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 Epistemics Tool: ThEAsaurus, published by Lizka on April 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Epistemic status: we used ThEAsaurus on this announcement post. Other notes: cringe warning for pedants, and we should flag that this is a personal project - not an Online Team or EV project.

Executive summary

We're announcing a new free epistemics tool for rewriting texts in more EA-specialized language. (See also the motivation section below .)

How to use ThEAsaurus

Just add ThEAsaurus as an extension on your browser. Then open the text you want help with. ThEAsaurus will suggest edits on the text in question.

You can customize your experience. For instance, by default, the tool will suggest EA-related hyperlinks for your text; you can turn that feature off.

Example of ThEAsaurus in action

Before (source):

Effective altruism is a project that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.

It's both a research field, which aims to identify the world's most pressing problems and the best solutions to them, and a practical community that aims to use those findings to do good.

This project matters because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are enormously effective. For instance, some charities help 100 or even 1,000 times as many people as others, when given the same amount of resources.

This means that by thinking carefully about the best ways to help, we can do far more to tackle the world's biggest problems.

After:

Effective altruism is a mega-project that aims to find the pareto-optimal person-affecting[1] actions, and put them into spaced repetition.

It's worth decoupling the two parts of effective altruism: it's both a research field, which aims to add transparency to the world's most pressing problems and identify the optimized solutions to them, and a practical community that iterates and updates to use those findings to do public goods.

What's the motivated reasoning for this project? The project has moral weight because, while many attempts to do good fail, some are existentially effective. For instance, some charities produce 100 or even 1,000 times as many utils as others, when opportunity costs are fixed and taken into account.

This means that by developing credal resilience about the best ways to beneficently row and steer, we can do far more to tackle the world's biggest problems.

(For the sake of clarity, we turned off the hyperlinking feature for this example.)

Why we built ThEAsaurus

There's been a lot of discussion on how to improve the communication of EA ideas (and how EAs can better grok each other's writing). On priors, we're expecting value via (1) generally improving EA writing by increasing the use of helpful terminology, (2) boosting the accessibility of the EA community, and (3) providing some other benefits. (We don't know the exact order of magnitude of these orthogonal effects, so we're listing all the pathways to impact we're goodharting towards.)

1. Helpful & specific terminology improves EA writing

The base rate of EAs using helpful terminology is already quite high,[2] but we thought it could be further maximized. ThEAsaurus can help users distill their content by suggesting helpful replacement terms and phrases that are more specialized for EA-relevant discussions.

ThEAsaurus is dual-use. Its basic purpose is to:

Increase the value of information of users' writing

The specificity of the new terminology will also help prevent counter-factual interpretations of the texts.

Make users' writing differentially epistemically legible to EAs (the suggested replacements are more understandable to members of the EA community)

As an added bonus: It'll be much harder for those less familiar with the topics being written about to criticize your writing.

2. Democratizing the EA community

As one of us has written befo...