches in this way, the value of all subsequent events might multiply.[5] There could be twice as much joy and twice as much suffering every time the universe branches in two.[6] We have the power to produce these quantum events. We can chain them one after another, potentially doubling, then redoubling, then again redoubling all the value and disvalue in the world. These quantum events happen all the time as well without our deliberate choice, but our decisions would make a difference to how many branchings occur. This gives us the power to pretty trivially exponentially increase the total amount of value (for better or worse) in the world by astronomical numbers. The interpretations of quantum mechanics that allow for branchings like this are almost surely wrong. Almost. There is a small sliver of chance that this is the right way to think about quantum phenomena. Quantum phenomena are weird. We should be humble. The interpretations are logically coherent. They deserve, I think, at least a one in a quintillion[7] probability of being right (and possibly a lot higher). A small sliver of probability in a simple Many Worlds interpretation is enough to make the expected value of spending our time and money producing[8] quantum events that might trigger branchings very high. It doesn't much matter how low of a probability you assign. (If you like, add a couple hundred 0s in back of that quintillion, and the expected value of attempting to produce branches will still be enormous.) Doubling the value of our world a thousand times successively would effectively multiply the amount of value by a factor of 21000. If this interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, then there must already be a number of branches being continuously created. There must be a ton of value in all of the lives in all those branches. Additional divisions would effectively multiply the number of branches created in the future. Multiplying the amount of value by a factor of 21000 would mean we multiply a tremendous amount of value by a huge factor. This suggests an expected utility inconceivably greater than any cur...