The Nonlinear Library

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: John Green & Grassroots Activists Pressure Danaher To Drop Price of Tuberculosis Test, published by Gemma Paterson on September 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Really great piece from Good Good Good on the campaign to pressure Danaher to reduce the price of their TB test. Excited to see the outcome!

Tuberculosis is the world's deadliest disease - and it is entirely curable.

The airborne disease has plagued human history, and the World Health Organization estimates that 10 million people across the globe are infected by TB every year. Of those millions, 1.6 million still die each year, despite the existence of life-saving technology and medicine.

These are facts that enrage many - but especially author and philanthropist John Green.

"Why am I passionate about TB? It's the deadliest disease in human history, but for most of human history we couldn't do much about it. However, since the mid-1950s, TB has been curable - yet we still allow TB to kill over 1.6 million people per year," Green told Good Good Good.

"This is horrifying to me. I don't want to accept a world where we know how to cure Tuberculosis but deny millions of people access to that cure."

This passion was put on display in July of this year.

Through the social media campaign #PatientsNotPatents, Green and his fanbase - called Nerdfighters, or Nerdfighteria in collective form - followed the lead of TB advocates to call on drug company Johnson & Johnson to allow the sale of generic bedaquiline - a life-saving TB drug that had been inaccessible under the company's patent for over a decade.

Nerdfighteria - as well as longtime TB organizations such as the Stop TB Partnership and TB-survivors Phumeza Tisile and Nandita Venkatesan - was successful, and Johnson & Johnson ended its reign on bedaquiline (though advocates are still working to ensure that all low- and middle-income countries receive access to the generic drug).

To end the TB epidemic by 2030 - a goal shared by both the WHO and the United Nations - more pharmaceutical companies need to do their part to make healthcare more accessible, especially in countries with a high TB burden.

So, in their effort to end TB, Nerdfighteria has taken on a new company: Danaher.

The Issue

Danaher is a multinational corporation, founded by brothers Steven and Mitchell Rales, that owns a number of other large companies, such as Cepheid, Pantone, and X-Rite. (Steven Rales also founded Indian Paintbrush Films, which has financed many of Wes Anderson's movies.)

Most relevant to this campaign, however, is that in 2006, Danaher and molecular diagnostics company Cepheid created the most helpful diagnostic resource for TB: The GeneXpert machine.

This rapid molecular testing machine is able to test for a number of infectious diseases, including COVID, HIV, TB, and multidrug-resistant TB. In fact, the WHO recommends Xpert tests as the initial test for all people with signs and symptoms of TB.

The GeneXpert machine itself is cost-effective, but its testing cartridges are more costly. The company charges about $10 per regular TB testing cartridge and about $15 per multidrug-resistant TB testing cartridge (though both tests cost the same to manufacture).

According to a 2019 brief from Doctors Without Borders, Danaher and Cepheid could reduce the cost of these cartridges to just $5 each - or lower - based on continuous increases in volume. The brief said a "20-30% reduction in price may be overdue" thanks to expansion in volume.

"These pricing packages serve to expand Cepheid's footprint . and do nothing to address the urgent need to scale up affordable testing for COVID-19, TB, and other diseases, or to address the longstanding lack of affordability and unfair pricing of Xpert tests," David Branigan, of activist organization Treatment Action Group, said in a statement in 2...

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: Theory: "WAW might be of higher impact than x-risk prevention based on utilitarianism", published by Jens Aslaug on September 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary

In the forthcoming post, I will argue why wild animal welfare (WAW) MIGHT be a more pressing cause area than x-risk prevention based on total utilitarianism, even after taking into account longtermism. I will show how you can make the same calculation yourself (checking if you agree) and then outline a rationale for how you could apply this estimation.

The scenario of humans outnumbering (wild) animals is improbable, primarily due to the vast number of wildlife and the potential for their spread to space, the perspective of total utilitarianism suggests that human suffering may be deemed negligible. Additionally, because sentient beings originating from Earth can live at least 1034 biological human life-years if we achieve interstellar travel, working on anything that doesn't cause permanent effects is also negligible. Consequently, our paramount concern should be decreasing x-risk or increasing net utilities "permanently". If one is comparatively easier than the other, then that's the superior option.

I will outline a formula that can be used to compare x-risk prevention to other cause areas. Subsequently, I will present a variety of arguments to consider for what these numbers might be, so you can make your own estimations. I will argue why it might be possible to create "permanent" changes in net utilities by working on WAW.

My estimation showed that WAW is more than twice as effective as x-risk prevention. Due to the high uncertainty of this number, even if you happen to concur with my estimation, I don't see it as strong enough evidence to warrant a career change from one area to the other. However, I do think that this could mean that the areas are closer in impact than many longtermist might think, and therefore if you're a better fit for one of them you should go for that one. Also, you should donate to whichever one is the most funding-constrained.

I will also delve into the practical applications of these calculations, should you arrive at a different conclusion than me.

(Note that I'm not in any way qualified to make such an analysis. The analysis as a whole and the different parts of the analysis could certainly be made better. Many of the ideas and made-up numbers I'm presenting are my own and therefore may differ greatly from what a more knowledgeable or professional in the field would think. To save time, I will not repeat this during every part of my analysis. I mainly wanted to present the idea of how we can compare x-risk prevention to WAW and other cause areas, in the hope that other people could use the idea (more than the actual estimations) for cause prioritization. I also want this post criticized for my personal use in cause prioritization. So please leave your questions, comments and most of all criticisms of my theory.)

(Note regarding s-risk: this analysis is based on comparing working on WAW to working on x-risk. While it does consider s-risks, it does not compare working on s-risks to other causes. However, the analysis could relatively easily be extended/changed to directly compare s-risks to x-risks. To save time and for simplifications, I didn't do this, however, if anyone is interested, I will be happy to discuss or maybe even write a follow-up post regarding this.)

Intro

While I have for a long time been related to EA, I only recently started to consider which cause area is the most effective. As a longtermist and total utilitarian (for the most part), finding the cause that increases utilities (no matter the time or type of sentient being) the most time/cost-effectively is my goal. I got an idea based on a number of things I read, that against the belief of mo...

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: Writing about my job: Academic Researcher, published by Kyle Smith on September 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I've greatly enjoyed reading the other posts from Career Conversations Week. I think these types of conversations can be incredibly helpful. I thought I would add my perspective as an academic that thinks of themselves as EA-adjacent.

Basic information: I am an Assistant Professor of Accounting at Mississippi State University. I think a good framework for thinking about accounting scholarship is as an area of applied economics - we use the same theories/methods as economists, we are just focused on the role of accounting information specifically (and accounting topics such as auditing and taxation). My research agenda is pretty niche within accounting research - I study nonprofit organizations, which is why I have learned about and started to become involved with EA. A lot of what I am working on focuses on the donor decision-making process and how to encourage more impactful giving.

Background:

I have undergraduate degrees in accounting and economics, and my work experience was in federal consulting with a Big4 accounting firm, working on audit readiness for a DoD agency. Interesting work, but I felt at the time that the long-term career trajectory would not be personally satisfying.

I then did a PhD in Accounting at the University of Alabama. I could write a whole separate post about the PhD experience, but I had a generally very good time. I was paid enough to live on, had a supportive spouse, had a great relationship with my advisor, and performed well-enough that after my first year, didn't doubt much that I could complete it. I also discovered a passion for research, which made this a very exciting time.

Application Process:

The academic job market is a unique beast so I won't spend too much time on it. A research job at an R1 university is a difficult thing to achieve (and that difficulty depends a lot on the field you are in).

A high-quality PhD program will maximize your odds of placing at the best universities, so following the lead of your fellow PhD students and advice of your advisor should steer you in the right direction. Where you choose to do your PhD is of extreme importance, so spend a lot of time deciding where to do your PhD.

Accounting PhDs don't often place in industry, so I don't have any real advice on that unfortunately.

What the job is like:

I'll start by saying being an academic is a very strange job - it is remarkably different from my previous experience in public accounting. It is very much a lifestyle - most end up being an academic for their entire career.

I am responsible for 2 courses per semester (one undergrad course and one master's course). I have a TON of flexibility on the materials and how I teach the courses, which is both good and bad. The good is that I get to teach what I want. The bad is that as I am still creating/prepping my courses, I spend approximately 3 days a week during the semester on teaching and prep. Eventually, this should get down to 2 days a week.

The rest of my time is devoted to research. I have an active research pipeline (around 9 projects, which is frankly too many), with projects at various stages. Currently, I spend around 3+ days a week on research, with an eye toward getting that to 4+ once my classes are a bit more developed.

As a general point, one major advantage of academia is the level of autonomy. Outside of my 2 scheduled lectures, I have complete and total control of my schedule and that allows me to work when and how I want.

One of the reasons I love research is that I have ownership over the end product, rather than being a cog in the machine of a major corporation. This, along with the publish or perish reality of academic jobs, means that I tie up a lot of my person...

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: €65million EU funding for far-UV and PPE start-ups, published by EU Policy Careers on September 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

The EU has an open funding call for overall €65million for start-ups in the built environment and PPE space (covering UV-C, air circulation/aerosol capture systems and next-generation face masks).

Grants (up to €2.5mn for innovation development costs) and direct equity investments (up to €15 million for scale up and other relevant costs) are available to businesses (or potentially subsidiaries) registered in the EU and associated countries (= EU neighbourhood countries like Norway; UK companies only eligible for the grants part, Swiss companies ineligible). Starting up a new company or relying on existing companies for a funding application could be options.

Applications close on 4 October 2023.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

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: Avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career (Alex Lawsen on the 80k After Hours Podcast), published by 80000 Hours on September 12, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

We just published an interview: Alex Lawsen on avoiding 10 mistakes people make when pursuing a high-impact career. You can click through for the audio, a full transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.

Episode summary

I think the key consideration that I end up highlighting to people who I think are trying to do the best thing right now is something like: It might be that setting yourself up well to do more good later looks like not directly having as much of an impact right now.

Because probably learning is pretty good if you want to have an impact later. Probably getting some signalling experience for a lot of careers, maybe doing a prestigious internship, maybe getting paid a lot of money: these things just often pay off later, and often trade off against doing the very most good with the summer internship you're doing this year, or in the first two years of your job just after you've graduated.

Alex Lawsen

In this episode of 80k After Hours, Luisa Rodriguez and Alex Lawsen discuss common mistakes people make when trying to do good with their careers, and advice on how to avoid them.

They cover:

Taking 80,000 Hours' rankings too seriously

Not trying hard enough to fail

Feeling like you need to optimise for having the most impact now

Feeling like you need to work directly on AI immediately

Not taking a role because you think you'll be replaceable

Constantly considering other career options

Overthinking or over-optimising career choices

Being unwilling to think things through for yourself

Ignoring conventional career wisdom

Doing community work even if you're not suited to it

Who this episode is for:

People who want to pursue a high-impact career

People wondering how much AI progress should change their plans

People who take 80,000 Hours' career advice seriously

Who this episode isn't for:

People not taking 80k's career advice seriously enough

People who've never made any career mistakes

People who don't want to hear Alex say "I said a bunch of stuff, maybe some of it's true" every time he's on the podcast

Get this episode by subscribing to our more experimental podcast on the world's most pressing problems and how to solve them: type '80k After Hours' into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.

Producer and editor: Keiran HarrisAudio Engineering Lead: Ben CordellTechnical editing: Milo McGuire and Dominic ArmstrongAdditional content editing: Luisa Rodriguez and Katy MooreTranscriptions: Katy Moore

Why you shouldn't "just do whatever 80k says is best"

Luisa Rodriguez: One thing you hear a lot is something like, "I should just do the thing that 80k says is best." Can you say more about what that looks like?

Alex Lawsen: Yeah, I think there are a bunch of different ways this can come up. Maybe the most obvious one is just that, at any particular time, there's going to be something really salient that it seems like lots of people should do. And maybe it's because it's at the top of the ranked list we have. That is one disadvantage of having ranked lists. So a very clean version of this mistake could just be people going, "The thing that's at number one of the list of career profiles on the 80k website is technical AI safety research, so I guess I have to do technical AI safety research."

So why might this be a mistake? The obvious thing is just that personal fit really matters. It matters in a bunch of ways. My guess is, during a lot of this conversation, I'm going to end up saying, "Did you know that personal fit is a big deal?" But specifically in the case of someone correctly realising that a thing is really important for ...

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: PSA: The community is in Berkeley/Oakland, not "the Bay Area", published by maia on September 11, 2023 on LessWrong.

Posting this because I recently had a conversation that went like this:

Friend: Hey, you used to live in SF. Is there any rationalist stuff actually happening in San Francisco? There don't seem to be many events, or even that many aspiring rationalists living here. What's up with that? [Paraphrased. I've had similar versions of this conversation more than once.]

Me: Something we realized living there is that SF actually suffers the same brain drain as most other cities, because everyone just goes to Berkeley/Oakland.

The same way people move from the East Coast or elsewhere to Berkeley, they move from the rest of the Bay Area to Berkeley. Actually, they do it even more, because moving to Berkeley is easier when you already live pretty close by.

And you don't figure this out until you move there, because people who live outside the Bay Area think of it as being all the same place. But the 45 minute train ride really matters when it comes to events and socializing, as it turns out.

Friend: That sounds so inconvenient for people who have jobs in the city or South Bay!

Me: Sure is! I don't have a super-solid answer for this, except that 1) Lots of people actually just do awful, awful commutes, because having a real, in-person community is that valuable to them, as bad as commuting is. 2) A surprising fraction of the community works at rationalist/rationalist-adjacent nonprofits, most of which are actually located in the East Bay. Plus, 3) in a post-COVID world, more people can work remote or partly remote. So you can choose to live where your community is... which is Berkeley... even though it is crazy expensive.

I don't actually live in the Bay Area anymore, so I don't have the most up-to-date information on where events are happening and things. But it seems from what I hear from folks still there that it's still broadly true that East Bay is where things are happening, and other parts of the area have much less of the community.

If you're thinking about moving to the Bay in part for the rationality community, take this into account!

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

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: Career advice the Probably Good team would give our younger selves, published by Probably Good on September 11, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

At Probably Good, our mission is to help more people maximize the impact of their career based on their own values, personal circumstances, and motivations. In the past few months, we've made many exciting strides towards fulfilling this mission - like launching our 1-on-1 advising calls, renovating and rebranding our site, and publishing several new in-depth career profiles and career guide chapters. Though we're still a relatively new org, we're learning a lot and striving to create high-quality content for a range of preferences and cause areas (be on the lookout for a whole lot of climate-focused career content in the next month!).

We think this sort of guidance can be extremely helpful in navigating your career search (it's why we do it!). But we also know that life is complex and unpredictable. Planning and strategizing for your career is super important, but so is chance, failure and learning along the way.

So to get a bit more personal and strike up some career conversations, our team is sharing the top piece of career advice we'd give our younger selves. We all come from fairly different backgrounds and career stages, so hopefully this can give a more practical perspective on our own career journeys.

Anna Beth, Writer

Show you can do the work instead of relying solely on on-paper qualifications. When looking for a job out of undergrad, I often wouldn't even apply to ambitious opportunities because I assumed I didn't have the impressive on-paper qualifications needed to stand-out. This probably has something to do with imposter syndrome, but I actually felt pretty confident in my abilities - I just thought I didn't have the background needed to be given a chance. Looking back, this was a pretty defeatist outlook. I wish I would have spent more time focused on practicing and sharing the sort of work I wanted to do. When I eventually started sharing (and emphasizing) a portfolio website with mostly personal writing projects, I ended up getting more interviews and my first full-time role.

If you feel limited by your background or like you're somehow behind for not doing more while in school, it can go a long way to show - not just tell - you can do the work. Sure, those prestigious internships and achievements could open doors and give you an extra boost, but ultimately, organizations want people who can actually do a good job and have something valuable to offer. Try a do-it-yourself approach by taking up projects that interest you, keeping up with a website, actively seeking work-tasks, or doing more volunteer work in your field.

Dylan, Researcher

You have more options than you likely realize. We tend to lean towards options we're already familiar with, and the careers we're exposed to at a young age are determined by fairly arbitrary variables like location, educational background, and our parent's careers. I think this means the career goals we form early on are often highly path dependent. In reality, there's far more areas of work we would have been excited about, if only we'd been exposed to them earlier on.

This probably sounds quite obvious, but it's something I wish I'd internalized before I latched onto the first subject that gripped me then spent a fair few years pursuing it at postgraduate level. I might still have chosen the same route, but my decision would have been better informed had I spent some more time trying a bunch of different things.

Itamar, Head of Growth

Early on, prioritize broadly applicable skills-like learning and communication-that will be useful regardless of what path you end up taking. This is especially beneficial in cases where you're unsure what you'll do later, or think that ...

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: Logical Share Splitting, published by DaemonicSigil on September 11, 2023 on LessWrong.

Are mathematicians just not trying hard enough?

The Riemann hypothesis is one of the most important open problems in math. There's a $1 million prize from the Clay mathematics institute for a proof or disproof of the Riemann hypothesis. At the time of writing, it remains unsolved. From this, we may conclude that one cannot simply buy a solution to difficult mathematical problems.

Or could we? How do we know that buying a difficult maths proof is impossible? Perhaps the Clay mathematics institute is somehow not asking the question in the right way. And it's true that the value of a million dollars has been eroded over time by inflation. One might guess that a Riemann proof would be worth at least 100 million. Would that be enough to conjure it from the collective intelligence of humanity?

Simply directly declaring a $100 million reward for a solution would probably not work. For one thing, there's the issue of corollary-sniping where the prize wouldn't give anyone an incentive to publish solutions to hard intermediate steps of the problem, since the prize as a whole only goes to the one who solves the entire problem as a whole. For another, even the million dollar prize on its own would be plenty of reason for a money-motivated person to solve the problem if a solution were within their grasp. The issue is not merely one of funding, we humans are somehow failing to combine our efforts properly.

Prediction markets are pretty cool

One of the standard ways to buy knowledge is prediction markets. Can we try that here? John Wentworth describes here a scheme for using markets to get mathematical proofs. Here's a scheme that's very similar in the overall idea, though the exact rules are slightly different:

Shares on mathematical propositions are traded on the market. Propositions should be the kind of things that might be theorems, i.e. they are syntactically meaningful, and contain no free variables, though it's fine if they are false or unprovable.

Shares on provable propositions are worth $1, at least if anyone knows or can find the proof. How this works out in practice is that a share in ⊤ can be redeemed in exchange for $1, together with the next rule.

Shares in logically equivalent propositions can be exchanged for each other. So if it's the case that A⟺B then a share in A can be exchanged for a share in B. This is a trading rule that will obviously have to be called the Law of Equivalent Exchange. We only allow exchanges that can be seen to be equivalent in one step, but for anything that can be proved equivalent in any number of steps, we can simply make multiple exchanges to get the shares we want.

How do people get these shares they're trading to begin with? Simple! You can buy shares in ⊤ for $1. You can also buy shares in ⊥ for $0, i.e. they're free.

We allow traders to perform a logical share splitting operation. This is a special operation that is described in the next section.

As Wentworth explains, the virtue of this system is that in order to redeem shares for a proposition you can prove, you need to reveal your proof to the people running the market. Not to other traders necessarily, but whatever the market mechanism is that is enabling the above rules, it can see the math proofs implied in the trades people make.

Logical share splitting

A common theme in mathematics is to split proofs up like this: First we show A⟹B, then we show A. This allows us to prove B. Part of the point of using a market is to combine the intelligence of the various traders in the market into something greater than any individual trader. So ideally, we'd like to be able to prove B, even if one trader can only prove A⟹B and the other trader can only prove A. So let's say there's some profit in pro...

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: Focus on the Hardest Part First, published by Johannes C. Mayer on September 11, 2023 on LessWrong.

Here is some obvious advice.

I think a common failure mode when working on AI alignment[1] is to not focus on the hard parts of the problem first. This is a problem when generating a research agenda, as well as when working on any specific research agenda. Given a research agenda, there are normally many problems that you know how to make progress on. But blindly working on what seems tractable is not a good idea.

Let's say we are working on a research agenda about solving problems A, B, and C. We know that if we find solutions to A, B, and C we will solve alignment. However, if we can't solve even one subproblem, the agenda would be doomed. If C seems like a very hard problem, that you are not sure you can solve, it would be a bad idea to flinch away from C and work on problem A instead, when A seems so much more manageable.

If solving A takes a lot of time and effort, all of that time and effort would be wasted, if you can't solve C in the end. It's especially worrisome when A has tight fightback loops, such that you constantly feel like you are making progress. Or when it is just generally fun to work on A.

Of course, it can make sense to work on A first if you expect this to help you solve C, or at least give you more information on its tractability. The general version of this is illustrated by considering that you have a large list of problems that you need to solve. In this case, focusing on problems that will provide you with information that will be helpful for solving many of the other problems can be very useful. But even then you should not lose sight of the hard problems that might block you down the road.

The takeaway is that these two things are very different:

Solving A as an instrumental subgoal in order to make progress on C, when C is a potential blocker.

Avoiding C, because it seems hard, and instead working on A because it seems tractable.

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Apply Now: EAGxPhilippines applications are closing soon, published by zianbee on September 11, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

↗️ See the original forum post

Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org