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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: EffectiveAltruismData.com is now a spreadsheet, published by Hamish Doodles on July 23, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.A few years ago I built EffectiveAltruismData.com which looked like this:A few people told me they liked the web app. Some even said they found it useful, especially the bits that made the funding landscape more legible.But anyway, I never got around to automating the data scraping, and the website ended up hopelessly out of date.So I killed it.But it recently occurred to me that I could do the data scraping, data aggregation, and data visualisation, all within Google Sheets.So with a bit of help from Chatty G, I put together a spreadsheet which:Downloads the latest grant data from the Open Philanthropy website every 24 hours (via Google Apps Scripts).Aggregate funding by cause areaAggregate funding by organization.Visualise all grant data in a pivot table that lets you expand/aggregate by Cause Area, then Organization Name, then individual grantsBut note that expanding/collapsing counts as editing the spreadsheet, so you'll have to make a copy to be able to do this.You can also change the scale of the bar chart using the dropdownAnd you can sort grants by size or by date using the "Sort Sheet Z to A" option on the Amount or Date columns.Here's a link to the spreadsheet. You can also find it at www.effectivealtruismdata.com.Other funding legibility projectsHere's another thing I made. It gives time series and cumulative bar charts for funding based on funder and cause area. You can hover over points on the time series to get the total funding per cause/org per year.The data comes from this spreadsheet by TylerMaule.Another thing which may be of interest is openbook.fyi by Rachel Weinberg & Austin Chen, which let's you search/view individual grants from a range of EA-flavoured sources.Openbook gets its data from donations.vipulnaik.com/ by Vipul Naik.I'm currently working on another spreadsheet which scrapes, aggregates, and visualises all the Vipul Naiks's data.Feedback & RequestsI enjoy working on spreadsheets and data viz and stuff. Let me know if you can think of any other stuff in this area which would be useful.This is a joke.This is also a joke.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
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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: Thoughts on yesterday's UN Security Council meeting on AI, published by Greg Colbourn on July 22, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Firstly, it's encouraging that AI is being discussed as a threat at the highest global body dedicated to ensuring global peace and security. This seemed like a remote possibility just 4 months ago.However, throughout the meeting, (possibly near term) extinction risk from uncontrollable superintelligent AI was the elephant in the room. ~1% air time, when it needs to be ~99%, given the venue and its power to stop it. Let's hope future meetings improve on this. Ultimately we need the UNSC to put together a global non-proliferation treaty on AGI, if we are to stand a reasonable chance of making it out of this decade alive.There was plenty of mention of using AI for peacekeeping. However, this seems naive in light of the offence-defence asymmetry facilitated by generative AI (especially when it comes to threats like bio-terror/engineered pandemics, and cybercrime/warfare). And in the limit of outsourcing intelligence gathering and strategy recommendations to AI (whist still keeping a human in the loop), you get scenarios like this.Highlights:China mentioned Pause: "The international community needs to. ensure that risks beyond human control don't occur. We need to strengthen the detection and evaluation of the entire lifecycle of AI, ensuring that mankind has the ability to press the pause button at critical moments". (Zhang Jun, representing China at the UN Security Council meeting on AI))Mozambique mentioned the Sorcerer's Apprentice, human loss of control, recursive self-improvement, accidents, catastrophic and existential risk: "In the event that credible evidence emerges indicating that AI poses and existential risk, it's crucial to negotiate an intergovernmental treaty to govern and monitor its use." (MANUEL GONÇALVES, Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs of Mozambique, at the UN Security Council meeting on AI)(A bunch of us protesting about this outside the UK Foreign Office last week.)(PauseAI's comments on the meeting on Twitter.)(Discussion with Jack Clark on Twitter re his lack of mention of x-risk. Note that the post war atomic settlement - Baruch Plan - would probably have been quite different if the first nuclear detonation was assessed to have a significant chance of igniting the entire atmosphere!)(My Tweet version of this post. I'm Tweeting more as I think it's time for mass public engagement on AGI x-risk.)Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
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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: EA EDA: What do Forum Topics tell us about changes in EA?, published by JWS on July 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.tl;dr2: Data on EA Forum posts and topics doesn't show clear 'waves' of EAtl;dr: I used the Forum API to collect data on the trends of EA Forum topics over time. While this analysis is by no means definitive, it doesn't support the simple narrative that there was a golden age of EA that has abandoned for a much worse one. There has been a rise in AI Safety posts, but that has also been fairly recent (within the last ~2 years)1. IntroductionI really liked Ben West's recent post about 'Third Wave Effective Altruism', especially for its historical reflection on what First and Second Wave EA looked like. This characterisation of EA's history seemed to strike a chord with many Forum users, and has been reflected in recent critical coverage of EA that claims the movement has abandoned its well-intentioned roots (e.g. donations for bed nets) and decided to focus fully on bizarre risks to save a distant, hypothetical future.I've always been a bit sceptical with how common this sort of framing seems to be, especially since the best evidence we have from funding for the overall EA picture shows that most funding is still going to Global Health areas. As something of a (data) scientist myself, I thought I'd turn to one of the primary sources of information for what EAs think to shed some more light on this problem - the Forum itself!This post is a write-up of the initial data collection and analysis that followed. It's not meant to be the definitive word on either how EA, or use of the EA Forum, has changed over time. Instead, I hope it will challenge some assumptions and intuitions, prompt some interesting discussion, and hopefully leads to future posts in a similar direction either from myself or others.2. Methodology(Feel free to skip this section if you're not interested in all the caveats)You may not be aware, the Forum has an API! While I couldn't find clear documentation on how to use it or a fully defined schema, people have used it in the past for interesting projects and some have very kindly shared their results & methods. I found these following three especially useful (the first two have linked GitHubs with their code):The Tree of Tags by Filip SondejEffective Altruism Data from HamishThis LessWrong tutorial from Issa RiceWith these examples to help me, I created my own code to get every post made on the EA Forum to date (without those who have deleted their post).There are various caveats to make about the data representation and data quality. These include:I extracted the data on July 7th - so any totals (e.g. number of posts, post score etc) or other details are only correct as of that date.I could only extract the postedAt date - which isn't always when the post in question was actually posted. A case in point, I'm pretty sure this post wasn't actually posted in 1972. However, it's the best data I could find, so hopefully for the vast majority of posts the display date is the posted date.In looking for a starting point for the data, there was a discontinuity between August to September 2014, but the data was a lot more continuous after then. I analyse the data in terms of monthly totals, so I threw out the one-week of data I had for July. The final dataset is therefore 106 months from September 2014 to June 2023 (inclusive).There are around ~950 distinct tags/topics in my data, which are far too many to plot concisely and share useful information. I've decided to take the top 50 topics in terms of times used, which collectively account for 56% of all Forum tags and 92% of posts in the above time period.I only extracted the first listed Author of a post - however, only 1 graph shared below relies on a user-level aggregat...
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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: Consider Earning Less, published by ElliotJDavies on July 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This post is aimed at those working in jobs which are funded by EA donors who might be interested in voluntarily earning less. This post isn't aimed to influence pay scales at organisations, or at those not interested in earning less. When the Future Fund was founded in 2022, there was a simultaneous upwards pressure on both ambitiousness and net-earnings in the wider EA community. The pressure to be ambitious resulted in EAs really considering the opportunity cost of key decisions. Meanwhile, the discussions around why EAs should consider ordering food or investing in a new laptop pointed towards a common solution: EAs in direct work earning more.The funding situation has significantly shifted from then, as has the supply-demand curve for EA jobs. This should put a deflationary pressure on EAs' salaries, but I'd argue we largely haven't seen this effect, likely because people's salaries are "sticky".One result of this is that there are a lot of impactful projects which are unable to find funding right now, and in a similar vein, there's a lot of productive potential employees who are unable to get hired right now. There's even a significant proportion of employees who will be made redundant.This seems a shame, since there's no good reasons for salaries to be sticky. It seems especially bad if we do in fact see significant redundancies, since under a "veil of ignorance" the optimal behaviour would be to voluntarily lower your salary (assuming you could get your colleagues to do the same). Members of German labour unions quite commonly do something similar (Kurzarbeit) during economic downturns, to avoid layoffs and enable faster growth during an upturnSome Reasons you Might Want to Earn Less:You want to do as much good as possible, and suspect your organisation will do more good if it had more money at hand.Your Organisation is likely to make redundancies, which could include you.You have short timelines, and you suspect that by earning less, more people could work on alignment.You can consider your voluntary pay-cut a donation, which you can report on your GWWC account. (The great thing about pay-cut donations is you essentially get a 100% tax refund, which is particularly nice if you live somewhere with high income tax).Some Reasons you May Not Want to Earn Less:It would cause you financial hardship.You would experience a significant drop in productivity.You suspect it would promote an unhealthy culture in your organisation.You expect you're much better than the next-best candidate, and you'd be less likely to work in a high impact role if you had to earn less.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org
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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: SoGive rates Open-Phil-funded charity NTI “too rich”, published by Sanjay on June 18, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Exec summaryUnder SoGive’s methodology, charities holding more than 1.5 years’ expenditure are typically rated “too rich”, in the absence of a strong reason to judge otherwise. (more)Our level of confidence in the appropriateness of this policy depends on fundamental ethical considerations, and could be “clearly (c.95%) very well justified” or “c.50% to c.90% confident in this policy, depending on the charity” (more)We understand that the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) holds > 4 years of spend (c$85m), as at the most recently published Form 990, well in excess of our warning threshold. (more)We are now around 90% confident that NTI’s reserves are well in excess of our warning threshold, indeed >3x annual spend, although there are some caveats. (more)Our conversation with NTI about this provides little reason to believe that we should deviate from our default rating of “too rich”. (more)It is possible that NTI could show us forecasts of their future income and spend that might make us less likely to be concerned about the value of donations to NTI, although this seems unlikely since they have already indicated that they do not wish to share this. (more)We do not typically recommend that donors donate to NTI. However we do think it’s valuable for donors to communicate that they are interested in supporting their work, but are avoiding donating to NTI because of their high reserves. (more)Although this post is primarily to help donors decide whether to donate to NTI, readers may find it interesting for understanding SoGive's approach to charities which are too rich, and how this interacts with different ethical systems.We thank NTI for agreeing to discuss this with us knowing that there was a good chance that we might publish something on the back of the discussion. We showed them a draft of this post before publishing; they indicated that they disagree with the premise of the piece, but declined to indicate what specifically they disagreed with.0. Intent of this postAlthough this post highlights the fact that NTI has received funding from Open Philanthropy (Open Phil), the aim is not to put Open Philanthropy on the spot or demand any response from them.Rather, we have argued that it is often a good idea for donors to “coattail” (i.e. copy) donations made by Open Phil. For donors doing this, including donors supported by SoGive, we think it’s useful to know which Open Phil grantees we might give lower or higher priority to.1. Background on SoGive’s methodology for assessing reservesThe SoGive ratings scale has a category called “too rich”. It is used for charities which we deem to have a large enough amount of money that it no longer makes sense for donors to provide them with funds. We set this threshold at 18 months of spend (i.e. if the amount of unrestricted reserves is one and a half times as big as its annual spend then we typically deem the charity “too rich”). To be clear, this allows the charity carte blanche to hold as much money as it likes as long as it indicates that it has a non-binding plan for that money.So, having generously ignored the designated reserves, we then notionally apply the (normally severe) stress of all the income disappearing overnight. Our threshold considers the scenario where the charity has so much reserves that it could go for one and a half years without even having to take management actions such as downsizing its activities.In this scenario, we think it is likely better for donors to send their donations elsewhere, and allow the charity to use up its reserves.Originally we considered a different, possibly more lenient policy. We considered that charities should be considered too rich if they...
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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: Driving Education on EA Topics Through Khan Academy, published by Hailey Dickson on August 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. What would you teach students in <1 min to prepare them to change the world?Hello everyone, I'm Hailey and I manage the social content strategy for Khan Academy, one of the world's largest nonprofit EdTech platform providing free Pre-K through college curricula in >50 languages over 140 million users worldwide. You may know us by from our original Youtube channel, but we're now a global organization partnered with school districts across the US, Brazil, and India to try to improve learning outcomes in critical areas. In particular, we are now trying to move the needle on STEM education by accelerating learning in historically-under resourced communities. I'm tasked with launching our social content strategy to drive meaningful learning to as many students as possible. I'm trying to conceptualize a TikTok/Youtube Shorts series with advice, tips, lessons etc that will get young learners excited about EA topics. I would love to curate a list of topics from the EA community that you think would give students the best chance of creating a better future.I think there is a unique opportunity through Khan Academy to drive millions of learners toward the topics that could build a better future, so I'd love to make the most of our social platforms with your insights! If you'd like to connect, feel free to shoot me an email at hailey@khanacademy.org Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Climate Change & Longtermism: new book-length report, published by John G. Halstead on August 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Since 2021, as part of the research for What We Owe the Future, I have been working on a report on climate change from a longtermist perspective. The report aims to provide the most complete treatment of that question yet produced. The executive summary is below and the full report is here, available at the What We Owe the Future supplementary materials webpage. I am grateful to the expert reviewers of the report for their comments. Views and mistakes are my own. Executive Summary In this report, I will evaluate the scale of climate change from a longtermist point of view. Longtermism is the idea that influencing the long-term future, thousands of years into the future and beyond, is a key moral priority of our time. In economics, longtermism is embodied by the idea that we should have a zero rate of ‘pure time preference’: we should not discount the welfare of future people merely because it is in the future. Economists who embrace a zero rate of pure time preference will tend to favour more aggressive climate policy than those who discount future benefits. Climate change is a proof of concept of longtermism. Every time we drive, fly, or flick a light switch, each of us causes CO2 to be released into the atmosphere. This changes the amount of CO2 that is in the atmosphere for a very long time: unless we suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere ourselves, concentrations only fall back to natural levels after hundreds of thousands of years. The chart below shows long-term CO2 concentrations after different amounts of cumulative carbon emissions. Some of the ecological effects of climate change get worse over time. The clearest example of this is sea level rise. On current policy, the most likely sea level rise this century is 75cm. However, over 10,000 years, sea levels will rise by 10 metres. Over the long-term, the world will look very different. From a longtermist point of view, it is especially important to avoid outcomes that could have persistent and significant effects. These include events like human extinction, societal collapse, a permanent negative change in human values, or prolonged economic stagnation. If we go extinct, then that would be the end of the human story, and there would be no future generations at all. If civilisation collapses permanently, then future generations will be left much worse off than they could have been, living lives full of suffering rather than ones of flourishing. The anatomy of climate risk The overall size of climate risk depends on the following factors: Greenhouse gas emissions The climate change we get from different levels of emissions The impacts of different levels of climate change There is uncertainty about all three factors. The main findings of this report are as follows. Emissions are likely to be lower than once thought Due to recent progress on clean technology and climate policy, we look likely to avoid the worst-case emissions scenario, known in the literature as ‘RCP8.5’. The most likely scenario on current policy is now the medium-low emissions pathway known as ‘RCP4.5’. Moreover, climate policy is likely to strengthen in the future. For instance, as I was writing this report, the US Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant piece of climate legislation in American history. Climate change is a great illustration of how society can make progress on a problem if enough people are motivated to solve it. This does not mean that climate change is solved, but there is significant momentum, and we are at least now moving in the right direction. The amount of carbon we could burn in a worst-case scenario is also much lower than once thought. Some of the literature a...
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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: A critical review of GiveWell's 2022 cost-effectiveness model, published by Froolow on August 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Section 1 – Introduction 1.1 Summary This is an entry into the ‘Effective Altruism Red Teaming Contest’ – it looks critically at GiveWell’s current cost-effectiveness model. The goal of the essay is to change GiveWell’s mind about the appropriateness of specific features of their cost-effectiveness model. However, I have tried to avoid writing an exhaustive point-by-point deconstruction of GiveWell’s model and instead tried to shine a light on common ‘blind spots’ that frequently occur in economic modelling and which the EA community has apparently not error-corrected until this point. In that respect a secondary goal of the essay is to be more broadly applicable and change the EA community’s view about what the gold-standard in economic evaluation looks like and help provide a framework for error-correcting future economic models. This contributes to a larger strategic ambition I think EA should have, which is improving modelling capacity to the point where economic models can be used as reliable guides to action. Economic models are the most transparent and flexible framework we have invented for difficult decisions taken under resource constraint (and uncertainty), and in utilitarian frameworks a cost-effectiveness model is an argument in its own right (and debatably the only kind of argument that has real meaning in this framework). Despite this, EA appears much more bearish on the use of economic models than sister disciplines such as Health Economics. My conclusion in this piece is that there scope for a paradigm shift in EA modelling before which will improve decision-making around contentious issues. In general, GiveWell’s model is of very high quality. It has few errors, and almost no errors that substantially change conclusions. I would be delighted if professional modellers I work with had paid such care and attention to a piece of cost-effectiveness analysis. However, it has a number of ‘architectural’ features which could be improved with further effort. For example, the structure of the model is difficult to follow (and likely prone to error) and data sources are used in a way which appears inappropriate at times. A summary of the issues considered in this essay is presented below: In my view, all of these issues except the issue of uncertainty analysis could be trivially fixed (trivial for people as intelligent as the GiveWell staff, anyway!). The issue of uncertainty analysis is much more serious; no attempt is made in the model to systematically investigate uncertainty and this potentially leads to the model being underutilised by GiveWell. This failure to conduct uncertainty analysis is not limited to GiveWell, but is instead low hanging fruit for greatly improving the impact of future cost-effectiveness modelling across the whole of EA. I will write an essay on this topic specifically in the very near-term future. 1.2 Context This essay is an attempt to ‘red team’ the current state of cost-effectiveness modelling in Effective Altruism. I have done this by picking a cost-effectiveness model which I believe to be close to the current state-of-the-art in EA cost-effectiveness modelling – GiveWell’s 2022 cost-effectiveness analysis spreadsheet – and applied the same level of scrutiny I would as if I was peer reviewing an economic model in my own discipline of Health Economics. For various reasons I’ll address below, it was easier for me to give this critique after completely refactoring the original model, and therefore much of what follows is based on my own analysis of GiveWell’s input data. You might find it helpful to have my refactored version of the model open as a companion piece to this essay. If so, it is down...
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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: Critique of MacAskill’s “Is It Good to Make Happy People?”, published by Magnus Vinding on August 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In What We Owe the Future, William MacAskill delves into population ethics in a chapter titled “Is It Good to Make Happy People?” (Chapter 8). As he writes at the outset of the chapter, our views on population ethics matter greatly for our priorities, and hence it is important that we reflect on the key questions of population ethics. Yet it seems to me that the book skips over some of the most fundamental and most action-guiding of these questions. In particular, the book does not broach questions concerning whether any purported goods can outweigh extreme suffering — and, more generally, whether happy lives can outweigh miserable lives — even as these questions are all-important for our priorities. The Asymmetry in population ethics A prominent position that gets a very short treatment in the book is the Asymmetry in population ethics (roughly: bringing a miserable life into the world has negative value while bringing a happy life into the world does not have positive value — except potentially through its instrumental effects and positive roles). The following is, as far as I can tell, the main argument that MacAskill makes against the Asymmetry (p. 172): If we think it’s bad to bring into existence a life of suffering, why should we not think that it’s good to bring into existence a flourishing life? I think any argument for the first claim would also be a good argument for the second. This claim about “any argument” seems unduly strong and general. Specifically, there are many arguments that support the intrinsic badness of bringing a miserable life into existence that do not support any intrinsic goodness of bringing a flourishing life into existence. Indeed, many arguments support the former while positively denying the latter. One such argument is that the presence of suffering is bad and morally worth preventing while the absence of pleasure is not bad and not a problem, and hence not morally worth “fixing” in a symmetric way (provided that no existing beings are deprived of that pleasure). A related class of arguments in favor of an asymmetry in population ethics is based on theories of wellbeing that understand happiness as the absence of cravings, preference frustrations, or other bothersome features. According to such views, states of untroubled contentment are just as good — and perhaps even better than — states of intense pleasure. These views of wellbeing likewise support the badness of creating miserable lives, yet they do not support any supposed goodness of creating happy lives. On these views, intrinsically positive lives do not exist, although relationally positive lives do. Another point that MacAskill raises against the Asymmetry is an example of happy children who already exist, about which he writes (p. 172): if I imagine this happiness continuing into their futures—if I imagine they each live a rewarding life, full of love and accomplishment—and ask myself, “Is the world at least a little better because of their existence, even ignoring their effects on others?” it becomes quite intuitive to me that the answer is yes. However, there is a potential ambiguity in this example. The term “existence” may here be understood to either mean “de novo existence” or “continued existence”, and interpreting it as the latter is made more tempting by the fact that 1) we are talking about already existing beings, and 2) the example mentions their happiness “continuing into their futures”. This is relevant because many proponents of the Asymmetry argue that there is an important distinction between the potential value of continued existence (or the badness of discontinued existence) versus the potential value of bringing ...
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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: The community health team’s work on interpersonal harm in the community, published by Julia Wise on August 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post aims to explain the work the community health team at the Centre for Effective Altruism does about particular kinds of community problems. The team does several kinds of work aimed at supporting the EA community and reducing risks to EA’s ability to have positive impact. We spend most of our time on those other kinds of work, but this post only focuses on work on interpersonal harm. We think this is likely the part of our work people have the most questions and confusion about, so we wanted to share more about it. In short, we try to reduce risk of harm to members of the community while being fair to people who are accused of wrongdoing. That’s a tricky balance, particularly when the need for confidentiality limits our ability to speak to everyone involved, and we sometimes get parts wrong. This post describes both some general principles and a year’s worth of specific examples. I’m not writing this now because anything in particular is going on. My goal here is to provide some transparency about how these things work in general, rather than commenting on any particular current situation. What kind of situation is this post about? It’s about actions people sometimes take that cause harm to others in the community, for example: Someone pushes past another person’s boundaries. This ranges from accidental discomfort, to sexual harassment, to deliberate sexual assault. Needlessly harsh or mean behavior. Erratic behavior that causes disruption or harm for others Deception / dishonesty Internally, we call this “risky actor” work. Concrete examples are below. Responses the community health team might make no action talking with the person about how to improve their behavior restricting them from CEA events Informing other EA groups / projects / organizations about the problem (very rarely) publicly warning others about the problem Often it’s very unclear what the best response would be, and people will disagree about whether we handled something well. Who works on these situations?The community health team is Nicole Ross (manager), Catherine Low, Chana Messinger, Eve McCormick, and me. I’ve done this kind of work at CEA since 2016. Currently Catherine and I are the main people on the team handling these kinds of situations. More background. Other people including group organizers also end up handling such situations. Difficult trade-offs Balances where I think both sides are valuable, and I’m not sure if we’ve got the balance right: Avoid false negatives: take action if there’s reason to think someone is causing problemsAvoid false positives: don’t unfairly harm someone’s reputation / ability to participate in EA Keep the community health team’s scope within what we can realistically handle; don’t take on too muchDon’t stand idly by while people do harm in the communityEncourage the sharing of research and other work, even if the people producing it have done bad stuff personallyDon’t let people use EA to gain social status that they’ll use to do more bad stuffTake the talent bottleneck seriously; don’t hamper hiring / projects too muchTake culture seriously; don’t create a culture where people can predictably get away with bad stuff if they’re also producing impactTry to improve the gender balance / not make it worse; take strong action on behavior that makes women uncomfortable in EA spacesDon’t crack down too much on spontaneity / dating / socializing; don’t make men feel that a slip-up or distorted accusation will ruin their lifeLet people know we take action against bad behavior and we care about thisDon’t create the impression that EA spaces are fully screened and safe - that’s not the caseGive people a second o...
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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: Rhodri Davies on why he's not an EA, published by Sanjay on August 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Rhodri Davies is a smart, reasonable, and well-respected commentator on philanthropy. Many people who follow charity and philanthropy in the UK (outside of EA) are familiar with his blog. He also has a background in maths and philosophy at Oxford (if I remember correctly) so he's exactly the sort of person that EA might attract, so it should be of interest to the EA movement to know why he didn't want to sign up. The critique that I most liked was the one entitled "Is EA just another in a long line of attempts to “rationalise” philanthropy?" I've copied and pasted it below. Rhodri has spent a lot of time thinking about the history of philanthropy, so his perspective is really valuable. Is EA just another in a long line of attempts to “rationalise” philanthropy? The dose of historical perspective at the end of the last section brings me to another one of my issues with EA: a nagging suspicion that it is in fact just another in a very long line of efforts to make philanthropy more “rational” or “effective” throughout history. The C18th and early C19th, for instance, saw efforts to impose upon charity the principles of political economy (the precursor to modern economics which focused on questions of production, trade and distribution of national wealth – as exemplified in the work of writers such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo). Then in the C19th and early C20th the Charity Organisation Society and Scientific Philanthropy movements waged war on the perceived scourge of emotionally driven “indiscriminate giving”. Charity Organization Society, by Henry Tonks 1862-1937. (Made available by the Tate Gallery under a CC 3.0 license http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T11004) This perhaps bothers me more than most people because I spend so much of my time noodling around in the history of philanthropy. It also isn’t a reason to dismiss EA out of hand: the fact that it might have historical precedents doesn’t invalidate it, it just means that we should be more critical in assessing claims of novelty and uniqueness. It also suggests to me that there would be value in providing greater historical context for the movement and its ideas. Doing so may well show that EA is genuinely novel in at least some regards (the idea of total cause agnosticism, for instance, is something that one might struggle to find in previous attempts to apply utilitarian thinking to philanthropy). But the other thing the history of philanthropy tends to show is that everyone thinks at the time that their effort to make giving “better” or “more rational” is inherently and objectively right, and it is often only with the benefit of hindsight that it becomes clear quite how ideologically driven and of their time they actually are. For my money, it is still an open question as to whether future historians will look back on EA in the same way that we look back on the Charity Organisation movement today. The other thing that historical perspective brings is the ability to trace longer-term consequences. And this is particularly important here, because efforts to make charity more “rational” have historically had an unfortunate habit of producing unintended consequences. The “scientific philanthropy” movement of the early 20th century, for instance (which counted many of the biggest donors and foundations of the era among its followers) had its roots in the 19th century charity organisation societies, which were primarily concerned with addressing inefficiency and duplication of charitable effort at a local level, and ensuring that individual giving was sufficiently careful to distinguish between ‘deserving’ and undeserving’ cases (as outlined further in this previous article). Over time, how...
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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: What We Owe The Future is out today, published by William MacAskill on August 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. So, as some of you might have noticed, there’s been a little bit of media attention about effective altruism / longtermism / me recently. This was all in the run up to my new book, What We Owe The Future, which is out today! I think I’ve worked harder on this book than I’ve worked on any other single project in my life. I personally spent something like three and a half times as much work on it as Doing Good Better, and I got enormous help from my team, who contributed more work in total than I did. At different times, that team included (in alphabetical order): Frankie Andersen-Wood, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Stephen Clare, Max Daniel, Eirin Evjen, John Halstead, Laura Pomarius, Luisa Rodriguez, and Aron Vallinder. Many more people helped immensely, such as Joao Fabiano with fact checking and the bibliography, Taylor Jones with graphic design, AJ Jacobs with storytelling, Joe Carlsmith with strategy and style, and Fin Moorhouse and Ketan Ramakrishnan with writing around launch. I also benefited from the in-depth advice of dozens of academic consultants and advisors, and dozens more expert reviewers. I want to give a particular thank-you and shout out to Abie Rohrig, who joined after the book was written, to run the publicity campaign. I’m immensely grateful to everyone who contributed; the book would have been a total turd without them. The book is not perfect — reading the audiobook made vivid to me how many things I’d already like to change — but I’m overall happy with how it turned out. The primary aim is to introduce the idea of longtermism to a broader audience, but I think there are hopefully some things that’ll be of interest to engaged EAs, too: there are deep dives on moral contingency, value lock-in, civilisation collapse and recovery, stagnation, population ethics and the value of the future. It also tries to bring a historical perspective to bear on these issues more often than is usual in the standard discussions. The book is about longtermism (in its “weak” form) — the idea that we should be doing much more to protect the interests of future generations. (Alt: that protecting the interests of future generations should be a key moral priority of our time.). Some of you have worried (very reasonably!) that we should simplify messages to “holy shit, x-risk!”. I respond to that worry here: I think the line of argument is a good one, but I don't see promoting concern for future generations as inconsistent with also talking about how grave the catastrophic risks we face in the next few decades are. In the comments, please AMA - questions don’t just have to be about the book, can be about EA, philosophy, fire raves, or whatever you like! (At worst, I’ll choose to not reply.) Things are pretty busy at the moment, but I’ll carve out a couple of hours next week to respond to as many questions as I can. If you want to buy the book, here’s the link I recommend:. (I’m using different links in different media because bookseller diversity helps with bestseller lists.) If you’d like to help with the launch, please also consider leaving an honest review on Amazon or Good Reads! Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: The Parable of the Boy Who Cried 5% Chance of Wolf, published by Kat Woods on August 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: a parable making a moderately strong claim about statistics Once upon a time, there was a boy who cried "there's a 5% chance there's a wolf!" The villagers came running, saw no wolf, and said "He said there was a wolf and there was not. Thus his probabilities are wrong and he's an alarmist." On the second day, the boy heard some rustling in the bushes and cried "there's a 10% chance there's a wolf!" Some villagers ran out and some did not. There was no wolf. The wolf-skeptics who stayed in bed felt smug. "That boy is always saying there is a wolf, but there isn't." "I didn't say there was a wolf!" cried the boy. "I was estimating the probability at low, but high enough. A false alarm is much less costly than a missed detection when it comes to dying! The expected value is good!" The villagers didn't understand the boy and ignored him. On the third day, the boy heard some sounds he couldn't identify but seemed wolf-y. "There's a 15% chance there's a wolf!" he cried. No villagers came. It was a wolf. They were all eaten. Because the villagers did not think probabilistically. The moral of the story is that we should expect to have a large number of false alarms before a catastrophe hits and that is not strong evidence against impending but improbable catastrophe. Each time somebody put a low but high enough probability on a pandemic being about to start, they weren't wrong when it didn't pan out. H1N1 and SARS and so forth didn't become global pandemics. But they could have. They had a low probability, but high enough to raise alarms. The problem is that people then thought to themselves "Look! People freaked out about those last ones and it was fine, so people are terrible at predictions and alarmist and we shouldn't worry about pandemics" And then COVID-19 happened. This will happen again for other things. People will be raising the alarm about something, and in the media, the nuanced thinking about probabilities will be washed out. You'll hear people saying that X will definitely fuck everything up very soon. And it doesn't. And when the catastrophe doesn't happen, don't over-update. Don't say, "They cried wolf before and nothing happened, thus they are no longer credible." Say "I wonder what probability they or I should put on it? Is that high enough to set up the proper precautions?" When somebody says that nuclear war hasn't happened yet despite all the scares, when somebody reminds you about the AI winter where nothing was happening in it despite all the hype, remember the boy who cried a 5% chance of wolf. Originally posted on my Twitter and personal blog. Reminder that if this reaches 25 upvotes, you can listen to this post on your podcast player using the Nonlinear Library. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Historical EA funding data, published by TylerMaule on August 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary I have consolidated publicly available grants data from EA organizations into a spreadsheet, which I intend to update periodically. Totals pictured below. Observations $2.6Bn in grants on record since 2012, about 63% of which went to Global Health. With the addition of FTX and impressive fundraising by GiveWell, Animal Welfare looks even more neglected in relative terms—effective animal charities will likely receive something like 5% of EA funding in 2022, the smallest figure since 2015 by a wide margin. Notes on the data NB: This is just one observer's tally of public data. Sources are cited in the spreadsheet; I am happy to correct any errors as they are pointed out. GiveWell: GiveWell uses a 'metrics year' starting 1 Feb (all other sources were tabulated by calendar year). GiveWell started breaking out 'funds directed' vs 'funds raised' for metrics year 2021. Previous years refer to 'money moved', which is close but not exactly the same. I have excluded funds directed through GiveWell by Open Phil and EA Funds, as those are already included in this data set. Open Phil Open Phil labels their grants using 25 'focus areas'. My subjective mapping to broader cause area is laid out in the spreadsheet. Note that about 20% of funds granted by Open Phil have gone to 'other' areas such as Criminal Justice Reform; these are omitted from the summary figures but still tabulated elsewhere in the spreadsheet. General 2022 estimates are a bit speculative, but a reasonable guess as to how funding will look with the addition of the Future Fund. The total Global Health figure for 2021 (~$400M) looks surprisingly low considering e.g. that GiveWell just reported over $500M funds directed for 2021 (including Open Phil and EA Funds). I think that this is accounted for by (a) GiveWell's metrics year extending through Jan '22, (Open Phil reported $26M of Global Health grants that month), and (b) the possibility that some of this was 'directed' i.e. 'firm commitment of $X to org Y' by Open Phil in 2021, but paid out or recorded to the grants database months later; still seeking explicit confirmation here. Future work If there is any presently available data that seems worth adding, let me know and I may consider it. I may be interested in a more comprehensive analysis on this topic, e.g. using the full budget of every GiveWell-recommended charity. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has access to this type of data, or if this type of project seems particularly valuable. Thanks to Niel Bowerman for helpful comments Currently the bottleneck to synchronizing data is the GiveWell annual metrics report, which is typically published in the second half of the following year. I may update more often if that is useful. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Announcing the EA Gather Town Event Hall as a global hub for online events, published by Emrik on August 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The EAGT Event Hall (contact) is a virtual space neighbouring the main EA Gather Town (EAGT) for hosting conferences, talks, discussion groups, and more. It looks kinda like a game, but whatever, I think there are strong reasons to prefer this platform over alternatives. More on that later. We're testing the space for the first time with our unconference on Sunday 12:30 UTC. We'd appreciate it if you joined to help us test it out! You'll also be helping us kickstart something that might turn into a noteworthy part of EA infrastructure. Our hope is that this will be one of many online events organically hosted here by various EA groups around the world. The main point of this post is that having a central venue for online events will help build and maintain an always-active meeting place for the EA community. Events hosted in the Hall will help familiarise people with using the space generally for coworking together, making connections, and having valuable conversations. Insofar as EAG conferences produce value by connecting people from across the world who then fly back to where they live, EAGT produces value for many of the same reasons without having to pay for the flight ticket in advance. How does it work? When I step near another person's character, our audio and video connects and I can engage them in a heated debate on the monistic ontology of blueberry muffins. Alternatively, I could book Auditorium A and lecture an entire hall about it. When I'm next to one of the microphones, I can broadcast to the entire room, but I cannot hear anyone in the audience unless I right-click to "spotlight" them. This comes in handy when e.g. they have their hand raised and I want their question to be heard by everyone. The audience hearing range is limited to include the speaker and the two people sitting right next to them. This allows them to speak to their neighbours if they wish without disturbing anyone else. Example event: The Unconference The easiest way to explain what you can do in the space is probably just to take you through our agenda for the unconference as an example. Feel free to take notes, or contact us and we'd be happy to help organise something here or just answer your questions. Before the event, we've emailed a document with some information for the speakers to help prepare them for the event. 1. Courtyard & intro When first logging into the space, everyone will spawn near the Earth portal (see image) that links the EAGT Event Hall and the EA coworking and lounge space, where the community is usually found coworking, talking, or socialising. When the event starts, Nguyên will give an introduction (broadcasting from the stage in the image) and share some practical information (like the fact that you can raise your hand with 6 and put it down again with 0). We will then proceed through the door northeast of the stage. 2. Foyer & browsing From the Foyer, all the session rooms can be found. The full schedule is linked via the big blue poster but you can also see it on the signs above each room. Two sessions will be held in parallel, and the participants may decide for themselves which room to enter. They are also encouraged to just roam, connect, and explore the main space through the portal. 3. Session rooms & group discussions & embeddable Padlets Each session lasts 30 minutes, but how it's structured is up to the speakers. For example, they could talk for 5 minutes, have 5 minutes for taking questions directly from the audience, and then 20 minutes where each table discusses among themselves and jots ideas/feedback down on their Padlets (unique per table). There are a maximum of 5 chairs per table, because bigg...
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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: Announcing the GovAI Policy Team, published by MarkusAnderljung on August 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The AI governance space needs more rigorous work on what influential actors (e.g. governments and AI labs) should do in the next few years to prepare the world for advanced AI. We’re setting up a Policy Team at the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) to help address this gap. The team will primarily focus on AI policy development from a long-run perspective. It will also spend some time on advising and advocating for recommendations, though we expect to lean heavily on other actors for that. Our work will be most relevant for the governments of the US, UK, and EU, as well as AI labs. We plan to focus on a handful of bets at a time. Initially, we are likely to pursue: Compute governance: Is compute a particularly useful governance node for AI? If so, how can this tool be used to meet various AI governance goals? Potential goals for compute governance include monitoring capabilities, restricting access to capabilities, and identifying high-risk systems such that they can be put to significant scrutiny. Corporate governance: What kinds of corporate governance measures should frontier labs adopt? Questions include: What can we learn from other industries to improve risk management practices? How can the board of directors most effectively oversee management? How should ethics boards be designed? AI regulation: What present-day AI regulation would be most helpful for managing risks from advanced AI systems? Example questions include: Should foundation models be a regulatory target? What features of AI systems should be mandated by AI regulation? How can we help create more adaptive and expert regulatory ecosystems? We’ll try several approaches to AI policy development, such as: Back-chaining from desirable outcomes to concrete policy recommendations (e.g. how can we increase the chance there are effective international treaties on AI in the future?); Considering what should be done today to prepare for some particular event (e.g. the US government makes an Apollo Program-level investment in AI); Articulating and evaluating intermediate policy goals (e.g. “ensure the world’s most powerful AI models receive external scrutiny by experts without causing diffusion of capabilities”); Analyzing what can and should be done with specific governance levers (e.g. the three bets outlined above); Evaluating existing policy recommendations (e.g. increasing high-skilled immigration to the US and UK); Providing concrete advice to decision-makers (e.g. providing input on the design of the US National AI Research Resource). Over time, we plan to evaluate which bets and approaches are most fruitful and refine our focus accordingly. The team currently consists of Jonas Schuett (specialization: corporate governance), Lennart Heim (specialization: compute governance), and myself (team lead). We’ll also collaborate with the rest of GovAI and people at other organizations. We’re looking to grow the team. We’re hiring Research Scholars (deadline: August 7th), hoping to add 2 people to the team. We’re also planning to work with people in the GovAI 3-month Fellowship (Winter Fellowship deadline: August 4th) and are likely to open applications for Research Fellows in the near future (you can submit expressions of interest now). We’re happy for new staff to work out of Oxford (where most of GovAI is based), the Bay Area (where I am based), or remotely. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to me at markus.anderljung@governance.ai. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: EA in the mainstream media: if you're not at the table, you're on the menu, published by Jack Lewars on July 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Another article just dropped criticising Effective Altruism, this time in the Wall Street Journal. I'm not linking to it here because it's garbage, but if you really want to look it up, the headline is 'Effective Altruism is neither'. I'd encourage you not to, so as not to help its readership figures. Other people have written very good forum posts about why we should care about perception of EA, collecting other examples of damaging commentary and suggesting some things we could do to help improve the community's image. However, I haven't seen anyone suggesting that we should create an EA PR agency, or hire a team at a PR firm to influence perception of EA. I think this seems like a very good idea. It seems at the moment like EA is leaving a vacuum, which is being filled by criticism. This is happening in multiple languages. Much of it could easily be countered but we're not in the game. There are all sorts of reasons not to worry too much about this particular opinion piece. Its criticisms are transparently bad, I suspect even to the audience it's written for - suggesting that pandemic preparedness is 'shutting the door after the horse has bolted' is self-evidently stupid. I doubt the readers of the WSJ opinion page are a high priority, high potential audience for EA. Even if it was devastating criticism aimed a key audience, it might have bad reach and we'd only amplify it by responding. However, the point is that we should have some experts deciding this, rather than the current situation where no one seems to be monitoring this or trying to respond on our behalf. It seems to me that some dedicated PR professionals could fairly quickly move to a) place more positive pieces about EA in the mainstream media; b) give more exposure to high fidelity, convincing messengers from the community (e.g. Will MacAskill); c) become the go-to place for comment on damaging pieces (which currently don't ever seem to involve a response from anyone in the community); and even d) manage to head-off some of the most illogical, most bad-faith criticisms before they're published. I've been advised by people in PR that the most cost-effective way to do this would be to hire a team of 2-3 full-time people from the PR sector and pay them at market rates (so I guess ~$500k/year). It's possible that it would be better to do this by hiring a PR agency with a pre-existing team (which has fewer start up costs) but people who work in PR say that, over time, you just end up paying exorbitant fees if you take this approach. I'd be happy with either, but instinctively lean towards the first. In some ways, I think EA has already missed several golden PR opportunities, not least the release of several high profile books (where there has been some decent PR but I feel there probably could have been more); and the recent pandemic, which validated much of what the community has been saying for a long time. It would be good to avoid missing future opportunities; and also satisfying to see some counter-programming to take on these sporadic poor-quality/bad-faith critiques.Call to action: if you agree, please comment or upvote; but, more importantly, send this on to people who might be able to fund this or otherwise make it happen. If you want to discuss the idea or think you can help, please DM me. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Announcing: the Prague Fall Season, published by IrenaK on July 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. tl;dr: We invite the broader EA/Rationality community to spend this fall in Prague. There will be a high concentration of global EA/Rationality events, workshops, retreats and seminars happening in and around Prague. While the events alone are interesting, we believe there will be additional benefits for staying around for a longer period of time and an opportunity to talk, create and meet caused by the higher density of people in one place. We will have a large coworking space available in Prague for people to work from and socialize. We also want to share with the world what we like about Prague and the local community. Prague seems to be a good place for thinking about hard problems - both Albert Einstein and Johannes Kepler made substantial progress on their fundamental research while living in Prague. We think you would enjoy being part of the Prague Fall Season if you: Want to spend an extended period of time this fall with other like-minded people, concentrated in one area, building momentum together. Are interested in exploring cities, cultures, and aesthetics different from the US or UK hubs. Are curious about the Czech EA/Rationality culture and want to spend some time with us. Want to work on some of the projects based in Prague. Want to experience what it’s like to live and work in Prague. If you are interested you can: Apply for a residency. Apply for one of the jobs based out of Prague. Apply to work from our new office space. Apply for a CFAR workshop. . or just visit us and we will figure it out! Why Prague? The events happening in Prague this autumn provide a Schelling point.Prague is a second-tier EA Hub, smaller than London or the Bay area, but comparable or larger than probably any other city in continental Europe. Prague has a thriving local EA community, a newly established alignment research group, ~20 full-time people working in/with high-impact organizations (eg Metaculus, ESPR, ALLFED, CFAR), and about a hundred people in the broader EA and rationalist communities. We aim for the Season to bring in on average additional 30-60 people staying for longer, and a few hundreds of shorter-time visitors, who will participate in some event and stay for a few days before or after. In our experience, Prague is a very good place to live - it has the benefits of a modern large city, while being walkable or bikeable, offering a high quality of living, and overall unique aesthetics and vibes (meaningfully different from other similar hubs); a likely fit for some creative high-impact people who seek a change in their environment. I often get questions about why there is such a big concentration of successful and interesting people in the Czech Republic, especially in the EA/Rationality community. My answer usually goes something like this. On a more serious note, we are quite excited about some of the virtues of the local EA/Rationality culture and would like to share them with the global community. If I were to summarize some of the key ones, they would be: Doing what's needed - one secret superpower we aim for is to do what needs to be done, even if the quests are not shiny and glittering with status. Sanity - Prague often feels like a more sane and more grounded place, which has distinct advantages and disadvantages; for example, if you feel you are too steady and unambitious or want to upend everything in your life, the vibes of Silicon Valley or the Bay area are likely better for moving in this direction. In contrast, if you feel the pressure of the competition for attention, networking, or similar source of stress is distracting you from useful work and you would benefit from having some time with less of that, Prague may be better for a few month...
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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: Interesting vs. Important Work - A Place EA is Prioritizing Poorly, published by Davidmanheim on July 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. There are many important issues in the world, and many interesting topics. But these are not the same thing, and we should beware of suspicious convergence. Given that, our assumption should be that the most interesting topics we hear about are far less important than the attention they receive. Heeding Scott Alexander’s recent warning, I’ll therefore ask much more specifically, what are the most intellectually interesting topics in Effective Altruism, and then I’ll suggest that we should be doing less work on them - and list a few concrete suggestions for how to do that. What are the interesting things? Here are some of my concrete candidates for most interesting work: infinite ethics, theoretical AI safety, rationality techniques, and writing high-level critiques of EA. And to be clear, all of these ARE important. But the number of people we need working on them should probably be more limited than the current trajectory, and we should probably de-emphasize status for the most theoretical work. To be clear, I love GPI, FHI, CSER, MIRI, and many other orgs doing this work. The people I know at each org are great, and I think that many of the things they do are, in fact, really important. And I like the work they do - not only do I think it’s important, it’s also SUPER interesting, especially to people who like philosophy, math, and/or economics. But the convergence between important and interesting is exactly the problem I'm pointing towards. Motivating Theoretical Model Duncan Sabien talks about Monks of Magnitude, where different people work on things that have different feedback loop lengths, from 1 day, to 10-days, to people who spend 10,000 days thinking. He more recently mentioned that he noticed “people continuously vanishing higher into the tower,” that is, focusing on more abstract and harder to evaluate issues, and that very few people have done the opposite. One commenter, Ben Weinstein-Raun, suggested several reasons, among them that longer-loop work is more visible, and higher status. I think this critique fits the same model, where we should be suspicious that such long-loop work is over-produced. (Another important issue is that “it's easier to pass yourself off as a long-looper when you're really doing nothing,” but that’s a different discussion.) The natural tendency to do work that is more conceptual and/or harder to pin to a concrete measurable outcome is one we should fight back against, since by default it is overproduced. The basic reason it is overproduced is because people who are even slightly affected by status or interesting research, i.e. everyone, will give it at least slightly more attention than warranted, and further, because others are already focused on it, the marginal value is lower. This is not to say that the optimal amount of fun and interesting research is zero, nor that all fun and interesting work is unimportant. We do need 10,000 day monks - and lots of interesting questions exist for long-termism that make them significant moral priorities. And I agree with the argument for a form of long-termism. But this isn’t a contradiction - and work on long-termism can be concrete and visible, isn’t necessarily conceptual, and doesn’t necessarily involve slow feedback loops. Towards fixing the problem Effective Altruism needs to be effective, and that means we need evaluable outputs wherever possible. First, anyone and everyone attempting to be impactful needs a theory of change, and an output that has some way of impacting the world. That means everyone, especially academics and researchers, should make this model clear, at least to themselves, but ideally also to others. If you’re writing f...
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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: The value of content density, published by Joey on July 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Different communities have different norms when it comes to writing and content production. One stylistic difference the EA community has, is that forum posts are often comparatively long, deep and advanced. I really like aspects of this and I think that having a relatively high level of depth can be very nice to offset the other mediums of communication EA uses (e.g., facebook). However, I wish EA forum authors would give content density a little bit more consideration. Different books have different levels of content density. Some have a strong concept on almost every page (a good example of this would be Ray Dalio's Principles), while other books could be summarized fairly easily into a single, short blog post (I think Carol Dweck’s Mindset falls into this category). There is often a strong social pressure to make something ~book length, so even if it's a bit concept-light it will get stretched to meet a word count. In the world of blog posts, no such limit exists but there are social norms that tend to affect the average duration. I think for entertainment blog posts there can be a lot of value in longer-form writing (e.g., Wait But Why’s writing), but for blog posts that are aiming to get a concept across (like this one) a leaner form of writing would be better. I do agree we should try to make writing entertaining, just not with huge length increases as a trade off. (A good example of both high content density + low wordcount). Why we should aim for higher content density Time limited: Many EA forum readers are time limited and thus it is often a worthwhile trade to write a post that covers 90% of the value and is half as long. I often see blog posts that have a good concept or two, but due to how long they are they get far less engagement and readership than they would otherwise. Counterfactuals: There is quite a volume of posts on the EA forum and this directly ties into most readers' opportunity cost. Oftentimes the trade-off might literally be reading two EA forum posts vs one that is double the length. Approachability: EAs are a fairly technical bunch and although the use of jargon has been written about, having a high volume of content with relatively sparse concepts also makes it harder for new people to get up to speed. It can make the forum as a whole seem more intimidating than it has to be. Possible heuristics Length: The rule of thumb I use for blog posts is ~0.5-1 page per major concept and 1-3 pages per blog post. This kind of cap creates a strong force toward brevity and conveying concepts concisely. It does sometimes require major editing (the quote “I would have written you a shorter letter but did not have the time” comes to mind). TL;DR and summaries: I think the EA forum makes great use of these and they are worth including in almost every post that is over one page. Top concept leveraging: I think blog posts often try to cover a large number of topics that could easily be broken into multiple posts. For example, this data on value drift post being separate from this strategies for preventing value drift post makes each piece of writing much more individually referable and digestible. More information Some examples of content-dense writing include: EA Dedicates Critiques of EA that I want to read A summary of every Replacing Guilt post Further reading: Steven Pinker has some really well-articulated and pointed suggestions for community writing norms, many of which I think would apply directly to the EA forum. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Reducing nightmares as a cause area, published by Drew Housman on July 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I am someone who suffers from truly terrible nightmares. I've spent many hours running from murderous villains, being killed by monsters, and being forced to watch my loved ones suffer. If you haven't had a vivid nightmare, you must understand that they feel 100% real. And if you're open to the idea that every moment of experience matters, even when we're asleep, then you've gotta care about nightmares. To me, nightmares fit the classic EA criteria of being important, neglected, and tractable. Nightmares are Important Nightmares tend to have a negative affect on those who experience them. When they are related to PTSD, they lead to "decreased psychological and physiological functioning." Other studies link them to "waking psychopathology." And they negatively affect overall sleep quality. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 50-85% of people have the occasional nightmare. (They don't give a source for that though 🤨) One thing researchers seem to agree on is that traumatic life experiences cause nightmares. I think it's safe to assume that there are millions of people around the world suffering through traumatic experiences on a semi-regular basis. How tragic that these people don't just suffer while awake, but also must be terrorized in their sleep. As for me, I've seen and done things in nightmares that are so horrific that they leave me shaken throughout the day. I can't even tell most people about them because I feel like they'd look at me differently. I can't go into my tech job and be like, "I don't think I'm going to be as productive today because I just had to guillotine my little sister in a dream and it felt very real and it's kind of messing with my head." And I've lived a pretty sheltered life! I can't imagine what I'd be like if I fought in a war. Someone who goes off to battle and then gets nightmares of being back on the battlefield really, actually suffers during those dreams. Night after night after night. I keep hammering the point about the suffering being real because I think it's easy to dismiss nightmares as little aberrations that can be easily shrugged off. It feels like the cultural consensus around nightmares, at least in the USA, is,"It didn't really happen, so what's the big deal?" Or people will say, "They serve an evolutionary purpose." I want to be like, you don't get it. What happened in that nightmare really did happen to me! And there are a whole bunch of quirks of evolution that cause for needless suffering. I put nightmares into the category of things we should fight to get rid of, evolution be damned. Finally, if you buy into the idea that suffering is on a log scale, then it might be really, really bad to be a soldier who has to relive their torture several times a week. Nightmares are Neglected I searched the EA forum for posts on nightmares and didn't find a single one. Anecdotally, when I bring this up with people they seem highly skeptical that nightmares are a problem. Perhaps I'm the crazy one, or maybe they've just never had a bad enough nightmare. The Nightmare Problem is Tractable From what I can tell, Imagery Reversal Treatment shows great promise (68% of subjects in one study decreased their nightmares), so perhaps finding ways to publicize that treatment more would have a big effect. What if someone made a free website or app that walks people through the steps of imagery rehearsal treatment? Seems relatively low effort with a potentially high payoff. What I'd like to see Clearer research into how many people suffer from nightmares, and how bad that suffering is Clearer research into ways to prevent nightmares. We should eradicate the worst forms of nightmares I know this might seem a little ...
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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: Why EAs are skeptical about AI Safety, published by Lukas Trötzmüller on July 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I interviewed 22 EAs who are skeptical about existential risk from Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or believe that it is overrated within EA. This post provides a comprehensive overview of their arguments. It can be used as a reference to design AI safety communication within EA, as a conversation starter, or as the starting point for further research. Introduction In casual conversation with EAs over the past months, I found that many are skeptical of the importance of AI safety. Some have arguments that are quite well reasoned. Others are bringing arguments that have been convincingly refuted somewhere - but they simply did not encounter that resource, and stopped thinking about it. It seems to me that the community would benefit from more in-depth discussion between proponents and skeptics of AI Safety focus. To facilitate more of that, I conducted interviews with 22 EAs who are skeptical about AGI risk. The interviews circled around two basic questions: Do you believe the development of general AI can plausibly lead to human extinction (not including cases where bad actors intentionally use AI as a tool)? Do you believe AI safety is overrated within EA as a cause area? Only people who said no to (1) or yes to (2) were interviewed. The goal was to get a very broad overview of their arguments. Methodology My goal was to better understand the viewpoints of my interview partners - not to engage in debate or convince anyone. That being said, I did bring some counterarguments to their position if that was helpful to gain better understanding. The results are summarized in a qualitative fashion, making sure every argument is covered well enough. No attempt was made to quantify which arguments occured more or less often. Most statements are direct quotes, slightly cleaned up. In some cases, when the interviewee spoke verbosely, I suggested a summarized version of their argument, and asked for their approval. Importantly, the number of bullet points for each argument below does not indicate the prevalence of an argument. Sometimes, all bullet points correspond to a single interviewee and sometimes each bullet point is from a different person. Sub-points indicate direct follow-ups or clarifications from the same person. Some interviewees brought arguments against their own position. These counterarguments are only mentioned if they are useful to illuminate the main point. General longtermism arguments without relation to AI Safety were omitted. How to read these arguments Some of these arguments hint towards specific ways in which AI safety resources could be improved. Others might seem obviously wrong or contradictory in themselves, and some might even have factual errors. However, I believe all of these arguments are useful data. I would suggest looking behind the argument and figuring out how each point hints at specific ways in which AI safety communication can be improved. Also, I take responsibility for some of the arguments perhaps making more sense in the original interview than they do here in this post (taken out of context and re-arranged into bullet points). Demographics Interview partners were recruited from the /r/EffectiveAltruism subreddit, from the EA Groups slack channel and the EA Germany slack channel, as well as the Effective Altruism Facebook group. The invitation text was roughly like this: Have you heard about the concept of existential risk from Advanced AI? Do you think the risk is small or negligible, and that advanced AI safety concerns are overblown? I'm doing research into people's beliefs on AI risk. Looking to interview EAs who believe that AI safety gets too much attention and is overblown. Current level of EA invol...
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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: When Utilitarianism is Actually ✨Fun✨, published by Hamish Huggard on July 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Utilitarianism can be a bummer. The world has so many problems and there's so much you could be doing to help. Donating more. Advocating more. Researching more. This can make me feel like: I have to keep giving until there's nothing left for me Even then, I can never live up to my moral obligations I am therefore a bad person But utilitarianism goes both ways. Sometimes the balance is in your favour. Sometimes utilitarianism is ✨Fun✨. Some examples: You're hanging out with your utilitarian friends. Alice has a really nice looking muffin. By your best objective estimation, you would enjoy the muffin more. Alice now has to give you the muffin or be sent to 👮 utilitarian jail 👮. The EAG conference needs volunteers to do a thing. You could do it, but you're already really busy. You happen to know that Bob has a pretty light load and it would be easier for him. Utilitarianism requires you to try and make Bob do it instead of you. "Me? Bossy? Listen, this is out of my hands. Utilitarianism is making me make you do it." You are depressed. You know that a walk and a swim would cheer you up. But what's even the point? You'd still be a failure and the world would still hate you. Well too bad bucko. Utilitarianism says you have to take care of your mental health. Utilitarianism needs you to be happy and radiating utils, even if you don't see the point right now. You need help but are afraid to ask for it. Maybe you're down on your luck and need a couch to sleep on. Maybe an important person has some information you need. Maybe you're spiralling and need to unload your troubles. Utilitarianism doesn't care if you're "squeamish about unpayable debts", or "intimidated by status", or "don't want to be a burden". If someone can pay a small price to give you a big benefit, then Utilitarianism requires that you ask for help. You can increase the total utility by increasing your own utility. In fact there are structural reasons why this might be a high-impact strategy: you have direct access to your own desires and emotional states, and it's easy to run intervention experiments on yourself. So apply the high-powered EA mindset to improving your own life. Think seriously about what you want out of life and how to get it. This can feel self-indulgent, unvirtuous, or even selfish. Doesn't matter. If you can make yourself better off without making anyone else comparably worse off, then utilitarianism says you have to do it. Last night I drank red wine and danced to Taylor Swift in my underwear and it was so much fun. The fact that I had never even tried this before in my 26 years of life makes me think that there’s tons of low-hanging fruit in the Personal Wellbeing Orchard. For similar reasons, it can also be high-impact to improve the lives of friends and family. Develop a “value theory” for the people around you. What do they most want and care about? You’re allowed to ask them if you’re not sure, but take their reported values with a grain of salt. Look for low-effort, high-utility actions you could take. Be creative. When this works it feels like you’re winning good-will points for free. Example: my dad recently mentioned how much he enjoys being a retired grandparent, and I know he likes having photos of everything, so I took about five minutes over the course of the day to build a Google Photos album of him playing with my nephew, and he loves it. There’s a well of utility in actions which are 1) hard to do by yourself, and 2) not so valuable that you want to ask someone for it and enter an emotionally charged reciprocal transaction. Compliments! It's nice to get a compliment, and it's fun to give a compliment. Free utility! Spam the compliment button! “Sure, I could ...
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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: List of Lists of Concrete Biosecurity Project Ideas, published by Tessa on July 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I was working on my own list of biorisk reduction project ideas, and ended up creating this list of lists, which seemed silly not to share. I have quoted a few words describing each project, but it’s well worth clicking through to the original lists. None of them describe projects for longer than two pages, and most for a paragraph or so. Several of the EA Forum posts also contain links for getting in touch with teams working on these projects. If you’re interested in that, you might also want to fill in the longtermist census. In general, I am so tired of people dying in pandemics. It does not necessarily make me optimistic to see all these project ideas― the world should already be much better at this, and there is so much work to be done. However, it does make me feel hopeful: the world can be much better, and there are projects that you could work on to help it become so. Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big) January 2022 EA Forum Post Early Detection Center Early detection of a biothreat increases the amount of time we have to respond (e.g. designing tailored countermeasures, using protective equipment, heading to bunkers, etc) See also: Nucleic Acid Observatory announcement from Will Bradshaw, Anjali Gopal, Mike McLaren, related post from Jeff Kaufman Super PPE it seems plausible that with good materials science and product design we could come up with next-generation PPE that is simultaneously highly effective in extreme cases, easy to use, reliable over long periods of time, and cheap/abundant. Medical countermeasures “radically improved medical countermeasures against GCBR-class threats, either by 1) producing targeted countermeasures against particularly concerning threats (or broad-spectrum countermeasures against a class of threats), or by 2) creating rapid response platforms that are reliable even against deliberate adversaries See also: Alvea Vax announcement from Kyle Fish BWC Strengthening there is more scope for creative ways of strengthening the treaty (e.g. whistleblowing prizes), or creating new bilateral agreements and avoiding bureaucratic gridlock Sterilization technology Sterilization techniques that rely on physical principles . have the advantage of being broadly applicable, difficult to engineer around, and having little dual-use downside potential See also: post on UV-C air purifiers Refuges specially designed refuges that safeguard against catastrophic pandemics See also: Fønix: Bioweapons shelter project launch, Help Us Make Civilizational Refuges Happen from Linch Zhang and Ajay Karpur Future Fund Project Ideas As of July 2022 (I have not repeated ideas that pull directly from the above post, though the FTX write-ups are not word-for-word identical) Crisis-aware regulation for global catastrophic biological risks public health measures that would have a poor risk-benefit balance in normal times may be warranted or even critical in a crisis in which the benefits to eradicating or delaying a public health threat are unusually large” (link) See also: original Project Ideas Competition submission by Mackenzie Arnold, with contributions by Kyle Fish Rapid development and approval of emergency vaccination and therapeutics imagine a team of high-powered vaccine developers, large-scale manufacturing capability on standby, and ready-to-go infrastructure for rapid human challenge trials in a regulatorily compliant manner” (link) New ideas for mitigating biotechnology misuse July 2022 EA Forum Post Record-keeping for strong attribution a record-based system for strong attribution of biological agents may be a powerful mechanism to deter biological weapons development and use” Responsible access to genetic s...
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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: A philosophical review of Open Philanthropy’s Cause Prioritisation Framework, published by MichaelPlant on July 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary In this post, I undertake a philosophical review of Open Philanthropy’s Global Health and Wellbeing Cause Prioritisation Framework, the method they use to compare the value of different outcomes. In practice, the framework focuses on the relative value of just two outcomes, increasing income and adding years of life. This is a ‘red-team’ exercise, partially inspired by the EA forum contests on blogging and on critiques. My aim is to constructively critique something that is already good with the aim of improving it. Here’s the prospectus. I sketch the various philosophical debates such a framework must take a position on. I note some of the options in each case and how choosing one rather than another may relatively alter the priorities. I attempt to identify the choices that the Open Philanthropy (OP) framework makes and conclude it is substantially unclear which positions they take or which arguments they accept. Specifically, to make the central trade-off between health and income OP implicitly appeals to different, opposing theories of wellbeing. Further, it is not obvious what assumptions the framework makes about population ethics and the badness of death, nor are any reasons given on these topics. I make three main recommendations: I suggest OP's framework would be greatly improved by clarifying and developing their stance on these philosophical issues. Given OP’s commitment to worldview diversification (putting significant resources behind every worldview they find plausible), I argue that OP is pushed to adopt more worldviews within the scope of its Global Health and Wellbeing Framework than the single one it adopts currently. I suggest how OP might, in practice, expand their set of worldviews. One crucial worldview I argue should be included - but which OP is currently sceptical of - is the use of subjective wellbeing measures (self-reports of happiness and life satisfaction) as a unified measure of value. I have previously advocated for an ‘SWB approach’ to cause prioritisation (see, for example, here and here). What’s novel here is the claim that using an SWB approach would be consistent with, indeed possibly even required by, OP’s worldview diversification approach. The simple thought is that it is plausible to think both that (1) happiness and life satisfaction matter morally and (2) people’s own ratings of their happiness and satisfaction are a credible way of measuring those feelings. While this discussion focuses on OP’s framework, the issues I discuss here are very general and apply to any method which involves comparing the value of different outcomes. I consider OP’s framework as it is a prominent and concrete means of doing this. 1. Background Open Philanthropy’s mission is “to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us”. Since 2014, it has directed over $1.5 billion in grants and in 2022-23 it plans to give an additional $1 billion to evidence-based charities working in global health and development. Open Philanthropy (OP) has done an enormous amount of good. In particular, I want to praise them for the transparent way they communicate their reasoning so that others may learn from, use, and suggest improvements to it. For OP to do this is a public service, one that is almost unique in the wider world of philanthropic actors. In November 2021, OP published a blog post setting out an updated framework for making trade-offs between different types of interventions in their global health and wellbeing portfolio. In January 2022, Alexander Berger (co-CEO) and Peter Favaloro (Research Fellow) presented the framework at an online seminar hosted by the Centre for Global De...
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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: Criticism of EA Criticism Contest, published by Zvi on July 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Back when it was announced, I toyed with the idea of criticizing the EA criticism and red teaming contest as an entry to that contest, leading to some very good Twitter discussion that I compiled into a post. I finally found myself motivated to write up my thinking in detail. Before I begin, I recommend reading the contest announcement yourself, and forming your own reaction. Ask yourself, among other things: What are they telling people they are interested in and likely to reward? What are they not interested in and telling people they will not reward? What does this announcement say more generally about EA? Praise First I will start with some things that I think are good about the contest and announcement. It exists at all. It is good to solicit (paid!) public criticism. It awards at least $100,000. That’s good prize money. It promises an even bigger prize for something that really hits home. It suggests it will reward causing people to change their minds. Guidelines offered to help with techniques includes red teaming. The exercise I read this as being is still worth doing, if not as worthwhile as the thing I’d rather be happening, so long as it doesn’t create a story that the thing I want to happen did indeed happen and is thus handled, when it isn’t handled. What actually wins will be an informative experiment. Stay tuned. Core Critique Effective Altruism has a core set of assumptions, and a core method of modeling and acting in the world. The core critique I am offering is that the contest is mostly taking things like the list below as givens, rather than as things to be questioned. It is sending a set of signals that such punches should be pulled, both for the contest and in general. Effective Altruism, in this model, very much wants criticism of its tactics, and mostly wants them also of its strategy, but only within the framework. This parallels EA more broadly, where within-paradigm critiques are welcomed (although, as everywhere, often incorrect disregarded) but deeper critiques are unwelcome, and treated as mistakes. Here is my attempt to summarize the framework, which came out to 21 points. Note that the rest of the post does not depend on the exact points or their wordings. Although I did attempt to make the list match my perceptions as much as possible, the list is included primarily to give an idea of the type of thing that is assumed here. Utilitarianism. Alternatives are considered at best to be mistakes. Importance of Suffering. Suffering is The Bad. Happiness/pleasure is The Good. Quantification. Emphasis on that which can be seen and measured. Bureaucracy. Distribution of funds via organizational grants and applications. Scope Sensitivity. Shut up and multiply, two are twice as good as one. Intentionality. You should to plan your life around the impact it will have. Effectiveness. Do what works. The goal is to cut the enemy. Altruism. The best way to do good yourself is to act selflessly to do good. Obligation. We owe the future quite a lot, arguably everything. Coordination. Working together is more effective than cultivating competition. Selflessness. You shouldn’t value yourself, locals or family more than others. Self-Recommending. Belief in the movement and methods themselves. Evangelicalism. Belief that it is good to convert others and add resources to EA. Reputation. EA should optimize largely for EA’s reputation. Modesty. Non-neglected topics can be safely ignored, often consensus trusted. Existential Risk. Wiping out all value in the universe is really, really bad. Sacrifice. Important to set a good example, and to not waste resources. Judgment. Not living up to this list is morally bad. Also sort of like murder. Veganism. If you are not...
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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: Passing Up Pay, published by Jeff Kaufman on July 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I recently switched from earning money to donate to doing something directly useful. I think this work is very important (or I wouldn't have switched!), and if I were still earning to give it's the kind of work I'd be excited to fund. I also think this about Julia's work; what should this mean for our donations? We've been donating 50%, and say we decide to continue doing that in future years. Let's say our employers are willing to pay us a combined $300k, so we donate $150k and have $150k left over. Then we pay $51k in taxes and our employers pay another $22k, for a total of $73k in income taxes. This leaves us with $99k for ourselves: Donate 50% Income $300k Donations $150k Employee-paid taxes $51k Employer-paid taxes $22k Post-tax post-donation pay $99k Since I'm equally happy for us to donate $1 as for either of our employers to keep $1, however, another option would be for us to ask for lower pay instead of donating. Let's say we want to keep the same $99k in post-tax post-donations pay; what does that look like? Donate 50% Reduce Pay Income $300k $130k Donations $150k $0 Employee-paid taxes $51k $31k Employer-paid taxes $22k $9k Post-tax post-donation pay $99k $99k Our family is equally well off in the two cases, but in the donation case $33k goes to taxes that would otherwise go to something much more valuable. That's 11% of what our employers would be willing to pay us, and 1/3 of our post-tax post-donation pay. This happens because while donations are "tax-deductible", that's only for Federal Income Tax (10%-37% in brackets). Social Security (12.4%), Medicare (2.9%), and State (5% for MA) taxes are all calculated on pre-donation income. While this is more efficient, there are some reasons why this might not be a good idea: This only works if there isn't some other organization you think would do more good with your money. People may overvalue their particular organization when they would be more objective in choosing among organizations at large. Your employer might say they are willing to pay the larger amount, but if it actually came down to it they wouldn't follow through. Perhaps they think they can get someone else to do the job for closer to what they had been paying you, or they just don't have the funding. One way this could happen is that they would have been fine with the larger amount initially, but over time that no longer makes sense for the organization, and no one notices because money that doesn't need to be spent feels less like real money. The more pay you are waiving, the larger an issue this is. If you know you're costing your employer less, you might hold yourself to a lower standard in your efforts. This would be ignoring major costs like you taking a spot that could go to someone more productive, and the way many top organizations are primarily constrained by management capacity, but I could still see someone falling into this. If you've pledged with Giving What We Can, it was initially not clear to me whether a voluntary and easily-reversed decision to waive pay would count. I wrote to community@givingwhatwecan.org, however, and they said it would. It's less legible. When you donate to a 501(c)(3) you get a tax receipt ("no goods or services were provided in exchange for your contribution" etc) and have something clear to list publicly. But if you instead waive pay the best you can do is write something up explaining what you're doing and get a document from the organization confirming it. It's a lot less clear! Some situations where this could be a problem: In trying to get a mortgage or other loan: "I understand sir, but for the purposes of this loan application what matters is what they've actually been paying you." In media: "These so-calle...
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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: Future Fund June 2022 Update, published by Nick Beckstead on July 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary Background The FTX Foundation’s Future Fund publicly launched in late February. We're a philanthropic fund that makes grants and investments to improve humanity's long-term prospects. For information about some of the areas we've been funding, see our Areas of Interest page. This is our first public update on the Future Fund’s grantmaking. The purpose of this post is to give an update on what we’ve done and what we're learning about the funding models we're testing. (It does not cover a range of other FTX Foundation activities.) We’ve also published a new grants page and regrants page with our public grants so far. Our focus on testing funding models We are trying to learn as much as we can about how to deploy funding at scale to improve humanity’s long-term prospects. Our primary objective for 2022 is to perform bold and decisive tests of new funding models. The main funding models we have tested so far are our regranting program and our open call for applications. In brief, these models worked as follows: The basic idea of regranting was, "There are a lot of people who share our values and might know of great people or projects we could support that we wouldn't know about by default. Let's make it rewarding, simple, and fast for them to make grants. We'll give them budgets of $100k to a few million to work with, and we'll presumptively approve their recommendations (after screening for various risks/issues)." The basic idea of the open call was, "Let's tell people what we're trying to do, what kinds of things we might be interested in funding, give them a lot of examples of projects they could launch, have an easy and fast application process, and then get the word out with Twitter blitz." We wrote some about the review process here. Our staff also made grants and investments that were not part of these programs (hereafter "staff-led grantmaking"). Grantmaking by funding model So far we have made 262 grants and investments, totaling ~$132M. These break down as follows: Regranting: We have onboarded >100 regrantors (with discretionary budgets) and >50 grant recommenders (without discretionary budgets). We set aside >$100M for them to use over the course of our 6 month experiment (April-October 2022). So far, regrantors have made 168 grants and investments, totaling ~$31M Open call: We received over 1700 applications and funded 69 (4%) of them, totaling ~$26M. (The acceptance rate for proposals focused squarely on our top priorities was much higher.) Staff-led grantmaking: Separate from these programs, we have made 25 grants and investments otherwise sourced by our staff, totaling ~$73M. There are also ~$25M of grants we are likely to make soon, but have some relevant aspects TBD. Some example grants and investments Below are some grants and investments that we find interesting and/or representative of what we are trying to fund. Regranting $1M investment in Manifold Markets to build a play-money prediction market platform. The platform is also experimenting with impact certificates and charity prediction markets. $490k for ML Safety Scholars Program to fund a summer program for up to 100 students to spend 9 weeks studying machine learning, deep learning, and technical topics in AI safety. We have funded >30 talent development and career transition grants that range from $1,450 to $175,000 depending on the duration and seniority level of the individual. Some examples include: $42,600 to Andi Peng to support salary and compute for research on AI alignment. $175,000 to Braden Leach to support a recent law school graduate to work on biosecurity, researching and writing at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. $37,500 to Thomas Kwa to support researc...
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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: The Future Might Not Be So Great., published by Jacy on June 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Many thanks for feedback and insight from Kelly Anthis, Tobias Baumann, Jan Brauner, Max Carpendale, Sasha Cooper, Sandro Del Rivo, Michael Dello-Iacovo, Michael Dickens, Anthony DiGiovanni, Marius Hobbhahn, Ali Ladak, Simon Knutsson, Greg Lewis, Kelly McNamara, John Mori, Thomas Moynihan, Caleb Ontiveros, Sean Richardson, Zachary Rudolph, Manny Rutinel, Stefan Schubert, Michael St. Jules, Nell Watson, Peter Wildeford, and Miranda Zhang. This essay is in part an early draft of an upcoming book chapter on the topic, and I will add the citation here when it is available. Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. ⸻ Cloud Atlas (2012) Summary The prioritization of extinction risk reduction depends on an assumption that the expected value (EV) of human survival and interstellar colonization is highly positive. In the feather-ruffling spirit of EA Criticism and Red Teaming, this essay lays out many arguments for a positive EV and a negative EV. This matters because, insofar as the EV is lower than we previously believed, we should shift some longtermist resources away from the current focus on extinction risk reduction. Extinction risks are the most extreme category of population risks, which are risks to the number of individuals in the long-term future. We could shift resources towards the other type of long-term risk, quality risks, which are risks to the moral value of individuals in the long-term future, such as whether they experience suffering or happiness. Promising approaches to improve the quality of the long-term future include some forms of AI safety, moral circle expansion, cooperative game theory, digital minds, and global priorities research. There may be substantial overlap with extinction risk reduction approaches, but in this case and in general, much more research is needed. I think that the effective altruism (EA) emphasis on existential risk could be replaced by a mindset of existential pragmatism: Rather than ensuring humanity expands its reach throughout the universe, we must ensure that the universe will be better for it. I have spoken to many longtermist EAs about this crucial consideration, and for most of them, that was their first time explicitly considering the EV of human expansion. My sense is that many more are considering it now, and the community is growing more skeptical of highly positive EV as the correct estimate. I’m eager to hear more people’s thoughts on the all-things-considered estimate of EV, and I discuss the limited work done on this topic to date in the “Related Work” section. In the following table, I lay out the object-level arguments on the EV of human expansion, and the rest of the essay details meta-considerations (e.g., option value). The table also includes the strongest supporting arguments that increase the evidential weight of their corresponding argument and the strongest counterarguments that reduce the weight. The arguments are not mutually exclusive and are merely intended as broad categories that reflect the most common and compelling arguments for at least some people (not necessarily me) on this topic. For example, Historical Progress and Value Through Intent have been intertwined insofar as humans intentionally create progress, so users of this table should be mindful that they do not overcount (e.g., double count) the same evidence. I handle this in my own thinking by splitting an overlapping piece of evidence among its categories in proportion to a rough sense of fit in those categories. In the associated spreadsheet, I list my own subjective evidential weight scores where positive numbers indicate evid...
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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: There is no separate "community building" track, published by Owen Cotton-Barratt on June 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Here's a cartoon picture I think people sometimes have: I think this is misguided and can be harmful. The appeal of the picture is that specialization generally brings big benefits; since there are two large buckets of work it's natural to think they should be pursued by specialists working in specialist orgs. The reason that the specialization argument doesn't just go through is that the things we're trying to build communities for are complicated. I think community-building work is often a lot better when it's high context on what's being done and what's needed in direct work. In some cases this could shift it from negative to positive; in others it merely provides a significant boost. By default in the "separate camps" model, the community-building camp simply isn't high enough context on the direct work camp to achieve that. Rather than separate camps, I think that it's better to think of there being one camp, which is oriented around "direct work". A good amount of community-building work goes on there, but it's all pretty well integrated with the direct work (often with heavy overlap of the people involved). At an individual level, I think it's often correct for people to multi-class between direct work and community building. After you have expertise on direct work and what's needed, there are low-hanging fruit in leveraging that expertise in community building (this might be e.g. via giving talks or mentoring junior people). Or if you're mostly focused on community building I think you'll often benefit from spending a fraction of your time really trying to get to the bottom of understanding direct work agendas, and exactly why people are pursuing different strategies. A possible way of getting solid grounding for this is to actually spend a fraction of your time aiming to do high-value direct work, but that's certainly not the only approach — reading content and (especially) talking to people who are engaged with direct work about what their bottlenecks are also helpful. As a very rough rule of thumb, I think that it's good if people doing community-building work spend at least 20% of their time obsessing over the details of what's needed in direct work. Clarifications & caveats to these claims: 20% time doesn't need to mean a day every week. It could be ten weeks a year, or one year every five. (It probably shouldn't be stretched longer than that, because knowledge will go stale.) I mean to refer to people trying to build communities aimed at increasing direct work. I think it's fine to have separate specialist people/orgs for things like: Education — e.g. if you had an org aimed at getting more people to intuitively understand scope-sensitivity Building communities that aren't aimed at direct work — e.g. if you want to build a community of AI researchers who read science fiction together and think about the future of AI It's fine to have professional facilitators who are helping the community-building work without detailed takes on object-level priorities, but they shouldn't be the ones making the calls about what kind of community-building work needs to happen The whole 20% figure is me plucking a number that feels reasonable out of the air. If someone wants to argue that it should be 12% or 30% I'm like "that's plausible". If someone wants to argue that it should be 2% or 80% I'm going to be pretty sceptical. I think a lot of people who are working professionally in community building understand all of this intuitively. But it doesn't seem to me to be uniformly understood/discussed, so I thought it was worth sharing the model. Corollaries of this view: People who want to do community building work should be particularly inter...
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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: Community Builders Spend Too Much Time Community Building, published by emmawilliamson on June 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. For helpful comments I thank Koji Flynn-Do, Abie Rohrig, Harry Taussig, Emma Abele, Sabrina Chwalek, Matt Burtell, Trevor Levin, Jemima Jones, Michel Justen, Caleb Parikh, and Max Daniel. Some of my observations come from my experience grantmaking with the EA Infrastructure Fund. I am contributing in a personal capacity however, not as an EAIF assistant fund manager. (In particular, you are welcome to apply for EAIF funding if your plans mostly consist of the kind of activities I’m questioning in this post.) All views are my own. Epistemic Status: In this post I’m mainly referring to university group community builders. It’s possible that a lot of what I say will still apply to city / country / other groups, but I’m less confident of this. In my problem section, I give some percentage estimates of how much organizers are marketing (defined later) and how much they should be marketing. This is based off of some rough estimates, which I’m not confident in. I’d love to see someone better estimate this or run a survey. Advisory Note: If you’re only going to read one section of this post, I encourage you to read the TLDR and the Solutions section. TLDR: There are significant downsides to the current model of community building, which involves organizers spending a large portion of their time marketing EA, doing (often menial) operations work for EA, and explaining to other EAs how to market EA: It trades off against some of the most promising EA students skilling up themselves It means that EA groups aren’t actually learning about object-level EA issues, and instead are learning things about small-scale marketing and club organization, which is significantly less important. It can give EA a “Ponzi scheme” vibe on campus, because EA groups are disproportionately focused on growing their group as opposed to skilling up and tackling object-level issues. Instead, many group leaders should think about what would be most useful for them, and then invite others to join them in the activity they’re doing. For examples of this, skim the solutions section. Outline: The Problem (in 4 Claims) Solutions Caveats and Why I Might be Wrong The problem The problem is that organizers and others at university EA groups (and possibly other EA groups) are spending too much time marketing EA and doing basic operations work when they should be skilling up. I think this is bad for the organizers, the epistemics of the group, the members of the group, and the external view of the group. By skilling up - also referred to as skill building - I mean taking action to improve one’s epistemics, knowledge of key global problems, or career. Most of the actions that fall under skilling up involve cognitively intensive learning. Some actions that fall within the category of skill building would be extremely useful for some and trivial for others (e.g. doing an ML bootcamp may be great for someone looking to do AI safety research, but useless for someone interested in GPR). For the rest of this essay, I will define marketing as “marketing EA, doing (often menial) operations work for EA, and explaining to other EAs how to market EA”. I recognize this is a broader definition of marketing than is generally used. However, I want to be able to simply point at the issue I’m talking about, which is when individuals - often top organizers - spend too much time doing activities like: running fellowships, advertising at club fairs, creating marketing materials (posters, emails, websites, etc), pitching EA to others, 1:1 outreach, and some events. Note: Some parts of organizing an event would be included in my definition of marketing and some would not. If hosting an event involves a ...
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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: Announcing Epoch: A research organization investigating the road to Transformative AI, published by Jaime Sevilla on June 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary We are a new research organization working on investigating trends in Machine Learning and forecasting the development of Transformative Artificial Intelligence This work is done in close collaboration with other organizations, like Rethink Priorities, Open Philanthropy, and MIT CSAIL We will be hiring for 2-4 full-time roles this summer – more information here You can find up-to-date information about Epoch on our website What is Epoch? Epoch is a new research organization that works to support AI strategy and improve forecasts around the development of Transformative Artificial Intelligence (TAI) – AI systems that have the potential to have an effect on society as large as that of the industrial revolution. Our founding team consists of seven members – Jaime Sevilla, Tamay Besiroglu, Lennart Heim, Pablo Villalobos, Eduardo Infante-Roldán, Marius Hobbhahn, and Anson Ho. Collectively, we have backgrounds in Machine Learning, Statistics, Economics, Forecasting, Physics, Computer Engineering, and Software Engineering. Our work involves close collaboration with other organizations, such as MIT CSAIL, Open Philanthropy, and Rethink Priorities’ AI Governance and Strategy team. We are advised by Tom Davidson from Open Philanthropy and Neil Thompson from MIT CSAIL. Rethink Priorities is also our fiscal sponsor. Our mission Epoch seeks to clarify when and how TAI capabilities will be developed. We see these two problems as core questions for informing AI strategy decisions by grantmakers, policy-makers, and technical researchers. We believe that to make good progress on these questions we need to advance towards a field of AI forecasting. We are committed to developing tools, gathering data and creating a scientific ecosystem to make collective progress towards this goal. Our research agenda Our work at Epoch encompasses two interconnected lines of research: The analysis of trends in Machine Learning. We aim to gather data on what has been happening in the field during the last two decades, explain it, and extrapolate the results to inform our views on the future of AI. The development of quantitative forecasting models related to advanced AI capabilities. We seek to use techniques from economics and statistics to predict when and how fast AI will be developed. These two research strands feed into each other: the analysis of trends informs the choice of parameters in quantitative models, and the development of these models brings clarity on the most important trends to analyze. Besides this, we also plan to opportunistically research topics important for AI governance where we are well positioned to do so. These investigations might relate to compute governance, near-term advances in AI and other topics. Our work so far Earlier this year we published Compute Trends Across Three Eras of Machine Learning. We collected and analyzed data about the training compute budget of >100 Machine Learning models across history. Consistent with our commitment to field building, we have released the associated dataset and an interactive visualization tool to help other researchers understand these trends better. This work has been featured in Our World in Data, in The Economist and at the OECD. More recently we have published Grokking “Forecasting TAI with biological anchors” and Grokking “Semi-informative priors over AI timelines”. In these pieces, Anson Ho dissects two popular AI forecasting models. These are the two first installments of a series of articles covering work on quantitative forecasting of when we will develop TAI. You can see more of our work on our blog. Here is a selection of further work by Epoch membe...
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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: Interested in EA/longtermist research careers? Here are my top recommended resources, published by MichaelA on June 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In the past ~2.5 years, I've very often given career advice to people in the EA community. This post is my up-to-date, prioritized list of recommended resources for people who are interested in research careers, longtermism-aligned careers, and/or working at EA orgs (rather than e.g. high-impact roles at non-EA orgs that work on relevant topics). The more you're interested in each of those three things, the more likely it is that this post will be useful to you - but I expect it would also be useful to many people interested in just one or two of those things. This post is also likely to be more useful to people who are earlier in their relevant career journeys, since many of the resources will be well-known or unnecessary for people with more relevant experience. Will these resources be useful to you? Hard to say, as I don't know you or what you already know! But this post itself should only take a few minutes to read, and then you can make your own decision about which links to open and how closely to engage with them. These resources should hopefully help you have an impact, build your career capital (e.g., knowledge, skills, connections, and credentials), & test your personal fit for various roles, and find other good advice or valuable opportunities for doing those things. This post won't itself give you many specific tips. I've bolded the resources that I expect will typically be most useful. Behold! The herald resources: Things you could apply to Note: I suggest you don’t spend too long thinking about the pros and cons of applying to an opportunity (e.g., a job, grant, degree program, or internship). Assuming the initial application wouldn’t take you long, if it seems worth thinking hard about, you should probably just apply instead. I and Akash elaborate on this in Don’t think, just apply! (usually). You could use the 80,000 Hours Job Board to find listings of jobs relevant to effective altruism, including jobs that could help in building skills and testing fit. You could apply to EA-aligned research training programs or internships. You can find lists of such programs here and here. I previously put together a list of EA funding opportunities, and noted: “I strongly encourage people to consider applying for one or more of these things. Given how quick applying often is and how impactful funded projects often are, applying is often worthwhile in expectation even if your odds of getting funding aren’t very high. (I think the same basic logic applies to job applications.)” These funding opportunities could be used to support a very wide range of activities, such as research, career exploration and planning, community building, and entrepreneurship. You could apply for coaching from Effective Thesis or check our their resources if you're working on a thesis or other piece of academic research or considering doing so. You could subscribe to the Effective Altruism Newsletter to stay up to date with the effective altruism community and get updates about new job opportunities. Other sources of career advice 80,000 Hours have a lot of valuable guidance on having more social impact with your career. In particular, I often suggest people check out their in-depth process and template for career planning and apply for their free career advising. If you're reading this post, you've almost certainly heard of 80,000 Hours and know they have a career planning process and a career advising service. But I still find that many people who are keen to talk to me for career advice haven't actually worked through 80k's process or applied for their advising service. In most such cases, I strongly suggest actually doing so! In 2...
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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: 2-factor voting (karma, agreement) for EA forum?, published by david reinstein on June 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. As many of you know, on LessWrong there is now: two axes on which you can vote on comments: the standard karma axis remains on the left, and the new axis on the right lets you show much you agree or disagree with the content of a comment. I was thinking we should have this on EA Forum for the same reasons ... to avoid (i) agreement with the claim/position being confounded with (ii) liking the contribution to the discussion/community. Reading the comments over there, it seems there are mixed reviews. Some key critiques: Visual confusion and mental overload (maybe improvable with better formats) It's often hard to discern what 'agree with the post' means. My quick takes: A. We might consider this for EAFo after LW works out the bugs (and probably the team is considering it) B. Perhaps the 'agreement' axis should be something that the post author can add voluntarily, specifying what is the claim people can indicate agreement/disagreement with? (This might also work well with the metaculus prediction link that is in the works afaik). What are your thoughts...? [1] On two-factor voting for EA Forum overall On "post author chooses what the agreement target ('central claim') is" On whether the considerations here are different for EA Forum vs. LessWrong Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Will faster economic growth make us happier? The relevance of the Easterlin Paradox to Progress Studies, published by MichaelPlant on June 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This is a transcript of a talk I gave at the Moral Foundations of Progress Studies workshop at the University of Texas in March 2022. Or rather, it’s a re-recorded and edited version of the talk that was subsequently produced for a Global Priorities Institute reading group on ‘progress’ and then updated in light of many helpful comments from that seminar. The original slide deck can be viewed here. 1. Introduction As I understand it, Progress Studies is a nascent intellectual field which starts by asking the question, “Since we seem to have gotten a lot of progress over the last couple of hundred years, where did this come from, and what can we do to get more of it?” (Vox, 2021). Progress Studies has been popularised by academics such as Tyler Cowen and Steven Pinker. However, the Easterlin Paradox presents a real challenge to the claim that if we want more progress, we just need to improve the long-run growth rate - a view that Cowen argues for in his book Stubborn Attachments. This is a possible version of Progress Studies and the one I'm responding to. So what is the Easterlin Paradox? Quoting Easterlin and O'Connor (2022), the Easterlin Paradox states: At a point in time, happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time the long-term growth rates of happiness and income are not significantly related. There is a common view that economic growth is going to make our lives better, but the Easterlin Paradox challenges this. What's paradoxical is that at a given point in time, richer people are more satisfied than poorer people and richer countries are more satisfied than poorer countries, but over the course of time, countries which grow faster don't seem to get happier faster. In other words, if I get richer, that will be good for me, but if we all get richer, that won’t do anything for us collectively. While subjective wellbeing (self-reported happiness and life satisfaction) has gone up in previous decades, the challenge of the Easterlin Paradox is that countries which grow faster do not seem to be getting happier faster; growth per se seems unrelated to average subjective wellbeing. If the paradox holds, the result would be striking and significant. It would suggest that, if we want to increase average wellbeing, we must not rely on growth, but go back to the drawing board and see what really works. There's been quite a bit of debate over the nature and existence of the Paradox. The topic first emerged in 1974 when Richard Easterlin published a paper called, Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? It's been particularly challenged by Stevenson and Wolfers (2008), who claim the paradox is an illusion and growth is making us happier. However, after looking into this myself, I actually think that Easterlin has the better half of the debate and the paradox does propose a real challenge to the idea that economic growth alone will make us happier. My main purpose here is to explain what the Easterlin Paradox is and why - despite doubts - we need to take it seriously. My second purpose is to show that we can work out how to improve subjective wellbeing in society and make some tentative suggestions about this. However, this project is only starting to be taken seriously and there is lots more work to be done. 2. Evidence for the Paradox So where does the Easterlin Paradox data come from? It's based on survey questions such as: Taking all things together, how would you say things are these days? Would you say you're very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?[1] All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays, from one, diss...
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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: User-Friendly Intro Post, published by James Odene [User-Friendly] on June 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Introducing User-Friendly User-Friendly is an EA-aligned marketing agency. We provide marketing expertise to impact-driven organisations, multiplying efforts towards solving the world's biggest challenges. We have supported EA clients such as Giving What We Can, 80K, High Impact Athletes, WANBAM, Rethink Priorities, Happier Lives Institute and Carrick Flynn’s recent campaign for congress, with a wide-range of strategic and creative marketing services.We had been operating User-Friendly as a freelance side-hustle up until early May this year when we increased our capacity following funding from the EA Infrastructure Fund. The grant is to give User-Friendly operational support whilst we continue to assess the worth and desire for our work in this space. The Pitch Effective communication is a key component to the success of many organisational aims. As a movement, core components of our work are unavoidably entwined in the way in which we communicate with our intended audiences. Whether you are aiming to change opinions, change behaviours, drive others towards a more impactful path or encourage donations or pledges, the way in which your message is constructed and disseminated plays a crucial role in how effective your organisation can be. As an indication of the scale for impact, it’s worth considering the Kantar research that suggests the creative quality of marketing is one of the best multipliers of impact (x12). This indicates the substantial impact available between the best and worst marketing attempts on quality alone. We want to support EA-aligned organisations to achieve their strategic objectives by utilising our expertise and skills, ensuring that their marketing is effectively (and cost-effectively) implemented. The Service User-Friendly brings together the international marketing and behavioural science expertise of James Odene and the substantial global animal movement campaigns experience of Amy Odene. We also collaborate with external freelancers for specific expertise that we do not hold ourselves.Getting the best multiplying effect of marketing requires not only creative skill, but sound strategic underpinning honed through years of experience and training. We offer strategic services including; strategic consultation, messaging development, brand development and management and marketing auditing as well as creative execution services including; graphic design, branding, social media management and asset development, campaign development and ad creative. The Scoping In order to assess the current landscape of the movement’s marketing and communications resource, we disseminated a scoping survey earlier this year. 35 organisations responded, the results from which were assessed alongside our top preconceptions about the desire and worth of such an offering in the EA space, informing our strategy moving forward. Here you will find a list of our initial preconceptions, a summary of the responses in relation to these, and our agency's solution. We identified 6 challenges that we felt the EA movement faced in relation to such a service. You can review the full scoping survey here. Internal resource Organisations are looking for a specific service or task to be completed but do not have the resource, funding or perhaps full-time capacity need, to hire in-house for this particular project.Survey result: Throughout the survey results it is clear that the demand for one-off project based work is high, and growing, with seemingly no short-term intention to build this capacity in-house. With the current lack of resource, skill deficit and predicted increase in spend, it is reasonable to suggest that a service such as User-Friendly, could provide a...
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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: EA-break, EA-slow, published by Rémi T on June 22, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. See also: It's ok to leave EA Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Fill out this census of everyone who could ever see themselves doing longtermist work — it’ll only take a few mins, published by 80000 Hours on June 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Often it’s really helpful to know who might be good at or potentially some day willing to join exciting projects. We’re collecting that information, so we can share it with >20 longtermist orgs and >100 longtermist entrepreneurs and funders. All you need to do is put your name, email and LinkedIn on this form. This will be quick if you have an up-to-date LinkedIn or online CV. And if you want to, you can give us a bunch more information that might help connect you up with future projects. Who should fill this out? This is a census of people who might (now or any time in the future) be interested in joining or launching a project aimed at improving humanity's long-term prospects. This includes employees of current longtermist projects. Why are we doing this? To populate a spreadsheet of people that various longtermist organisations and individuals might contact when hiring or looking for a co-founder; To help us better understand the skillsets and current employment of people interested in longtermism. Who will see my response? Your responses may be shared with any organisation doing longtermist work, such as the ones on this list. Your responses may also be shared with more than 100 donors and entrepreneurs in the longtermist space who are looking to fund and start new projects, including the Future Fund regrantors. We will ask these people and organisations not to share your information further. Why would you not want to do this? Your employer might see this! If you work for a longtermist org, your employer will understand that including your name does not mean you want to leave your job. We want you to fill this out, but feel free to skip any sections if that makes you more comfortable. We’re going to share this database with lots of people (>100 people and >20 orgs). So there’s some risk this ends up being shared more widely without our consent. Of course, we would take any breach of your data seriously, but it would also help if you could avoid including anything you wouldn’t want to be widely known. People might reach out to you pitching you on projects, roles and ideas. This is obviously what we want! But this might be a small cost on your time or your inbox. Why should you do it anyway? This might be an extremely high impact use of a few minutes of your time. Organisations have been asking us (80,000 Hours) for a shareable list of people they can hire for years. So we’re finally going to have one! Hiring is really difficult and is a big bottleneck to building new orgs and starting new projects. We want to encourage more people to found new projects. This will also help connect founders to people who might be interested in co-founding or funding their projects. Where can I comment on this census? If you found a typo, or have an idea for how this census could be improved, please comment in this public doc so we can centrally track suggestions from across multiple sources. But feel free to comment below if you prefer. Who’s we? This form is maintained by 80,000 Hours, and was designed in collaboration with Nick Beckstead at the Future Fund. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: You don’t have to respond to every comment, published by Lizka on June 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: When you publish a post, you might get comments. Some of them might be pointing you to additional resources or expressing gratitude for the post, while some might give constructive feedback and point out disagreements or errors. It can be nice to engage in a conversation to get to the bottom of the disagreement but, crucially: you don’t have to respond to every comment. Epistemic status (how much you should trust me): Engaging with the Forum is my job, and I ran this by a few people, who all agreed with the argument. One person was surprised that this was an issue. So I’m more confident than usual. Elaboration Let’s say you’ve written a Forum post and finally gotten up the courage to publish it. You click the ‘Publish’ button, then anxiously avoid the Forum — but you occasionally check back in to glance at the karma count on your post. And then suddenly someone leaves a comment. Maybe they say: You write [...], but I don’t think this accounts for [...]. I think this means [...]. We encourage collective truth-seeking on the Forum, and sometimes that involves disagreements and criticism or pointing out errors. The commenter — as long as they’re civil — is providing a service by disagreeing or giving you feedback. As a result, it can sometimes feel like you’re obliged to respond to long or substantive comments. You might feel that since the commenter has put lots of effort into their comment, it’s rude not to respond. Or, especially if the comment is critical, it can feel like you’ve been publicly challenged, and if you don’t respond, you’ve ‘lost’. Or you might worry that if you don’t reply, you’ll look like a coward who can’t acknowledge their errors. These feelings are misguided. While it’s often helpful to engage in a conversation on the Forum and incorporate feedback into your posts, it’s not always the best course of action, and this should not be an obligation or even a strong norm. Some reasons you may not want to respond to comments You find it emotionally draining or stressful to engage in the conversation Responding takes valuable time that you could be spending on something else Keeping up with the conversation would distract you and harm your productivity You just don’t want to Relatedly, there are some specific harms that arise from having a norm that people should always respond to comments: People respond to comments too much and are unhappy, waste their time, or misuse their energy as a result People don’t post in the first place because they don’t want to have to respond to all the comments None of this means that Forum readers shouldn’t comment on posts! I think commenting is great. Just don’t be upset if the original poster does not respond. And of course, there are many reasons for responding to comments — you just shouldn’t feel like you have to. Conclusion & message If you ever needed someone with some semblance of authority to tell you that it’s ok to leave comments unanswered — consider this your message of permission. Someone I know even struck a bargain with their partner, agreeing that they will pay a fine if they respond to any comment on their forum post within the first week. That doesn’t seem like a bad idea. If you don’t want to engage with comments but feel awkward saying nothing, you can also share a link to this post and leave a comment response that just reads: Thank you for your comment. I appreciate it, but will not engage further. Thanks to those who prompted this post and gave feedback on it! Beware over-identification with karma! Karma can be determined by tons of random things — from the time you posted to what else is going on or what’s in vogue on the Forum that week — and doesn’t track true impact very well....
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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: Critiques of EA that I want to read, published by abrahamrowe on June 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Note — I’m writing this in a personal capacity, and am not representing the views of my employer. I’m interested in the EA red-teaming contest as an idea, and there are lots of interesting critiques I’d want to read. But I haven’t seen any of those written yet. I put together a big list of critiques of EA I’d be really interested in seeing come out of the contest. I personally would be interested in writing some of these, but don’t really have time to right now, so I am hoping that by sharing these, someone else will write a good version of them. I’d also welcome people to share other critiques they’d be excited to see written in the comments here! I think that if someone wrote all of these, there are many where I wouldn’t necessarily agree with the conclusions, but I’d be really interested in the community having a discussion about each of them and I haven’t seen that discussion happen before. If you want to write any of these, I’m happy to give brief feedback on it, or give you a bunch of bullet-points of my thoughts on them. Critiques of EA Defending person-affecting views Person-affecting views try to capture an intuition that is something like, “something can only be bad if it is bad for some particular person or group of people.” This specifically interacts with an argument for reducing existential risk that presents reducing x-risk as good because then future people will be born and have good lives. If you take a person-affecting view seriously, maybe you think it is no big deal that people won’t be born, since they aren’t any particular people, and thus not being born is not bad for them. Likewise, some forms of person-affecting views are generally neutral toward adding additional happy people, while a non-person-affecting total utilitarian view is in favor of adding additional happy people, all other things being neutral. People in the EA community have critiqued person-affecting views for a variety of reasons related to the nonidentity problem Person-affecting views are interesting, but pretty much universally dismissed in the EA community. However, I think a lot of people find the intuitions behind person-affecting views to be really powerful. And, if there was a convincing version of a person-affecting view, it probably would change a fair amount of longtermist prioritization. I’d really love to see a strong defense of person-affecting views, or a formulation of a person-affecting view that tries to address critiques made of them. This seems like a fairly valuable contribution to making EA more robust. I think I’d currently bet on the community not realigning in light of this defense, but it seems worth trying to make because the intuitions powering person-affecting views and compelling. It’s getting harder socially to be a non-longtermist in EA. People seem to push back on the idea that EA is getting more longtermist by pointing at the increase in granting in the global health and development space. Despite this, a lot of people seem to have a sense that EA is pushing toward longtermism. I think that the argument that EA is becoming more longtermist is stronger than doubters give it credit for, but it might mostly have to do with social dynamics in the space. The intellectual leaders / community building efforts seem to be focused on longtermism. The “energy” of the space seems mostly focused on longtermist projects. People join EA interested in neartermist causes, and gradually become more interested in longtermist causes (on average) I think that these factors might be making it socially harder to be a non-longtermist who engages with the EA community, and that is an important and missing part of the ongoing discussion about EA community norm...
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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: Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic, published by Evie Cottrell on June 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Thank you to Fin Moorhouse and Bella Forristal for helpful feedback on this post! Thanks to Fin for getting me so excited about writing this during coworking breaks that I struggled to focus on maths for the rest of the day. Nearly all of the best things that have happened to me in the last year have been a result of actively seeking and asking for those things. I have slowly been developing the skill of agency. By ‘agency’ I mean the ability to get what you want across different contexts – the general skill of coming up with ambitious goals and actually achieving them, whatever they are. In my experience, I’ve found this is learnable. Neel Nanda explains the concept of agency really well in this blog post, so I won’t repeat it here. Instead, I’ll focus on how to learn it. It’s worth acknowledging that agency is often socially discouraged in different minority groups. Speaking from my own experience, I used to feel shameful around being agentic – I associated it with being entitled or ‘too much’ or bossy – which seems to be a phenomenon that many women experience. I sometimes still have a voice in my head saying, “who do you think you are???” But, fortunately, I’m paying less and less attention to it. In no particular order, nine ways I’ve found to become unstoppably agentic: 1. Figure out what you need, figure out who can help you get it, ask them for it There will (nearly) always be people who can help you achieve your goals better. Find them and ask them to help you. They might say yes! If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. When I was self-studying for my A-Levels (UK high school exams), I reached out to an EA who I’d never met, asking to chat about why I was finding self-studying so hard. We ended up having a call, which I found extremely helpful. At the time, I had a huge ugh-field around my Anki flashcards, which he completely helped me clear up. I then started sending him my daily plan (after checking this was ok), which turned out to be a really valuable accountability system. He gave support and encouragement countless times over the few months. These daily check-ins were the best thing that could have happened to my A-Levels, and led me to feel way more supported throughout my time self-studying. Having a low bar for asking for help is a learnable mindset. Now, whenever I encounter something difficult or aversive, my first thought is, “who would be the best person to have on my side here?” Then I begin to reach out to people who could help. Things that make this hard in practice: It’s hard to actually know what you want or need; It’s hard to be creative about solutions and imagine how another person would help solve it; It can be intimidating to ask the person; You are making yourself vulnerable to rejection, which can feel crushing and bad. Some tentative solutions: Questions that help me figure out what I need: If this was easy, what would it look like? What is the bottleneck here and what can I do to solve it? What would it look like if I could do this with 10% of the time/ effort? What’s weighing on my mind? Whose advice would help me solve this problem? See this list of questions for more. One suggestion is that you can ask people if they know anyone who can help you. I recently asked an EA for help with this, and they generated nearly ten people who I could reach out to. (Also see point number 7 about considering a wide option space to be creative about solutions.) People can be scary! One thing to bear in mind though, is that EAs really love agency. So if the person you are asking for help is an EA, they’re likely to be impressed that you were so proactive. But, yup, it’s scary to put yourself out there. I really think it’s wort...
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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: Seven (more) learnings from LEEP, published by ClareDonaldson on June 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. LEEP (Lead Exposure Elimination Project) is an impact-driven nonprofit founded in 2020 through Charity Entrepreneurship’s incubation program. Our mission is to eliminate childhood lead poisoning and improve the health, wellbeing and potential of children worldwide. Our primary focus so far has been to work with policy-makers and industry to ban lead paints. (You can find out more in our launch post or our blog.) In this post we share some updates and lessons learnt during LEEP’s second year, following on from last year’s post. As background, by the end of LEEP’s first year, we had started programs in three countries and had received one government commitment to lead paint regulation. In LEEP’s second year (this year), we started working in six more countries, bringing the total to nine. We received another government commitment and paint manufacturers in two countries started switching to lead-free. You can see most of our current projects here. We hope the lessons in this post will be useful to potential nonprofit entrepreneurs and those working in policy change or advocacy. In other news, we are hiring! You can find out more later in this post. 1. By running programs in parallel, policy advocacy organisations can avoid time bottlenecks and expand their impact faster There are often waiting times in advocacy. We’ve found that governments or industry partners need time to independently move forward with the next steps in the process, such as organising a multi-stakeholder meeting, reviewing a new law, or when new paint ingredients are in transit. These waiting periods would slow down overall progress, but that can be avoided by running programs in multiple countries in parallel – when progress is bottlenecked by waiting times in one country, we can be moving activities ahead in others. We expect this could be a useful approach for other new policy organisations after their pilot stage, as it allows impact to be scaled to multiple countries without sacrificing speed in any individual country. 2. A hybrid approach of remote and in-person is another factor that allows a small team to increase their speed In our first year we found that it was possible to make progress with remote advocacy. We’ve found this is still the case, even after countries opened up and in-person meetings were possible again. Remote advocacy can reduce time spent travelling and arranging formal visits with government partners. This speeds up our work and makes it easier for one team member to manage government and partner relationships in multiple countires. WhatsApp or Zoom meetings, in combination with WhatsApp messages and emails, have led to more progress than we previously expected. We experimented with having Zoom calls with policy-makers using an interpreter (French-English in Niger and Portuguese-English in Angola), which were more successful than we expected and we will include in our standard toolbox if no LEEP team member is fluent. Overall we find remote engagement to be an efficient complement to in-person advocacy. 3. In-person conversations have outsized value It’s important to dig into a theory of change to gain better information about which levers matter most and why. We would like to start eight new projects by the end of 2023 and be working in at least 40 countries in a few years; this makes it important to gain information quickly in order to rapidly scale with an efficient playbook. When seeking this information, we have found that a number of very valuable lessons have come from in-person time in our focus-countries, which could be because: It’s easier to build trust and have warmer relationships, which makes it easier to ask (potentially more sensitive) questions ...
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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: A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform, published by NunoSempere on June 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: Dwelling on the negatives. Summary From 2013 to 2021, Open Philanthropy donated $200M to criminal justice reform. My best guess is that, from a utilitarian perspective, this was likely suboptimal. In particular, I am fairly sure that it was possible to realize sooner that the area was unpromising and act on that earlier on. In this post, I first present the background for Open Philanthropy's grants on criminal justice reform, and the abstract case for considering it a priority. I then estimate that criminal justice grants were distinctly worse than other grants in the global health and development portfolio, such as those to GiveDirectly or AMF. I speculate about why Open Philanthropy donated to criminal justice in the first place, and why it continued donating. I end up uncertain about to what extent this was a sincere play based on considerations around the value of information and learning, and to what extent it was determined by other factors, such as the idiosyncratic preferences of Open Philanthropy's funders, human fallibility and slowness, paying too much to avoid social awkwardness, “worldview diversification” being an imperfect framework imperfectly applied, or it being tricky to maintain a balance between conventional morality and expected utility maximization. In short, I started out being skeptical that a utilitarian, left alone, spontaneously starts exploring criminal justice reform in the US as a cause area, and to some degree I still think that upon further investigation, though I still have significant uncertainty. I then outline my updates about Open Philanthropy. Personally, I updated downwards on Open Philanthropy’s decision speed, rationality and degree of openness, from an initially very high starting point. I also provide a shallow analysis of Open Philanthropy’s worldview diversification strategy and suggest that they move to a model where regular rebalancing roughly equalizes the marginal expected values for the grants in each cause area. Open Philanthropy is doing that for its global health and development portfolio anyways. Lastly, I brainstorm some mechanisms which could have accelerated and improved Open Philanthropy's decision-making and suggest red teams and monetary bets or prediction markets as potential avenues of investigation. Throughout this piece, my focus is aimed at thinking clearly and expressing myself clearly. I understand that this might come across as impolite or unduly harsh. However, I think that providing uncertain and perhaps flawed criticism is still worth it, in expectation. I would like to note that I still respect Open Philanthropy and think that it’s one of the best philanthropic organizations around. Open Philanthropy staff reviewed this post prior to publication. Index Background information What is the case for Criminal Justice Reform? What is the cost-effectiveness of criminal justice grants? Why did Open Philanthropy donate to criminal justice in the first place? Why did Philanthropy keep donating to criminal justice? What conclusions can we reach from this? Systems that could have optimized Open Philanthropy’s impact Conclusion Background information From 2013 to 2021, Open Philanthropy distributed $199,574,123 to criminal justice reform [0]. In 2015, they hired Chloe Cockburn as a program officer, following a “stretch goal” for the year. They elaborated on their method and reasoning on The Process of Hiring our First Cause-Specific Program Officer. In that blog post, they described their expansion into the criminal justice reform space as substantially a “bet on Chloe”. Overall, the post was very positive about Chloe (more on red teams below). ...
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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: Apply to join SHELTER Weekend this August, published by joel bkr on June 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. SHELTER (Safe Haven to Evade Long-Term Extinction Risk) Weekend is a 3-4 day event focused on gaining strategic clarity on exactly what’s needed to build civilizational shelters, and perhaps kickstarting an organization to do so. It will take place August 5th-8th 2022, at a residential retreat in Oxford, UK. We are recruiting participants from a broad range of backgrounds. Travel, accommodation, and food during the event will be covered. (If attending the event still seems tricky to you, contact us and we’ll try to work something out.) The initial application is extremely short and has a June 26th deadline. Apply now! About the event Civilizational shelters could help civilization to survive or rebuild following global catastrophes. Building such shelters could be a high-value intervention (1), (2), (3), (4), but there is little systematic work on them so far. SHELTER Weekend will bring relevant actors together to further explore the idea and consider concrete steps to implementation. Questions we hope to get some clarity on include: What scale would we need for shelters to be helpful above existing natural, public, and private shelters? What information or technology might be most helpful to have stored within shelters? What are the major social challenges that shelters would face in the event of a catastrophe? To what extent should shelters host capacity for developing medical countermeasures? How should civilizational shelters be managed in the years before a potential catastrophe? What are the bottlenecks to having civilizational shelters? What are the most useful things that could be done over the next 2-3 years on civilizational shelters? What would we need from initial teams working on these challenges? We hope that this event will lead to greater strategic clarity, better professional integration of people thinking about shelters, and perhaps concrete plans for work over the next months and years towards a future which has a robust line of defense against civilization-ending catastrophes in the form of shelters. Who we’re looking for Participants might have skills in: management, leadership, engineering (various flavors), biosecurity research, (anti-)nuclear research, or disaster planning. But this list is not exhaustive — we surely have not yet thought of all possible roles! Please err on the side of applying even if you are unsure whether or not your skills could be helpful. We are most interested in applications from people who want to engage with both the macrostrategic questions of how shelters could help, and the pragmatic questions of what will be needed from new organizations. Still, if you’re particularly keen on one half of this we would be excited for you to apply. It would be great to have event participants be excited about potentially joining a shelter-building organization that might result from the event. But you do not need to want to do this to participate in the event, and you do not need to participate in the event in order to do this! Contact us For queries about the event, Joel Becker joelhbkr@gmail.com. For queries about shelters more broadly, Tereza Flidrova tereza.flidrova13@gmail.com and Sebastian Lodemann sebastian.lodemann@gmail.com. Or leave a comment on this post! Apply now! Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Steering AI to care for animals, and soon, published by Andrew Critch on June 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I'm worried that animal welfare advocates might neglect the importance of AI in determining what happens to animals. More specifically, I'm worried that the value {animal welfare matters} and the true-according-to-me belief {AI is going to transform and determine most of what happens on earth} ... don't exist in same person often enough, such that opportunities to steer AI technology toward applications that care for animals could go under-served. Of course, we could hope that AI alignment solutions would, if effective in protecting human wellbeing, would likely serve animals as well, but I'm not so sure, and I'd like to see more efforts to change the memetic landscape among present-day humans to better recognize the sentience and moral importance of of animal life, especially wild animals that we might not by default think of humanity as "responsible for". The only concrete example I know of is the following, which seems to have had little support from or connection to EA: / - a project using ML to translate the language of sperm whale in their natural habitat. As far as I know, they are not fully funded, and could probably use support from EAs, and I think the work they're doing is in-principle feasible from a technical perspective. Ideally, I'd like to see a lot more support for projects like the above, which increase AI animal welfare bandwidth over the next 3-5 years, before more break-neck progress in AI makes it even harder to influence people and steer where technology and its applications are going. So! If you care about animals, and are starting to get more interested in importance of AI, please consider joining or supporting or starting projects that steer AI progress toward caring more about animals. I'm sad to say my day job is not addressing this problem nearly as well or as quickly as I'd like (although we will somewhat), so I wanted to issue a bit of a cry for help — or at least, a cry for "someone should do something here". Whatever you decide, good luck, and thanks for reading! Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Megaprojects for animals, published by James Ozden on June 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary Megaprojects ($100M+) for nonhuman animal welfare seem unlikely unless major new funding appears. We still think it is worth laying out some ideas of comparatively smaller $10M megaprojects so that there are some shovel-ready projects if large funding arrives, and to perhaps entice funders to enter the space in a big way with a list of promising ideas. This post lists some animal welfare projects that further research might reveal would cost-effectively absorb $10M+/year. Where are the megaprojects for animals? There has been a lot of buzz lately about megaprojects (projects that could deploy $100 million or more in funding per year). However, among the long lists of ideas presented so far (here, here, here, here, here, here) there are few ideas to reduce or end the suffering of animals. This invites the question: do we have similarly scalable and promising opportunities to cost-effectively help animals given additional resources? Despite corporate campaigns being very cost-effective (Šimčikas 2019) and receiving a large share of EA animal funding (Kato 2022, Ozden 2021), it’s not obvious that this will continue indefinitely. How much can we scale up corporate campaigns and still achieve a sufficiently large total impact to offset any decline in cost-effectiveness? What are some potential large and effective projects if our current projects become fully funded or less cost-effective? What options do we have for other species and welfare asks? Can they scale? Current spending by 2,000 organisations that include fighting factory farming as part of their work is just over $200 million per year (FAF 2021, 2020), and even less, about $40 million per year, is spent on “effective animal advocacy” (Ozden 2021 and Forristal 2020). Most (85%) of these organisations in the animal advocacy space operate on budgets less than $1M, and the largest operate on less than $20M (FAF 2020). So we’re very short of the level of spending of $100M+ megaprojects. However, it’s expected that as the EA movement grows, the resources available to EA-aligned animal advocacy will too (especially from increased funding in this space from Open Philanthropy and possibly FTX Community). Still, it’s unclear if/when this would reach the levels of funding available for human-focused longtermist projects. Given this practical limit, $10M might be a more reasonable operationalization of “mega” in this space. Regardless, we still think it is worth laying out some ideas of megaprojects for animals so that there are some shovel-ready projects if funding scales up, and to perhaps entice funders to enter the space in a big way with promising ideas. Additionally, this list is a call to action to generate back-of-the-envelope calculations or detailed research into some of these ideas, to more rigorously identify highly scalable and cost-effective ways to help animals. This list contains ideas from a range of reviews, contributors, and experts (though not all may endorse the broader idea of megaprojects or all ideas in this post). We haven’t yet taken the time to assess whether each of them could absorb $10M and at what level of cost-effectiveness. Partly this is because it’s unclear what the minimum bar should be. We are unsure which interventions can reach the cost-effectiveness of cage-free campaigns, especially when spending $10M per year (61-120 years of chicken life per average dollar spent/ ~7 animals spared a year of complete suffering). We perhaps should be willing to lower the cost-effectiveness bar because it’s plausible corporate campaigns are just a very rare good opportunity and it’s unfair to use it as a baseline (imagine if Givewell only granted to opportunities that were at least 5x AMF inst...
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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: Power dynamics between people in EA, published by Julia Wise on June 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In any field, including EA, power differences affect how people interact. Sometimes power differences are obvious, like between a manager and their report or a grantmaker and grantee. Organizations should have policies around some things here, like on conflicts of interest within an organization. But there are a bunch of smaller power differences that subtly affect a lot of interactions. Formal policies would be too heavy-handed here, but we can all adjust how we handle these situations. I've tried to lay out some situations to be aware of, and steps that might help. This post is meant for people who have relatively more power within EA — though who that is changes with the circumstances! EA is complicated EA is both a social community and a professional field. In the words of one HR person at an EA organization about handling this dynamic, “Boy, is it complicated and strange.” For many of us who work in EA, it will be well worth it to have friendships, housemates, and/or partners within the community, not just our professional contacts. But that also introduces more complexity, and we should expect to need to tread carefully. Some factors in how people influence each other Funding Being an actual grantmaker Having grantmakers in your network who listen to you Being a major donor to an organization In organizations If you work at or are on the board of an EA organization, you can affect the outcome of other people’s interactions with the organization. This affects hiring, grantmaking, etc even if you aren’t directly involved in hiring or funding. Your impression of a colleague can matter for promotion and other decisions, even if you’re not directly managing them. Network Who you can introduce people to, who you’re friends with, etc. Gatekeeping Ability to get people in or keep them out of events, retreats, office spaces, parties, etc. Age This won’t be true of everyone, but my impression is that people under about 25 often weigh others’ opinions more heavily and have a harder time expressing clearly when they’re uncomfortable with something. History If they looked up to you when they were first getting involved in EA, you may still have a kind of influence over them even if you’re now peers in other ways. Demographics and culture Some of this is big obvious categories like race and gender, but some is subtler things like accent, sharing more background knowledge with the cool kids, etc. People from cultures with higher power distance may be more reluctant to question authority figures. How this affects things Relationships that feel equal aren’t always equal If I ask a community member for a favor, I don’t feel like I’m pulling rank or anything. But because of various advantages I have over them, their perception of the interaction will probably be slanted by those things. So maybe they’ll go along with things that are more costly for them than I intended. Possible steps: Ask fewer favors from people who might feel uncomfortable refusing. Try to make clear when things are truly optional, and provide easy ways to decline. It’s harder for junior people to give their real opinion Opinions that junior people express will often be shaped (maybe unintentionally and unknowingly) by what they perceive senior people’s opinions to be or what they think the senior people want to hear. Possible steps: Ask junior people to share thoughts before you give yours. Listen openly and show interest. Give them more time and encouragement to lay out messy thoughts. Set the stage for welcoming messy / unformed thoughts by sharing some of your own. Give encouragement and appreciation when they offer opinions and especially when they disagree with you - make it a good experience for...
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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: Effektiv Spenden - Review of the Year 2021, published by Sebastian Schwiecker on May 31, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. It has been a good year. In 2021, Effektiv Spenden was able to raise a total of 18.86 million euros from more than 9,000 donors for some of the most effective charities in the world. This represents a growth of over 560% compared to the previous year (2.84 million euros), once again exceeding all our expectations. 56% of the donations went to development aid organizations, 22% to climate change organizations, 19% to animal welfare organizations, and 3% to organizations seeking to reduce existential risk or invest in the Effective Altruism community. Four reasons were particularly decisive for this, in our view, extremely positive development: 1. Attracting major donors 58% of our donation volume in 2021 came from people who donated 100,000 euros or more (2020: 21%). In cooperation with our partner legacies.now as well as other philanthropic advisors, we were able to respond to individual needs—sometimes at very short notice—without having to compromise on the effectiveness of the charities we recommended. 2. Effektiv Spenden Switzerland We set up a non-profit in Switzerland in 2021 and met a high level of interest there from day one, thanks in part to the support of the Effective Altruism Foundation. Particularly through major donors, this has led to donations from Switzerland accounting for 48% of our total donation volume last year. 3. Press relations In 2021, wide-reaching media once again reported on us and the idea of effective giving. In addition to radio appearances on Deutschlandfunk or Bayerischer Rundfunk, we were also briefly the lead story on Spiegel Online, Germany's largest news site outside the tabloids, in December. 4. Growth of Effective Altruism The language barrier continues to prevent excellent English-language contributions from the Effective Altruism community (e.g., The Precipice, 80,000 Hours podcasts and articles, etc.) from reaching a wider audience in German-speaking countries. Nevertheless, we have benefited from the general growth of the EA community. To find out what percentage of our donors are familiar with Effective Altruism, we regularly conduct surveys, with the following results: about 24% said they were well versed in Effective Altruism. 47% said they were somewhat familiar, and 29% had not previously heard of Effective Altruism. However, among major donors the proportion of people already very familiar with Effective Altruism was smaller. In addition to raise money for effective charities, we opened TEAMWORK in May 2021, a coworking space by and for the EA community. Despite the constraints of the Covid 19 pandemic, we were thus able to offer people from more than 20 EA-aligned organizations an opportunity to (net)work. With an average of less than 2 full-time employees in 2021, we were able to keep our costs very low despite the rapid growth of the platform. Excluding the start-up costs for setting up and operating the TEAMWORK Office and additional flow-through costs, these amounted to approximately 175,000 euros according to preliminary calculations. Putting this in relation to the volume of donations we raised results in a multiplier of 107, i.e. for every euro we needed to operate the platform, we were able to generate 107 euros for the charities we recommended. One reason for the relatively low costs is also that we were able to switch from an external donor management system that had become increasingly more expensive and inflexible for our needs to a customized solution of our own. This was only possible thanks to the initiative of Patrick Gruban, who, as a volunteer, designed and programmed a customized system within a few months. With this we were able to process several million euros and francs...
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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: We should expect to worry more about speculative risks, published by Ben Garfinkel on May 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. (This is a repost of a short-form, which I realized might be worth making into its own post. It’s partly inspired by Greg Lewis’s recent post “Rational Predictions Often Update Predictably.”)[1] The existential risk community’s level of concern about different possible risks is correlated with how hard-to-analyse these risks are. For example, here is The Precipice’s ranking of the top five most concerning existential risks: Unaligned artificial intelligence[2] Unforeseen anthropogenic risks (tied) Engineered pandemics (tied) Other anthropogenic risks Nuclear war (tied) Climate change (tied) This isn’t surprising. For a number of risks, when you first hear and think a bit about them, it’s reasonable to have the reaction “Oh, hm, maybe that could be a huge threat to human survival” and initially assign something on the order of a 10% credence to the hypothesis that it will by default lead to existentially bad outcomes. In each case, if we can gain much greater clarity about the risk, then we should think there’s about a 90% chance this clarity will make us less worried about it. We’re likely to remain decently worried about hard-to-analyze risks (because we can’t get greater clarity about them) while becoming less worried about easy-to-analyze risks. In particular, our level of worry about different plausible existential risks is likely to roughly track our ability to analyze them (e.g. through empirical evidence, predictively accurate formal models, and clearcut arguments). Some plausible existential risks also are far easier to analyze than others. If you compare 80,000 Hours’ articles on climate change and artificial intelligence, for example, then I think it is pretty clear that people analyzing existential risks from climate change simply have a lot more to go on. When we study climate change, we can rely on climate models that we have reason to believe have a decent amount of validity. We can also draw on empirical evidence about the historical effects of previous large changes in global temperature and about the ability of humans and other species to survive under different local climate conditions. As a conceptual foundation, we are also lucky to have a set of precise and scientifically validated concepts (e.g. “temperature” and "sea-level") that we can use to avoid ambiguity in our analysis. And so on. We’re in a much worse epistemic position when it comes to analyzing the existential risk posed by misaligned AI: we’re reliant abstract arguments that use ambiguous concepts (e.g. “objectives” and “intelligence”), rough analogies, observations of the behaviour of present-day AI systems (e.g. reinforcement learners that play videogames) that will probably be very different than future AI systems, a single datapoint (the evolution of human intelligence and values) that has a lot of important differences with the case we’re considering, and attempts to predict the incentives and beliefs of future actors in development scenarios that are still very opaque to us. Even if misaligned AI actually poses very little risk to continued human survival, then it’s hard to see how we could become really confident of that. Some upshots: The fact that the existential risk community is particularly worried about misaligned AI might largely reflect the fact that it’s hard to analyze risks from misaligned AI. Nonetheless, even if the above possibility is true, it doesn't at all follow that the community is irrational to worry more about misaligned AI than other potential risks. It’s completely coherent to have something like this attitude: “If I could think more clearly about the risk from misaligned AI, then I would probably come to realize it’s not a ...
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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: High Impact Medicine, 6 months later - Update & Key Lessons, published by Akhil on May 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. With thanks to Jacob Arbeid, George Rosenfeld, Jacob Smith, Thomas Cohen, Jake Mendel (Hi-Med Oxford), Pauline Scheuber (Hi-Med Germany), Erik Jentzen (Hi-Med Germany) and Rahul Shah (Hi-Med Cambridge) for comments. 6 months ago, we launched High Impact Medicine. In this post, we share an update on our progress and the lessons we learnt in running a community building organisation focussed on a particular profession. We hope that this might be relevant to others interested in community building, particularly in professional and workplace groups. High Impact Medicine is a group whose goals are to bring together medics who want to have a wide reaching positive impact, alongside and learning from clinical practice, and explore the opportunities for them to do so. We have 3 main paths to impact: Outreach & community building: our chapters run talks and socials for medics of all grades, from students to doctors working in hospitals or outside of clinical medicine Knowledge building around impact in medicine: we run a fellowship, a podcast and talks. We are planning to run follow up ‘senior’ fellowships as well. Career advice: we help members explore how they can have a large impact alongside, and learning from clinical medicine We set out to foster local, engaged communities of medical students and doctors including those not familiar with EA, focussing on outreach to new interested medics, working alongside EA Medicine who facilitate a global network of medics who are already EA aligned. Since launching: High Impact Medicine has grown to approximately 100-120 members, at least 60 of whom are moderately to highly engaged (definition). Our rough split has been 70% medical students and 30% doctors. Our inaugural fellowship attracted 7 cohorts with a total of 54 fellows We have run many talks and socials in Cambridge, Oxford and London with an average of 15 attendees per event, with speakers including Professor Sir Andrew Pollard We have launched our Podcast Several (≥4) members have taken the GWWC pledge, and ≥3 others have made changes in their career direction as a result of being part of the organisation. We have expanded significantly beyond our initial base in the UK: We recently launched High-Impact Medicine Germany We are running a cohort of our fellowship for medical students in Tehran, Iran We have members in the USA, Australia and Singapore. Our key lessons 1. Having an open framing allows for effective outreach We chose to frame Hi-Med openly - a chance for medics to find out about ways to ‘have a widespread positive impact’ and explore areas such as ‘global health, health policy, biosecurity and mental health’. Our objective was to try and get a lot of people interested in considering their own personal impact and how they could do a lot of good alongside and learning from their medical backgrounds. This was reflected in the fact that a significant number (approximately 25 out of 50) of the fellowship participants were entirely new to EA. Many of the ideas we discussed in the fellowship stem from the Effective Altruism community (e.g. ITN framework, EA-aligned cause areas) but we also drew on material from the wider scientific community in our fellowship, talks and podcast. Our approach was intended to provide medics with information to make their own decisions and enable an honest approach. Hearing ideas without them being exclusively attached to a wider philosophy and in more neutral (rather than persuasive) fashion may help avoid putting people off and allows individuals the freedom to pick aspects they found more meaningful to explore. This helps encourage a ‘truth seeking’ approach that focuses on ‘learning useful tools and asking...
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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: On funding, trust relationships, and scaling our community [PalmCone memo], published by Habryka on May 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The following is a memo I wrote for the private "PalmCone" conference that Lightcone ran a few months ago that involved many people active in AI Alignment and EA community building (that I was sadly unable to attend myself because of visa reasons). I previously posted it in two comments on a previous post, but people kept asking me for a more easily linkable version, so here it is as a top-level post. Epistemic status: Vague models that try to point at something. Many details are likely wrong. If I had more time I would say more accurate things, but I wanted to get this out before you all get started with the retreat. I think it it was Marc Andreessen who first hypothesized that startups usually go through two very different phases: Pre Product-market fit: At this stage, you have some inkling of an idea, or some broad domain that seems promising, but you don't yet really have anything that solves a really crucial problem. This period is characterized by small teams working on their inside-view, and a shared, tentative, malleable vision that is often hard to explain to outsiders. Post Product-market fit: At some point you find a product that works for people. The transition here can take a while, but by the end of it, you have customers and users banging on your door relentlessly to get more of what you have. This is the time of scaling. You don't need to hold a tentative vision anymore, and your value proposition is clear to both you and your customers. Now is the time to hire people and scale up and make sure that you don't let the product-market fit you've discovered go to waste. I think it was Paul Graham or someone else close to YC (or maybe Ray Dalio) who said something like the following (NOT A QUOTE, since I currently can't find the direct source): The early stages of an organization are characterized by building trust. If your company is successful, and reaches product-market fit, these early founders and employees usually go on to lead whole departments. Use these early years to build trust and stay in sync, because when you are a thousand-person company, you won't have the time for long 10-hour conversations when you hang out in the evening. As you scale, you spend down that trust that you built in the early days. As you succeed, it's hard to know who is here because they really believe in your vision, and who just wants to make sure they get a big enough cut of the pie. That early trust is what keeps you agile and capable, and frequently as we see founders leave an organization, and with that those crucial trust relationships, we see the organization ossify, internal tensions increase, and the ability to effectively correspond to crises and changing environments get worse. It's hard to say how well this model actually applies to startups or young organizations (it matches some of my observations, though definitely far from perfectly), and even more dubious how well it applies to systems like our community, but my current model is that it captures something pretty important. I think whether we want it or not, I think we are now likely in the post-product-market fit part of the lifecycle of our community, at least when it comes to building trust relationships and onboarding new people. I think we have become high-profile enough, and have enough visible resources (especially with FTX's latest funding announcements), and have gotten involved in enough high-stakes politics, that if someone shows up next year at EA Global, you can no longer confidently know whether they are there because they have a deeply shared vision of the future with you, or because they want to get a big share of the pie that seems to be up for t...
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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: Quantifying Uncertainty in GiveWell's GiveDirectly Cost-Effectiveness Analysis, published by Hazelfire on May 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Effort: This took about 40 hours to research and write, excluding time spent developing Squiggle. Disclaimer: Opinions do not represent the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute nor GiveWell. I talk about GiveWell's intentions with the GiveDirectly model. However, my understanding may not be complete. All mistakes are my own. Epistemic Status: I am uncertain about these uncertainties! Most of them are best guesses. I could also be wrong about the inconsistencies I've identified. A lot of these issues could easily be considered bike-shedding. Target Audiences: I wrote this post for: People who are interested in evaluating interventions. People who are interested in the quantification of uncertainty. EA software developers that are interested in open source projects. TLDR: I've transposed GiveDirectly's Cost-Effectiveness Analysis into an interactive notebook. This format allows us to measure our uncertainty about GiveDirectly's cost-effectiveness. The model finds that GiveDirectly's 95% confidence interval for its effectiveness spans an order of magnitude, which I deem a relatively low level of uncertainty. Additionally, I found an internal inconsistency with the model that increased GiveDirectly's cost-effectiveness by 11%. The notebook is quite long, detailed and technical. Therefore, I present a summary in this post. This model uses Squiggle, an in-development language for estimation and evaluation, developed by myself and others at the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute. We'll write more about the language itself in future posts, especially as it becomes more stable. GiveWell's cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) of top charities are often considered the gold standard. However, they still have room for improvement. One such improvement is the quantification of uncertainty. I created a Squiggle Notebook that investigates this for GiveDirectly CEA. This notebook also serves as an example of Squiggle and what's possible with future CEAs. In GiveWell's CEAs, GiveDirectly is used as a benchmark to evaluate other interventions. All other charities' effectiveness is measured relative to GiveDirectly. For example, as of 2022, the Against Malaria Foundation was calculated to be 7.1x to 15.4x as cost-effective as GiveDirectly. Evidence Action's Deworm the World is considered 5.3x to 38.2x as cost-effective. GiveDirectly makes a good benchmark because unconditional cash transfers have a strong (some might even say tautological) case behind their effectiveness. GiveDirectly being a benchmark makes it a good start for quantifying uncertainty. I also focus on GiveDirectly because it's the most simple CEA. GiveWell CEAs do not include explicit considerations of uncertainty in their analysis. However, quantifying uncertainty has many benefits. It can: Improve people's understanding of how much evidence we have behind interventions. Help us judge the effectiveness of further research on an intervention using the Value of Information. Allows us to forecast parameters and better determine how wrong we were about different parameters to correct them over time. Cole Haus has done similar work quantifying uncertainty on GiveWell models in Python. The primary decision in this work is choosing how much uncertainty each parameter has. I decided on this with two different methods: If there was enough information about the parameter, I performed a formal bayesian update. If there wasn't as much information, I guessed it with the help of Nuño Sempere, a respected forecaster. These estimates are simple, and future researchers could better estimate them. Results Methodology and calculations are in my Squiggle notebook: /@hazelfire/giv...
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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: Introducing Asterisk, published by Clara Collier on May 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Asterisk is a new quarterly journal of ideas from in and around Effective Altruism. Our goal is to provide clear, engaging, and deeply researched writing about complicated questions. This might look like a superforecaster giving a detailed explanation of the reasoning they use to make a prediction, a researcher discussing a problem in their work, or deep-dive into something the author noticed didn’t quite make sense. While everything we publish should be useful (or at least interesting) to committed EAs, our audience is the wider penumbra of people who care about improving the world but aren't necessarily routine readers of, say, the EA forum. In a nutshell: we're for Bayes' theorem, acknowledging our uncertainty, weird hypotheticals, and well constructed sentences. We're against easy answers, lazy metaphors, and the end of life as we know it. Submission Guidelines While we expect the bulk of our pieces will be about typical EA cause areas (we think they’re important for a reason!), we’re a lot less interested in covering specific topics than in showcasing an "EA-ish" way of thinking about the world. We want to show off what this community does best: finding new ideas, taking them seriously, and investigating them rigorously – all while doing our best to reason under uncertainty. We’re especially excited about pieces that help readers improve their epistemics and build better models of the world (the kinds of questions you’d see in the world-modeling tag on Less Wrong would all be within scope for us). We’d like to see smart writing about global catastrophic risks aimed at a wider audience, EA methods applied to topics we’ve never thought about, and historical case studies that help us understand the present. Here are a few representative examples of the kinds of questions we’d like to see people tackle: How can we predict the next pandemic? Are there plausible candidate pathogens outside the usual suspects (flu, pox or coronavirus)? What economic impacts of AI do we expect to see in the next five years? The next ten? Which industries will be impacted first? How was Oral Rehydration Therapy developed and rolled out? Why did it take until the 1960s when the underlying mechanism is so simple? The pessimists are probably right about lab grown meat for human consumption. Is there a niche for it anyway? Does the typical American cow lead a life worth living? We're approaching the 10 year anniversary of the replication crisis: what's changed, what hasn't? Net neutrality was repealed in 2018. At the time, everyone was convinced this would be the end of internet freedom. What's actually happened since, and why did so many people get it wrong? What lessons should the biosafety community draw from the Soviet & US cold war bio-warfare programs? Technology drives agricultural productivity in the US – what are the barriers to bringing that to the developing world? Effective PPE exists. What would it take to make it wearable and widely available? What do we know about the evolution of human intelligence, and what, if anything can it tell us about the development of artificial intelligence? How contingent is scientific progress? Is differential technological development possible, and if so, how can it be steered? Right now, we’re not interested in pure philosophy, movement evangelism, or meta-EA and other inside baseball. Reports on the health of the community or various internal organizations can be interesting, but they don’t have the kind of broad appeal we’re looking for. If you're interested in writing for us, please send a short paragraph explaining your idea (along with a writing sample, if you have one) to clara@asteriskmag.com. Jobs In addition to writers, we're looking for: M...
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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: Open Philanthropy's Cause Exploration Prizes: $120k for written work on global health and wellbeing, published by ChrisSmith on May 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. At Open Philanthropy, we aim to give as effectively as we can. To find the best opportunities, we’ve looked at many different causes, some of which have become our current focus areas. Even after a decade of research, we think there are many excellent grantmaking ideas we haven’t yet uncovered. So we’ve launched the Cause Exploration Prizes around a set of questions that will help us explore new areas. We’re most interested in responses to our open prompt: “What new cause area should Open Philanthropy consider funding?” We also have prompts in the following areas: Health Development Worldview Investigations We’re looking for responses of up to 5,000 words that clearly convey your findings. It’s fine to use bullet points and informal language. For more detail, see our guidance for authors. To submit, go to this page. We hope that the Prizes help us to: Identify new cause areas and funding strategies. Develop our thinking on how best to measure impact. Find people who might be a good fit to work with us in the future. You can read more about the Cause Exploration Prizes on our dedicated website. You’ll also be able to read all of the submissions on the Effective Altruism Forum later this summer – stay tuned! Prizes, rules, and deadlines All work must be submitted by 11:00 pm PDT on August 4, 2022. You are almost certainly eligible. We think these questions can be approached from many directions; you don’t need to be an expert or have a PhD to apply. There’s a $25,000 prize for the top submission, and three $15,000 prizes. Anyone who wins one of these prizes will be invited to present their work to Open Phil’s cause prioritization team in San Francisco (with compensation for time and travel). And we will follow up with authors if their work contributes to our grantmaking decisions! We will also award twenty honorable mentions ($500), and a participation award ($200) for the first 200 submissions made in good faith and not awarded another prize. All submissions will be shared on the Forum to allow others to learn from them. If participants prefer, their submission can be published anonymously, and we can handle the logistics of posting to the Forum. See more detail here. For full eligibility requirements and prize details, see our rules and FAQs. If you have any questions not answered by that page, contact us at hello@causeexplorationprizes.com. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Some unfun lessons I learned as a junior grantmaker, published by Linch on May 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I’ve been a part-time grantmaker since January 15th or so, first (and currently) as a guest manager on the Long-Term Future Fund, and more recently did non-trivial other grantmaking as well. In doing so, I learned a number of useful but not fun lessons, some of which may be useful to others on this forum. I mostly learned these lessons through consulting more senior grantmakers and other advisors, and secondarily from thinking through these problems abstractly, rather than independently learning them the hard way from contact with reality with my own grants. Standard disclaimers apply: all views are my own. I do not speak for any of the people who advised me on grantmaking. I do not speak for the Long-Term Future Fund, other grantmakers, or my full-time employer (Rethink Priorities). I believe my points are more true for the longtermist and meta spaces (I have zero experience with animal or global health grantmaking), and more true for longtermism than meta (in particular, I think the points about feedback especially are directionally true for meta but less so than in longtermist grantmaking). Most of my actual grants have been in forecasting, but I actually do not believe my points below are more true for forecasting grants than for other subfields of longtermist grantmaking. In this article, I tried my best to convey knowledge that is both true and at least somewhat novel to me/this Forum. In doing so, I may say things that are systematically not-yet-said because others believe that these messages are difficult to hear and convey publicly with the appropriate level of care and nuance. I tried my best to be both honest and kind, but I likely still screwed up the balance at various parts. I ask for your patience. Summary Important lessons (Refresher) The top grants are much much better than the marginal grants, even ex ante. All of the grantmakers are extremely busy Most (within-scope) projects are usually rejected for personal factors or person-project fit reasons Some of your most impactful work in grantmaking won’t look like evaluating grants Most grantmakers don’t (and shouldn’t) spend a lot of time on evaluating any given grant. It’s rarely worth your time to give detailed feedback Less Important Lessons The value of time for people in EA is incredibly high The direct counterfactual impact of grant evaluation is lower than I initially would have guessed People are often grateful to you for granting them money. This is a mistake. Conflicts of Interests are unavoidable if you want to maximize impact as a grantmaker in EA. Acceptance/Rejection rates can easily be extremely misleading (Refresher) The top grants are much much better than the marginal grants, even ex ante. I think it’s well understood in EA that for most important values of X in the EA space (charitable interventions, organizations, careers, etc,), the best X are much more impactful than the marginal X. I think I have internalized this more after I started grantmaking than before. In particular, I now understood that (from the perspective of many grantmakers), their top grants are ex ante much more impactful than their marginal grants. This lesson has publicly been discussed by other grantmakers, see e.g. I think the top decile is at least an order of magnitude more impactful (per dollar) than the bottom decile grantmaking that we’re doing Claire I think that more than half of the impact I have via my EAIF grantmaking is through the top 25% of the grants I make. And I am able to spend more time on making those best grants go better, by working on active grantmaking or by advising grantees in various ways. Buck In practice, this often means that your highest impact actions as a grant...
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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: Impact is very complicated, published by Justis on May 22, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: gestural food for thought. This is a post to aggregate a bunch of boring or obvious observations that are easy to overlook. I don't expect anything to be new. But I do think difficulties gauging impact, in aggregate, form a sort of missing mood that we should be paying more attention to. At the end of the post, I'll touch on why. Let us count the ways Here are some factors that can make assessing impact complex: Some interventions are backed by scientific studies. Scientific studies vary in quality in many ways. They can be larger or smaller, more or less numerous, clearly biased or apparently unbiased, clearly significant or only marginally significant, randomized or non-randomized, observational or experimental, etc. Even for good studies, the same interventions may become better or worse over time as conditions in the world change, or may be very particular to certain places. Cash transfers, for example, might just work way better in certain parts of the world than others, and it may be hard to predict how or why in advance. Many interventions require many simultaneous layers of involvement. Suppose I give to the Against Malaria Foundation. I can say "I estimate I am saving a life per $5,000 I spend." But I read Peter Singer when I was 13, then Scott Alexander when I was 19, and I likely wouldn't have ended up donating much without these. I also couldn't give to AMF if it didn't exist, so I owe a debt to Rob Mather. And perhaps whoever told Scott Alexander about AMF. All these steps are necessary to actually "save a life", so we run the risk of massively overcounting if we give every person in the chain "full credit". But there's no objectively rigorous way to decide who gets how much of the credit! Just using counterfactuals doesn't work; it may be the case that all of us are required and a single person "out of the chain" breaks it down. But we can't all get all the credit! Plus many interventions, like in the AMF example, mostly are just reducing probabilities across large numbers of people anyway. What does it even mean for "my money" to "save life". Once the money all goes into a pool, whose money actually funds which nets anyway? And which nets prevent cases of malaria that would have been fatal? No way to answer these questions even in principle. Some (perhaps all) interventions rely on difficult-to-impossible philosophical questions to resolve. How should we weigh insect suffering? All we can do is guess - learning more facts about insects doesn't really get us over Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat?" hurdle. Empirical information, analogies, and intuition pumps all can help, but there are fundamental judgment calls at play. How to assess well being and weigh well being against survival is another example here where it's hard to boil down to numbers: there are lots of ways to do it (QALYs, seeing how much people would pay to avert various harms, natural experiments) but none is perfect and all involve their own judgment calls. Some interventions require certain thresholds being met or they don't actually accomplish anything. Donating to a political campaign that promises credibly to do something good might help bring about that good thing. But if the campaign fails, that donation accomplished basically nothing. Existential risk mitigation efforts (as such) only do any good if they work. If the world ends anyway, that effort didn't actually accomplish anything. Plenty of interventions can also backfire. Some interventions aim to increase or decrease probabilities. There are a lot of ways to mess this up. My least favorite arguments in intro EA messaging historically were things like: "even if the chance of [EVENT] is quite low, say 1%, then ...
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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: You should join an EA organization with too many employees, published by Ben West on May 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I sometimes hear prospective employees feel like they are "overqualified" for EA positions by trying to compare relevant metrics. E.g. "you don't need a product manager if you have less than 5,000 page views per day." I think this is misunderstanding a key difference between altruistic and profit-motivated organizations. Many companies only capture a small fraction of the value they produce. Nordhaus 2004 estimates that companies capture about 2% of the value they create through innovation. This means that companies underinvest their products (relative to the social optimum), because they can't capture the value from improved products. Therefore, altruistic organizations should invest substantially more into their products than comparable for-profit organizations do. As a concrete example: Reddit has approximately one employee per 600,000 users, whereas this Forum has approximately one employee per 13,000. Interestingly, this is almost exactly the 50x multiple Nordhaus would predict. I would further argue that it's multiple orders of magnitude more valuable to attract a user to the EA Forum than to Reddit, so the 50x multiple should be even higher, though obviously I have a bias. I think this adjustment for externalities is still not actually the right way to make career decisions – you should think more about the impact you have, not how some arbitrary metric compares – but if you are going to consider arbitrary metrics, I think you should consider adjusting by >50x. Some of these ideas are also referenced in the tech entrepreneurship 80 K article. CEA Online, the team supporting this forum, has current openings for for UI, UX, or Graphic Designer, Product Manager, Full-Stack Engineer. Reddit data taken from. There are four people who work full-time on the Forum (JP, Sarah, Clifford, Lizka); without evidence I will claim that the portion of operational staff who support them add up to a 5th FTE. Forum MAU count from Google analytics, trailing 28 days ending May 17, 2022. Of course, this is oversimplified. For example, presumably there are diminishing returns to labor, so naïvely multiplying employees by 50 is too simplistic. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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 tent" effective altruism is very important (particularly right now), published by Luke Freeman on May 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This August, when Will MacAskill launches What We Owe The Future, we will see a spike of interest in longtermism and effective altruism more broadly. People will form their first impressions – these will be hard to shake. After hearing of these ideas for the first time, they will be wondering things like: Who are these people? (Can I trust them? Are they like me? Do they have an ulterior agenda?) What can I do (literally right now and also might it might my decisions over time)? What does this all mean for me and my life? If we're lucky, they'll investigate these questions. The answers they get matter (and so does their experience finding those answers). I get the sense that effective altruism is at a crossroads right now. We can either become a movement of people who appear dedicated to a particular set of conclusions about the world, or we can become a movement of people that appear united by a shared commitment to using reason and evidence to do the most good we can. In the former case, I expect to become a much smaller group, easier to coordinate our focus, but it's also a group that's more easily dismissed. People might see us as a bunch of nerds who have read too many philosophy papers and who are out of touch with the real world. In the latter case, I'd expect to become a much bigger group. I'll admit that it's also a group that's harder to organise (people are coming at the problem from different angles and with varying levels of knowledge). However, if we are to have the impact we want: I'd bet on the latter option. I don't believe we can – nor should – simply tinker on the margins forever nor try to act as a "shadowy cabal". As we grow, we will start pushing for bigger and more significant changes, and people will notice. We've already seen this with the increased media coverage of things like political campaigns and prominent people that are seen to be EA-adjacent. A lot of these first impressions we won't be able to control. But we can try to spread good memes about EA (inspiring and accurate ones), and we do have some level of control about what happens when people show up at our "shop fronts" (e.g. prominent organisations, local and university groups, conferences etc.). I recently had a pretty disheartening exchange where I heard from a new GWWC member who'd started to help run a local group felt "discouraged and embarrassed" at an EAGx conference. They left feeling like they weren't earning enough to be "earning to give" and that they didn't belong in the community if they're not doing direct work (or don't have an immediate plan to drop everything and change). They said this "poisoned" their interest in EA. Experiences like this aren't always easy to prevent, but it's worth trying. We are aware that we are one of the "shop fronts" at Giving What We Can. So we're currently thinking about how we represent worldview diversity within effective giving and what options we present to first-time donors. Some examples: We're focusing on providing easily legible options (e.g. larger organisations with an understandable mission and strong track record instead of more speculative small grants that foundations better make) and easier decisions (e.g. "I want to help people now" or "I want to help future generations"). We're also cautious about how we talk about The Giving What We Can Pledge to ensure that it's framed as an invitation for those who want it and not an admonition of those for whom it's not the right fit. We're working to ensure that people who first come across EA via effective giving can find their way to the actions that best fit them (e.g. by introducing them to the broader EA community). We often cros...
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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: Are you really in a race? The Cautionary Tales of Szilárd and Ellsberg, published by HaydnBelfield on May 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. OR The Tragedy of the Einstein Letter and the Gaither Report; Cautionary Lessons from the Manhattan Project and the ‘Missile Gap’; Beware Assuming You’re in an AI Race; The illusory Atomic Gap, the illusory Missile Gap and the AGI Gap Summary In both the 1940s and 1950s, well-meaning and good people – the brightest of their generation – were convinced they were in an existential race with an expansionary, totalitarian regime. Because of this belief, they advocated for and participated in a ‘sprint’ race: the Manhattan Project to develop a US atomic bomb (1939-1945); and the ‘missile gap’ project to build up a US ICBM capability (1957-1962). These were both based on a mistake, however - the Nazis decided against a Manhattan Project in 1942, and the Soviets decided against an ICBM build-up in 1958. The main consequence of both was to unilaterally speed up dangerous developments and increase existential risk. Key participants, such as Albert Einstein and Daniel Ellsberg, described their involvement as the greatest mistake of their life. Our current situation with AGI shares certain striking similarities and certain lessons suggest themselves: make sure you’re actually in a race (information on whether you are is very valuable), be careful when secrecy is emphasised, and don’t give up your power as an expert too easily. I briefly cover the two case studies, discuss the atmosphere at RAND, then draw the comparison with AGI and explain my three takeaways. This short piece is mainly based on Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine. It was inspired by a Slack discussion with Di Cooke. The ‘atomic gap’, the Einstein-Szilárd Letter, and the Manhattan Project Here is a rough timeline of some key events around the Manhattan Project: 12 September 1933: Szilárd conceives the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, and keeps it a secret for the next six years. 2 August 1939: Einstein-Szilárd letter to Roosevelt advocates for setting up a Manhattan Project. 1 September 1939: Nazi invasion of Poland. 9 October 1941: Roosevelt approves the atomic program, subsequently Manhattan Project receives serious funding (eventually, 0.4% of GDP). June 1942: Hitler decides against an atomic program for practical reasons. December 1942: First chain reaction in Chicago. Szilard notes “I shook hands with Fermi and I said I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.” 30 April 1945: Hitler kills himself. 7 May 1945: Nazi surrender. July 1945: Szilárd petition (signed by 70 scientists) calls for the bomb to be used only after Japan had refused to surrender, and for the decision to be made by Truman personally – and reiterated the original intention was to defend against the Nazis. 6 and 9 August 1945: The USA bombs Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 29 August 1949: First successful Soviet nuclear test. The Manhattan Project (and other US projects like the Apollo program) was a ‘sprint’ project, in which the peak year funding reached 0.4% of GDP (Stine, 2009, see also Grace, 2015). Why did nuclear scientists like Szilárd, who kept the chain reaction secret and opposed nuclear weapons for decades after the war, advocate for and participate in the Manhattan Project? In Ellsberg’s words: “How could he? The answer is he believed, even before others, that they were racing Hitler to the attainment of this power. It was German scientists, after all, who had first accomplished the fission of a heavy element. There seemed no reason to suppose that Germany could not stay ahead of any competitors in harnessing this unearthly energy to Hitler’s unlimited ambitions for conquest. The specter of a possible Germ...
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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: Some potential lessons from Carrick’s Congressional bid, published by Daniel Eth on May 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The primary for Oregon’s 6th congressional district is now over, and it’s looking like Carrick is going to lose, coming in second out of nine candidates. That Carrick lost is a real shame. My sense is if Carrick had won, he could have done a lot of good – in particular, advancing pandemic prevention (e.g., via participating in bill markups), with an outside chance of getting Biden’s pandemic prevention plan enacted. As a silver lining, I think the value of information from this race was quite high, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the information this race provides will be valuable enough to EA that it outweighs the costs associated with the race. First off, I want to applaud Carrick for taking the plunge and running; as a general rule, I think EAs should be more ambitious, especially in novel situations where the value of information is high, and it’s nice to see someone really following through with this. Carrick, his wife Kathryn, and their whole team put it in an enormous amount of work, faced many obstacles outside of their control, and withstood unfair public criticism, all in the service of improving the world. Below are what I believe to be some of the more important lessons that we should take away from this race. For transparency sake, I started jotting down notes and sketching part of a draft of this piece before the day of the race – I didn’t write the piece entirely today. I also got feedback on this post from a few people in my network, and I strongly recommend others who plan on writing further posts on this topic similarly get feedback from other EAs before posting, in order to ensure that the post embodies community ideals, both to those reading it from within our community and those who may be looking in from the outside, especially right now as more external attention is being directed at EA. Personally, some of the feedback I got from others led me to rephrase certain things in ways I hadn’t considered and for which I think was helpful for reducing misunderstandings of EA. Lesson 1: EAs can seriously compete for open congressional seats, and preparing to run well in advance of a race probably would significantly further improve the odds of winning Yes, Carrick lost. But he came in second out of nine, despite several factors pushing pretty strongly against him. Had things shaken out differently on a few key factors, he could have won. Here’s a partial list of factors that were pushing against Carrick: lack of local political connections, which led local political actors to strongly fight against him relative lack of practice/training in talking like a politician, which understandably led to politically costly misstatements running in a state that he had very recently moved back to (he moved back after COVID hit), which appears to have led to some skepticism a combination of the above factors led to unfavorable media coverage Salinas (the winner of the primary) benefitting from $1M of Super PAC money herself from BOLD PAC. Most of the items on that list seem avoidable by any future EA candidate who preps for a political career far ahead of time instead of first beginning to think about running when a seat opens up – even the adversarial Super PAC spending (the least controllable item on the list) may be reduced by having better long-term relationships with the political community. For instance, if Carrick had held local office before running for the House, I think he would have been in a much stronger position for this race (I think he probably would have won). To be clear, this point is not a criticism of Carrick running for the House directly – I actually agree with the decision, given that Congressional seats only open u...
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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: Organizational alignment, published by CarolineEllison on May 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. [Note: this was written in response to being asked for my thoughts on how important it is for EA orgs to hire aligned staff as they scale. Thanks to Sam Bankman-Fried for comments and for significant influence on these thoughts.] Organizational alignment is a really hard problem; putting EA aside and just thinking about organizations that are trying to make money or something else, I think it’s still one of the biggest problems that organizations face. There’s this Elon Musk quote that SBF likes to reference: “Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.” By default, as you scale an organization, those vectors will all end up pointing in random different directions. Getting their directions more aligned is one of the key things you have to do to scale. I think most of the stuff I have to say about organizational alignment applies to both EA and non-EA organizations. There’s two differences for EA orgs that I can think of: EA gives you an extra tool in your alignment toolbox, in that other EAs will tend to be more aligned with your organization. The less legible your goals are, the more important it is to hire aligned people. If your goal is “make money,” you at least have something to fall back on, in that you can do stuff like see how much money people make and compensate them accordingly. If your goal is “do research to determine priorities for making the long-term future go well,” that’s much harder to measure so it seems more important for people to be aligned. I think the broad ways to do organizational alignment are: building loyalty/trust being fair to employees, treating them well, trusting them, etc compensation compensating in equity or something similar making compensation heavily dependent on how much value you add culture setting an organization level culture that emphasizes teamwork, deemphasizes individual status, etc management you can pass the buck somewhat by just having good and aligned managers hiring just hiring people who are going to be aligned in the first place Unsurprisingly, I think the more decision-making power someone has the more important it is for them to be aligned. There are a few ways I know of to have employees be super aligned with your org: getting people who are dedicated EAs getting people with a strong sense of personal loyalty to the org and/or the people in it getting people who have relatively linear utility in money, and compensating them well in equity-type things In practice, I think what I tend to do in my hiring is: to first order, mostly just hire whoever is most competent and don’t worry too much about alignment I put some weight on a potential hire being EA, but not a ton I think trying to eg hire only EAs would have been fatally limiting to our growth though depends on what the talent pools look like in the specific roles you’re trying to hire for but when deciding to give people a lot of decision-making power or have them manage a lot of people, prioritize very strongly how aligned they are this alignment can come from EA or from something else working with them and getting to know them over time is probably more helpful for determining this than “whether they identify as EA” But caveating that this is at an organization with fairly legible goals, and the less legible things are the more I’d expect hiring EAs to be important. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Guided by the Beauty of One’s Philosophies: Why Aesthetics Matter, published by Étienne Fortier-Dubois on May 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Hi! This is my first post here. I had been thinking about aesthetics for philosophical movements and ended up using Effective Altruism as a case study, so it felt appropriate to share the essay, first published here, on the EA forum. Note that it's not written primarily for an EA audience, and it is somewhat of an outsider's perspective. I've been familiar with EA for several years, but I probably got some things wrong anyway. The most successful ideology of all time is arguably Christianity. It is two thousand years old, has about two and a half billion adherents, and has been the dominant religion of most of the most powerful countries. Few belief systems have come close, although the other big religions are in the same order of magnitude. If we ask the question of secular ideologies, then the strongest contender is probably liberalism, which has been at the core of the political and economic systems of the wealthiest states over the past few centuries. Now let us perform a little exercise. After you have read this paragraph, close your eyes, and take a few moments to visualize Christianity. It won’t be obvious, since Christianity is an abstract idea, but you should be able to see something anyway. You can imagine the sounds, too. When you are done, do the same for liberalism. What did you see and hear? To my mind’s eye, Christianity immediately evokes magnificent cathedrals, spires rising into the sky, the play of light through stained glass, and elaborately ornamented architectural detail. I see Jesus on the cross, and indeed crosses everywhere: the cross is a simple symbol, easy to remix into countless variations. I hear organ music, and choirs singing, and bells ringing, and the hypnotic utterances of a priest during mass. Liberalism is trickier to visualize, but some things come to mind too: the Statue of Liberty overlooking New York harbor. Lady Justice, blinded and watchful. Neoclassical buildings, serving as the houses of government or the law, with their white marble columns and stately appearance — a nod to the birthplace of democracy in ancient Athens. Sounds: the chatter of lively debate in a coffee house of the Enlightenment; the bustle of an industrious and ethnically diverse city; the scribbling a quill laying down the principles of political liberty. These descriptions point to what we can call an aesthetic. An aesthetic is a coherent, recognizable style. It manifests in everything from architecture to music, clothing, poetry, storytelling, or website design. Aesthetics determine how beautiful a thing is, which is simply a specific way of saying how interesting it is. Not all aesthetics are created equal. It seems clear to me, at least, that Christianity has a richer aesthetic tapestry than liberalism does. Yet liberalism still has an aesthetic. Other religions and philosophies have their own, with varying levels of definition: the relationship between an ideology and its art is not straightforward. The aesthetic of a movement can be intentional or incidental. It can derive from existing prestige and power, or it can be the cause of prestige and power (or a mix of both in a self-reinforcing feedback loop). It can obscure the goals of the movement through attractive propaganda, or make them legible by bringing to light a clear vision. Whatever the situation, it should be obvious that aesthetics matter. They matter because they are unavoidable — if you don’t define them, they will be defined for you, probably in a haphazard way — and because they are often associated with success in some way. It would be a mistake to view them as a superficial part of your enterprise, a casual task that you can offload...
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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: Rational predictions often update predictably, published by Gregory Lewis on May 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. BLUF: One common supposition is a rational forecast, because it ‘prices in’ anticipated evidence, should follow a (symmetric) random walk. Thus one should not expect a predictable trend in rational forecasts (e.g. 10% day 1, 9% day 2, 8% day 3, etc.), nor commonly see this pattern when reviewing good forecasting platforms. Yet one does, and this is because the supposition is wrong: ‘pricing in’ and reflective equilibrium constraints only entail the present credence is the expected value of a future credence. Skew in the anticipated distribution can give rise to the commonly observed “steady pattern of updates in one direction”. Such skew is very common: it is typical in 'will event happen by date' questions, and one’s current belief often implies skew in the expected distribution of future credences. Thus predictable directions in updating are unreliable indicators of irrationality. Introduction Forecasting is common (although it should be commoner) and forecasts (whether our own or others) change with further reflection or new evidence. There are standard metrics to assess how good someone’s forecasting is, like accuracy and calibration. Another putative metric is something like ‘crowd anticipation’: if I predict P(X) = 0.8 when the consensus is P(X) = 0.6, but over time this consensus moves to P(X) = 0.8, regardless of how the question resolves, I might take this to be evidence I was ‘ahead of the curve’ in assessing the right probability which should have been believed given the evidence available. This leads to scepticism about the rationality of predictors which show a pattern of ‘steadily moving in one direction’ for a given question: e.g. P(X) = 0.6, then 0.63, 0.69, 0.72 . and then the question resolves affirmatively. Surely a more rational predictor, observing this pattern, would try and make forecasts an observer couldn’t reliably guess to be higher or lower in the future, so forecast values follow something like a (symmetrical) random walk. Yet forecast aggregates (and individual forecasters) commonly show these directional patterns if tracking a given question. Scott Alexander noted curiosity about this behaviour; Eliezer Yudkowsky has confidently asserted it is an indicator of sub-par Bayesian updating. Yet the forecasters regularly (and predictably) notching questions up or down as time passes are being rational. Alexander’s curiosity was satisfied by various comments on his piece, but I write here as this understanding may be tacit knowledge to regular forecasters, yet valuable to explain to a wider audience. Reflective equilibrium, expected value, and skew One of the typical arguments against steadily directional patterns is they suggest a violation of reflective equilibrium. In the same way if I say P(X) = 0.8, I should not expect to believe P(X) = 1 (i.e. it happened) more than 80% of the time, I shouldn’t expect to believe P(X) [later] > P(X) [now] more likely than not. If I did, surely I should start ‘pricing that in’ and updating my current forecast upwards. Market analogies are commonly appealed to in making this point: if we know the stock price of a company is more likely than not to go up, why haven’t we bid up the price already? This motivation is mistaken. Reflective equilibrium only demands one’s current forecast is the expected value of one’s future credence. So although the mean of P(X) [later] should equal P(X) [now], there are no other constraints on the distribution. If it is skewed, then you can have predictable update direction without irrationality: e.g. from P(X) = 0.8, I may think in a week I will - most of the time - have notched this forecast slightly upwards, but less of the time notching it further downwa...
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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: The biggest risk of free-spending EA is not optics or epistemics, but grift, published by Ben Kuhn on May 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In EA and the current funding situation, Will MacAskill tried to enumerate the "risks of commission" that large amounts of EA funding exposed the community to (i.e., ways that extra funding could actually harm EA's impact). Free-spending EA might be a big problem for optics and epistemics raised similar concerns. The risks described in these posts largely involve either money looking bad to outsiders, or money causing well-intentioned people to think poorly despite their best effort. I think this misses what I'd guess is the biggest risk: the risk that large amounts of funding will attract people who aren't making an effort at all because they don't share EA values, but instead see it as a source of easy money or a target of grift. Naively, you might think that it's not that much of a problem if (say) 50% of EA funding is eaten by grift—that's only a factor of 2 decrease in effectiveness, which isn't that big in a world of power-law distributions. But in reality, grifters are incentivized to accumulate power and sabotage the movement's overall ability to process information, and many non-grifters find participating in high-grift environments unpleasant and leave. So the stable equilibrium (absent countermeasures) is closer to 100% grift. The basic mental model This is something I've thought about, and talked to people about, a fair amount because an analogous grift problem exists in successful organizations, and I would like to help the one I work at avoid this fate. In addition to those conversations, a lot of what I go over here is based on the book Moral Mazes, and I'd recommend reading it (or Zvi Mowshowitz's review/elaboration, which IMO is hyperbolic but directionally correct) for elaboration. At some point in their growth, most large organizations become extremely ineffective at achieving their goals. If you look for the root cause of individual instances of inefficiency and sclerosis in these orgs, it's very frequently that some manager, or group of managers, was "misaligned" from the overall organization, in that they were trying to do what was best for themselves rather than for the org as a whole, and in fact often actively sabotaging the org to improve their own prospects. The stable equilibrium for these orgs is to be composed almost entirely of misaligned managers, because: Well-aligned managers prioritize the org's values over their own ascent up the hierarchy (by definition), so will be out-advanced by misaligned managers who prioritize their own ascent above all. Misaligned managers will attempt to sabotage and oust well-aligned managers because their values are harder to predict, so they're more likely to do surprising or dangerous things. Most managers get most of their information from their direct reports, who can sabotage info flows if it would make them look bad. So even if a well-aligned manager has the power to oust a misaligned (e.g.) direct report, they may not realize there's a problem. For example, a friend described a group inside a name-brand company he worked at that was considered by almost every individual contributor to be extremely incompetent and impossible to collaborate with, largely as a result of poor leadership by the manager. The problem was so bad that when the manager was up for promotion, a number of senior people from outside the group signed a memo to the decision-maker saying that approving the promotion would be a disaster for the company. The manager's promotion was denied that cycle, but approved in the next promotion cycle. In this case, even despite the warning sign of strong opposition from people elsewhere in the company, the promotion decision-maker was fed enough b...
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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: Results from the First Decade Review, published by Lizka on May 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Tl;dr: The Decade Review happened: Forum users voted on which posts from the first decade of effective altruism they found most useful and important and reviewed the posts to explain what they appreciated. We’re awarding $12,500 in prizes to authors and reviewers. The distribution of prizes to authors was based on your votes, the results of which are linked. I’m using this post to highlight some aspects of the winning posts and reviews. I encourage more discussion in the comments (and in new posts!). Prizes for posts We’re awarding a total of $10,000 to the top posts (and $2,500 for the top reviews). Note that some authors chose to donate their prizes. Summary We’re awarding $10,000 to authors of the posts, broken down as follows. $1,500 to Hauke Hillebrandt and John G. Halstead ($750 each) for Growth and the case against randomista development $1000 each to Helen for Effective Altruism is a Question (not an ideology) Jai for 500 Million, But Not A Single One More Greg Lewis for Beware surprising and suspicious convergence Nate Soares for On Caring Luisa Rodriguez for two posts(!) : What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would directly lead to human extinction (within decades)? and How bad would nuclear winter caused by a US-Russia nuclear exchange be? $500 each to David Althaus and Tobias Baumann ($250 each) for Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors Will MacAskill for Are we living at the most influential time in history? Holly Elmore for We are in triage every second of every day “EA applicant” for After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation Brian Tomasik for Why Charities Usually Don't Differ Astronomically in Expected Cost-Effectiveness Julia Wise for You have more than one goal, and that's fine Peter Singer for Peter Singer – Famine, Affluence, and Morality First prize ($1500): Growth and the case against randomista development by Hauke Hillebrandt and John Halstead Randomista development is “an approach to development economics [that focuses on] interventions which can be tested by randomised controlled trials (RCTs).” This is popular in effective altruism, but, as this post argues, might systematically undervalue or miss the interventions that have been responsible for some of the biggest improvements ever in quality of life. In particular, the authors discuss the importance of economic growth for human welfare and argue that the welfare gains from increasing GDP per capita in a country are so large that they outweigh the benefits of randomista development programs by orders of magnitude. As a result, they argue, researchers and grantmakers should spend much more time looking for interventions that can promote growth. The post also discusses objections and explores the limitations of GDP/growth, but emphasizes that this topic is under-prioritized by people in effective altruism. I like a lot of things about this post. I had to print the post out and read it carefully (pen, highlighters, and all), and don’t claim expertise in the subjects involved, but I understand enough to see that it’s making some important and true points (although you should also read the comments on the post for a discussion on potential weaknesses and more disputable claims). I think more people should explore the value and tractability of economic growth, and more people might want to read this post as an introduction to that subject. Beyond that, it’s also a good example to follow if you’re considering writing or researching something. So I’m glad this post has won the first prize. Or, as Maxime CdS put it, [...] this post makes a very good point in a very important conversation, namely that we can do b...
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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: Demandingness and Time/Money Tradeoffs are Orthogonal, published by CarolineEllison on May 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Recently there has been a spate of discussion on the EA Forum and elsewhere about increased spending in EA and its potential negative consequences. There are various potential concerns one might have about this, and addressing all of them would require a much longer discussion. But it seems like one common worry is something like: Having a frugal EA movement has positive selection effects. Living frugally is a costly signal. This ensures people will only want to join if they’re very altruistically motivated. Conversely, spending more on community building, EA salaries, etc has negative selection effects. It will attract people who are primarily motivated by money rather than altruism. I think this argument conflates two separate questions: How demanding should EA be? How should we value EA time compared to money? These two questions seem totally separable to me. For instance, say A works at an EA org. His work produces $500/hour of value. He gets paid $50/hour by his employer. He has a fraudulent charge of $100 on a card that he could dispute. This requires him to spend 1 hour on the phone with customer service. He is indifferent between this and spending an hour doing a relatively unpleasant work task. As things currently stand, he might spend the hour to recover the $100. But I think it would clearly be better if someone paid him $100 to spend an hour doing the unpleasant work task for his organization rather than trying to recover the money. It would keep his utility (and thus demandingness) constant, while resulting in $400 of surplus value created. I think in the current EA movement: I feel unsure about whether it would be better to increase or decrease demandingness. It seems like a tough tradeoff. Increasing demandingness pushes people to do and sacrifice more, as well as selecting for altruistically motivated people. On the other hand, it may exclude people who could make valuable contributions but aren’t as dedicated, as well as leading to demotivation and burnout. I do think it would be better to increase the monetary value we assign to the time of people doing EA work on average. Given the current stock of funding vs human capital in EA, I think the time of the highest performing EAs is worth a lot. I suspect the current artificially low salaries in EA often lead to people making inefficient time/money tradeoffs. I think many people have an intuitive worry that paying EAs more will cause EA to lose its edge. Initially EA was a scrappy movement of people who really cared, and they worry that giving people more money will make it soft and cushy. I’m sympathetic to that, but I think there are a lot of ways EA can be demanding that don’t rely on frugality. We could expect EAs to: work 7 days a week prioritize work over socializing or hobbies work long hours and be constantly available/responsive outside work hours leave a fun and/or high-status job for an unpleasant and/or low-status one do job tasks that are valuable even if they’re ones they don’t enjoy move to a location they don’t like for work prioritize their impact over relationships with family, friends, romantic partners, or children admit when they were wrong even if it’s painful train skills they think are valuable even if it feels unnatural and hard act in a way that represents EA well, even if they’d rather be petty and uncharitable practice the virtue of silence There are probably many other things I’m not thinking of here that are both demanding and potentially quite valuable. Many of the most effective EAs I know have done and continue to do a bunch of these things, and I think they’re pretty awesome and hardcore for doing so. I think these are all more efficient c...
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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: Messy personal stuff that affected my cause prioritization (or: how I started to care about AI safety), published by Julia Wise on May 5, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Crossposted from OtherwiseThis is the story of how I started to care about AI risk. It’s far from an ideal decision-making process, but I wanted to try to spell out the untidy reality. I first learned about the idea of AI risk by reading a lot of LessWrong in the summer of 2011. I didn’t like the idea of directing resources toward it. I didn’t spell out my reasons to myself at the time, but here’s what I think was going on under the surface: I was already really dedicated to global health as a cause area, and didn’t want competition with that. The concrete thing you could do about AI risk seemed to be “donate to MIRI,” and I didn’t understand what MIRI was doing or how it was going to help. These people all seemed to be California tech guys, and that wasn’t my culture. My explicit thoughts were something like: Well yeah, I can see how misaligned AI might be the end of everything But maybe that wouldn’t be so bad; seems like there’s a lot of suffering in the world Anyway, I don’t know what we’re really going to do about it. In 2017, a coworker/friend who had worked at an early version of MIRI talked to some of her old friends and got particularly worried about short AI timelines. And seeing her level of concern clicked with me. She wasn’t a California tech guy; she was a former civil rights lawyer from Detroit. She was a Giving What We Can member. She felt like My People. And I started to take it seriously. I started to feel viscerally that it could be very bad for everything I cared about if we developed superhuman AI and we weren’t ready. Once I started caring about this area a lot, I took a fresh look around at what might be done about it. In the time since I’d first encountered the idea, more people had also started taking it seriously. Now there were more projects like AI policy work that I found easier to comprehend. Two other things that shifted over time: My concern about people and animals having net-negative lives has been related to what’s happening with my own depression. My concern is a lot stronger when I’m doing worse personally. Once I had children, I had a gut-level feeling that it was extremely important that they have long and healthy lives. Changing my beliefs didn’t mean there were especially good actions to take. Once I changed my view on AI safety I was more willing to donate to that area, but a lot of people had the same idea, and there wasn’t/isn't a lot of obvious work that wasn’t already funded. So I’ve continued donating to a mix of global health (which I still really value) and EA community-building. I was already doing cause-general work and didn’t think I could be more useful in direct work, but I started to encourage other people to consider work on global catastrophic risks. Reflections now: What subculture you belong to doesn’t mean much about how right you are about something. Subcultures / echo chambers develop different ideas from the mainstream, some of which will be valuable and many which will be pointless or harmful. (LessWrong was also very into cryonics at the time, and I think it’s right for that idea to get a lot less attention than AI safety.) One downside of a homogeneous culture is that other people may bounce off for tribalistic reasons. Because you don’t share the same concerns, and don’t speak to the things they care about Because they’re put off in some basic social or demographic way, and never seriously listen to you in the first place When I think about what could have alerted me that my thinking was driven by group identity more than by logic, what comes to mind is the feeling of annoyance I had about “AI people.” Thanks for listening. To h...
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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: Should we buy coal mines?, published by John G. Halstead on May 4, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. At Effective Altruism Global, Will MacAskill proposed the idea of buying a coal mine in order to keep coal in the ground, as a potential longtermist megaproject. The idea was covered in a piece by Richard Fisher for the BBC here. There is a large literature in economics on the idea of reducing the supply of fossil fuels in the economics literature, and the idea recently received additional attention thanks to a post by Alex Tabarrok on the Marginal Revolution blog here. I have spent around 50 hours looking into whether it would be worth buying a coal mine. I talked to more than 10 experts about this. I have mainly focused on feasibility in the US and Australia because the project seemed more promising in those countries due to likely political and legal barriers in countries like India, China and Indonesia. I have concluded that: Buying a coal mine is much more expensive than it might at first appear due to costs to reclaim the land after mine closure and foregone royalty payments to the mine owner. Buying mines is legally impossible for some mines, and for others seems extremely practically difficult, for legal, political and cultural reasons. My impression is that there are few viable opportunities to buy coal mines in the world. The full costs of buying a mine would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars for a mine a similar size to a top 30 US coal mine. So, the barriers to buying just one mine are very high. For context, total global spending on climate philanthropy is $5-9 billion. So you could spend close to a tenth of global climate philanthropy buying just one coal mine. It is unclear whether buying a mine and retiring it would make much difference compared to the counterfactual, in the US at least, because coal demand there seems to be in structural decline. The counterfactual benefits seem larger in Australia because the coal industry is more buoyant, but, for that very reason, buying up coal mines would be much more politically difficult there. It seems likely that there are other better ways to limit coal production or consumption, such as political advocacy, or paying some lawyers to gum up the works. I think EA donors could have more impact through other projects. Buying up a coal mine might be a good option for donors who would otherwise have lower impact and have the time to identify some workable opportunities. This is a very quick write-up of my reasoning that I thought I would share in case anyone else had thought about looking into this area. I am optimising for speed and writing up my findings quickly, rather than referencing to back up my claims, doing lots of checking of my numbers, and asking for review before publishing. I am >75% sure that my central claims are correct. Thanks to Max Daniel, Abie Rohrig and Will MacAskill for comments and discussion. 1. Costs are much higher than they seem In his recent post on the promise of buying a coal mine, Alex Tabarrok noted that there is a coal mine for sale for $7.8m dollars. If you assume that this is the total cost of buying the mine and shutting it down, then doing so would be highly cost-effective. However, the true cost would be much higher than this. Reclamation costs Owners of coal mining leases have to pay ‘reclamation costs’, which is the environmental cleanup of the mine: turning it into forest, a solar farm etc. In the US, the typical cost of reclamation is ~$10,000 per acre (report). For mines with data in the US, the size ranges from 1,000 acres to 40,000 acres. North Antelope Rochelle, the world’s largest coal mine, is ~5,000 acres. So, the reclamation costs would range from $10m to $400m and would be $50m for North Antelope (calculations are here). For the McDowell mine listed ...
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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: EA Forum Lowdown: April 2022, published by NunoSempere on May 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Imagine a tabloid to the EA Forum digest's weather report. This publication gives an opinionated curation of EA forum posts published during April 2022, according to my whim. I probably have a bias towards forecasting, longtermism, evaluations, wit, and takedowns. You can sign up for this newsletter on substack. Index How did we get here? Monthly highlights Finest newcomers Keen criticism Underupvoted underdogs How did we get here? Back and forth discussions On occasion, a few people discuss a topic at some length in the EA forum, going back and forth and considering different perspectives across a few posts. There is a beauty to it. On how much of one’s life to give to EA Altruism as a central purpose (a) struck a chord with me: After some thought I have decided that the descriptor that best fits the role altruism plays in my life, is that of a central purpose. A purpose can be a philosophy and a way of living. A central purpose transcends a passion; even considering how intense and transformative a passion can be. It carries a far deeper significance in one’s life. When I describe EA as my purpose, it suggests that it is something that my life is built around; a fundamental and constitutive value. Of course, effective altruism fits into people’s lives in different ways and to different extents. For many EAs, an existing descriptor adequately captures their perspective. But there are many subgroups in EA for whom I think it has been helpful to have a more focused discussion on the role EA plays for them. I would imagine that a space within EA for purpose-driven EAs could be particularly useful for this subset, while of little interest to the broader community. In contrast, Eric Neyman's My bargain with the EA machine (a) explains how someone who isn't quite as fanatically altruistic established his boundaries in his relationship with the EA machinery: I’m only willing to accept a bargain that would allow me to attain a higher point than what I would attain by default – but besides that, anything is on the table. I really enjoy socializing and working with other EAs, more so than with any other community I’ve found. The career outcomes that are all the way up (and pretty far to the right) are ones where I do cool work at a longtermist office space, hanging out with the awesome people there during lunch and after work. Note that there is a tension between creating inclusive spaces that would include people like Eric and creating spaces restricted to committed altruists. As a sign of respect, I left a comment on Eric’s post here. Jeff Kaufman reflects on the increasing demandingness in EA (a). In response, a Giving What We Can (GWWC) pledger explains that he just doesn't care (a) all that much what the EA community thinks about him. He writes (lightly edited for clarity): "my relative status as an EA is just not very important to me... no amount of focus on direct work by people across the world is likely to make me feel inadequate or rethink this... we [GWWC pledgers] are perfectly happy to be by far the most effectively altruistic person we know of within dozens of miles". On decadence and caution I found the contrast between EA Houses: Live or Stay with EAs Around The World (a) and posts such as Free-spending EA might be a big problem for optics and epistemics (a) and The Vultures Are Circling (a) striking and amusing. Although somewhat forceful, the posts presenting considerations to the contrary probably didn’t move the spending plans already in motion. Personal monthly highlights I appreciated the ruthlessness of Project: bioengineering an all-female breed of chicken to end chick culling (a) Luke Muehlhauser writes Features that make a report especially helpful ...
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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: Notes From a Pledger, published by Justis on April 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post is a response to Jeff's post here, and the genre of post it represents. I think Jeff's post is valid and valuable, and that thinking through this sort of thing is a good idea. I also think that necessarily, personal testimonies are going to be more common from more engaged EAs. So I'd like to give the perspective of a GWWC pledge taker more toward the periphery. N=1, so have your salt shaker ready! EA status is unimportant at a certain distance I've done freelance editing work for EAs and EA-related organizations for over five years, including (at various times) CEA, LessWrong, AI Impacts, BERI, PIE, and probably others I'm forgetting. There have been times - the longest was a little under a year - when this editing work was my primary source of income. I read a lot of EA content and occasionally wade into the discourse. So among non-inner-ring EAs, I think I'm probably unusually engaged by most metrics, perhaps among the most engaged 10% in the reference class of people who might skim the EA newsletter now and then. All this being said, my relative status as an EA is just not very important to me at all. I took the Giving What We Can pledge several years ago. I've been donating 10% of my income to the Against Malaria Foundation since then. I care approximately 0 if EA bigwigs think I'm a bit dim for this decision, or if they think "ok well, a direct worker is worth about 30 Justis equivalents on the margin." My grandparents were religious and tithed; it feels nice to "do my part" not in an abstract EA community cred sense but in a vague, "being a morally decent person" sense, and no amount of focus on direct work by people across the country/world is likely to make me feel inadequate or rethink this. Really! I will maintain my pledge with a similar level of pride and joy no matter what the official recommendation to current Yale students in EA student groups is (not to undermine them - they are very important, just approximately irrelevant to my life). I am in Florida. Most of my friends work at restaurants or for the state government. Sure, it feels nice when people across the country want to include me or rank me well, but it's not in a crucial spot on my hierarchy of needs. I suspect the same is true for most pledge-takers. It's possible to regard EA roles as desirable without regarding them as morally necessary I've applied for a few jobs in EA over the years. I didn't get them. This was painful. In one case I was doing 25+ hours a week freelance work for an org for several months, it went really well, they put up a job posting with precisely my current duties and invited me to apply, then hired someone else. This was very painful, and strongly discouraged me from applying to full time EA roles in the future. However, at no point did I think "oh no, now I can't have all the impact I might have had counterfactually, so I'm a bad/worthless person." Here I think it's time for another interlude: I've got moderate OCD and a lot of that manifests as scrupulosity. My most common negative emotion is guilt. I'm confident that I worry about being somehow ineffably "bad" significantly more than the average human being. I read Peter Singer in high school and it rocked my world - I got on the phone with Oxfam to donate something, anything, but realized I didn't actually have any money I'd earned myself yet and hung up. I'm confident that I am among the most vulnerable people to feeling distress from the notion that I've not lived up to an ethical obligation. But no, none of my EA-role-failure pain has really been in that direction. I am giving 10% of my income. This is much more than basically anyone I know, including virtually all my friends and all my family. I will proba...
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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: Announcing the Nucleic Acid Observatory project for early detection of catastrophic biothreats, published by Will Bradshaw on April 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: The Nucleic Acid Observatory project aims to protect the world from catastrophic biothreats by detecting novel agents spreading in the human population or environment. We are developing the experimental tools, computational approaches, and hands-on knowledge needed to achieve reliable early detection of any future outbreak. We are hiring for research and support roles. The catastrophic potential of biological threats lies in their ability to self-replicate and spread from host to host, allowing isolated spillover events to develop into devastating pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the destructive potential of exponentially growing disease agents. Future pandemics could be far worse, especially if deliberately engineered by humans to cause increased harm. A corollary of the exponential growth of biological threats is that early detection of outbreaks can be immensely valuable. When a threat can spread exponentially, early detection and response requires exponentially fewer resources to achieve containment and eradication. Had governments acted a few weeks earlier, SARS-CoV-2 may have been excluded from many more countries or even eradicated before becoming a global pandemic. In future outbreaks, a difference of a few doubling times could make the difference between successful containment and global catastrophe. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent years have seen enormous interest in technologies for rapid diagnosis and outbreak detection. However, most of this work is centered around sensitively detecting specific known pathogens – especially SARS-CoV-2. Most common monitoring techniques are only able to detect the presence of biological signatures specified in advance; they can’t spot things we aren’t already looking for. To achieve reliable early detection of novel catastrophic biothreats, we need to do better. The Nucleic Acid Observatory project, currently part of the Sculpting Evolution group at the MIT Media Lab, aims to solve one key piece of this early-detection puzzle. By collecting wastewater and other environmental samples at airports and other sites, performing unbiased metagenomic sequencing, and analyzing the resulting data with novel pathogen-agnostic detection algorithms, our goal is to achieve reliable early detection of any biological threat. At present, our priority is to develop the technical tools, practical expertise, and partnerships required to implement effective metagenomic biomonitoring on the ground. To that end, we are developing experimental tools and protocols to investigate the sensitivity of different sampling approaches and sites; investigating computational approaches to agnostically identify threat signatures in metagenomic data; and reaching out to a number of potential sites about on-the-ground pilot studies. We aim to begin field trials by autumn 2022. We are a small team, but well-funded and growing rapidly. Right now, we are especially excited to hire full-time technical researchers and wet-lab support staff; we expect to open more positions in the near future. You can see our open positions and apply here. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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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: Increasing Demandingness in EA, published by Jeff Kaufman on April 29, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. In thinking about what it means to lead a good life, people often struggle with the question of how much is enough: how much does our morality demand of us? People have given a wide range of answers to this question, but effective altruism has historically used "giving 10%". Yes, it's better if you donate a larger fraction, switch to a job where you can earn more, or put your career to use directly, but if you're giving 10% to effective charity you're doing your share, you've met the bar to consider yourself an EA, and we're happy to have you on board. I say "historically", because it feels like this is changing; I think EAs would generally still agree with my paragraph above, but while in 2014 it would have been uncontroversial now I think some would disagree and others would have to think for a while. EA started out as a funding-constrained movement. Whether you looked at global poverty, existential risk, animal advocacy, or movement building, many excellent people were working as volunteers or well below what they could earn because there just wasn't the money to offer competitive pay. Every year GiveWell's total room for more funding was a multiple of their money moved. In this environment, the importance of donations was clear. EA has been pretty successful in raising money, however, and the primary constraint has shifted from money to people. In 2015, 80k made a strong case for focusing on what people can do directly, not mediated by donations, and this case is even stronger today. Personally, I've found this pretty convincing, though in 2017 I decided to return to earning to give because it still seemed like the best fit for me. What this means, however, is that we are now trying to build a different sort of movement than we were ten years ago. While people who've dedicated their careers toward the most critical things have made up the core of the movement all along, the ratio of impact has changed. Imagine you have a group of people donating 10% to the typical mix of EA causes. You are given the option to convince one of them to start working on one of 80k's priority areas, but in doing so N others will get discouraged and stop donating. This is a bit of a false dilemma, since ideally these would not be in conflict, but let's stick with this for a bit because I think it is illustrative. In 2012 I would have put a pretty low number for N, perhaps ~3, partly because we were low on money, but also because we were starting a movement. In 2015 I would have put N at ~30: a factor of 6 because of the difference between 10% and the most that people in typical earning to give roles can generally donate (~60%) and a factor of 5 because of the considerations in Why you should focus more on talent gaps, not funding gaps. With the large recent increases in EA-influenced spending I'd roughly put N at ~300 [1], though I'd be interested in better estimates. Unfortunately, a norm of "10% and you're doing your part" combines very poorly with the reality of 100% of someone's career having ~300x more impact than 10%. This makes EA feel much more demanding than it used to: instead of saying "look at the impact you can have by donating 10%", we're now generally saying "look at the impact you can have by building your entire career around work on an important problem." (This has not applied evenly. People who were already planning to make EA central to their career are generally experiencing EA as less demanding: pay in EA organizations has gone up, there is less stress around fundraising, and there is less of a focus on frugality or other forms of personal sacrifice. In some cases these changes mean that if someone does decide to shift their career it is less of a sacrifice...
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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: Against immortality?, published by Owen Cotton-Barratt on April 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: there are some strong anti-death / pro-immortality sentiments in EA/rationalist circles, and it's bugged me that I haven't seen a good articulation of the anti-immortality case. This is a quick attempt to make that case. I'm confused about what to think about immortality overall; I think that it may depend a lot on circumstances/details, and be eventually desirable but not currently desirable. The basic case for immortality goes something like: A death is a tragedy. Individuals would, in almost all cases, prefer not to die. They have friends and family who care about them and would prefer they not die. In a large majority of the cases where they would prefer to die this is because of other factors they'd prefer to fix instead (e.g. extremely poor health). In a post-scarcity future we should expect to be able to fix these factors, so we should plan on abolishing death. This argument mostly checks out to me when evaluating whether it's good for individuals to die. But my worry is that the whole line of thinking is too individualistic. Would it be good for society as a whole if people were immortal? Historically I think the answer is not clear-cut, but my guess leans towards "no". If I imagine I have the option of pressing a button so that people 3,000 (or 1,000, or 300, or 100) years ago were immortal — not aging, and not dying of disease — I feel like I don't want to press that button. There would certainly be a lot of good things that would happen from it — many tragic deaths averted, many good things that persisted longer, and perhaps longer time horizons for individuals. But I am scared that: For most of history, populations were food-limited, so this would lead to more deaths by starvation or violence, which seem probably worse However in the modern world this might not be an immediate problem We'd also have contraception available as a tool (although it's unclear whether it's good to give existing people more life rather than their children having lives) It's possible that technology will move us to fundamentally different positions re. personal identity (e.g. because everyone is run as emulations, and these can be slowed down) before our inability to keep scaling food production exponentially causes hard constraints on population The world would have been much more likely to get stuck locked into some bad states A lot of repressive dictators die of natural causes If they were immortal, it seems much more likely that one would have successfully conquered the world, and established a regime which stably kept them in control for eternity Less extremely, there is the adage that science progresses one funeral at a time I'm sure this is sometimes an exaggeration, but also feel sympathetic to the thought that if new ideas threaten existing social structures, and if the people instantiating those structures were permanent fixtures, there might have been much more repression of new ideas It's a trope that the death of elderly relatives — even highly beloved ones — can be freeing for people This doesn't point to any particular failure modes, but is some support for "death may play an important role in allowing society (as it is currently arranged) to move on from things" These are still concerns to me today. At a more personal level, I have some worry that the narrative of death-as-tragedy can belittle narratives of death-as-end-to-story-arc, and that sometimes the latter seem like they are capturing something true and important. For old people who have had a happy routine and watched their grandkids grow up and have kids of their own, and feel like they can let go rather than needing to do more in the world, I dislike telling them (implicitly or exp...
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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: Redwood Research is hiring for several roles (Operations and Technical), published by JJXWang on April 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Redwood Research is a research organization with the mission of aligning superhuman AI. In addition to our primary work of applied AI alignment research, we host and operate Constellation, a shared office space we created to foster knowledge-sharing and collaboration between longtermist organizations. People from the Alignment Research Center, MIRI, and Open Philanthropy often work from the space. Redwood and Constellation are expanding. Redwood Research’s staff includes Nate Thomas (CEO), Buck Shlegeris (CTO), and Bill Zito (COO), and a board of Nate Thomas, Holden Karnofsky, and Paul Christiano. We’re running a hiring round for a number of Operations roles, across of range of experience levels. The roles we are most excited to hire are: Constellation Operations Manager Constellation: Head of Community Constellation IT Analyst Recruiting & MLAB Lead We also have a number of other roles, including technical roles, which you can also apply to here. Our office is in downtown Berkeley, thirteen seconds from the nearest BART stop. We offer catered lunches and dinners, and cover PPO health, dental, and vision insurance. We will consider international applicants who need visas. Below is a picture taken from the office -- we have beautiful views in all directions! If you’re interested in any of the roles listed above, fill out this application form. If you would like to express interest in this role but don’t want to be considered for the current hiring round there is the option to specify this on the form. Any questions, please email ops-recruiting@rdwrs.com, if you’re on the fence about applying, please email us. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.