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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: Three Reflections from 101 EA Global Conversations, published by Akash on April 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I recently attended EAGxOxford, EAGxBoston, and EAG London. In total, I had about 101 one-on-one conversations (+-10; depends on how you count casual/informal 1-1s). The vast majority of these were with people interested in longtermist community-building or AI safety. Here are three of my biggest takeaways: 1) There are many people doing interesting work who aren’t well-connected I recently moved to Berkeley, one of the major EA hubs for AI safety research and longtermist movement-building. I live with several people who are skilling up in alignment research, and I work out of an office with people who regularly talk about the probability of doom, timelines, takeoff speeds, MIRI’s agenda, Paul and Eliezer dialogues, ELK, agent foundations, interpretability, and, well, you get it. At the EAGs, I was excited to meet many people (>30) interested in AI safety and longtermist community-building. Several (>10) of them were already dedicating a large portion of their time to AI safety or longtermist community-building (e.g., by spending a summer on AI safety research, leading a local EA chapter, or contracting for EA orgs.) One thing stood out to me, though: Many of the people I spoke to, including those who were already investing >100 hours into EA work, weren’t aware of the people/models/work in Berkeley and other EA hubs. Here’s a hypothetical example: Alice: I’ve spent the last several semesters skilling up in AI safety research. I took several ML classes, and I’m going to be spending the summer working under [professor] at [my university] on [ML project that doesn’t really have to do with AI safety]. Me: Wow, that’s great! Have you considered working on the Eliciting Latent Knowledge challenge, or reading Evan Hubinger’s Risks from Learned Optimization sequence, or trying to distill alignment articles? Alice: Oh, no! I haven’t heard of most of these things. do you think it would be useful for me to do that instead? Me: Well, I’m not sure what you should do. But I would encourage you to at least consider these options and at least be familiar with these resources and opportunities. As an example, did you ever considering applying to the Long-Term Future Fund to skill-up on your own, and maybe visit Berkeley and some other EA Hubs? The point here is not that Alice should immediately drop what she’s doing. But I found it interesting how many people didn’t even realize what options they had available. Alice, for example, could apply for a grant to skill-up in AI safety research in an EA Hub. But she often doesn’t even realize this, or even if she does, she doesn’t seriously consider it when she’s thinking about her summer plans. I don’t think people should blindly defer to the people/models in EA hubs. But I do think that exposure to these people/models will generally help people make more informed decisions. Two quick examples: People skilling-up in AI safety researcher would generally benefit from understanding the major criticisms/concerns with current alignment research agendas. It seems useful to at least be exposed to some of the doomy people and understand why they’re so doomy. People skilling-up in longtermist community-building could benefit from understanding the major criticisms/concerns with general community-building efforts. It seems useful to at least be exposed to the arguments around impact being heavy-tailed, mass outreach compromising the epistemics of the community and making it less attractive for people who take ideas seriously, and concerns around community-builders not knowing enough about the issues they are community-building for. One of the easiest ways to do this, I claim, is to talk directly to people doing this kind of work...