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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: Big EA and Its Infinite Money Printer, published by Arjun Panickssery on April 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I started the student group at the University of Illinois this semester and after talking to about a dozen student group organizers at the Boston and London conferences I was encouraged by a few people to post about what our group is like. This is probably the first of three posts and I'll follow it with a post about the way I've used/adapted the intro materials and a post about ideology/evangelism/AI safety/longtermism stuff. TLDR: Our new student group's relationship to EA is closely related to the funding situation of the CEA/OpenPhil/FTX Fund/etc constellation, which we've dubbed "Big EA." One of my primary activities is assuring people that it's not suspect that Big EA provides us so much money. There's a dynamic where the typical club member is sympathetic to EA but would not do direct work except for the money, and might even see this behavior as a kind of "grifting" even though I and Big EA wouldn't. But I think this is fine and that concerns about EA spending described in recent posts are overrated. The Prometheus Science Bowl I'm involved in the national high school/college quiz bowl circuit. In January, a friend who worked with me on a business where we ran online quiz bowl tournament after the COVID lockdowns heard about an online science bowl tournament run by Devansh with no entry fee and $28,000 in prizes. Quiz bowl tournaments don't typically offer cash prizes and science bowl (which I'm not well acquainted with) only offers prizes like this for the national championships. Having run many online quiz bowl tournaments I scheduled a call to give some advice about preventing cheating and give some leads on finding volunteer readers or teams, only to discover that the readers wouldn't be volunteering but would instead make $25/hr (quiz bowl tournaments usually give a stipend for lunch at most). I told Devansh that he could double the field size goal with this kind of money and remember replying to one question with "normally yes, but you have an infinite money printer." The staff payment was probably perceived as decadent spending by the UIUC guys because the tournament could have reached its staff goals with half the wage, and the OpenPhil investment as liberal because the tournament director was a high school student. The way it was explained to me is that OpenPhil values a switch to an AI safety research career as +$20M in expected value, so a $100k science bowl tournament only has to have a 0.5% chance of convincing at least one of the ~800 participants to make a career change in order to be net positive. By this logic Devansh clearly exceeded reasonable metrics and the tournament ran very well. It was just a novelty for our first interaction with EA to be this hilarious leviathan with more money than God. EAGx Boston The contract work for the tournament brought EA back to the front of my mind. A friend and I had considered starting an EA group here in fall 2020 and I even contacted CEA/some nearby student groups but we were ultimately occupied with other things. I learned that CEA funds student groups for things like food, books, posters, and T-shirts. I had trouble seeing the value proposition of books and posters so I just asked for money to buy food at our weekly meetings. The enthusiasm level for the club was low enough that the meetings wouldn't be attended at all without free food or if I moved the meeting to a building on the other side of campus. A typical view was "This EA stuff is good (except AI safety) and someone should be doing it, but not me, I have my career at Amazon/Nvidia/academia to attend to." Then I brought 7 members of the group to the Boston conference and their view of EA might have actually gone down sligh...