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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 intuitions about EA: responsibility, scale, self-improvement, published by richard ngo on April 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a post about three intuitions for how to think about the effective altruism community. Part 1: responsibility The first intuition is that, in a global sense, there are no “adults in the room”. Before covid I harboured a hope that, despite the incessant political squabbling we see worldwide, in the face of a major crisis with global implications, there were serious people who would come out of the woodwork to ensure that it went well. There weren’t. And that’s not just a national phenomenon, that’s a global phenomenon. Even countries like New Zealand, which handled covid incredibly well, weren’t taking responsibility in the global way I’m thinking about - they looked after their own citizens, but didn’t try to speed up vaccine distribution overall (e.g. by allowing human challenge trials), or fix everyone else’s misunderstandings. Others developed the same “no adults in the room” intuition by observing failures on different issues. For some, AI risk; for others, climate change; for others, policies like immigration or housing reform. I don’t think covid is a bigger failure than any of these, but I think it comes much closer to creating common knowledge that the systems we have in place aren’t capable of steering through global crises. This naturally points us towards a long-term goal for the EA community: to become the adults in the room, the people who are responsible enough and capable enough to steer humanity towards good outcomes. By this I mean something different from just “being in charge” or “having a lot of power”. There are many large power structures, containing many competent people, which try to keep the world on track in a range of ways. What those power structures don’t have is the ability to absorb novel ideas and take novel actions in response. In other words, the wider world solves large problems via OODA loops that take decades. In the case of climate change, decades of advocacy led to public awareness which led to large-scale policies, plus significant reallocation of talent. I think this will be enough to avoid catastrophic outcomes, but that’s more from luck than skill. In the case of covid, the OODA loop on substantially changing vaccine regulations was far too long to make a difference (although maybe it’ll make a difference to the next pandemic). The rest of the world has long OODA loops because people on the inside of power structures don’t have strong incentives to fix problems; and because people on the outside can’t mobilise people, ideas and money quickly. But EA can. I don’t think there’s any other group in the world which can allocate as much talent as quickly as EA has; I don’t think there’s any other group which can identify and propagate important new ideas as quickly as EA can; and there are few groups which can mobilise as much money as flexibly. Having said all that, I don’t think we’re currently the adults in the room, or else we would have made much more of a difference during covid. While it’s not itself a central EA concern, it’s closely related to one of our central concerns, and would have been worth addressing for reputational reasons alone. But I do think we were closer to being the adults in the room than almost any other group - particularly in terms of long-term warnings about pandemics, short-term warnings about covid in particular, and converging quickly towards accurate beliefs. We should reflect on what would have been needed for us to convert those advantages into much more concrete impact. I want to emphasise, though, that being the adults in the room doesn’t require each individual to take on a feeling of responsibility towards the world. Perhaps a better way to t...