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 summary of every "Highlights from the Sequences" post, published by Akash on July 15, 2022 on LessWrong.

1

I recently finished reading Highlights from the Sequences, 49 essays from The Sequences that were compiled by the LessWrong team.

Since moving to Berkeley several months ago, I’ve heard many people talking about posts from The Sequences. A lot of my friends and colleagues commonly reference biases, have a respect for Bayes Rule, and say things like “absence of evidence is evidence of absence!”

So, I was impressed that the Highlights were not merely a refresher of things I had already absorbed through the social waters. There was plenty of new material, and there were also plenty of moments when a concept became much crisper in my head. It’s one thing to know that dissent is hard, and it’s another thing to internalize that lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black— it feels like going to school wearing a clown suit.

2

As I read, I wrote a few sentences summarizing each post. I mostly did this to improve my own comprehension/memory.

You should treat the summaries as "here's what Akash took away from this post" as opposed to "here's an actual summary of what Eliezer said."

Note that the summaries are not meant to replace the posts. Read them here.

3

Here are my notes on each post, in order. I also plan to post a reflection on some of my favorite posts.

Thinking Better on Purpose

One difference between humans and mice is that humans are able to think about thinking. Mice brains and human brains both have flaws. But a human brain is a lens that can understand its own flaws. This is powerful and this is extremely rare in the animal kingdom.

Epistemic rationality is about building beliefs that correspond to reality (accuracy). Instrumental rationality is about steering the future toward outcomes we desire (winning). Sometimes, people have debates about whether things are “rational.” These often seem like debates over the definitions of words. We should not debate over whether something is “rational”— we should debate over whether something leads us to more accurate beliefs or leads us to steer the world more successfully. If it helps, every time Eliezer says “rationality”, you should replace it with “foozal” and then strive for what is foozal.

An 8-year-old will fail a calculus test because there are a lot of ways to get the wrong answer and very few ways to get the right answer. When humans pursue goals, there are often many ways of pursuing goals ineffectively and only a few ways of pursuing them effectively. We rarely do seemingly-obvious things, like:

Ask what we are trying to achieve

Track progress

Reflect on which strategies have worked & or haven’t worked for us in the past

Seek out strategies that have worked or haven’t worked for others

Test several different hypotheses for how to achieve goals

Ask for help

Experiment with alternative ways of studying, writing, working, or socializing

Luke Skywalker tried to lift a spaceship once. Then, he gave up. Instantly. He told Yoda it was impossible. And then he walked away. And the audience sat along and nodded, because this is typical for humans. “People wouldn’t try for more than five minutes before giving up if the fate of humanity were at stake.”

If a model can explain any possible outcome, it is not a useful model. Sometimes, we encounter a situation, and we’re like “huh. something doesn’t seem right here”. But then we push this away and explain the situation in terms of our existing models. Instead, we should pay attention to this feeling. We should resist the impulse to go through mental gymnastics to explain a surprising situation with our existing models. Either our model is wrong, or the story isn’t true.

Sometimes, we investigate our beliefs because we are “supposed to.” A good rati...

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 to the Open Philanthropy Technology Policy Fellowship!, published by lukeprog on July 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Due to the success of our first cohort of the Open Philanthropy Technology Policy Fellowship (OPTPF), we are excited to announce that applications are open for the second cohort of OPTPF. You can apply here until September 15th.

Open Philanthropy is seeking applicants for a US policy fellowship program focused on high-priority emerging technologies, especially AI and biotechnology. Selected applicants will receive policy-focused training and mentorship and be supported in matching with a host organization for a full-time, fully-funded fellowship based in the Washington, DC area. Potential host organizations include executive branch offices, Congressional offices, and think tank programs.

Fellowship placements are expected to begin in early or mid-2023 and to last 6 or 12 months (depending on the fellowship category), with potential renewal for a second term (for a total fellowship duration of up to 24 months). Fellowship opportunities are available for both entry-level and mid-career applicants, and for people both with and without prior policy experience.

You can read more about the fellowship here. The first cohort consisted of 15 fellows, whose backgrounds you can see here. Their placements include positions at the Departments of Defense and Health and Human Services, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Center for Health Security, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Brookings Institution, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

(If you’d like more information about careers in US policy, we also recommend this summer speaker series run by the Stanford Existential Risks Initiative. This series has dedicated sessions on each of the three institutional tracks of the fellowship — think tanks, congress, and the executive branch.)

Who should apply?

OPTPF was designed to accommodate a broad talent pool. Opportunities are available for both entry-level and mid-career applicants, for technical and non-technical people, and for people both with and without prior policy experience.

Entry-level applicants can apply to be “junior fellows” at think tanks. This role will combine research assistance with operational support, for example organizing and taking notes at expert workshops. Junior fellows may also get opportunities for short-form independent writing (e.g. articles for popular outlets). The position will initially be for 6 months, with potential renewal for another 6 months. Current students who will complete their bachelor’s or master’s degree in Spring 2022 are eligible to apply, as are other recent graduates (see here for more on eligibility).

Early/mid-career applicants can apply to be fellows in the executive branch, Congress, or at think tanks. Applicants must have a minimum of several years of relevant experience, but it is not uncommon for policy fellowship programs to take in people at a more advanced career stage (e.g. someone in their 30s or 40s with 10+ years of experience). We are open to applicants of all levels of seniority above our minimum requirements; we will work hard to support all fellows in matching with a host office and role where their background and expertise will be put to good use. (See here for more on eligibility.)

Besides the appropriate level of seniority, we will largely be looking for (a) sufficient alignment with Open Phil's priorities in AI, biosecurity, and other global risks (b) evidence of “fit” for applied policy work, and (c) some expertise or experience relevant to emerging technology (broadly defined). What does this mean in practice?

Policy work o...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Results of a Spanish-speaking essay contest about Global Catastrophic Risk, published by Jaime Sevilla on July 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Over June I have been evaluating entries of the essay contest organised by Riesgos Catastróficos Globales, an organisation supporting Spanish-speaking work on Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs). The contest ran from 4 March 2022 to 30 May 2022, and we received 141 (valid) applications. The applications were written in Spanish.

I am immensely grateful to our support team (Cristina Schmidt Ibañez, Claudette Salinas, Alison Díaz and Emilio Bazan) for running the operations of the contest and helping me evaluate the entries, to the rest of the RCGs team (Juan García, Ángela Aristizábal and Pablo Stafforini), the Spanish Speaking EA community (especially coordinators Sandra Malagón and Laura González) and many university professors for their support and help promoting the contest; and to the FTX Future Fund Regranting Program for financing the contest.

The essay contest has been a great opportunity to promote Spanish content and writers. Also it has been an interesting exercise to learn how Spanish-speakers relate to GCRs. In this article I share some observations about the contest.

In particular, I talk about the reception of the contest, the content of the entries, the format of the entries and the quality of the entries.

Key highlights

The writing contest seems to have been a very cost-effective way of promoting engagement with GCRs. We spent $10k and got ~39k visits to our website and received ~141 valid essays.

Unintuitively, the contest drove a lot of web traffic from Latin American countries with little EA presence like the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Venezuela, Perú, Honduras, Ecuador and Nicaragua, and relatively little from places with moderate community presence like Spain, Mexico and Colombia.

People mostly wrote about Global Catastrophic Risks in general and climate change. There were very few entries on other specific GCRs.

Most essays were of rather poor quality. There were 26 essays that met a minimum bar of quality and and from those 11 that I considered good quality.

You can read the winning entries of the contest (in Spanish) here.

Reception and geographical information

I am very pleased with the reception of the contest. I was expecting to receive twenty-odd entries. Instead we received 141 valid entries.

While the contest was up (March, April and May) our webpage received 39,377 visits. In comparison, in January and February we received <200 visits.

Running the contest cost around $10k including prizes, salaries and ads. That's about $0.25 per visit or $70 per essay. Googling around I found cost-per-clicks between $0.15 and $0.75. I now believe that writing contests are a cost-effective way to promote engagement with a topic.

The ads we ran through Facebook were not a big part of the traffic, though they were particularly cost-effective. We spent $100 in Facebook ads, and got 840 visitors through the social media site.

Most visitors came through Twitter and direct search. We ran a campaign of emailing University professors in Latin American countries to promote the contest, though we don't have good data on how effective that was.

Most visitors came from Dominican Republic (7355 visits, 18.7% of all visits), Guatemala (5792, 14.7%), Venezuela (5364, 13.6%), Perú (5012, 12.7%), Honduras (4895, 12.5%), Ecuador (3795, 9.64%) and Nicaragua (2383, 6.05%). This was surprising to me as these are countries where Effective Altruism and the GCR community has very little presence. The next most popular countries were Colombia (1758, 4.46%), México (806, 2.05%), Chile (597, 1.52%), United States (379, 0.96%) and Spain (290,0.74%), where the Spanish Speaking EA community has a moderate presence.

Content

The most ...

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: Impact Markets: The Annoying Details, published by Scott Alexander on July 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

(crossposted to)

Impact markets (aka impact certificates, retroactive public goods funding) are a frequently-mooted EA idea to create "a VC ecosystem for charity". Instead of funders (eg large foundations) prospectively paying teams to do charitable work, they would retrospectively "buy" moral impact from successful projects. Then investors would "buy equity" in charitable proposals, funding their work in exchange for a portion of the eventual profits. For more information, read Paul Christiano’s or Vitalik Buterin’s in-depth explanations.

I'm interested in using impact markets for the Winter 2022 ACX Grants round, which would require turning this sketch of an idea into a concrete proposal. Below I'm listing some of the open questions about details of an impact marketplace, and my preliminary thoughts on each.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed and made suggestions on this draft. I'm defaulting to keeping reviewers anonymous, but if they prefer to be named I'll add them here later.

1: What Is The Basic Format Of The Market?

A: Simple Retroactive Funding

Some charitable funder announces they will give money to good things that they like. If somebody does a good thing, the funder might give them money later. There isn’t necessarily any investing, certificates, or tokens.

Advantage: This is very simple, and can be done right now: in fact, a team is already doing this for good Effective Altruism Forum posts.

Disadvantage: This is a good start, but really just equivalent to giving prizes to good EA Forum posts. Absent someone else setting up an auxiliary structure, it doesn’t help useful projects get funded. At best, it encourages a few marginal people to do cheap things they might have done anyway.

B: Block Impact Certificates

A charity offers a single impact certificate representing a project. For example, if they need $1 million to cure malaria in Senegal, they sell a single certificate representing that project for $1 million. Then, when an final oracular funder decides the project is worth $5 million, they give $5 million to the holder of the certificate.

Advantage: Again, it's simple.

Disadvantage: Someone needs to have the entire $1 million in order to fund the project. There’s no way to split the costs, which makes it worse than eg stocks. When Tesla needs $1 billion in new funding, it doesn’t just ask billionaires. It sells (eg) one million shares of stock for $1000 each, and then people with much less than $1 billion can bet on their success.

C: Fractionalized Impact Shares

A charity offers splits its offering into many shares or tokens. For example, if they need $1 million to cure malaria in Senegal, they could sell 10,000 tokens for $100 each. Then, when a final oracular funder decides the project is worth $5 million, they compensate each token holder with 1/10,000th of the final reward, so $500.

Advantage: this allows people with much less than $1 million to invest, and creates a secondary market in tokens which people could probably do interesting things with.

Disadvantage: Suppose the charity wants $1 million because it will take $500,000 to build a medicine factory, and then they want to make $500,000 worth of medicine. If only $400,000 in tokens are sold, they can’t even build the factory, and the whole project is worthless. So an investor wouldn’t want to invest $400,000 unless they were sure that someone would produce the other $600,000. But since nobody can know that, people might not invest. Or they might invest, then get very angry when their investment turns ends up useless.

D: Fractionalized Impact Shares With Assurance Contract

As above, except instead of buying a token, investors commit to buy a certain amount of tokens if all tokens ...

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 philosophical review of Open Philanthropy’s Cause Prioritisation Framework, published by MichaelPlant on July 15, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary

In this post, I undertake a philosophical review of Open Philanthropy’s Global Health and Wellbeing Cause Prioritisation Framework, the method they use to compare the value of different outcomes. In practice, the framework focuses on the relative value of just two outcomes, increasing income and adding years of life. This is a ‘red-team’ exercise, partially inspired by the EA forum contests on blogging and on critiques. My aim is to constructively critique something that is already good with the aim of improving it.

Here’s the prospectus. I sketch the various philosophical debates such a framework must take a position on. I note some of the options in each case and how choosing one rather than another may relatively alter the priorities. I attempt to identify the choices that the Open Philanthropy (OP) framework makes and conclude it is substantially unclear which positions they take or which arguments they accept. Specifically, to make the central trade-off between health and income OP implicitly appeals to different, opposing theories of wellbeing. Further, it is not obvious what assumptions the framework makes about population ethics and the badness of death, nor are any reasons given on these topics.

I make three main recommendations:

I suggest OP's framework would be greatly improved by clarifying and developing their stance on these philosophical issues.

Given OP’s commitment to worldview diversification (putting significant resources behind every worldview they find plausible), I argue that OP is pushed to adopt more worldviews within the scope of its Global Health and Wellbeing Framework than the single one it adopts currently.

I suggest how OP might, in practice, expand their set of worldviews.

One crucial worldview I argue should be included - but which OP is currently sceptical of - is the use of subjective wellbeing measures (self-reports of happiness and life satisfaction) as a unified measure of value. I have previously advocated for an ‘SWB approach’ to cause prioritisation (see, for example, here and here). What’s novel here is the claim that using an SWB approach would be consistent with, indeed possibly even required by, OP’s worldview diversification approach. The simple thought is that it is plausible to think both that (1) happiness and life satisfaction matter morally and (2) people’s own ratings of their happiness and satisfaction are a credible way of measuring those feelings.

While this discussion focuses on OP’s framework, the issues I discuss here are very general and apply to any method which involves comparing the value of different outcomes. I consider OP’s framework as it is a prominent and concrete means of doing this.

1. Background

Open Philanthropy’s mission is “to help others as much as we can with the resources available to us”. Since 2014, it has directed over $1.5 billion in grants and in 2022-23 it plans to give an additional $1 billion to evidence-based charities working in global health and development.

Open Philanthropy (OP) has done an enormous amount of good. In particular, I want to praise them for the transparent way they communicate their reasoning so that others may learn from, use, and suggest improvements to it. For OP to do this is a public service, one that is almost unique in the wider world of philanthropic actors.

In November 2021, OP published a blog post setting out an updated framework for making trade-offs between different types of interventions in their global health and wellbeing portfolio. In January 2022, Alexander Berger (co-CEO) and Peter Favaloro (Research Fellow) presented the framework at an online seminar hosted by the Centre for Global De...

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: Don't use 'infohazard' for collectively destructive info, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on July 15, 2022 on LessWrong.

Suppose there were a cheap way to make nuclear weapons out of common household materials. Knowing this information is not directly harmful to the median individual like yourself. On average, it may even be beneficial to the average person, to know that secret yourself; either because you could directly conquer places, or because you could sell the info to somebody who could. But society as a whole would rather that nobody knew it than that everybody knew it.

For a more realistic example, consider the DNA sequence for smallpox: I'd definitely rather that nobody knew it, than that people could with some effort find out, even though I don't expect being exposed to that quoted DNA information to harm my own thought processes.

'Infohazard', I think, should be used only to refer to the slightly stranger case of information such that the individual themselves would rather not hear it and would say, "Don't tell me that".

A spoiler for a book you're in the middle of reading is the classic example of information which is anomalously harmful to you personally. You might pay a penny not to hear it, if the ordinary course of events would expose you to it. People enclose info about the book's ending inside spoilers, if on Reddit or Discord, not because they mean to keep that secret to benefit themselves and harm you - as is the more usual case of secrecy, in human interactions - but because they're trying to protect you from info that would harm you to know.

The term 'infohazard' has taken on some strange and mystical connotations by being used to refer to 'individually hazardous info'. I am worried about using the same word to also refer to information being alleged to be dangerous in the much more mundane sense of 'collectively destructive info' - info that helps the average individual hearer, but has net negative externalities if lots of people know it.

This was originally posted by me to Facebook at greater length (linkpost goes to original essay). Best suggestions there (imo) were 'malinfo' and 'sociohazard', and if I had to pick one of those I'd pick 'sociohazard'.

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: Potato diet: A post mortem and an answer to SMTM's article, published by joy void joy on July 14, 2022 on LessWrong.

Slime Mold Time Mold (SMTM) has just published the results of their studies on the potato diet. The idea is to eat nothing but potatoes for four weeks, and report how it went.

You can read SMTM's reasoning here, the basic idea is that they've observed some annectdotal data point of some people losing substantive weight while eating nothing but potatoes and want to reproduce the result.

Natália Coelho Mendonça has written in a very detailed and well-written article why it was probably not lithium, SMTM's leading hypothesis of why obesity is so prevalent.

As SMTM's potato diet is not directly linked with lithium, some readers might think that even if SMTM was wrong on that one, the potato diet could be interesting to try.

Having done the diet, I thought I could give a subjective data point into all this. I wanted to be pseudo-anonymous, but this post has been nagging at me ever since finishing the diet.

This post will not be as sourced as Natália's article, I do not intend to explain the mechanism or absence thereof of the potato diet. I am not knowledgeable in nutrition or biology to really have any insights into the mechanisms of this.

This article will serve both as a report of how it went down for me, a postmortem of mistakes I made, and a general impression of the SMTM methodology that results from this.

While I am glad I tried the potato diet, and it gave me great insights into what can affect my energy and mood levels, I feel that my following of it was dangerous in a way SMTM did not account for. I am also finding their methodology has been very poor, and their recent article is loose in the way it draws its conclusions.

There are some things I either completely blundered and that were my fault, or that I calculated the risks of and decided they were worth the gamble. For instance, I asked SMTM if my bipolar anorexia would muddle the data, to which they said that they advise against bipolars taking the diet. Seeing as I am quite atypical in my bipolarity (my manias are never a problem for me, I actually look for ways to trigger them), I decided it was worth a shot.

So I am not trying to hold SMTM responsible for what happened or what might have happened. I am trying to

warn other users here who might be tempted to follow the diet of precautions they might want to take into considerations

narrate my experience as a whole in case there is something interesting for other people.

A quick TLDR of the (long, sorry) following post:

Personal experience:

First started the diet eating self-made, oilless fries and chips/crisps, as well as potato soup. Then, as there were no effects, switched to whole boiled potatoes on their recommendations

Got some bruises/maybe oedema and general dizziness after stopping the diet, which I think is mild refeeding syndrome

Lost 8 pounds in 4 weeks, regained them completely 2 weeks after the diet

I was in a quite low energy state for months, I am now having bipolar swings and low sleep for two weeks (as I knew about being bipolar, those were risks I knew of and somewhat expected)

I still do not understand why eating the potatoes whole and boiled had an effect when nothing else worked. Especially seeing that I seem to be the only one. Solanine poisoning? Placebo effect? Weird timing?

SMTM's methodology:

The design of the study was very weird, sometimes it would be about trying to reproduce the potato diet, and other time to search for a diet that would work.

The features of the change they were looking for were themselves not fixed in time

I do not think SMTM took enough precautions in safety communication

SMTM seemed focused in confirming their hypothesis rather than challenging it

Weird felt sense that might just come from ...

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 note about differential technological development, published by Nate Soares on July 15, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum.

Quick note: I occasionally run into arguments of the form "my research advances capabilities, but it advances alignment more than it advances capabilities, so it's good on net". I do not buy this argument, and think that in most such cases, this sort of research does more harm than good. (Cf. differential technological development.)

For a simplified version of my model as to why:

Suppose that aligning an AGI requires 1000 person-years of research.

900 of these person-years can be done in parallelizable 5-year chunks (e.g., by 180 people over 5 years — or, more realistically, by 1800 people over 10 years, with 10% of the people doing the job correctly half the time).

The remaining 100 of these person-years factor into four chunks that take 25 serial years apiece (so that you can't get any of those four parts done in less than 25 years).

In this toy model, a critical resource is serial time: if AGI is only 26 years off, then shortening overall timelines by 2 years is a death sentence, even if you're getting all 900 years of the "parallelizable" research done in exchange.

My real model of the research landscape is more complex than this toy picture, but I do in fact expect that serial time is a key resource when it comes to AGI alignment.

The most blatant case of alignment work that seems parallelizable to me is that of "AI psychologizing": we can imagine having enough success building comprehensible minds, and enough success with transparency tools, that with a sufficiently large army of people studying the alien mind, we can develop a pretty good understanding of what and how it's thinking. (I currently doubt we'll get there in practice, but if we did, I could imagine most of the human-years spent on alignment-work being sunk into understanding the first artificial mind we get.)

The most blatant case of alignment work that seems serial to me is work that requires having a theoretical understanding of minds/optimization/whatever, or work that requires having just the right concepts for thinking about minds. Relative to our current state of knowledge, it seems to me that a lot of serial work is plausibly needed in order for us to understand how to safely and reliably aim AGI systems at a goal/task of our choosing.

A bunch of modern alignment work seems to me to sit in some middle-ground. As a rule of thumb, alignment work that is closer to behavioral observations of modern systems is more parallelizable (because you can have lots of people making those observations in parallel), and alignment work that requires having a good conceptual or theoretical framework is more serial (because, in the worst case, you might need a whole new generation of researchers raised with a half-baked version of the technical framework, in order to get people who both have enough technical clarity to grapple with the remaining confusions, and enough youth to invent a whole new way of seeing the problem—a pattern which seems common to me in my read of the development of things like analysis, meta-mathematics, quantum physics, etc.).

As an egregious and fictitious (but "based on a true story") example of the arguments I disagree with, consider the following dialog:

Uncharacteristically conscientious capabilities researcher: Alignment is made significantly trickier by the fact that we do not have an artificial mind in front of us to study. By doing capabilities research now (and being personally willing to pause when we get to the brink), I am making it more possible to do alignment research.

Me: Once humanity gets to the brink, I doubt we have much time left. (For a host of reasons, including: simultaneous discovery; the way the field seems to be on a trajectory to publicly...

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: Covid 7/14/22: BA.2.75 Plus Tax, published by Zvi on July 14, 2022 on LessWrong.

That’s the new variant for this week. I am not worried about it, but there is little other news on the Covid front and I’m still attempting not to reuse titles. As time goes by the events are still new but they tend to rhyme. This update is inessential.

In addition to various non-Covid stuff I’m putting at the end, which I anticipate will slowly grow as a section over time, this week’s other post is Criticism of EA Criticism Contest. If you find that is relevant to your interests, with an additional copy on the EA forum. If it is not relevant to your interests you can safely skip it.

Executive Summary

BA.2.75 is potentially a thing, unclear if it is a meaningful thing yet.

Spike in deaths that is likely a data artifact.

A reminder we could be working faster towards

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 700k cases (+5%) and 2,250 deaths (-1%)

Results: 746k cases (+10%) and 2,885 deaths (+27%).

Prediction for next week: 750k cases (+1%) and 2,450 deaths (-15%).

With BA.5 taking over it makes sense for there to be a modest rise in total cases about now, so even though I think the jump was partly a holiday backfill my guess is we catch back up there. For deaths the details look a lot like backfills and spikes in reporting rather than an actual increase in deaths, so my guess is that it largely reverts but uncertainty prevents predicting a full reversion.

Deaths

Diving into the state-by-state data shows a bunch of places that are getting increasingly lazy with when they report deaths. A bunch of them happened to report substantial numbers of deaths this week (and Florida, which reported zero, was adjusted while the others weren’t because it’s not obvious how to do that properly). The regional numbers end up looking mostly sane aside from the Western spike.

Cases

An estimate that at least in the UK we’re catching almost none of the child cases anymore, and not that many adult ones either. Seems likely to be right.

BA.2.75 Our Price Cheap

BA.2.75 is suddenly something people are talking about as rising rapidly, a subvariant of BA.2. We will not be calling it Centaurus. Here we go again?

Go go gadget log scale.

And yet:

My guess is this probably isn’t going to be an impactful thing, to the extent it is a thing at all. If it is, we’ll have plenty of warning signs that are much louder than this. Local surges are nothing new by themselves.

Universal Variant Vaccines Our Price Cheap

Patrick Collison of Stripe and Fast Grants writes that with a modest lifting of regulatory barriers and a small (~1bb) investment we could greatly accelerate universal Covid vaccines that would protect against all current and future variants.

There isn’t that much to say here. Developing such a vaccine would be a big win. Helping it along and speeding up deployment would be cheap. I do not doubt the premise here.

We are not doing it because we are not interested in doing helpful things regarding Covid. That is a shame. It would be good if there was a way to do helpful things but not unhelpful things, but I do not know what that would be.

BA.1.2.3.4.5

Mina thread reminding us that BA.5 isn’t more immune evasive except insofar that it is different from previous strains. Against a not-yet-infected individual there’s no difference.

New White House briefing on pandemic strategy for BA.5. Same stuff. Take-homes (or, really, remain-at-homes):

I do not know what change of strategy could be expected to be net useful.

Bloomberg opinion piece on ‘How bad is BA.5? Bad enough.’ Meaning standard Long Covid generic worries, basically.

Atlantic article about BA.5. Headline is that it ‘is a test of our pandemic priorities’ and that seems right. When people say that, it is usually because they think the...

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: How do employers not affiliated with effective altruism regard experience at EA-affiliated organizations?, published by Evan Gaensbauer on July 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This post is adapted from a question anonymously asked in the Effective Altruism Careers Discussion Facebook group. There are a couple of main questions:

How do employers not affiliated with effective altruism regard experience at EA-affiliated organizations (or at other non-profit organizations and think tanks, to the extent they’re interchangeable)?

Other than skills learned and other forms of professional development, how much signalling potential, prestige, etc., does working at an EA-affiliated organization afford one outside the EA ecosystem?

The main text of the post with the full context is below.

I’m an early-stage career researcher approaching something of a crossroads soon. I’m faced with that classic EA decision. I can try either to get hired for a job that will potentially earn me way more money, to improve my own standard of living and donate more, or apply to positions at various EA-affiliated organizations. I see a lot of stories of individuals transitioning from a career path like earning to give to direct EA work but I don’t see as many about the inverse.

There are of course several biases acting to structure these observations. People are less likely to publicize departures from pro-EA organizations. Many organizations are also new enough that there isn’t enough time for someone who has worked there to establish oneself, and then leave.

There is a lot of discourse about building career capital, most of it focused on skills-building outside of the EA ecosystem. Other than skills learned and other forms of professional development, how much signalling potential, prestige, etc., does working at an EA-affiliated organization afford one outside the EA ecosystem?

That’s not to say that one can’t spend one’s entire career working only in the EA ecosystem, but in case of changes--new priorities, more impactful opportunities outside the EA ecosystem presenting themselves, the entire EA movement collapsing, or something else--it’s nice to have some flexibility!To elaborate with a brief hypothetical: suppose I get hired for a role at a mid-sized EA-affiliated organization, with a moderately fancy title, maybe at a ‘senior researcher’ or ‘research manager’ level. My performance meets or exceeds expectations. After a few years, circumstances conspired to enact my departure. I apply to work outside the EA ecosystem. Will my previously held title seem credible to, e.g., an industry hiring manager? Will it “count” as experience in that role, or will they think, “what is this wacky company they worked for? Some small, fringe organization pushing preposterous ideas?

This is a classic case of title inflation, so I’m calling this 3 years of junior experience at best.”I’ve heard this play out in the startup sphere--you’re the third employee, so you get to call yourself CTO for a time, alongside the CEO/Founder and COO, working out of your friend’s garage, but the startup goes belly up. You apply for jobs at mid-sized companies but nobody takes your “CTO” experience seriously, and rightfully so. What’s the risk of this being the case for EA-affiliated organizations?

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