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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: I want more columns like Future Perfect, but for science publications, published by James Lin on March 8, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. 1. Introduction Positive public opinion is an important asset for convincing really smart people to work on the most important—yet still socially unsexy—problems, such as AI safety. I’m going to lay out the case for establishing EA-adjacent columns in reputable science/tech publications (e.g. MIT Tech Review, Scientific American, etc), and how—given the precedence of similar ventures and a fair number of EA science writers—there’s a strong possibility this idea becomes reality. A note: I have a publication—X—in mind which I won't name in this post, but feel free to reach out if you're interested! 2. Problem Observations are based on personal experience from retreats and community building for Harvard/MIT. An outsized proportion of the progress made in the field of AI safety comes from a minority of brilliant EAs (e.g. Paul Christiano) working on hard problems, rather than simply increasing member counts and recruiting capable but otherwise unexceptional students, even when they’re from a fancy school. Additionally, it’s often hard to convince highly-talented CS students to work on AI safety when there are other competing career paths that are considerably more appealing, such as finance, Big Tech, and transformative startups. The general sentiment seems to be: “Wow, seems important. Hopefully someone else solves this.” There are 2 main reasons: It's hard to know where to start; the problem feels like a black box. For all of its importance and neglectedness, working on minimizing AI risk is not yet an appealing problem to work on. Headlines frequently evangelize the amazing work responsible for computer vision advancing beyond human capabilities, and deep learning systems beating the world’s best at Go, but we rarely hear about AI safety triumphs, even when there are breakthroughs. Considering the technical rigor required and also the significant impact it has on the future going well, we need to hear more about these successes. This is the problem I’ll attempt to address. 3. Solution One possible solution is reaching out to students in groups with a high density of technical prowess (e.g. IMO camps). Others have suggested similar ideas, so this proposal will focus on a different form of outreach. There should be a shift in the public discourse towards focusing more on AI safety and existential risk in general. I claim that working with a reputable publication organization and having libraries of articles to direct excited students towards will gradually make it easier to recruit von Neumanns. Some great examples of outreach in this category include The Precipice and the Future Perfect column at Vox, spearheaded by folks like Kelsey Piper, Ezra Klein, and Dylan Matthews. Back in 2019, Kelsey suggested that more initiatives like FP at other organizations could do quite a lot of good, and I’m not aware of any explicit expansions into this space. I would love to hear about some other EA-adjacent columns like this that currently exist, and I’m excited about generating more initiatives like these! Specifically, I want to launch an X-Risk or EA-adjacent column, similar to Future Perfect, for large science/tech publications like X. I think this would be quite impactful and tractable. 3.1 What Impact will this have? Working with existing organizations come with major perks. Readership stats for X hover around 5 million unique monthly readers and 500k estimated print subscriptions. Those are big numbers! Each month, there are around 20 articles, which translates into an average of 250,000 views per article. Some pieces will have millions and others in the low deci-thousands; but overall, pretty good. Having articles on AI Safety (and o...