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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: Want To Be An Expert? Build Deep Models, published by lynettebye on December 4, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This piece is crossposted on my blog . Good news! This post is shorter than it looks. There’s a bunch of supplemental info in endnotes if you want the extended edition director’s cut. But it’s much shorter if you skip those. Summary: For impact, we need people who can really understand problems and then act on their understanding. Building deep models of a field is necessary for understanding problems and therefore developing expertise. I claim that researchers or strategists who want to have the most impact should spend a significant amount of time building these deep models early on in order to develop expertise as soon as possible. This could be 50%+ of your time for the first year or two, and then 10% or so on an ongoing basis. Intro It is really easy to fail to have an impact because you didn’t know something. Someone once told me this story of how their work would make an impact (their theory of change): “A lot of people are suffering from mental health problems. Most of them don't access any support despite interventions existing that can help. If we can make online interventions more accessible, maybe we can help a lot of people.” This plan will probably fail to make an impact. This answer is far too shallow. What online intervention do they intend to make, and why do they think it will work? I got 251 results when I typed “mental health app” into Google Play. What bottleneck is stopping these 251 other apps from solving the problem? Are they not evidence-based? Maybe people don’t know the apps exist? Maybe online apps just don’t work? A crude theory of change is a good starting point for investigating the problem more. But if this is their final theory of change, then they will fail. When I imagine someone who I expect to actually succeed at building an organization to improve mental health, I visualize an expert who can answer all of the questions above right away, with convincing arguments supported by facts that they know off the top of their heads. They might not have a direct answer to every question, but whenever they don’t have a direct answer they’ll have a good explanation of why that question is not particularly important. In short, these experts have an unusually complex mental map of the problem. I call these mental maps ‘deep models’. A theory of change is a plan for how to fix a problem. A model is a map of the problem. Without that map, it’s much more difficult to make a good plan. You need to understand the landscape extremely well to do impactful research or start a great charity or, heck, succeed at basically anything where there’s no one to tell you what to do. Importantly, you don’t need to start out with a deep model. Impactful people usually started with their best guess at a theory of change, learned a bit more to deepen their model, checked if they needed to update their theory of change, and so forth. The important thing is to 1) keep learning and 2) keep checking if this is still the important thing. Michael Plant’s cause profile is an example of a deep model for mental health. It’s a 7,000+ word explanation that includes detailed evidence, numbers to compare to other interventions, and crucial considerations that might change the conclusion. I suspect you need a model as detailed as this before you’re likely to reach correct substantive conclusions about the action-relevant questions. Most people with models that detailed I’d call “experts” - experts loosely defined here as the top people in the world in their niche. The world desperately needs more expert-level people working with good theories of change on important problems. I’m surrounded by good-intentioned effective altruists. Few of those people have the know...