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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: Learning from our mistakes: how HLI plans to improve, published by PeterBrietbart on September 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Hi folks, in this post we'd like to describe our views as the Chair (Peter) and Director (Michael) of HLI in light of the recent conversations around HLI's work. The purpose of this post is to reflect on HLI's work and its role within the EA community in response to community member feedback, highlight what we're doing about it, and engage in further constructive dialogue on how HLI can improve moving forward.HLI hasn't always got things right. Indeed, we think there have been some noteworthy errors (quick note: our goal here isn't to delve into details but to highlight broad lessons learnt, so this isn't an exhaustive list):Most importantly, we were overconfident and defensive in communication, particularly around our 2022 giving season post.We described our recommendation for StrongMinds using language that was too strong: "We're now in a position to confidently recommend StrongMinds as the most effective way we know of to help other people with your money". We agree with feedback that this level of confidence was and is not commensurate with the strength of the evidence and the depth of our analysis.The post's original title was "Don't give well, give WELLBYs". Though this was intended in a playful manner, it was tone-deaf, and we apologise.We made mistakes in our analysis.We made a data entry error. In our meta-analysis, we recorded that Kemp et al. (2009) found a positive effect, but in fact it was a negative effect. This correction reduced our estimated 'spillover effect' for psychotherapy (the effect that someone receiving an intervention had on other people) from 53% to 38% and therefore reduced the total cost-effectiveness estimate from 9.5x cash transfers to 7.5x.We did not include standard diagnostic tests of publication bias. If we had done this, we would have decreased our confidence in the quality of the literature on psychotherapy that we were using.After receiving feedback about necessary corrections to our cost-effectiveness estimates for psychotherapy and StrongMinds, we failed to update our materials on our website in a timely manner.As a community, EA prides itself on its commitment to epistemic rigour, and we're both grateful and glad that folks will speak up to maintain high standards. We have heard these constructive critiques, and we are making changes in response.We'd like to give a short outline of what HLI is doing next and has done in order to improve its epistemic health and comms processes.We've added an "Our Blunders" page on the HLI website, which lists the errors and missteps we mentioned above. The goal of this page is to be transparent about our mistakes, and to keep us accountable to making improvements.We've added the following text to the places in our website where we discuss StrongMinds:"Our current estimation for StrongMinds is that a donation of $1,000 produces 62 WELLBYs (or 7.5 times GiveDirectly cash transfers). See our changelog. However, we have been working on an update to our analysis since July 2023 and expect to be ready by the end of 2023. This will include using new data and improving our methods. We expect our cost-effectiveness estimate will decrease by about 25% or more - although this is a prediction we are very uncertain about as the analysis is yet to be done. While we expect the cost-effectiveness of StrongMinds will decrease, we think it is unlikely that the cost-effectiveness will be lower than GiveDirectly. Donors may want to wait to make funding decisions until the updated report is finished."We have added more/higher quality controls to our work:Since the initial StrongMinds report, we've added Samuel Dupret (researcher) and Dr Ryan Dwyer (senior research...
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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: Select examples of adverse selection in longtermist grantmaking, published by Linch on August 23, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Sometimes, there is a reason other grantmakers aren't funding a fairly well-known EA (-adjacent) project.This post is written in a professional capacity, as a volunteer/sometimes contractor for EA Funds' Long-Term Future Fund (LTFF), which is a fiscally sponsored project of Effective Ventures Foundation (UK) and Effective Ventures Foundation USA Inc. I am not and have never been an employee at either Effective Ventures entity. Opinions are my own and do not necessarily represent that of any of my employers or of either Effective Ventures entity. I originally wanted to make this post a personal shortform, but Caleb Parikh encouraged me to make it a top-level post instead.There is an increasing number of new grantmakers popping up, and also some fairly rich donors in longtermist EA that are thinking of playing a more active role in their own giving (instead of deferring). I am broadly excited about the diversification of funding in longtermist EA. There are many advantages of having a diverse pool of funding:Potentially increases financial stability of projects and charitiesAllows for a diversification of worldviewsEncourages accountability, particularly of donors and grantmakers - if there's only one or a few funders, people might be scared of offering justified criticismsAccess to more or better networks - more diverse grantmakers might mean access to a greater diversity of networks, allowing otherwise overlooked and potentially extremely high-impact projects to be fundedGreater competition and race to excellence and speed among grantmakers - I've personally been on both sides of being faster and much slower than other grantmakers, and it's helpful to have a competitive ecosystem to improve grantee and/or donor experienceHowever, this comment will mostly talk about the disadvantages. I want to address adverse selection: In particular, if a project that you've heard of through normal EA channels hasn't been funded by existing grantmakers like LTFF, there is a decently high likelihood that other grantmakers have already evaluated the grant and (sometimes for sensitive private reasons) have decided it is not worth funding.Reasons against broadly sharing reasons for rejectionFrom my perspective as an LTFF grantmaker, it is frequently imprudent, impractical, or straightforwardly unethical to directly make public our reasons for rejection. For example:Our assessments may include private information that we are not able to share with other funders.Writing up our reasons for rejection of specific projects may be time-consuming, politically unwise, and/or encourage additional ire ("punching down").We don't want to reify our highly subjective choices too much, and public writeups of rejections can cause informational cascades.Often other funders don't even think to ask about whether the project has already been rejected by us, and why (and/or rejected grantees don't pass on that they've been rejected by another funder).Sharing negative information about applicants would make applying to EA Funds more costly and could discourage promising applicants.Select examplesHere are some (highly) anonymized examples of grants I have personally observed being rejected by a centralized grantmaker. For further anonymization, in some cases I've switched details around or collapsed multiple examples into one. Most, although not all, of the examples are personal experiences from working on the LTFF. Many of these examples are grants that have later been funded by other grantmakers or private donors.An academic wants funding for a promising sounding existential safety research intervention in an area of study that none of the LTFF grantmakers ...
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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: Price-, Taste-, and Convenience-Competitive Plant-Based Meat Would Not Currently Replace Meat, published by Jacob Peacock on August 15, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Also available on the Rethink Priorities website. Executive summary Plant-based meats, like the Beyond Sausage or Impossible Burger, and cultivated meats have become a source of optimism for reducing animal-based meat usage. Public health, environmental, and animal welfare advocates aim to mitigate the myriad harms of meat usage. The price, taste, and convenience (PTC) hypothesis posits that if plant-based meat is competitive with animal-based meat on these three criteria, the large majority of current consumers would replace animal-based meat with plant-based meat. The PTC hypothesis rests on the premise that PTC primarily drive food choice. The PTC hypothesis and premise are both likely false. A majority of current consumers would continue eating primarily animal-based meat even if plant-based meats were PTC-competitive. PTC do not mainly determine food choices of current consumers; social and psychological factors also play important roles. Although not examined here, there may exist other viable approaches to drive the replacement of animal-based meats with plant-based meats. There is insufficient empirical evidence to more precisely estimate or optimize the current (or future) impacts of plant-based meat. To rectify this, consider funding: Research measuring the effects of plant-based meat sales on displacement of animal-based meat. Research comparing the effects of plant-based meats with other interventions to reduce animal-based meat usage. Informed (non-blinded) taste tests to benchmark current plant-based meats and enable measurements of taste improvement over time. Introduction Plant-based meats, like the Beyond Sausage or Impossible Burger, and cultivated meats[1] have been identified as important means of reducing the public health, environmental, and animal welfare harms associated with animal-based meat production (Rubio et al., 2020). By providing competitive alternatives, these products might displace the consumption of animal-based meats. Since cultivated meats are not currently widely available on the public market, this paper will focus on plant-based meats, although many of the arguments might also apply to cultivated meats. Animal welfare, environmental, and public health advocates believe plant-based meats present a valuable opportunity to mitigate significant negative externalities of industrial animal agriculture, like animal suffering, greenhouse gas emissions, and antimicrobial resistance. For example, Animal Charity Evaluators lists "[cultivated] and plant-based food tech" as a priority cause area (Animal Charity Evaluators, 2022b), and a 2018 survey of 30 animal advocacy leaders and researchers ranked creating plant-based (and cultivated) meats third (after only research and corporate outreach) in their top priorities (Savoie, 2018). Non-profits working to research and support plant-based and cultivated meat production have received millions of dollars in funding (Animal Charity Evaluators, 2022a; New Harvest, 2021). Hu et al. (2019) describes plant-based meats as a potentially "vital" means to reduce the risks of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some cancers. Others have focused on reducing the climate impact of food production and "the need to de-risk global food systems" (Zane Swanson et al., 2023). The private and public sectors have taken note as well; in 2022, the "plant-based meat, seafood, eggs, and dairy companies" foods industry attracted at least $1.2 billion in private investment activity and at least $874 million in public funding (The Good Food Institute, 2022, pp. 55, 85-88). This enthusiasm has been propelled in some significant part by the informa...
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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: University EA Groups Need Fixing, published by Dave Banerjee on August 3, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. (Cross-posted from my website.) I recently resigned as Columbia EA President and have stepped away from the EA community. This post aims to explain my EA experience and some reasons why I am leaving EA. I will discuss poor epistemic norms in university groups, why retreats can be manipulative, and why paying university group organizers may be harmful. Most of my views on university group dynamics are informed by my experience with Columbia EA. My knowledge of other university groups comes from conversations with other organizers from selective US universities, but I don't claim to have a complete picture of the university group ecosystem. Disclaimer: I've written this piece in a more aggressive tone than I initially intended. I suppose the writing style reflects my feelings of EA disillusionment and betrayal. My EA Experience During my freshman year, I heard about a club called Columbia Effective Altruism. Rumor on the street told me it was a cult, but I was intrigued. Every week, my friend would return from the fellowship and share what he learned. I was fascinated. Once spring rolled around, I applied for the spring Arete (Introductory) Fellowship. After enrolling in the fellowship, I quickly fell in love with effective altruism. Everything about EA seemed just right - it was the perfect club for me. EAs were talking about the biggest and most important ideas of our time. The EA community was everything I hoped college to be. I felt like I found my people. I found people who actually cared about improving the world. I found people who strived to tear down the sellout culture at Columbia. After completing the Arete Fellowship, I reached out to the organizers asking how I could get more involved. They told me about EA Global San Francisco (EAG SF) and a longtermist community builder retreat. Excited, I applied to both and was accepted. Just three months after getting involved with EA, I was flown out to San Francisco to a fancy conference and a seemingly exclusive retreat. EAG SF was a lovely experience. I met many people who inspired me to be more ambitious. My love for EA further cemented itself. I felt psychologically safe and welcomed. After about thirty one-on-ones, the conference was over, and I was on my way to an ~exclusive~ retreat. I like to think I can navigate social situations elegantly, but at this retreat, I felt totally lost. All these people around me were talking about so many weird ideas I knew nothing about. When I'd hear these ideas, I didn't really know what to do besides nod my head and occasionally say "that makes sense." After each one-on-one, I knew that I shouldn't update my beliefs too much, but after hearing almost every person talk about how AI safety is the most important cause area, I couldn't help but be convinced. By the end of the retreat, I went home a self-proclaimed longtermist who prioritized AI safety. It took several months to sober up. After rereading some notable EA criticisms (Bad Omens, Doing EA Better, etc.), I realized I got duped. My poor epistemics led me astray, but weirdly enough, my poor epistemics gained me some social points in EA circles. While at the retreat and at EA events afterwards, I was socially rewarded for telling people that I was a longtermist who cared about AI safety. Nowadays, when I tell people I might not be a longtermist and don't prioritize AI safety, the burden of proof is on me to explain why I "dissent" from EA. If you're a longtermist AI safety person, there's no need to offer evidence to defend your view. (I would be really excited if more experienced EAs asked EA newbies why they take AI safety seriously more often. I think what normally happens is that the experienced EA gets su...
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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: Launching the meta charity funding circle (MCF): Apply for funding or join as a donor!, published by Joey on July 26, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary We are launching the Meta Charity Funders, a growing network of donors sharing knowledge and discussing funding opportunities in the EA meta space. Apply for funding by August 27th or join the circle as a donor. See below or visit our website to learn more! If you are doing EA-aligned "meta" work, and have not received substantial funding for several years, you might be worried about funding. Over the past 10 years, Open Philanthropy and EA Funds comprised a large percent of total meta funding and are far from independent of each other. This lack of diversity means potentially effective projects outside their priorities often struggle to stay afloat or scale, and the beliefs of just a few grant-makers can massively shape the EA movement's trajectory. It can be difficult for funders within meta as well. Individual donors often don't know where to give if they don't share EA Funds' approach. Thorough vetting is scarce and expensive, with only a handful of grant-makers deploying tens of millions per year in meta grants, resulting in sub-optimal allocations. This is why we are launching the Meta Charity Funders, a growing network of donors sharing knowledge, discussing funding opportunities, and running joint open grant rounds in the EA meta space. We believe many charitable projects create a huge impact by working at one level removed from direct impact to instead enhance the impact of others. Often these projects cut across causes and don't fit neatly into a box, thus being neglected by funders. Well known examples of meta organizations include charity evaluators like GiveWell, incubators like Charity Entrepreneurship, cause prioritization research organizations like Rethink Priorities, or field-building projects promoting effective giving or impactful careers. Grantees: Apply to many HNW donors at once - 1st round closes August 27. We are open to funding meta work across a range of causes, organizational stages, strategies, etc. We are most interested in applications that have not already been substantially supported by similar actors such as EA Funds or Open Philanthropy, though we will still consider these. We expect most of our grants to range from $10,000 to $500,000 and consider grants to both individuals and organizations. We expect our first round to be between $500,000 and $1.5m of total funding. Please lean in favor of applying if you are unsure if you would be a good fit! Donors: Join us! Find neglected opportunities, get help with ops and vetting, and give on your own terms. People who are unable to commit to regular meetings are still encouraged to apply and may be invited to our Slack and email list and gain access to our grant opportunities database. Meta Charity Funding Circle is a project of Charity Entrepreneurship and Impactful Grantmaking. It is organized by this post's authors: Gage Weston, Vilhelm Skoglund, and Joey Savoie. Our members are anonymous. 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: Shaping Humanity's Longterm Trajectory, published by Toby Ord on July 18, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Since writing The Precipice, one of my aims has been to better understand how reducing existential risk compares with other ways of influencing the longterm future. Helping avert a catastrophe can have profound value due to the way that the short-run effects of our actions can have a systematic influence on the long-run future. But it isn't the only way that could happen. For example, if we advanced human progress by a year, perhaps we should expect to see us reach each subsequent milestone a year earlier. And if things are generally becoming better over time, then this may make all years across the whole future better on average. I've developed a clean mathematical framework in which possibilities like this can be made precise, the assumptions behind them can be clearly stated, and their value can be compared. The starting point is the longterm trajectory of humanity, understood as how the instantaneous value of humanity unfolds over time. In this framework, the value of our future is equal to the area under this curve and the value of altering our trajectory is equal to the area between the original curve and the altered curve. This allows us to compare the value of reducing existential risk to other ways our actions might improve the longterm future, such as improving the values that guide humanity, or advancing progress. Ultimately, I draw out and name 4 idealised ways our short-term actions could change the longterm trajectory: advancements speed-ups gains enhancements And I show how these compare to each other, and to reducing existential risk. While the framework is mathematical, the maths in these four cases turns out to simplify dramatically, so anyone should be able to follow it. My hope is that this framework, and this categorisation of some of the key ways we might hope to shape the longterm future, can improve our thinking about longtermism. Some upshots of the work: Some ways of altering our trajectory only scale with humanity's duration or its average value - but not both. There is a serious advantage to those that scale with both: speed-ups, enhancements, and reducing existential risk. When people talk about 'speed-ups', they are often conflating two different concepts. I disentangle these into advancements and speed-ups, showing that we mainly have advancements in mind, but that true speed-ups may yet be possible. The value of advancements and speed-ups depends crucially on whether they also bring forward the end of humanity. When they do, they have negative value. It is hard for pure advancements to compete with reducing existential risk as their value turns out not to scale with the duration of humanity's future. Advancements are competitive in outcomes where value increases exponentially up until the end time, but this isn't likely over the very long run. Work on creating longterm value via advancing progress is most likely to compete with reducing risk if the focus is on increasing the relative progress of some areas over others, in order to make a more radical change to the trajectory. The work is appearing as a chapter for the forthcoming book, Essays on Longtermism, but as of today, you can also read it online 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: Electric Shrimp Stunning: a Potential High-Impact Donation Opportunity, published by MHR on July 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Epistemic status: layperson's attempt to understand the relevant considerations. I welcome corrections from anyone with a better understanding of welfare biology Summary The Shrimp Welfare Project (SWP) has a novel opportunity to spend up to $115,500 to purchase and install electric stunners at multiple shrimp farms The stunners would be used to stun shrimp prior to slaughter, likely rendering them unconscious and thereby preventing suffering that is currently experienced when shrimp asphyxiate or freeze without effective analgesics Based on formal agreements SWP has signed with multiple producers, raising $115,500 would enable the stunning (rather than rather than conventional slaughtering) of 1.7 billion shrimp over the next three years, for a ratio of nearly 15000 shrimp/dollar I performed a preliminary cost-effectiveness analysis of this initiative and reached the following three tentative conclusions: The expected cost-effectiveness distribution for electric shrimp stunning likely overlaps that of corporate hen welfare campaigns The cost-effectiveness of electric shrimp stunning is more likely to be lower than that of corporate hen welfare campaigns than it is to be higher Shrimp stunning is a very heavy-tailed intervention. The mean cost-effectiveness of stunning is significantly influenced by a few extreme cases, which mostly represent instances in which the undiluted experience model of welfare turns out to be correct Given these results, electric shrimp stunning might be worth supporting as a somewhat speculative bet in the animal welfare space. Considerations that might drive donor decisions on this project include risk tolerance, credence in the undiluted experience model of welfare, and willingness to take a hits-based giving approach. Description of the Opportunity The following information is quoted from the project description written by Marcus Abramovitch on the Manifund donation platform, based on information provided by Andrés Jiménez Zorrilla (CEO of SWP) : Project summary Shrimp Welfare Project is an organization of people who believe that shrimps are capable of suffering and deserve our moral consideration [1]. We aim to cost-effectively reduce the suffering of billions of shrimps and envision a world where shrimps don't suffer needlessly. Programme: our current most impactful intervention is to place electrical stunners with producers ($60k/stunner): We have signed agreements with 2 producers willing and able to use electrical stunning technology as part of their slaughter process which will materially reduce the acute suffering at the last few minutes / hours of shrimps lives. Collectively, these 2 agreements will impact more than half a billion animals per year at a rate of more than 4,000 shrimps/dollar/annum. Please take a look at our blog post on the first agreement here. We are in advanced negotiations with 2 more producers which would take the number of animals to more than 1 billion shrimps per annum. See our back-of-the-envelope calculation for the number of shrimps and cost-effectiveness analysis here Project goals Simplified end-game of this programme: the interim goal of placing these stunners with selected producers in different contexts/systems is to remove some perceived obstacles to the industry and show major retailers and other shrimp buyers that electrical stunning is something they can demand from their supply chain The ultimate goal is for electrical stunning to be: widely adopted by medium to large shrimp producers in their slaughter process (pushed by their buyers), included by certifiers in their standards, and eventually considered (eventually) to be an obvious requirement by legislat...
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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 CE’s new Research Training Program - Apply Now!, published by KarolinaSarek on June 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR: We are excited to announce our Research Training Program. This online program is designed to equip participants with the tools and skills needed to identify, compare, and recommend the most effective charities and interventions. It is a full-time, fully cost-covered program that will run online for 11 weeks. Apply here!Deadline for application: July 17, 2023The program dates are: October 2 - December 17, 2023 So far, Charity Entrepreneurship has launched and run two successful training programs: a Charity Incubation Program and a Foundation Program. Now we are piloting a third - a Research Training Program, which will tackle a different problem. The Problem: People: Many individuals are eager to enter research careers, level up their current knowledge and skills from junior to senior, or simply make their existing skills more applicable to work within EA frameworks/organizations. At the same time, research organizations have trouble filling a senior-level researcher talent gap. There is a scarcity of specific training opportunities for the niche skills required, such as intervention prioritization and cost-effectiveness analyses, which are hard to learn through traditional avenues. Ideas: A lack of capacity for exhaustive investigation means there is a multitude of potentially impactful intervention ideas that remain unexplored. There may be great ideas being missed, as with limited time, we will only get to the most obvious solutions that other people are likely to have thought of as well. Evaluation: Unlike the for-profit sector, the nonprofit sector lacks clear metrics for assessing an organization's actual impact. External evaluations can help nonprofits evaluate and reorganize their own effectiveness and also allow funders to choose the highest impact opportunities available to them- potentially unlocking more funding (sometimes limited by lack of public external evaluation). There are some great organizations that carry out evaluations (e.g., GiveWell), but they are constrained by capacity and have limited scope; this results in several potentially worthwhile organizations remaining unassessed. Who Is This Program For? Motivated researchers who want to produce trusted research outputs to improve the prioritization and allocation decisions of effectiveness-minded organizations Early career individuals who are seeking to build their research toolkits and gain practical experience through real projects Existing researchers in the broader Global Health and Well-being communities (global health, animal advocacy, mental health, health/biosecurity, etc.) who are interested in approaching research from an effectiveness-minded perspective What Does Being a Fellow Involve? Similar to our Charity Incubation Program, the first month focuses on learning generalizable and specific research skills. It involves watching training videos, reading materials, and practicing by applying those skills to concrete mini-research projects. Participants learn by doing while we provide guidance and lots of feedback. The second month is focused on applying skills, working on different stages of the research process, and producing final research reports that could be used to guide real decision-making. Frequent feedback on your projects from expert researchers Regular check-in calls with a mentor for troubleshooting, guidance on research, and your career Writing reports on selected topics Opportunities to connect with established researchers and explore potential job opportunities Assistance with editing your cause area report for publication and dissemination What Are We Offering? 11 weeks of online, full-time training with practical research assig...
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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: Lab-grown meat is cleared for sale in the United States, published by Ben West on June 22, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Upside Foods and Good Meat, two companies that make what they call “cultivated chicken,” said Wednesday that they have gotten approval from the US Department of Agriculture to start producing their cell-based proteins. Good Meat, which is owned by plant-based egg substitute maker Eat Just, said that production is starting immediately. 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 organizations should have a transparent scope, published by Joey on June 14, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Executive summary One of the biggest challenges of being in a community that really cares about counterfactuals is knowing where the most important gaps are and which areas are already effectively covered. This can be even more complex with meta organizations and funders that often have broad scopes that change over time. However, I think it is really important for every meta organization to clearly establish what they cover and thus where these gaps are; there is a substantial negative flowthrough effect when a community thinks an area is covered when it is not. Why this matters The topic of having a transparent scope recently came up at a conference as one of the top concerns with many EA meta orgs. Some negative effects that have been felt by the community are in large part due to unclear scopes, including: Organizations leaving a space thinking it's covered when it's not. Funders reducing funding in an area due to an assumption that someone else is covering it when there are still major gaps. Two organizations working on the same thing without knowledge of each other, due to both having a broad mandate, but simultaneously putting resources into an overlapping subcomponent of this mandate. Talent being turned off or feeling misled by EA when they think an org misportrays itself. Talent ‘dropping out of the funnel’ when they go to what they believe is the primary organization covering an area and finding that what they care about isn’t covered, due to the organization claiming too broad a mandate. There can also be a significant amount of general frustration caused when people think an organization will cover, or is covering, an area and then an organization fails to deliver (often on something they did not even plan on doing). What do I mean when I say that organizations should have a transparent scope: Broadly, I mean organizations being publicly clear and specific about what they are planning to cover both in terms of action and cause area. In a relevant timeframe: I think this is most important in the short term (e.g., there is a ton of value in an organization saying what they are going to cover over the next 12 months, and what they have covered over the last months). For the most important questions: This clarity needs to both be in priorities (e.g., cause prioritization) and planned actions (e.g., working with student chapters). This can include things the organization might like or think is impactful to do but are not doing due to capacity constraints or its current strategic direction. For the areas most likely for people to confuse: It is particularly important to provide clarity about things that people think one might be doing (for example, Charity Entrepreneurship probably doesn’t need to clarify that it doesn’t sell flowers, but should really be transparent over whether it plans to incubate projects in a certain cause area or not). How to do this When I have talked to organizations about this, I sometimes think that the “perfect” becomes the enemy of the good and they do not want to share a scope that is not set in stone. All prioritizations can change, and it can sometimes even be hard internally to have a sense of where the majority of your resources are going. However, given the importance of counterfactuals and the number of aspects that can help proxy these factors, I think a pretty solid template can be created. Given that CE is also often asked this question I made a quick template below that I think gives a lot of transparency if answered clearly and can give people a pretty clear sense of an organization's focus. It's worth noting that what I am suggesting is more about clarity rather than justification. While an org can choo...
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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: Statement on AI Extinction - Signed by AGI Labs, Top Academics, and Many Other Notable Figures, published by Center for AI Safety on May 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Today, the AI Extinction Statement was released by the Center for AI Safety, a one-sentence statement jointly signed by a historic coalition of AI experts, professors, and tech leaders. Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio have signed, as have the CEOs of the major AGI labs–Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Dario Amodei–as well as executives from Microsoft and Google (but notably not Meta). The statement reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” We hope this statement will bring AI x-risk further into the overton window and open up discussion around AI’s most severe risks. Given the growing number of experts and public figures who take risks from advanced AI seriously, we hope to improve epistemics by encouraging discussion and focusing public and international attention toward this issue. 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: KFC Supplier Sued for Cruelty, published by alene on May 24, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Dear EA Forum readers,The EA charity, Legal Impact for Chickens (LIC), just filed our second lawsuit!As many of you know, LIC is a litigation nonprofit dedicated to making factory-farm cruelty a liability. We focus on chickens because of the huge numbers in which they suffer and the extreme severity of that suffering.Today, we sued one of the country’s largest poultry producers and a KFC supplier, Case Farms, for animal cruelty.The complaint comes on the heels of a 2021 undercover investigation by Animal Outlook, revealing abuse at a Morganton, N.C. Case Farms hatchery that processes more than 200,000 chicks daily.Our lawsuit attacks the notion that Big Ag is above the law. We are suing under North Carolina's 19A statute, which lets private parties enjoin animal cruelty.Case Farms was documented knowingly operating faulty equipment, including a machine piston which repeatedly smashes chicks to death and a dangerous metal conveyor belt which traps and kills young birds. Case Farms was also documented crushing chicks’ necks between heavy plastic trays.Case Farms supplies its chicken to KFC, Taco Bell, and Boar’s Head, among other customers.Thank you so much to all the EA Forum readers who helped make this happen, by donating to, and volunteering for, Legal Impact for Chickens!Sincerely,AleneThanks 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 Publication of Animal Liberation Now, published by Peter Singer on May 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryMy new book, Animal Liberation Now, will be out next Tuesday (May 23).I consider ALN to be a new book, rather than just a revision, because so much of the material in the book is new.Pre-ordering from Amazon or other online booksellers (US only) or ordering/purchasing within the first week of publication will increase the chance of the book getting on NYT best-seller list. (Doing the same in other countries may increase the prospects of the book getting on that country’s bestseller list.)Along with the publication of the book, I will be doing a speaking tour with the same title as the book. You can book tickets here, with a 50% discount if you use the code SINGER50 (Profits will be 100% donated to effective charities opposing intensive animal production).Please spread the words (and links) about the book and the speaking tour to help give the book a strong start.Why a new book?The major motivation of writing the new book is to have a book about animal ethics that is relevant in the 21st Century. Compared with Animal Liberation, there are major updates on the situation of animals used in research and factory farming, and people’s attitudes toward animals, as well as new research on the capacities of animals to suffer, and on the contribution of meat to climate change.What’s different?The animal movement emerged after the 1975 version of AL. In particular, the concern for farmed animals developed rapidly over the last two decades. These developments deserve to be reported and discussed.Some of the issues discussed in AL have seen many changes since then. Some animal experiments are going out of fashion, while some others emerged. On factory farming, there were wins for the farmed animal movement, such as the partially successful “cage-free movement” and various wins in legislative reforms. But the number of animals raised in factory farms increased rapidly during the same time. A significant portion of this increased number came from aquaculture, in other words fish factory farms. New developments were also seen regarding replacing factory farming, in particular the development of plant-based meat alternative and cultivated meats.ALN has a more global perspective than AL, most notably discussing what happened in China. Since the last edition of AL, China has greatly increased the use of animals in research and factory farming.There are also changes in my views about a number of issues. Firstly, since 1990 (The year of publication for the last full revision of the 1975 version of AL), scientists have gained more evidence that suggests the sentience of fish and some invertebrates. Accordingly, I have updated my attitudes toward the probability of sentience of these animals. Secondly, I have changed my views toward the suffering of wild animals, in particular the possibility and tractability of helping them. Thirdly, I have added the discussion about the relation between climate change and meat consumption. Last but not least, Effective Altruism, as an idea or as a movement, did not exist when the versions of Animal Liberation were written, so I have added some discussions of the EA movement and EA principles in the new book.Is the book relevant to EA?Animal welfare is, and should be, one of the major cause areas with EA for reasons I do not need to repeat here. I will explain why ALN is relevant to EA.Firstly, ALN contains some of the commonly used arguments by EAs who work on animal welfare on why the issues of animal suffering is important. Reading ALN provides an opportunity for newcomers to the EA community to learn about animal ethics and why some (hopefully most) EAs think that animals matter morally and that they are...
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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: Prioritising animal welfare over global health and development?, published by Vasco Grilo on May 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummaryCorporate campaigns for chicken welfare increase wellbeing way more cost-effectively than the best global health and development (GHD) interventions.In addition, the effects on farmed animals of such interventions can influence which countries they should target, and those on wild animals might determine whether they are beneficial or harmful.I encourage Charity Entrepreneurship (CE), Founders Pledge (FP), GiveWell (GW), Open Philanthropy (OP) and Rethink Priorities (RP) to:Increase their support of animal welfare interventions relative to those of GHD (at the margin).Account for effects on animals in the cost-effectiveness analyses of GHD interventions.Corporate campaigns for chicken welfare increase nearterm wellbeing way more cost-effectively than GiveWell’s top charitiesCorporate campaigns for chicken welfare are considered one of the most effective animal welfare interventions. A key supporter of these is The Humane League (THL), which is one of the 3 top charities of Animal Charity Evaluators.I calculated the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns for broiler welfare in human-years per dollar from the product between:Chicken-years affected per dollar, which I set to 15 as estimated here by Saulius Simcikas.Improvement in welfare as a fraction of that of median welfare range when broilers go from a conventional to a reformed scenario, assuming:The time broilers experience each level of pain defined here (search for “definitions”) in a conventional and reformed scenario is given by these data (search for “pain-tracks”) from the Welfare Footprint Project (WFP).The welfare range is symmetric around the neutral point, and excruciating pain corresponds to the worst possible experience.Excruciating pain is 1 k times as bad as disabling pain.Disabling pain is 100 times as bad as hurtful pain.Hurtful pain is 10 times as bad as annoying pain.The lifespan of broilers is 42 days, in agreement with section “Conventional and Reformed Scenarios” of Chapter 1 of Quantifying pain in broiler chickens by Cynthia Schuck-Paim and Wladimir Alonso.Broilers sleep 8 h each day, and have a neutral experience during that time.Broilers being awake is as good as hurtful pain is bad. This means being awake with hurtful pain is neutral, thus accounting for positive experiences.Median welfare range of chickens, which I set to RP's median estimate of 0.332.Reciprocal of the intensity of the mean human experience, which I obtained supposing humans:Sleep 8 h each day, and have a neutral experience during that time.Being awake is as good as hurtful pain is bad. This means being awake with hurtful pain is neutral, thus accounting for positive experiences.I computed the cost-effectiveness in the same metric for the lowest cost to save a life among GW's top charities from the ratio between:Life expectancy at birth in Africa in 2021, which was 61.7 years according to these data from OWID.Lowest cost to save a life of 3.5 k$ (from Helen Keller International), as stated by GW here.The results are in the tables below. The data and calculations are here (see tab “Cost-effectiveness”).Intensity of the mean experience as a fraction of the median welfare rangeBroiler in a conventional scenarioBroiler in a reformed scenarioHuman5.7710^-62.5910^-53.3310^-6Broiler in a conventional scenario relative to a humanBroiler in a reformed scenario relative to a humanBroiler in a conventional scenario relative to a reformed scenario7.771.734.49Improvement in chicken welfare when broilers go from a conventional to a reformed scenario as a fraction of...The median welfare range of chickensThe intensity of the mean human experience2....
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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: Current plans as the incoming director of the Global Priorities Institute, published by Eva on April 26, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Cross-posted from my blog.I am taking leave from the University of Toronto to serve as the Director of the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) at the University of Oxford. I can't express enough gratitude to the University of Toronto for enabling this. (I'll be back in the fall to fulfill my teaching obligations, though - keep inviting me to seminars and such!)GPI is an interdisciplinary research institute focusing on academic research that informs decision-makers on how to do good more effectively. In its first few years, under the leadership of its founding director, Hilary Greaves, GPI created and grew a community of academics in philosophy and economics interested in global priorities research. I am excited to build from this strong foundation and, in particular, to further develop the economics side.There are several areas I would like to focus on while at GPI. The below items reflect my current views, however, I expect these views to be refined over time. These items are not intended to be an exhaustive list, but they are things I would like GPI to do more of on the margin.1) Research on decision-making under uncertaintyThere is a lot of uncertainty in estimates of the effects of various actions. My views here are coloured by my past work. In the early 2010s, I tried to compile estimates of the effects of popular development interventions such as insecticide-treated bed nets for malaria, deworming drugs, and unconditional cash transfers. My initial thought was that by synthesizing the evidence, I'd be able to say something more conclusive about "the best" intervention for a given outcome. Unfortunately, I found that results varied, a lot (you can read more about it in my JEEA paper).If it's really hard to predict effects in global development, which is a very well-studied area, it would seem even harder to know what to do in other areas with less evidence. Yet, decisions still have to be made. One of the core areas GPI has focused on in the past is decision-making under uncertainty, and I expect that to continue to be a priority research area. Some work on robustness might also fall under this category.2) Increasing empirical researchGPI is an interdisciplinary institute combining philosophy and economics. To date, the economics side has largely focused on theoretical issues. But I think it's important for there to be careful, rigorous empirical work at GPI. I think there are relevant hypotheses that can be tested that pertain to global priorities research.Many economists interested in global priorities research come from applied fields like development economics, and there's a talented pool of people who can do empirical work on, e.g., encouraging better uptake of evidence or forecasting. There's simply a lot to be done here, and I look forward to working with colleagues like Julian Jamison (on leave from Exeter), Benjamin Tereick, and Mattie Toma (visiting from Warwick Business School), among many others.3) Expanding GPI’s network in economicsThere is an existing program at GPI for senior research affiliates based at other institutions. However, I think a lot more can be done with this, especially on the economics side. I'm still exploring the right structures, but suffice it to say, if you are an academic economist interested in global priorities research, please do get in touch. I am envisioning a network of loosely affiliated individuals in core fields of interest who would be sent notifications about research and funding opportunities. There may also be the occasional workshop or conference invitation.4) Exploring expanding to other fields and topicsThere are a number of topics that appear relevant to gl...
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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 Living Without Idols, published by Rockwell on January 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.For many years, I've actively lived in avoidance of idolizing behavior and in pursuit of a nuanced view of even those I respect most deeply. I think this has helped me in numerous ways and has been of particular help in weathering the past few months within the EA community. Below, I discuss how I think about the act of idolizing behavior, some of my personal experiences, and how this mentality can be of use to others.Note: I want more people to post on the EA Forum and have their ideas taken seriously regardless of whether they conform to Forum stylistic norms. I'm perfectly capable of writing a version of this post in the style typical to the Forum, but this post is written the way I actually like to write. If this style doesn’t work for you, you might want to read the first section “Anarchists have no idols” and then skip ahead to the section “Living without idols, Pt. 1” toward the end. You’ll lose some of the insights contained in my anecdotes, but still get most of the core ideas I want to convey here.Anarchists have no idols.I wrote a Facebook post in July 2019 following a blowup in one of my communities:"Anarchists have no idols."Years ago, I heard this expression (that weirdly doesn't seem to exist in Google) and it really stuck with me. I think about it often. It's something I try to live by and it feels extremely timely. Whether you agree with anarchism or not, I think this is a philosophy everyone might benefit from.What this means to me: Never put someone on a pedestal. Never believe anyone is incapable of doing wrong. Always create mechanisms for accountability, even if you don't anticipate ever needing to use them. Allow people to be multifaceted. Exist in nuance. Operate with an understanding of that nuance. Cherish the good while recognizing it doesn't mean there is no bad. Remember not to hero worship. Remember your fave is probably problematic. Remember no one is too big to fail, too big for flaws. Remember that when you idolize someone, it depersonalizes the idolized and erodes your autonomy. Hold on to your autonomy. Cultivate a culture of liberty. Idolize no one.Idolize no one. Idolize no one.My mentor, Pt. 1.When I was in college, I had a boss I considered my mentor. She was intelligent, ethical, and skilled. She shared her expertise with me and I eagerly learned from her. She gave me responsibility and trusted me to use it well. She oversaw me without micromanaging me, and used a gentle hand to correct my course and steer my development. She saw my potential and helped me to see it, too.She also lied to me. Directly to my face. She violated an ethical principle she had previously imparted to me, involved me in the violation, and then lied to me about it. I was made an unwitting participant in something I deeply morally opposed and I experienced a major, life-shattering breach of trust from someone I deeply respected. She was my boss and my friend, but in a sense, she was also my idol. And since then, I have refused to have another.Abusive people do not exist.A month after my mentor ceased to be my mentor, I took a semester-long course, "Domestic Violence". It stands as one of the most formative experiences in my way of thinking about the world. There's a lot I could write about it, but I want to share one small tidbit here, that I wrote about a few years after the course concluded:More and more people are promoting a shift in our language away from talking about “abusive relationships” and toward relationships with “abusive people.” This is a small but powerful way to locate where culpability lies. It is not the relationship that is to blame, but one individual in it. I suggest taking this a step further and selectively avoiding use of...
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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: Process for Returning FTX Funds Announced, published by Molly on December 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.FTX has put out a press release announcing a “process for voluntary return of avoidable payments.” This may be a useful option for grantees looking to urgently return any FTX-associated funding rather than wait for the bankruptcy process to play out. But anyone interested in returning money should keep in mind that in order to avoid being subject to redundant clawbacks or other legal claims later, it’s crucial to receive proper release-of-claims paperwork in exchange for returning funding. I strongly recommend you consult with a bankruptcy lawyer before starting this process. The Open Phil legal team is putting together a list of legal service providers for grantees who want to explore this option; we’ll follow up after the holidays with more information.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 career guide for people from LMICs, published by Surbhi B on December 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Executive SummaryIndividuals from Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) engaging with EA often find that existing EA career advice does not address various frequently arising questions and challenges. This post attempts to address that gap by sharing the tentative outcomes of discussions between the authors (who are all from LMICs) on the pros and cons for various career paths.We hope that this guide will serve as a tool for individuals in LMICs to prioritize career paths. This post may be particularly useful as material for localized introductory or in depth fellowships.The advice for paths to impact depends on the individual, but broadly speaking, we recommend EAs, and especially those from LMICs, to:Build career capital early onWork on top global issues instead of local ones, unless there are clear impact-related reasons to opt for the latterSome Individuals -we further discuss who and when- may have impact by doing:local community buildinglocal priorities research and charity-related activitieslocal career advisingThere are many other paths the authors did not explore in-depth but consider promising, such as LMIC-relevant content creation to research on regional comparative advantages in addressing global prioritiesFor each path, the authors discuss pros and cons and suggest actionable next steps (lots of them!)Some general advice around how to think about paths to impact:Assess and prioritize paths by the problem’s scale / neglectedness / tractability, the incremental value you can contribute, and your personal fit.Consider global priorities first. Look for local comparative advantage.New EAs with a bias towards acting now risk subpar outcomes by hastily jumping into direct work, so instead first upskill and engage deeply with (and critique!) EA ideas.Note that this post is not meant to be the final word on how EAs from LMICs should think about career paths, but rather a conversation-starter and call-to-action to improve LMIC-specific diversity in EA. It builds upon excellent prior work by several LMIC groups and community builders, which the authors have compiled in this resource bank.AcknowledgementsThanks to Alejandro Acelas, Agustin Covarrubias, Claudette Salinas, Siobhan McDonough, Vaishnav Sunil, and Yi-Yang Chua for all of your feedback on previous drafts.IntroductionEngaging with EA when you come from a Low or Middle Income Country (LMIC) raises some challenges that might not be obvious to the current EA majority, composed of people from higher income countries, often in the Western world. EA principles framed from a high-income audience can fall flat in contexts where individuals lack the ability to donate, don’t have access to large EA networks for continued engagement, and where EA principles may be at odds with typical cultural norms and histories.If you come from an LMIC, you have probably wondered how your strategy and prioritization fits in with the EA movement at-large. Some common questions/concerns we hear from LMICs audiences (that you might have at the moment) are:Why should I care about suffering in other countries if I am surrounded by suffering, poverty, and disease in my own city or country?What are the most effective causes and charities in my country? Does global EA or GiveWell have adequate information to assess local interventions?Is it worthwhile to focus on identifying effective charities in my own country? Will it increase overall impact or divert funding from higher impact interventions?What other high leverage interventions can increase impact? How should we think about localized career advising, research, community building, founding new charities?What are the comparative advantages of my...
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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: I’m a 22-year-old woman involved in Effective Altruism. I’m sad, disappointed, and scared., published by Maya D on December 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Before I get to the heart of what I want to share, a couple of disclaimers:I am one person and, as such, I recognize that my perspective is both informed and limited by my experience and identity. I would like to share my perspective in the hope that it may interact with and broaden yours.In writing this post, my aim is not to be combative nor divisive. The values of Effective Altruism are my values (for the most part - I likely value rationality less than many), and its goals are my goals. I do not, therefore, aim to “take down” or harm the Effective Altruism community. Rather, I hope to challenge us all to think about what it means to be in community.Who am I and why am I writing this?I’m a 22-year-old college senior, set to graduate with a degree in Human and Organizational Development in May. I learned about Effective Altruism last fall, when I transferred to a new university and started attending my school’s EA events and fellowships. I have become increasingly involved in the Effective Altruism community over the past 14 months - participating in intro and in-depth fellowships, taking on a leadership role in my school’s EA club, and attending an EAGx and an EAG.So why am I writing this? Because I am at a point in my life where I have to make a lot of choices: where I want to live; what type of work I want to engage in; the people whom I want to surround myself with. When I found Effective Altruism, it seemed as though I had stumbled across a movement and a community that would provide me with guidance in all three of these areas. However, as my social and intellectual circles became increasingly entangled with EA, I grew hesitant, then skeptical, then downright sad as I observed behavior (both in-person and online) from those involved in the EA community. I’m writing this because I want to be able to feel proud when I tell people that I am involved in Effective Altruism. I want to feel as if I can encourage others to join without an added list of disclaimers about the type of behavior they may encounter.Lastly, I want the Effective Altruism community to revisit and continuously strive towards what the Centre for Effective Altruism calls the core principles of EA: commitment to others, scientific mindset, openness, integrity, and collaborative spirit.Gender and CultureAccording to the EA Survey 2020 (the latest year for which I could find data), the makeup of people involved in EA was very similar to that of 2019: 76% white and 71% male. Lack of diversity within movements, organizations, and “intellectual projects” is incredibly damaging for many important reasons. CEA writes several of these reasons on their Diversity and Inclusion page, but the one I would like to highlight is We don’t want to miss important perspectives. As the website reads, “if the community isn’t able to welcome and encourage members who don’t resemble the existing community, we will consistently miss out on the perspectives of underrepresented groups.” I agree with this statement and that is why I am concerned - I’m unconvinced that this community is effective in “welcoming and encouraging” people who don’t fit the majority white-and-man mold.I question the welcoming-ness of the EA community because, despite fitting the EA mold in many ways - I’m white, American, in my twenties, and will soon graduate from a highly-ranked college - I still often feel as if the EA community is not something I want to be a part of. I can imagine that those with even less of the predominant EA demographic characteristics face exponentially increased barriers to entry. Several (yet not all) instances in which I’ve felt this way.A friend ...
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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 Letter to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, published by John G. Halstead on November 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Tldr: This is a letter I wrote to the Climate Contributing Editor of the Bulletin Atomic Scientists, Dawn Stover, about Emile Torres' latest piece criticising EA. In short:In advance of the publication of the article, Ms Stover reached out to us to check on what Torres calls their most "disturbing" claim viz. that Will MacAskill lied about getting advice from five climate experts.We showed them that this was false.The Bulletin published the claim anyway, and then tweeted it.In my opinion, this is outrageous, so I have asked them to issue a correction and an apology.Dear Ms Stover,I have long admired the work of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. However, I am extremely disappointed by your publication of the latest piece by Emile Torres.I knew long ago that Torres would publish a piece critical of What We Owe the Future, and on me following my report on climate change. However, I am surprised that the Bulletin has chosen to publish this particular piece in its current form. There are many things wrong with the piece, but the most important is that it accuses Will MacAskill and his research assistants of research misconduct. Specifically, Torres contends that five of the climate experts we listed in the acknowledgements for the book were not actually consulted.Ms Stover: you contacted us about this claim in advance of the article’s publication, and we informed you that it was not true. Overall, we consulted around 106 experts in the research process for What We Owe The Future. Torres suggests that five experts were never consulted at all, but this is not true — as Will stated in his earlier email to you, four of those five experts were consulted. I am happy to provide evidence for this. The article would have readers think that we made up the citations out of thin air. One of them was contacted but didn’t have time to give feedback, and was incorrectly credited in the acknowledgements, which we will change in future editions: this was an honest mistake. The Bulletin also went on to tweet the false claim that multiple people hadn’t been consulted at all.The acknowledgements are also clear that we are not claiming that those listed checked and agreed with every claim in the book. Immediately after the acknowledgements of subject-matter experts, Will writes: “These advisers don’t necessarily agree with the claims I make in the book, and all errors in the book are my responsibility alone.”To accuse someone of research misconduct is a very serious allegation. After you check it and find out that it is false, it is extremely poor form to let the claim go out anyway and then to tweet it. The Bulletin should issue a correction to the article, and to the false claim they put out in a tweet.I also have concerns about the nature of Torres’ background work for article — they seemingly sent every person that was acknowledged for the book a misleading email, telling them that we lied in the acknowledgements, and making some reviewers quite uncomfortable.To reiterate, I am very disappointed by the journalistic standards demonstrated in this article. I will be publishing something separately about Torres’ (as usual) misrepresented substantive claims, but the most serious allegation of research misconduct needs to be retracted and we need an apology.(Also, a more minor point: it's not true that I am Head of Applied Research at Founders Pledge. I left that role in 2019.)JohnThanks 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: Open Phil is seeking applications from grantees impacted by recent events, published by Bastian Stern on November 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We (Open Phil) are seeking applications from grantees affected by the recent collapse of the FTX Future Fund (FTXFF) who fall within our long-termist focus areas (biosecurity, AI risk, and building the long-termist EA community). If you fit the following description, please fill out this application form. We’re open to applications from: Grantees who never received some or all of their committed funds from FTXFF. Grantees who received funds, but want to set them aside to return to creditors or depositors. We think there could be a number of complex considerations here, and we don’t yet have a clear picture of how we’ll treat requests like these. We’d encourage people to apply if in doubt, but to avoid making assumptions about whether you’ll be funded (and about what our take will end up being on what the right thing to do is for your case). (Additionally, we’re unsure if there will be legal barriers to returning funds.) That said, we’ll do our best to respond to urgent requests quickly, so you have clarity as soon as possible. Grantees whose funding was otherwise affected by recent events. Please note that this form does not guarantee funding. We intend to evaluate applications using the same standard as we would if they were coming through one of our other longtermist programs — we will evaluate whether they are a cost-effective way to positively influence the long-term future. As described in Holden’s post, we expect our cost-effectiveness “bar” to rise relative to what it has been in the past, so unfortunately we expect that some of the applications we receive (and possibly a sizeable fraction of them) will not be successful. That said, this is a sudden disruptive event and we plan to take into account the benefits of stability and continuity in our assessment. We’ll prioritize getting back to applicants who indicate time sensitivity and whose work seems highly likely to fall above our updated bar. If we’re unsure whether an application is above our new bar, we’ll do our best to get back within the indicated deadline (or within 6 weeks, if the application isn’t time-sensitive), but we may take longer as we reevaluate where the bar should be. We’re aware that others may want to help out financially. If you would like to identify yourself as a potential donor either to this effort or to a different one aimed at impacted FTXFF grantees, you can get in contact with us at inquiries@openphilanthropy.org. We sincerely appreciate anyone who wants to help, but due to logistical reasons we can only respond to emails from people who think there’s a serious chance they’d be willing to contribute over $250k. We’ve left an option on the form to explain specific circumstances – we can imagine many ways that recent events could be disruptive. (For example, if FTXFF had committed to funding a grantee that planned to regrant some of those funds, anyone anticipating a regrant could be affected.) 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: CE: Who underrates their likelihood of success. Why applying is worthwhile., published by SteveThompson on November 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR: If we don't find more potential founders we may not be able to launch charities in Tobacco Taxation and Fish Welfare. We've extended the deadline to November 10 to our incubation program starting early 2023. Below we set out why applying is worthwhile. In our recent ‘Ask Charity Entrepreneurship anything’ post, the question was asked: “What kind of applicant do you think underrates their likelihood of success?” With so many upvotes, we’ve decided to give our response its own post. “You get so many applicants, it’s not worth applying” Yes, our application process is competitive and it is true that we get a lot of applicants (~3 thousand). But, and it’s a big but, ~80% of the applications are speculative, from people outside the EA community and don’t even really understand what we do. Of the 300 relevant candidates we receive, maybe 20 or so will make it onto the program. So for the purposes of those reading the EA Forum, (who one would imagine are somewhat or very involved in EA) the likelihood of getting into the later rounds of the application process are actually pretty good. “The charities you are launching will get started whether I apply or not” Nope. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. In recent years we have had more charity ideas than we have been able to find founders for. We have been trying to launch a Postpartum charity for a number of years, and ideas such as Exploratory Altruism have rolled over from one cohort to the next. The truth is that for every year a charity doesn’t get founded, that’s a year of its impact gone. Many EAs don't realize that they are exactly who we are looking for. Right now we are particularly interested in finding founders who could potentially focus on Tobacco Taxation and Fish Welfare, as it may well be the case that these interventions won’t get off the ground if we don’t find suitable co-founders very soon. To help mitigate this, we have just extended our application deadline to November 10 and we are appealing to readers here, to think once more about applying, and to spread the word. “But it pays too little” It is true that, historically, some CE founders made the decision to take meager salaries but it’s worth clarifying that the charities we launch set their own salaries (CE doesn’t dictate anything). Moreover, in recent years we’ve seen steep improvements in the speed, ease and quantity of funding achieved by our incubatees, so the choice of salaries taken, ranges greatly. Don’t expect to match corporate salaries, but our founders are living fully and comfortably. (When it comes to financial support during the program, we don’t want financial limitations to stop anyone from starting an organization, so we offer extended stipends to cover living costs, childcare, etc.. Personal financial limitations should never be a reason to not start a charity that could save thousands, if not millions, of lives.) “But I don’t have the right skills and experience” Doctors think they lack the commercial skills, business students think they lack the research skills and researchers think they lack the interpersonal skills. The truth is that nobody comes onto the program ready. That’s what the program is for! Even after the program, the first year of running the new charity is spent learning- piloting and testing, becoming a skillful and capable expert in your chosen intervention. The Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program is far more than just a way to get a new intervention funded. We are not looking to find ready made charity entrepreneurs, we are looking for people with great potential to, overtime, become great founders - we literally wrote the handbook on thi...
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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: New book on s-risks, published by Tobias Baumann on October 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I have just published my new book on s-risks, titled Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe. You can find it on Amazon or read the PDF version. The book is primarily aimed at longtermist effective altruists. I wrote it because I feel that s-risk prevention is a somewhat neglected priority area in the community, and because a single, comprehensive introduction to s-risks did not yet exist. My hope is that a coherent introduction will help to strengthen interest in the topic and spark further work. Here’s a short description of the book: From Nineteen Eighty-Four to Black Mirror, we are all familiar with the tropes of dystopian science fiction. But what if worst-case scenarios could actually become reality? And what if we could do something now to put the world on a better path? In Avoiding the Worst, Tobias Baumann lays out the concept of risks of future suffering (s-risks). With a focus on s-risks that are both realistic and avoidable, he argues that we have strong reasons to consider their reduction a top priority. Finally, he turns to the question of what we can do to help steer the world away from s-risks and towards a brighter future. For a rough overview, here’s the book's table of contents: Part I: What are s-risks? Chapter 1: Technology and astronomical stakes Chapter 2: Types of s-risks Part II: Should we focus on s-risks? Chapter 3: Should we focus on the long-term future? Chapter 4: Should we focus on reducing suffering? Chapter 5: Should we focus on worst-case outcomes? Chapter 6: Cognitive biases Part III: How can we best reduce s-risks? Chapter 7: Risk factors for s-risks Chapter 8: Moral advocacy Chapter 9: Better Politics Chapter 10: Emerging technologies Chapter 11: Long-term impact And finally, some blurbs for the book: “One of the most important, original, and disturbing books I have read. Tobias Baumann provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of s-risk reduction. Most importantly, he outlines sensible steps towards preventing future atrocities. Highly recommended.” David Pearce, author of The Hedonistic Imperative and Can Biotechnology Abolish Suffering? “This book is a groundbreaking contribution on a topic that has been severely neglected to date. Tobias Baumann presents a powerful case for averting worst-case scenarios that could involve vast amounts of suffering. A much needed read for our time.” Oscar Horta, co-founder of Animal Ethics and author of Making a Stand for Animals 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: My experience experimenting with a bunch of antidepressants I'd never heard of, published by Luisa Rodriguez on October 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This isn't professional medical advice, it's just my experience and amateur knowledge. Summary I got moderately (and occasionally, severely) depressed about four months into the pandemic. I tried a bunch of things to treat it, including therapy, antidepressants, meditation, and a long list of other things. I was prescribed the antidepressant sertraline (aka Zoloft) by my NHS GP, and it really helped! But it had a number of side effects that made me very unexcited to stay on it. I experimented with a bunch of different types of antidepressants to see if I could find one that worked well and didn’t give me bad side effects. I knew this would probably be a long and grueling experiment... and it was. It took over a year, and was really hard, both emotionally and physically. But I ended up finding a great one for me, and it now feels well worth the costs. I think this kind of experimentation might be a good approach for some people who also experience depression and anxiety. Caveats: This was expensive. It’s probably much harder to do this without savings or great insurance, or both. I have a particularly supportive work environment and partner. It’s probably much harder to do this without those things. Things besides antidepressants were also really important to feeling better (and also allowed me to stick with the experiment). Therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) were extremely effective for me in treating my imposter syndrome and perfectionism, and in making my depression manageable. Searching for an antidepressant that worked for me probably wouldn’t have gone nearly as well if I hadn’t done it alongside these other practices. Antidepressants have not solved all of my problems — and it’s important to set reasonable expectations for how much they can help. Context I got moderately (and occasionally, severely) depressed about four months into the pandemic. This was triggered by: The pandemic — including things like: feeling very isolated, not having much personal space, shitty British weather, having to work from home, not being able to see my family for years. Genetics — my mom has suffered from moderate-severe depression since she was in her early thirties. Imposter syndrome at work — I’d gotten a dream job, but it felt like, sooner or later, my employer would realize I was a total phony. I was afraid to do really any task that might reveal I was actually a big idiot, which made me anxious for a lot of my day-to-day activities. My main symptoms were: Having continuous low mood or sadness Feeling hopeless Having very low self-esteem, feeling like I was letting everyone down all the time Feeling tearful Feeling guilt-ridden Feeling irritable and intolerant of others Having little motivation or interest in things — finding myself and everyone else really boring Finding it difficult to make decisions Not getting much enjoyment out of life, including out of things that were previously some of my favorite activities (hiking, seeing close friends) Feeling anxious and worried Non-pharmacological things I did to treat my depression: Weekly therapy with an excellent therapist, who taught me a bunch about CBT (helped a lot) Weekly therapy with a couples therapist (sometimes my depression made me especially angst-y about my relationship) (helped a bit) Taking time off work (sometimes helped, sometimes made things a bunch worse) My depression was a factor in switching jobs (kind of helped) Changing my role at work significantly to focus on tasks I found especially exciting and satisfying (helped a lot) Spending time in sunnier countries (helped a fair bit) Regular exercise (helped a fair bit when I actually had ...
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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: Let me blind myself to Forum post authors, published by Will Payne on October 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: I'd like to have the ability to hide the author(s) of all the posts on my news feed so that I see can read the content without knowing about the source. I have some intuitions for why this might be good but mainly I think adding the feature is easy and it lets us check whether or not it's good. Is this the right place to post this? I can't remember if there's an obvious place to suggest forum features (I think there might have been a survey a while back but I might have imagined it). Since the bulk of this post is closer to "Why you might want this" than "Why you should add this to the forum you maintain" I think it's better posted publically. Also it seems likely this can be quickly made with a chrome extension. The feature I'd like to be able to blur out author names wherever they appear like this... (It could also be black boxes of regular size or random strings of nonsense characters like this ⏁⊑⟟⌇ ⟟⌇ ⋏⍜⋏⌇⟒⋏⌇⟒) I'd like to be able to click on names to reveal them but would be ok with an easy toggle for the feature. A larger project would be for folks at CEA to run an AB test where post authors are hidden for one group of users and not hidden for another and publish click through rates and karma from different groups. I think there will be a difference I'm not sure which setting I'd advocate for as a norm though (I'll go into why below). EDIT: Since a lot of people are suggesting extensions / greaterwrong style solutions. One benefit of an integrated into the forum solution is the ability to separate blinded Karma from unblinded Karma (even if this is only on the back end). I'm mostly interested in what the frontpage looks like when karma is driven only by post content and not by authorship. Why I might (or might not) want this I don't think I say anything super surprising in this section, you're welcome to skip it. It seems pretty obvious that the authorship of a post affects my click through rate. There are good reasons for this. If I recognise a name as someone who I've read content from before and found that content useful I think it's more likely I'll find their new content useful too. This is the same logic that led me to watch the new Game of Thrones spin off, buy a second pair of Levi jeans, and listen to the latest Dodie album. However this policy makes me less great at exploring new sources of insight. Historically I'm significantly more likely to re-read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality than pick up any specific book on my to-read list. This actually doesn't just affect me but also, through the karma system, everyone else. FYI this is the factor which made me decide to post this. I can think of a few examples off hand where I opened a post I might not have otherwise because I know the author personally and want to know what they're up to, I then end up upvoting the post. If I extrapolate my policy to everyone else on the forum I'd expect posts from authors who have a lot of friends in the community to do better than the exact same post posted anonymously. I could train myself to stop doing this (and suggest others do so) but it would be a lot easier to just anonymise posts. Separately once I open a post I'd guess there are a bunch of associations happening at a level of my thinking I'm not aware of when I read a name I recognise at the top of a post (ala Halo/Horn effect). I mostly guessing about what these would be but I expect people I like / have agreed with before get more of the benefit of the doubt and are engaged with less critically. This would mean I'd be more open to novel or unintuitive seeming proposals from people I know who are already established in the community. I think this effect still exists when I ...
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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 Future Fund's AI Worldview Prize, published by Nick Beckstead on September 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Today we are announcing a competition with prizes ranging from $15k to $1.5M for work that informs the Future Fund's fundamental assumptions about the future of AI, or is informative to a panel of superforecaster judges. These prizes will be open for three months—until Dec 23—after which we may change or discontinue them at our discretion. We have two reasons for launching these prizes. First, we hope to expose our assumptions about the future of AI to intense external scrutiny and improve them. We think artificial intelligence (AI) is the development most likely to dramatically alter the trajectory of humanity this century, and it is consequently one of our top funding priorities. Yet our philanthropic interest in AI is fundamentally dependent on a number of very difficult judgment calls, which we think have been inadequately scrutinized by others. As a result, we think it's really possible that: all of this AI stuff is a misguided sideshow, we should be even more focused on AI, or a bunch of this AI stuff is basically right, but we should be focusing on entirely different aspects of the problem. If any of those three options is right—and we strongly suspect at least one of them is—we want to learn about it as quickly as possible because it would change how we allocate hundreds of millions of dollars (or more) and help us better serve our mission of improving humanity's longterm prospects. Second, we are aiming to do bold and decisive tests of prize-based philanthropy, as part of our more general aim of testing highly scalable approaches to funding. We think these prizes contribute to that work. If these prizes work, it will be a large update in favor of this approach being capable of surfacing valuable knowledge that could affect our prioritization. If they don't work, that could be an update against this approach surfacing such knowledge (depending how it plays out). The rest of this post will: Explain the beliefs that, if altered, would dramatically affect our approach to grantmaking Describe the conditions under which our prizes will pay out Describe in basic terms how we arrived at our beliefs and cover other clarifications Prize conditions On our areas of interest page, we introduce our core concerns about AI as follows: We think artificial intelligence (AI) is the development most likely to dramatically alter the trajectory of humanity this century. AI is already posing serious challenges: transparency, interpretability, algorithmic bias, and robustness, to name just a few. Before too long, advanced AI could automate the process of scientific and technological discovery, leading to economic growth rates well over 10% per year (see Aghion et al 2017, this post, and Davidson 2021). As a result, our world could soon look radically different. With the help of advanced AI, we could make enormous progress toward ending global poverty, animal suffering, early death and debilitating disease. But two formidable new problems for humanity could also arise: Loss of control to AI systemsAdvanced AI systems might acquire undesirable objectives and pursue power in unintended ways, causing humans to lose all or most of their influence over the future. Concentration of powerActors with an edge in advanced AI technology could acquire massive power and influence; if they misuse this technology, they could inflict lasting damage on humanity’s long-term future. For more on these problems, we recommend Holden Karnofsky’s “Most Important Century,” Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, and Joseph Carlsmith’s “Is power-seeking AI an existential risk?”. Here is a table identifying various questions about these scenarios that we believe are central, our curren...
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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: Peter Eckersley (1979-2022), published by Gavin on September 3, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Security engineer, digital rights activist, AI safety and policy researcher. Beloved in these communities. Eckersley is most famous as an advocate/developer at the intersection of tech and legal activism. His work on the Let's Encrypt free certificate authority, HTTPS Everywhere, and the SSL Observatory made the internet significantly less terrible. Mizza: Let's Encrypt is something we all came to take for granted very quickly, but lots of us remember when getting an SSL certificate was an expensive and tedious process. Deprecating a billion dollar industry overnight and providing better security for internet users everywhere is a hell of a legacy to leave behind, and I hope one that will be an inspiration for generations to come. He identified "device fingerprinting" as a major privacy hole and spent a long time trying to mitigate it. His PhD thesis was a characteristic mix of software engineering, economic theory, and law. We'd call it Web3 these days. He was the 8th person ever to take the GWWC pledge. A few places say he was on the board of CEA US at some point. Around 2017 he went into AI risk. His work bridged AI ethics and AI safety, covering recidivism prediction, self-driving cars, security against ML hacking, and military AI but also big-brain topics like impossibility theorems in social choice and ML, the cybersecurity implications of emulated minds, and the queer theory of human alignment. At the end, he was running the AI Objectives Institute (notable for mobilising people already concerned about corporate maximisation) and mentoring for PIBBSS. He was on many of the big "technical AI policy" papers of the last few years. The Alignment Problem is dedicated to him, after he convinced his friend Brian Christian of it. During covid he worked intensely on private contact tracing algorithms. He received a cancer diagnosis a week before his death. A minor consolation of dying in the present age is people telling beautiful stories about you for strangers and for posterity. So you can know that he was fluent in French, that he organised guerilla meetups, that he was an avid cyclist, that he was a memorable remedial teacher of programming. This is an Eckersley quotes account. Similarly, I can tell you he was writing code until one month before his death. He lived sans LinkedIn. 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: Open EA Global, published by Scott Alexander on September 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I think EA Global should be open access. No admissions process. Whoever wants to go can. I'm very grateful for the work that everyone does to put together EA Global. I know this would add much more work for them. I know it is easy for me, a person who doesn't do the work now and won't have to do the extra work, to say extra work should be done to make it bigger. But 1,500 people attended last EAG. Compare this to the 10,000 people at the last American Psychiatric Association conference, or the 13,000 at NeurIPS. EAG isn't small because we haven't discovered large-conference-holding technology. It's small as a design choice. When I talk to people involved, they say they want to project an exclusive atmosphere, or make sure that promising people can find and network with each other. I think this is a bad tradeoff. ...because it makes people upset This comment (seen on Kerry Vaughan's Twitter) hit me hard: A friend describes volunteering at EA Global for several years. Then one year they were told that not only was their help not needed, but they weren't impressive enough to be allowed admission at all. Then later something went wrong and the organizers begged them to come and help after all. I am not sure that they became less committed to EA because of the experience, but based on the look of delight in their eyes when they described rejecting the organizers' plea, it wouldn't surprise me if they did. Not everyone rejected from EAG feels vengeful. Some people feel miserable. This year I came across the Very Serious Guide To Surviving EAG FOMO: Part of me worries that, despite its name, it may not really be Very Serious... ...but you can learn a lot about what people are thinking by what they joke about, and I think a lot of EAs are sad because they can't go to EAG. ...because you can't identify promising people. In early 2020 Kelsey Piper and I gave a talk to an EA student group. Most of the people there were young overachievers who had their entire lives planned out, people working on optimizing which research labs they would intern at in which order throughout their early 20s. They expected us to have useful tips on how to do this. Meanwhile, in my early 20s, I was making $20,000/year as an intro-level English teacher at a Japanese conglomerate that went bankrupt six months after I joined. In her early 20s, Kelsey was taking leave from college for mental health reasons and babysitting her friends' kid for room and board. If either of us had been in the student group, we would have been the least promising of the lot. And here we were, being asked to advise! I mumbled something about optionality or something, but the real lesson I took away from this is that I don't trust anyone to identify promising people reliably. ...because people will refuse to apply out of scrupulosity. I do this. I'm not a very good conference attendee. Faced with the challenge of getting up early on a Saturday to go to San Francisco, I drag my feet and show up an hour late. After a few talks and meetings, I'm exhausted and go home early. I'm unlikely to change my career based on anything anyone says at EA Global, and I don't have any special wisdom that would convince other people to change theirs. So when I consider applying to EAG, I ask myself whether it's worth taking up a slot that would otherwise go to some bright-eyed college student who has been dreaming of going to EAG for years and is going to consider it the highlight of their life. Then I realize I can't justify bumping that college student, and don't apply. I used to think I was the only person who felt this way. But a few weeks ago, I brought it up in a group of five people, and two of them said they had also stopped applying to EA...
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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: 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: Internationalism is a key value in EA, published by freedomandutility on August 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. With increasing coverage of EA, I’m seeing many critiques on Twitter along the line of “EA billionaires should just pay more taxes” and “philanthropy bypasses democratic processes”. A key value which EAs share and most people do not hold (or at least do not adhere to in practice) is internationalism and the idea that people matter equally, regardless of nationality. I think it’s very important to emphasise this when communicating about EA. Internationalism explains why paying taxes isn’t better than funding EA charities and projects (because governments typically spend <1% of tax revenue on improving things for people in other countries, while EA spending values everyone equally). Internationalism also justifies philanthropists using their influence to promote policies which improve things for people around the world (because the policies of powerful governments can have large impacts on foreigners, but foreigners are excluded from the democratic processes which determine the policies). (Also, side note, but I think when EAs observe that people don’t care as much about people who are far away from them, the reason is more about nationality and nationalism than physical distance) 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: Effective Altruism for Muslims, published by Ahmed Ghoor on July 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: We are finally making progress on EA for Muslims. For the next few months, we have someone working 0.5FTE on furthering the project and preparing it to be launched as its own organisation. We’ve linked a doc outlining our strategy in more detail and added a lot of other interesting info and considerations regarding EA for Muslims. Anyone interested in assisting this project, or wanting to keep up-to-date with its development, can email Ahmed or book a time on his calendly. Announcement: Kaleem will be hosting the “Meetup and Breakfast: EA For Muslims” session on the Saturday morning of EAG San Francisco - if you’re attending EAG, interested in joining the project or are interested in the topics in this post, please join! The “Why?” Scale Muslims are currently estimated to make up about 24% of the world population (1.8 billion people), and, being the fastest growing religion due partially to birth rates, the number of people in this altruistic community is set only to increase if current trends continue. The amount of charitable funding raised yearly through the Islamic institution of Zakat is estimated to be ~$550 billion . However, the total amount of charitable funding is likely much greater because many Muslims donate other forms of Islamic charity throughout the year, which does not count towards Zakat figures. Neglectedness To our knowledge, there are currently no organisations actively trying to direct Zakat, or other Muslim resources, to the highest impact evidence-based interventions, using frameworks advocated for by Effective Altruism. There have been no successful attempts to involve Muslim influencers in the EA community, or research and document the overlaps between ideas of effective altruism and understandings of Islam. The number of Muslims in the EA community is minimal. In the 2018 EA Survey, 7 respondents (out of 2607) identified as Muslim, and in the 2019 version, only 4 (of 1892) identified as Muslim.This is compared to 41 who identified as Jewish (before EA for Jews was started) and 209 that identified as Christian in the 2018 survey. Tractability Although community building within religious communities does pose some unique challenges, there are also comparative advantages. Individuals in religious communities are generally already convinced, by Scripture, that they should be dedicating a portion of their time and wealth to service. Therefore, not much energy needs to be given to convince the community to serve. It’s simply the “How/Where” that is up for debate. There are several philosophical and normative overlaps between ideas of effective altruism and understandings of Islam, which means we don’t have to distort or radically reinterpret religious texts to be in line with EA causes or principles (such as effective giving, animal welfare, or caring about the longterm future). Other reasons: There is a lot of overlap between community building in the Muslim community and community building in Africa and Asia (where Islam is a major religion in many countries). Work is currently being started in the African community building space, showing significant growth potential over the next year. These projects could, therefore, complement each other. Attempts to explore alternative “non-western” approaches to EA frameworks may benefit significantly from Islamic intellectual traditions, which itself inherited Greek philosophy and developed on it for several centuries. The “How?” Short-term Carry out the first phase of community building Focus on engaging Muslims already in EA (low-hanging fruit). Create a closed Facebook and Slack community group. Understand human resource capacity and skill sets within the community, which may inform, in co...
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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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Snakebites kill 100,000 people every year, here's what you should know, published by MathiasKB on April 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. WHO estimates between 81,000-138,000 die every year from venomous snakebites. What on earth!? When I first heard this I refused to believe it. How had I managed to call myself an EA for so many years and not known snakebites were this big a deal? Not only do snakebites kill an unfathomable number of people, another four hundred thousand are permanently disabled every year. In this post I will: Provide an overview of the situation. Look at the cost-effectiveness of conventional interventions to prevent and treat envenoming. Argue that a new medical invention could make a massive difference and shill for the company that invented it. Why do snakebites kill and maim so many? Imagine you're a farmer working in the amazon. One day, as you are working your field, you suddenly feel a searing pain from your leg. You see a snake dislodging its fangs from your calf and quickly slither away. Was it venomous or not? Even if it were a venomous snake that bit you, there's a 50% chance it was a dry-bite, and that the swelling will go away after a while. The trip to the nearest medical facility will take an entire day and cost you a fortune. You decide to wait and see. After a while the symptoms get worse and you decide to consult your family. They tell you to go to the town's spiritual healer, who can treat you for a much smaller cost. When morning comes around, you finally make the decision to go to the hospital. It's now too late. By the time you arrive the venom will have done its damage. Even if you receive the correct antivenom treatment and survive, you will suffer permanent disability and be in for a long and expensive hospital stay. After a few weeks spent recovering in the hospital you will find yourself handicapped, out of work, and in debt. Snakebite envenoming is an enormous burden on tropical regions in the third and second world. Like other neglected tropical diseases, the burden of snakebites is much larger than the just deaths they cause. Having a productive member of one's family or community suddenly die or become permanently disabled wrecks havoc on all those who were dependent on them. Children, for example, are often removed from schools to make up for the lost income and additional person who must now be taken care of. After reading up on various studies, WHO reports, and meeting with the CEO of a venom diagnostics startup, I believe there are two primary reasons why snakebites do so much harm. Snakebites are expensive to treat Treating envenoming requires administering antivenom which is expensive to produce. Each type of venomous snake species requires its own antivenom. Administering the wrong antivenom is costly and harms the patient. The hospitalization and antivenom treatment is far too expensive for many to afford. In Bangladesh, nearly 75% of snakebite victims spent their savings on treatment and over 60% had to borrow to meet the costs. The world currently produces roughly half the antivenom needed to treat every patient. WHO argues (without using these exact terms) that there is a lemons-market for antivenom, where production of low-grade and ineffective antivenom is crowding out high-quality producers. This has reduced the profitability of antivenom production and prevents producers from scaling up production. For example, FAV Afrique, a dependable and widely distributed antivenom in sub-saharan Africa, was discontinued in 2016. I haven't been able to verify that recent discontinuations of antivenom production can be attributed to a lemon market, and an alternative explanation could be that WHO is neglecting that a worse treatment for less money may be the better outcome for some. Lemons-market or not, we ...
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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.