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: Here's the exit., published by Valentine on November 21, 2022 on LessWrong.

There's a kind of game here on Less Wrong.

It's the kind of game that's a little rude to point out. Part of how it works is by not being named.

Or rather, attempts to name it get dissected so everyone can agree to continue ignoring the fact that it's a game.

So I'm going to do the rude thing. But I mean to do so gently. It's not my intention to end the game. I really do respect the right for folk to keep playing it if they want.

Instead I want to offer an exit to those who would really, really like one.

I know I really super would have liked that back in 2015 & 2016. That was the peak of my hell in rationalist circles.

I'm watching the game intensify this year. Folk have been talking about this a lot. How there's a ton more talk of AI here, and a stronger tone of doom.

I bet this is just too intense for some folk. It was for me when I was playing. I just didn't know how to stop. I kind of had to break down in order to stop. All the way to a brush with severe depression and suicide.

And it also ate parts of my life I dearly, dearly wish I could get back.

So, in case this is audible and precious to some of you, I'd like to point a way to ease.

The Apocalypse Game

The upshot is this:

You have to live in a kind of mental illusion to be in terror of the end of the world.

Illusions don't look on the inside like illusions. They look like how things really are.

Part of how this one does the "daughter's arm" thing is by redirecting attention to facts and arguments.

"Here's why the argument about AI makes sense."

"Do you have some alternative view of what will happen? How do you address XYZ?"

"What makes it an 'illusion'? I challenge that framing because it dismisses our ability to analyze and understand yada yada."

None of this is relevant.

I'm pointing at something that comes before these thoughts. The thing that fuels the fixation on the worldview.

I also bet this is the thing that occasionally drives some people in this space psychotic, depressed, or into burnout.

The basic engine is:

There's a kind of underlying body-level pain. I would tag this as "emotional pain" but it's important to understand that I really am pointing at physical sensations.

The pain is kind of stored and ignored. Often it arose from a very young age but was too overwhelming, so child-you found methods of distraction.

This is the basic core of addiction. Addictions are when there's an intolerable sensation but you find a way to bear its presence without addressing its cause. The more that distraction becomes a habit, the more that's the thing you automatically turn to when the sensation arises. This dynamic becomes desperate and life-destroying to the extent that it triggers a red queen race.

A major unifying flavor of the LW attractor is intense thought as an addictive distraction. And the underlying flavor of pain that fuels this addiction is usually some variation of fear.

In not-so-coincidental analogy to uFAI, these distracting thoughts can come to form autonomous programs that memetically evolve to have something like survival and reproductive instincts — especially in the space between people as they share and discuss these thoughts with each other.

The rationalist memeplex focuses on AI Ragnarok in part because it's a way for the intense thought to pull fuel from the underlying fear.

In this case, the search for truth isn't in service to seeing reality clearly. The logic of economic races to the bottom, orthogonality, etc. might very well be perfectly correct.

But these thoughts are also (and in some cases, mostly) in service to the doomsday meme's survival.

But I know that thinking of memes as living beings is something of an ontological leap in these parts. It's totally compatible with the LW memeplex, but it seems ...

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 Scouting: Dentistry, published by koratkar on November 20, 2022 on LessWrong.

As a high school student, I worry a great deal over my future profession. According to Cal Newport, career satisfaction for any choice of occupation often won't materialize until you've become "so good they can't ignore you" at what you do. Based on this, Newport recommends directing your nervous energy towards building skill in whatever you choose, rather than choosing the "right job". While I found his advice useful for framing the issue, it opened a new box of concerns: What if you chose something you have little innate ability in – or what if the point at which your improvement slows down is not exceptional? How do you even know whether you have talent in something before you've invested effort into shadowing or interning? Sometimes talent doesn't appear initially – what if the thing you have the greatest potential in is something you'll have to struggle at for a long time? And there are so many jobs! We have to narrow the search space!

There's another panoply of concerns related to your worth to the world: if you care about the world and your impact in it, don't you owe it to those who worked hard to give you the opportunities you have to find the thing you'll be the best at? But what if the thing you'll end up being the best at is something that doesn't always scale well – like medicine? (Of course, you could go into research, but what if you're only mid-tier at that?) You'll end up positively affecting the lives of many fewer people than you could have! And how do you avoid choosing work dry of meaning?

People tell me I over-think these things – the answer to most (if not all) of my what-if's is "nothing interesting will happen in this case or the counter-factual one - you are ultimately insignificant in the greater procession of the world, and you live a cushy live in the developed world, meaning that no matter how badly you screw things up, as long as you don't get addicted to heroine, you will still have access to food, water, and shelter." While I think that answer is probably the right one, it looks like most young people don't think about this much at all! I have a seriously useful bone to throw them from my side of the anxiety fence!

In earnest of providing information to a batch of high schoolers staring at fog-covered futures, a class of college students with sinking intimations that they chose the wrong major, and a karass of adults who curse their occupations with every breath, I'm compiling a database of rationalist-inspired interviews with members of various professions over at careerscouting.substack.com. I hope to respond to the wordless disconcertions about life that must bubble inside most people with answered questions.

Below is my first interview with a general dentist.

Object-Level

What does a normal day in your field look like? Can you give me a “day in the life” kind of run-down?

“I start early in the morning. I leave home at 6:15. My first patient is seated at 7:00. Then it’s non-stop until 1:00, when I have a fifty minute lunch. After 1:50, I continue until 5:00. Some days I work through lunch.”

How does this differ from the average practitioner?

“It doesn’t differ – almost every dentist works the same way.”

How does your time split across different kinds of activities?

“Aside from operative work, I have patient notes, lab work (e.g. pouring models of people’s mouths), hygiene exams, and treatment conferences (consulting the patient about what is going to happen during their treatment).”

What does a bad day in your field look like, and how does your definition differ from the average person’s?

“Every dentist faces a bad day where nothing is going right. I can’t even begin to explain the parameters of a bad day – patient anxiety, patients crying in the c...

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: Beyond Simple Existential Risk: Survival in a Complex Interconnected World, published by Gideon Futerman on November 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This is the script of a talk I gave at EAGx Rotterdam, with some citations and references linked throughout. I lay out the argument challenging the relatively narrow focus EA has in existential risk studies, and in favour of more methodological pluralism. This isn't a finalised thesis, and nor should it be taken as anything except a conversation starter. I hope to follow this up with more rigorous work exploring the questions I pose over the next few years, and hope other do too, but I thought to post the script to give everyone an opportunity to see what was said. Note, however, the tone of this is obviously the tone of a speech, not as much of a forum post. I hope to link the video when its up. Mostly, however, this is really synthesising the work of others; very little of this is my own original thought. If people are interested in talking to me about this, please DM me on here.

Existential Risk Studies; the interdisciplinary “science” of studying existential and global catastrophic risk. So, what is the object of our study? There are many definitions of Existential Risk, including an irrecoverable loss of humanity's potential or a major loss of the expected value of the future, both of these from essentially a transhumanist perspective. In this talk, however, I will be using Existential Risk in the broadest sense, taking my definition from Beard et al 2020, with Existential Risk being risk that may result in the very worst catastrophes “encompassing human extinction, civilizational collapse and any major catastrophe commonly associated with these things.”

X-Risk is a risk, not an event. It is defined therefore by potentiality, and thus is inherently uncertain. We can thus clearly distinguish between different global and existential catastrophes (nuclear winters, pandemics) and drivers of existential risk, and there are no one to one mapping of these. The IPCC commonly, and helpfully, splits drivers of risk into hazards, vulnerabilities, exposures, and responses, and through this lens, it is clear that risk isn’t something exogenous, but is reliant on decision making and governance failures, even if that failure is merely a failure of response.

The thesis I present here is not original, and draws on the work of a variety of thinkers, although I accept full blame for things that may be wrong. I will argue there are two different paradigms of studying X-Risk: a simple paradigm and a complex paradigm. I will argue that EA unfairly neglects the complex paradigm, and that this is dangerous if we want to have a complete understanding of X-Risk to be able to combat it. I am not suggesting the simple paradigm is “wrong”; but that alone it currently doesn’t and never truly can, capture the full picture of X-Risk. I think the differences in the two paradigms of existential risk are diverse, with some of the differences being “intellectual” due to fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of the world we live in, and some are “cultural” which is more contingent on which thinkers works gain prominence.

I won’t really try and distinguish between these differences too hard, as I think this will make everything a bit too complicated. This presentation is merely a start, a challenge to the status quo, not asking for it to be torn down, but arguing for more epistemic and methodological pluralism. This call for pluralism is the core of my argument.

The “simple” paradigm of existential risk is at present dominant in EA-circles. It tends to assume that the best way to combat X-Risk is identify the most important hazards, find out the most tractable and neglected solutions to those, and work on that. It often takes a ...

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 first issue of Asterisk, published by Clara Collier on November 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Are you a fan of engaging, epistemically rigorous longform writing about the world's most pressing problems? Interested in in-depth interviews with leading scholars? A reader of taste and discernment? Sick of FTXcourse?

Distract yourself with the inaugural issue of Asterisk Magazine, out now!

Asterisk is a new quarterly journal of clear writing and clear thinking about things that matter (and, occasionally, things we just think are interesting). In this issue:

Kelsey Piper argues that What We Owe The Future can't quite support the weight of its own premises.

Kevin Esvelt talks about how we can prevent the next pandemic.

Jared Leibowich gives us a superforecaster's approach to modeling monkeypox.

Christopher Leslie Brown on the history of abolitionism and the slippery concept of moral progress

Stuart Ritchie tries to find out if the replication crisis has really made science better.

Dietrich Vollrath explains what economists do and don't know about why some countries become rich and others don't.

Scott Alexander asks: is wine fake?

Karson Elmgren on the history and future of China's semiconductor industry.

Xander Balwit imagines a future where genetic engineering has radically altered the animals we eat.

A huge thank you to everyone in the community who helped us make Asterisk a reality. We hope you all enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed making it.

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: A job matching service for affected FTXFF grantees, published by High Impact Professionals on November 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

In light of recent developments with the FTX Future Fund (FTXFF), there are many uncertainties around promised funding for grantees. Many in our community are rallying to support those affected, from potential funding opportunities to avenues of health support.

To help those impacted FTXFF grantees who are now seeking alternative job opportunities, High Impact Professionals (HIP) is providing a service to help match grantees with high-impact opportunities.

This works as follows:

You sign up for a talent directory to provide us information on your background, interests, availability, and the like.

We help match you to high-impact roles in the following ways, depending on the level of consent you give us (laid out more in the linked form):

We reach out to you with roles that are potentially a good fit for your profile.

We share your information with EA partner organizations that are looking to fill roles.

We add your information to a talent directory list that will be published on our website (similar to/).

If you are an affected FTXFF grantee who is now pursuing other jobs, please fill out this form. We plan to keep the survey open through the end of the year; however, we encourage you to complete it as soon and as thoroughly as possible. We will consider you on our list to match to organizations until you explicitly tell us not to, which you can do by reaching out.

As a side note, we plan to send around a similar but more general form in the coming weeks for anyone interested in being placed at a high-impact organization. But, we wanted to get this version out quickly as a bridge for those affected.

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: Shallow Report on Hypertension, published by Joel Tan (CEARCH) on November 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary

Taking into account the expected benefits of eliminating hypertension (i.e. improved health and greater economic output), as well as the tractability of sodium taxation policy advocacy, I find that the marginal expected value of sodium taxation policy advocacy to control hypertension to be 190,927 DALYs per USD 100,000, which is around 300x as cost-effective as giving to a GiveWell top charity.

Key Points

Importance: This is a strongly important cause, with 1.28 1010 DALYs at stake from now to the indefinite future. Around 84% of the burden is health related, while 16% is economic in nature.

Neglectedness: Whatever governments/charities/businesses are doing to solve this problem (e.g. labelling laws/providing low sodium food in food banks/developing new hypertension drugs) may be making a difference, since age-standardized DALYs lost are falling, but (a) attribution is hard, and structural factors (e.g. more educated populations eating and exercising better, or economic development expanding access to healthcare) will also be behind the decline; and (b) all this is insufficient all the same, with population growth and ageing driving an increase in DALYs lost over time for the coming decades.

Tractability: A moderately tractable solution in the form of sodium taxes is available. This is highly effective if and when implemented, but there is of course considerably uncertainty as to whether advocacy for taxes on food – which are highly unpopular – can succeed.

Further Discussion

This is a highly promising cause area that CEARCH will be conducting deeper research into, but it is important to note that early stage CEAs tend to be overoptimistic, and it is likely that this initial x300 GiveWell estimate will be revised downwards after more research and greater scrutiny, possibly extremely substantially (e.g. a one or two magnitude downgrade in cost-effectiveness).

DALYs lost to hypertension have grown tremendously (43.5%) from 1990 to 2015, and it is certainly not just a rich world problem – over that same period, DALYs lost to hypertension in LMICs exploded (45% increase in high-middle income countries, 72% increase in middle income countries, 94% in low-middle income countries, and 86% in low income countries); and of the large countries, Bangladesh notably saw a fairly staggering near-tripling of DALYs lost.

Growth in DALYs lost is driven not just by population growth and ageing, but also by urbanization and corresponding lifestyle changes (e.g. excessive dietary sodium, stress, sedentary lifestyle etc).

Note that the analysis here does not model income effects from the tax (i.e. reduced purchasing power causing less consumption of healthy food) or substitution effects, whether positive (e.g. reducing sugar and fat consumption from food – such as junk food – that is high in not just salt but also sugar and fat) or negative (i.e. causing people to switch to low-salt high-sugar food or drinks); the analysis here also does not model the impact of industry reformulating food products in response to a sodium tax. My sense is that these balance out to some extent, but it is very hard to say.

There is extremely high uncertainty over the calculations over how the problem will grow or shrink in the coming decades. This is certainly an area where expert advice and expert epidemiological modelling would be extremely valuable, and is something that CEARCH will pursue at deeper research stages.

We underestimate the economic burden insofar as it focuses on the burden from hypertension (i.e. SBP of > 140 mm Hg) even though high systolic blood pressure (i.e. SBP of > 110-115 mm Hg) has adverse health consequences and presumably negative economic effects as well....

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Are you neglecting your health?, published by dotsam on November 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Do you take your physical and mental health seriously?

If you are trying to secure a good future for humanity, make sure you are also working to secure a good future for your own body and mind too.

Do you do regular exercise? If not (and you don't have a medical reason not to exercise) spend 5 minutes thinking of actionable ways you could start exercising more, make a plan, and get to work (you can literally do this right now).

It doesn't have to be perfect. You can start very small and work up. Doing a little consistently is better than trying to do too much and then giving up. Plan to experiment to find what will work best for you, if you don't already know.

Take another 5 minutes and do the same for the other areas that robustly affect your ability to live a healthy and long life - check in on your diet, your sleep patterns and your stress levels.

Even if you don't much like yourself, even if you detest physical exercise, even if you are imperfect at keeping to routines or impulse control, and even if you were bad at sports as a kid, this is worth doing.

The world is a better place with you in it. Be the kind of person who works actively to keep fit and healthy. It matters!

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: The relative silence on FTX/SBF is likely the result of sound legal advice, published by Tyler Whitmer on November 21, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

The purpose of this post is to explain why I think we should expect to hear very little, if anything, about the FTX/SBF fiasco from any EA public figures or institutions, and why I wouldn’t read anything into that other than that folks are receiving good legal advice and appropriately following it.

A little about me and why I’m writing this

A little background on me, as this is my first real post here (gulp!) after lurking on and off for a long time. I recently resigned from the partnership of a big international law firm based in the US so I could take some time off. During my 16ish-year career as a big firm lawyer, my practice often focused on plaintiff-side restructuring-related litigation, including cases stemming from some of the biggest financial blow-ups in US history. Early in my career, I worked on litigation about deceptive lending practices at Enron. I then spent the better part of a decade working on litigation against the big money center banks by creditors of Lehman Brothers. I was also involved in litigation against the banks by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, after it took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

I’ve been what I’ll call EA-adjacent for a long time, but I’ve recently gotten more involved. For the past few months during my time off, I’ve been meeting as many lawyers and other mid-career folks in the EA community as I can (hi to those I’ve met!), and I’ve pitched in on a few projects led by others. I was informed on November 2 that I would receive funding for my own project from the FTX Future Fund. I obviously don’t expect to see that funding now. I’m upset and sad about that. I’m really excited about the project, and while I can do some of it by donating my time to it, some of it really does require a bit of funding that I’m not sure I can get now. That sucks, and I’m still working out how I feel about it.

Obligatory “this is not legal advice” throat clearing

I’m not acting as anyone’s lawyer here, and I don’t want to (at least right now with respect to these issues). Nothing in this post is legal advice. This is just my two cents, off the top of my head, based entirely on my experience and no research at all.

Why it’s best for folks not to comment on the FTX/SFB situation, and not just for their own sake

I don’t know anything about the FTX/SBF situation other than what’s in the public record, which I’ve been following closely as it develops. My thoughts here are inspired a bit by this post by Shakeel Hashim and this one by Holden Karnofsky, and the comments to each, but it’s also a response more generally to frustration I've seen here and on Twitter about the fact that many public figure EAs and senior folks at EA institutions are not directly addressing the FTX/SBF situation as much as some would like.

Lawyers almost always advise both individual clients and folks representing client entities not to speak to anyone, including friends and family, about ongoing litigation or any facts and circumstances likely to lead to litigation, including bankruptcy proceedings. People often feel frustrated by being “muzzled” in this way—especially where a narrative is establishing itself publicly that they see as casting them in a negative light. I suspect many are feeling that way right now about FTX/SBF and how the press is reporting on it. But smart people will continue to follow their lawyers’ advice. There are good reasons for this, including many that go beyond self-interest.

I’ve seen most of the self-interest angles addressed elsewhere, but I’ll say a bit about it just to drive the point home. Being involved in litigation, even as a totally blameless witness—or even a perceived witness who...

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: Scott Aaronson on "Reform AI Alignment", published by shminux on November 20, 2022 on LessWrong.

The framing is based on contrasting Orthodox Judaism with Reform Judaism, only for AI Alignment.

If AI alignment is a religion, it’s now large and established enough to have a thriving “Reform” branch, in addition to the original “Orthodox” branch epitomized by Eliezer Yudkowsky and MIRI. As far as I can tell, this Reform branch now counts among its members a large fraction of the AI safety researchers now working in academia and industry. (I’ll leave the formation of a Conservative branch of AI alignment, which reacts against the Reform branch by moving slightly back in the direction of the Orthodox branch, as a problem for the future — to say nothing of Reconstructionist or Marxist branches.)

There are 8 points of comparison, here is just the first one:

(1) Orthodox AI-riskers tend to believe that humanity will survive or be destroyed based on the actions of a few elite engineers over the next decade or two. Everything else—climate change, droughts, the future of US democracy, war over Ukraine and maybe Taiwan—fades into insignificance except insofar as it affects those engineers.

We Reform AI-riskers, by contrast, believe that AI might well pose civilizational risks in the coming century, but so does all the other stuff, and it’s all tied together. An invasion of Taiwan might change which world power gets access to TSMC GPUs. Almost everything affects which entities pursue the AI scaling frontier and whether they’re cooperating or competing to be first.

This framing seems new and worthwhile, crystallizing some long-standing divisions in the AI community.

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: What happened to the "Women and Effective Altruism" post?, published by Cornelis Dirk Haupt on November 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

There was a post up some time last week I wanted to read called Women and Effective Altruism. Later last week I noticed the page seemed down and now I just get "Sorry, you don't have access to this page." I was wondering why that was. My 60 second glance at the two top comments gave me the impression that the post stimulated healthy discourse among EA women on their experiences in EA.

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