Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: We’re hiring! Probably Good is expanding our team, published by Probably Good on October 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. is a young and growing organization. We’re looking for people who are passionate about helping others achieve a significant positive impact withand want to join as one of our core team members.

While the roles listed below reflect our major needs, it’s worth keeping in mind that we are fairly flexible in adapting a position to fit someone’s skills and interests. We’re a small team – each wearing many hats and taking up new tasks. As such, we embrace a learning-focused culture where everyone can do their best work.

Why join Probably Good?

We’re a career guidance organization aiming to make impact-centered career guidance more accessible to more people (you can read more about our goals, approach, distinction from 80k, and more in our announcement post).

This past spring, we brought on our first two employees, effectively doubling our team. After some months of creating new content and strategizing, we’re ready to ramp up. In the coming months, we have some exciting things in store, including:

Launching a new website & full rebrand

Creating more content and career profiles to reflect a broader range of career paths

Completing the final section of our career guide

Expanding our outreach and marketing efforts to reach a lot more people

If you’re compelled by our mission and goals, this could be a great opportunity to help shape the future of Probably Good.

Inclusiveness

We believe that forming an inclusive workplace and a diverse team is not only the right thing to do, but also helps us do better work. The nature of our mission requires us to consider multiple perspectives, which is only possible by making Probably Good an inclusive and welcoming place to work.

To that end, we do our best to:

Minimize unnecessary job requirements which would deter capable people from applying.

Work with candidates to try and accommodate different needs – allowing everyone to do their best work and thrive with us.

Encourage people with diverse backgrounds to apply. Even if you think that you might not be ‘good enough’ but you’re excited about our mission and want to contribute - please apply and give us a chance to get to know you and how you can help.

General information about our hiring

All of our roles are fully remote, and we welcome candidates from all geographies and timezones.

Many of our roles are flexible and we would consider hiring candidates at either a part-time or full-time capacity

In most cases, our hiring process includes a several months paid trial period, which we expect to make permanent if the role fits your expectations and you perform well.

Qualities that we appreciate across all of our roles are clarity in communication, a deep familiarity with Effective Altruism, and working well in a team.

If you’re interested in applying to any of these roles, send an email to [email protected] with your CV and references to any previous work relevant to the role you’re applying for.

Current Opportunities

Operations Lead

About the role

Help us improve the processes and workflow of Probably Good. This role will support the whole team by tackling a range of operations tasks – from ensuring payroll runs smoothly to improving our internal systems to assisting with hiring/onboarding new members.

About you

We’re looking for people who want to thrive in organizational and detail-oriented tasks, feel excited to support the efforts of a growing organization, have excellent communication and judgment skills, and can balance multiple tasks at once. Many backgrounds could be applicable to this position, though experience in project management or operations support would be advantageous.

Head of Growth / Growth Manager

About the role

Help us connect with new ...

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 Founders Pledge Global Catastrophic Risks Fund, published by christian.r on October 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

At Founders Pledge, we just launched a new addition to our funds: the Global Catastrophic Risks Fund. This post gives a brief overview of the fund.

Key Points

The fund will focus on global catastrophic risks with a special emphasis on risk pathways through international stability and great power relations.

The fund’s shorter giving timelines are complementary to our investing-to-give Patient Philanthropy Fund — we are publishing a short write-up on this soon.

The fund is designed to offer high-impact giving opportunities for both longtermists and non-longtermists who care about catastrophic risks (see section on “Our Perspective” in the Prospectus).

You can find more information — including differences and complementarity with other funds and longtermist funders — in our Fund Prospectus.

Overview

The GCR Fund will build on Founders Pledge’s recent research into great power conflict and risks from frontier military and civilian technologies, with a special focus on international stability — a pathway that we believe shapes a number of the biggest risks facing humanity — and will work on:

War between great powers, like a U.S.-China clash over Taiwan, or U.S.-Russia war;

Nuclear war, especially emerging threats to nuclear stability, like vulnerabilities of nuclear command, control, and communications;

Risks from artificial intelligence (AI), including risks from both machine learning applications (like autonomous weapon systems) and from transformative AI;

Catastrophic biological risks, such as naturally-arising pandemics, engineered pathogens, laboratory accidents, and the misuse of new advances in synthetic biology; and

Emerging threats from new technologies and in new domains.

Moreover, the Fund will support field-building activities around the study and mitigation of global catastrophic risks, and methodological interventions, including new ways of studying these risks, such as probabilistic forecasting and experimental wargaming. The focus on international security is a current specialty, and we expect the areas of expertise of the fund to expand as we build capacity.

Current and Future Generations

This Fund is designed both to tackle threats to humanity’s long-term future and to take action now to protect every human being alive today. We believe both that some interventions on global catastrophic risks can be justified on a simple cost-benefit analysis alone, and also that safeguarding the long-term future of humanity is among the most important things we can work on (and that in practice, they often converge). Whether or not you share our commitment to longtermism or believe that reducing existential risks is particularly important, you may still be interested in the Fund for the simple reason that you want to help prevent the deaths and suffering of millions of people.

To illustrate this, the Fund may support the development of confidence-building measures on AI — like an International Autonomous Incidents Agreement — with the aim of both mitigating the destabilizing impact of near-term military AI applications, as well as providing a focal point for long-termist AI governance. Some grants will focus mainly on near-termist risks; others mainly on longtermist concerns.

Like our other Funds, this will be a philanthropic co-funding vehicle designed to enable us to pursue a number of grantmaking opportunities, including:

Active grantmaking, working with organizations to shape their plans for the future;

Seeding new organizations and projects with high expected value;

Committing to multi-year funding to give stability to promising projects and decrease their fundraising costs;

Filling small funding gaps that fall between the cr...

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 Giving Store- 100% Profits to GiveDirectly, published by Ellie Leszczynski on October 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TLDR: Here's a link to a store selling housewares, kids/babies supplies, pet products and out door products where 100% of the profits go to GiveDirectly. Now, shipping is 100% free on all items in the store!

My name is Ellie Leszczynski and I am the Social Media Director for the Consumer Power Initiative (also known as CPI), founded by Brad West. I got interested in volunteering because once I heard about the idea and the mission, I knew I just had to be a part of it.

After becoming familiar with the Effective Altruism community, I realized the EA principles really inspire me to think of how I can be better in my own life and give back to others. So I went on the EA website and ordered my free book - “Doing Good Better” by William MacAskill. I am now looking forward to reading his new book, “What We Owe the Future," as well. And I really am amazed by the community that has been developed around using our time, money, grit, and creativity to maximize our positive impact for everyone, including even insects raised in alternative farming or consciousness being generated by machine learning.

This is a vast world with a lot of moving parts and ideas going on in it, and the Consumer Power Initiative is taking initiative to promote an altruistic mission that doesn't take much to share and spread. As example, I would like to introduce you to an online shop called the Consumer Giving Store. The Giving Store directs all of the profit that it generates to GiveDirectly, a highly-rated charity that does direct cash transfers to the global poor. The storefront was designed by Kagen Zethmayr, one of the members of the Consumer Power Initiative, and coded by Madhav Malhotra, an EA who was inspired by a discussion with Brad in the comments of one of his posts. You may already be familiar with it. At the Giving Store, you can buy products curated from a variety of sources at no-more-than-retail prices, whose sole purpose in being sold in this venue is to generate profits toward a worthy cause without added cost to the consumer.

This fits into the broader idea of the Profit for Good model (also called “Guided Consumption”), which the Consumer Power Initiative is trying to promote and normalize. The Giving Store not only allows people to help GiveDirectly by buying goods, it also allows them to send a signal to the broader world that consumers care and want to help in what ways they can.

We believe that the general public will choose to buy goods from Profit for Good Companies (“PFGs”) when they can do it without paying more or sacrificing quality. We are confident in the proposition that, however flawed and/or selfish members of the general public may be, they would rather the beneficiaries of effective charities, such as those that help the global poor, get the benefits of profit generated from their activity rather than the people who currently get said benefits: the very wealthy, especially if not even doing the work involved in this activity. The general public at large, however, cannot create this infrastructure or the initial steps for the community. This project will need EAs and others who put additional effort in trying to make the world a better place. Brad discusses the different players in the Profit for Good and their motivations here. Vincent van der Holst reviews some of the advantages Profit for Good firms have here.

I gather that EA is all about how we can use our resources and our time to have the highest positive impact in the world. And using consumer sentiment and our economies to further effective charities could really transform the world with everyday choices! We would like to thank you in advance for any purchasing you might do on ...

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: Reslab Request for Information: EA hardware projects, published by Joel Becker on October 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TL;DR

We want to hear ideas for physical engineering projects - that is, hardware prototypes moving around atoms (not just bits) - from the EA and/or longtermist community. Submit here!

Introducing Reslab

There has been a lot of talk about EA needing to take more large-scale action recently (e.g. Longtermist EA needs more Phase 2 work). And there likely exist cases where it would be helpful for action plans to start with small-scale hardware prototypes/MVPs. We came across such a case recently: as participants on SHELTER Weekend, we realised that the smallest scale MVPs for civilizational shelters often required technical implementation and tests.

We are starting Resilience Lab (or ‘Reslab’) to build capacity for prototyping hardware ideas with relevance to areas identified as important to the long-term future.

At this stage, we would love to hear from people with more project ideas, or an interest in working on someone else’s submitted idea. We will award $200, $150, and $50 prizes to the first-, second-, and third-best ideas respectively!

Long-term goal

Our intent is to develop a long-term resource to support EA and/or longtermist hardware projects. If successful, this pilot project would lead to a dedicated space with more full time staff and projects spinning out.

Which projects are suitable?

Any projects that:

Are primarily focused on EA and/or longtermist cause areas, and

Could make substantial progress with materials funding of up to $100k and project ownership by a junior mechanical engineer and intern for six months.

To give you a better sense of what we’re interested in, here are some ideas we have for possible projects:

Scaling of mushroom manufacturing techniques.

Positive pressure air filtration system kits.

Disinfection treatment testing.

PPE development and testing.

ALLFED technical development projects (e.g. open source hardware designs for greenhouse construction, seaweed farming, or food processing).

Submit your hardware project ideas here!

The deadline to be considered for prizes is January 31st, 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: Paper: In-context Reinforcement Learning with Algorithm Distillation [Deepmind], published by Lawrence Chan on October 26, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum.

Authors train transformers to imitate the trajectory of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Find that the transformers learn to do in-context RL (that is, the transformers implement an RL algorithm)---the authors check this by having the transformers solve new RL tasks. Indeed, the transformers can sometimes do better than the RL algorithms they're trained to imitate.

Seems like more evidence for the "a generative model contain agents" point.Abstract:

We propose Algorithm Distillation (AD), a method for distilling reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms into neural networks by modeling their training histories with a causal sequence model. Algorithm Distillation treats learning to reinforcement learn as an across-episode sequential prediction problem. A dataset of learning histories is generated by a source RL algorithm, and then a causal transformer is trained by autoregressively predicting actions given their preceding learning histories as context. Unlike sequential policy prediction architectures that distill post-learning or expert sequences, AD is able to improve its policy entirely in-context without updating its network parameters. We demonstrate that AD can reinforcement learn in-context in a variety of environments with sparse rewards, combinatorial task structure, and pixel-based observations, and find that AD learns a more data-efficient RL algorithm than the one that generated the source data.

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: Signals of war in August 2021, published by yieldthought on October 26, 2022 on LessWrong.

Could we have predicted Russia's intention to invade Ukraine earlier? Back in August 2021 the energy prices in Europe doubled and stayed at this level until the start of hostilites:

This, of course, did not go unnoticed. Many, many articles were written about it. Shockingly, a wide range of unsubstantiated theories for the rise were presented in these, often with a suggestion that carbon taxes or decarbonisation was the root cause.

Actually, the root cause was an increase in natural gas prices. This was obvious at the time to anyone who knows how the energy market price is determined:

The cause of the gas price increase was that Russia suddenly restricted its supplies to Europe, which was also noticed and reported on as in this CNBC article titled "Russia is pumping a lot less natural gas to Europe all of a sudden — and it is not clear why".

The effect was to dramatically lower European gas reserves, which was also noticed:

Why would Russia deliberately reduce European gas reserves? To increase their leverage, ideally timed at some point in the future when Europe needs that gas the most. This has to be relatively short-term, as if supply remains low and prices high over the long term Europe will choose to fill its reserves anyway, giving us three main sweet spots:

Late 2021: reserves insufficient to cover the winter and demand high.

Early 2022: reserves at their lowest point, but demand decreasing for 9 months.

Late 2022: demand increasing but risks that reserves have had time to refill.

What conclusions could we draw from information in August 2021 about this? Well, by April of 2021 Russia had amassed significant and unusual forces on the border with Ukraine, which was also well-reported:

Russia claimed the forces were on training exercises. Western spectators mostly seem to have assumed sabre-rattling.

That interpretation is inconsistent with reducing gas supply to Europe over a period of months to ensure gas supplies will be depleted after the winter of 2021. The logical conclusion from Russia's military buildup (which intensified in October 2021) must have been that Putin plans to invade, ideally in late 2021 but at the latest in early 2022.

With 20/20 hindsight it's easy to cherry-pick evidence. So I have a few questions:

Who drew this connection in August / October 2021? I haven't found anything but would love to update on these people's current analysis of events.

What's was the steel-man case in August / October 2021 that Putin is not preparing for war - which other concrete information out there was strong enough to overlook these clear signs of economic and military preparation for war?

Is there evidence that the invasion was delayed by 1-2 months? The economic timing suggests Putin would have had more leverage if he had invaded at the start of winter. Indeed, much was made of the spring thawing making the invasion harder (soft ground channels heavy vehicles along roads, making them more vulnerable) and the actual timing meant Europe was able to refill its gas reserves ahead of the 2022 winter.

This is a rare opportunity to look back and update on world-model predictions. The information was there. Who saw it and made the case?

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: 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.

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: PAs in EA: A Brief Guide & FAQ, published by Vaidehi Agarwalla on October 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This guide was produced by Pineapple Operations; Holly Morgan is the primary author, with support from Jennifer Waldmann and Vaidehi Agarwalla (all mistakes are Holly’s own).

1. What is a Personal Assistant? What is an Executive Assistant?

Personal Assistants (PA) tend to be hired remotely on a self-employed basis for ~5-10 hours a week per client. Support is generally focused on saving time in someone’s private life and is primarily administrative.

Executive Assistants (ExA) tend to be full-time, on-site employees. Support is usually focused on saving and managing time in someone’s professional life and is often a mix of administrative, motivational, and generalist.

For simplicity, we’ll refer to both as PAs for the rest of this post.

2. What typical tasks might a PA do?

Admin and research

Travel logistics

Research and summarise/book top options for flights and accommodation

Look into the latest rules around visas, coronavirus, etc.

Procurement

Research and summarise/buy top options for a particular product or service

E.g. laptop, eye mask, credit card, gift, hairdresser, therapist, apartment

Desk research

Write/find digestible summaries of specific articles, papers, books, etc.

Answer questions, e.g. “Are any organisations working on X?”, “What’s the best productivity solution for Y?”

Household management

In-person errands, e.g. receive/return packages, process mail, duplicate keys

Find and manage household workers, e.g. cleaners, childcare, electricians

Motivation and focus

Check-ins

Regularly run through a tailored list of questions, e.g. “What are your most important tasks this week that you're worried you won't do?”, “Can we think of any motivational hacks now to increase the chance that you'll do them?”, “What steps will you take this month towards becoming your best self?”

Check that the person has started work, spent 1 hour on top-priority tasks, done 7 hours' work today, etc. or just literally stand behind them like a patient teacher while they write that aversive email

Proactively address current/anticipated issues with workflows and prioritisation processes based on a deepening familiarity with those systems and the goals behind them

Disruptive and 'ugh' tasks

Do tasks that must be done frequently or at a specific time and so would otherwise disrupt the person’s schedule/focus, e.g. regularly check incoming messages for anything sufficiently urgent and important, take notes in meetings, try to get hold of a company that rarely picks up, buy tickets as soon as they go on sale

Do/start tasks that the person finds particularly aversive, e.g. draft emails, book medical appointments

Inbox, calendar, and task management

Provide daily summaries of what today’s priorities seem to be (and stay on top of deadlines)

Triage incoming emails and politely decline requests as appropriate

Schedule meetings (with more privacy/professionalism/gatekeeping/nuance than an app)

Deliver briefings before meetings and conferences

Manage tasks as they’re thought of, allowing the person to quickly regain focus on their work

Listen to the person’s problems without judgement :-)

Generalist and miscellaneous

Generalist

Drawing on the Assistant’s generalist skill set, ad hoc tasks that there are no dedicated staff for (yet)

Can involve generally being another pair of eyes (proofreading, being a sounding board, rubber ducking, user testing, etc.) or potentially management in specific areas (social media, recruitment, office, events, etc.)

Miscellaneous

This is an opportunity to add a complementary set of skills and attributes to someone’s working life

So if someone is disorganised, reckless, pessimistic, etc., they could work with an assistant who’s the opposite

3. How much...

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 Forum License: Creative Commons, published by Ben West on October 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Thank you to everyone who commented, DMed, voted, or otherwise gave feedback on our proposal to change the Forum license! While we are unlikely to come up with a solution that’s perfect for everyone, it seems like there was broad support for a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license.

I would particularly like to thank everyone who argued in favor of dropping the “noncommercial” clause – we found those arguments compelling, and are planning to follow your advice.

We are excited about all the people who are translating Forum posts, reading them in podcasts, and creating other derivative works, and we want to be sure that they are legally protected. We also know that authors generally use the Forum because they want others to share and build upon their ideas, and our job as a Forum is to enable that to happen.

Therefore, as of December 1, 2022, we are requiring that all content posted to the Forum be available under a CC BY 4.0 license.

What does this mean if I want to translate or remix Forum content?

tl;dr: you must credit the original author in a way that does not imply they endorse your changes. E.g.:

Translated from Why CEA Online doesn’t outsource more work to non-EA freelancers by Ben West under CC-BY 4.0

Creative Commons has more information about best practices for attribution.

How will this affect previously posted material?

By default, we will not change the license for anything posted before December 1, 2022.

If an author wants to make it clear that their work is free to reuse, they can add a license clause at the bottom of their posts, even those posted before December 1, 2022. Additionally, some projects (run by CEA and other organizations or individuals) may want to reach out to some authors about reusing their past work; we will be able to add a license clause at the bottom of old Forum posts, when the author gives permission.

You can do this proactively, and without our involvement, too: if you are an author, we encourage you to include a license clause in your older posts so that others can reuse your work! All you need to do is add the following clause — you can see an example of this in this post of mine:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

What if I want to use a different license?

We are currently not planning on adding a more complicated “menu” of licenses content can be published under. If you wish to publish under a different license, we encourage you to instead create a link-post to an external page which has the appropriate license (link-posting will not make the linked content published under the CC BY license).

I am only able to find two historical instances of Forum authors choosing to publish under a specific license, and one of those was using CC BY. In general, the authors we’ve contacted have been overwhelmingly supportive of sharing their work, although we are aware of some strong reasons why CC BY is not the best fit for all use cases.

Effective altruism is an intellectual community, and people usually post on the Forum precisely because they want others to build upon and share their ideas. As a global community whose members are almost universally not experts in copyright law, we want to be able to give simple, uniform guidance about how Forum content can be reused.

What if I have another concern or question?

I encourage you to comment below! You can also contact us through email, intercom, etc.

Thank you!

A goal of the EA Forum is to let authors better share their ideas with the world. I’m excited about projects that remix Forum content in new ways to better accomplish that: podcasts, translations, fellowship curricula, and more.

I know that the last thing your vol...

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 does it take to defend the world against out-of-control AGIs?, published by Steven Byrnes on October 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

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