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: IPTi for malaria: a promising intervention with likely room to scale, published by GiveWell on April 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary

Intermittent preventive treatment in infants (IPTi) for malaria provides preventive antimalarial medicine to children under 12 months old. It is among the most promising programs we’ve identified in our active pipeline of new interventions. Not only does IPTi appear to be highly effective at reducing clinical malaria, it’s also underutilized (more below), and the population it targets is especially vulnerable to malaria. That implies potential to open up large amounts of room for more funding if IPTi begins to be used more widely—our crude estimate is between $50 million and $200 million globally once it’s scaled—which is something we’re increasingly thinking about as we aim to direct $1 billion in cost-effective funding by 2025.

In September 2021, we recommended a small grant to Malaria Consortium and PATH to assess the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of implementing IPTi at national scale in two countries. This grant was the result of an atypical process for us: because we don’t know of any organizations currently implementing IPTi, we issued a request for information to several charities that we thought might be good candidates to do so (more below). We’re hopeful that this scoping exercise will answer some of our many open questions about IPTi, and that this intervention continues to look promising as we learn more.

What is IPTi?

Intermittent preventive treatment in infants (IPTi) for malaria is a program that distributes preventive antimalarial medicine (usually sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, or SP) to infants, regardless of whether they have malaria, during routine immunization services. A Cochrane meta-analysis of 12 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) found that IPTi reduced cases of clinical malaria by 30%.[1]

IPTi appears effective enough that the World Health Organization (WHO) began recommending it 12 years ago, in 2010.[2] However, our research has identified only one country, Sierra Leone, that has integrated IPTi into its routine national health care practice.[3] We think this neglectedness is due in part to potentially surmountable logistical factors, such as the need to coordinate work between national malaria control programs and national immunization programs.[4] Other barriers to implementation have included the way WHO guidelines identified which settings are appropriate for IPTi[5] (though we understand from speaking with other organizations in the malaria space that these guidelines are currently under revision), and challenges with administering previously available formulations of SP.[6]

Why we’re excited about it

Effectiveness – If the results found by the meta-analysis were mirrored in real-world application, IPTi could be another powerful tool through which to reduce incidence of malaria, which continues to be one of the most deadly diseases among under-five children in sub-Saharan Africa.[7]

Room for more funding – With only one country having adopted IPTi, there are currently no charities and no philanthropic funding that we know of supporting its implementation at significant scale. The lack of investment in this intervention indicates that it measures up well on one of the criteria we use to assess programs: room for more funding. If IPTi begins to be used at scale in more countries, implementing organizations will likely be able to absorb a great deal of additional resources.

Cost-effectiveness – Our preliminary estimate suggested that IPTi may be around 18 times as cost-effective as cash transfers, which is above the range of cost-effectiveness of programs we would consider funding.[8] However, this estimate is quite rough, given our uncertainties about program costs, feasibility of imp...

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: Introducing Canopy Retreats, published by Leilani Bellamy on April 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TLDR: Canopy Retreats is a new org created to help the EA community run more highly impactful retreats. If you’d like our help, fill out this form. Apply for our internship here.

Canopy Retreats, formerly known as EA Retreats or EARs, is a new org that aims to aid the EA community in the planning and running of mid-sized, multi-day events. We are running a hands-on, experience-based internship this summer. Read more about it here. The deadline for applying is April 26th, 2022.

How we plan to support the community:

Retreat consultation: Would you like to run a retreat but are unsure where to start? Set up a meeting and discuss your ideas with Leilani.

Operational Support: You’ve received funding for your retreat but lack the time/ people to manage the back-end logistics and operations needed to run the event. Apply for operational support here.

We are currently minimally staffed as this is a new org, but will likely be taking on 2-3 retreats this summer, and hope to support at least two retreats a month from September on.

Resources: Over the next five months we will be releasing a set of resources that the community can use to run their own retreats. This includes programming guides, operations air tables, and email templates.

We are excited to assist with impactful retreats that otherwise would not happen.

Thank you to Lenny McCline, Aris Richardson, Akash Wasil, Sydney, Owen Cotton-Barratt, Max Daniel, and the countless others who supported me along this journey.

Special thanks to Catherine Low for the new name!

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 Is a Major Chord?, published by jefftk on April 24, 2022 on LessWrong.

In the discussion on my

minimal chords post, someone

commented:

I have no idea what any of this means (what is a chord? what is a major chord? what is a note? what is a first/fourth/fifth note? is there a 65th note? what is a scale? what is a major scale? what does it mean that a note is of a scale? what does it mean that a chord uses a note? is there a difference between a chord using a note of a scale and not of a scale?)

Here's an attempt to introduce enough music theory to answer these questions:

We hear changes in air pressure. If those changes are rapid enough and consistent enough, we hear them as pitch (frequency). We can talk about these in terms of how many changes we get per second, which we call "Hz". For example, a pitch could be 100Hz or 500Hz. When we say a pitch is "higher" or "above" another pitch, we mean more changes per second: 500Hz is higher than 100Hz.

A note is something that gives the impression of being a single pitch. For example, what you get when you play a single key on the piano, or pluck a string on a stringed instrument. Many instruments can only play one note at a time: trumpet, flute, saxophone.

The standard notes used in Western music differ in pitch by a factor of the 12th root of 2 (~1.06x). This means that if you go up twelve notes (which we call "half steps", confusingly) your pitch doubles

(the 12th root of 2, multiplied by itself twelve times, is just 2). Two notes whose pitch differs by a factor of two (ex: 100Hz and 200Hz) are said to be an "octave" apart, and sound almost like the same note. We give notes that differ by some number of octaves the same name (ex: "C"), though when we want to be specific about which octave we're talking about we can append numbers ("C1" at ~32Hz is an octave above

"C0" at ~16Hz).

A scale is a set of notes from an octave. We usually talk about a scale as being sorted from lowest note to highest. We can define a scale by the distances between its notes. Perhaps the simplest scale

(the "chromatic scale") would be to go up by one note each time, playing every note: 111111111111. This typically doesn't sound very good, and we don't usually use it.

A "major scale" has the pattern 2212221: you go up by two notes, two notes, one note, etc. This gives you seven different notes in your octave. We can call these notes the "first", "second", etc notes of the major scale. We typically don't talk about "65th" notes because they would be way too high.

We name the notes with the letters A through G, which is only seven options for twelve notes. Each letter refers to a note that is one or two notes higher than the previous. For example, if we have the notes

"A B C", to go from A to B we go up two notes, while from B to C we go up one note. To refer to the note we skipped when going from A to B we can say say "A#" ("A sharp") which means "start at A and go up one note" or "Bb" ("B flat") which means "start at B and go down one note". This is all very silly, but it's what we're stuck with for historical reasons. If you start with C and go up through the notes of the major scale, you will use the seven named notes: "C D E F G A

B".

A chord is multiple notes played at the same time. The chords I was talking about in my post were

"triads", which means they are three simultaneous notes. A major chord is notes one, three, and five of a major scale. A minor chord is the same, but the middle note (three) is moved down one note, which we call "flat" or "minor". You can also skip the third and play just notes one and five ("open fifths" or "power chords") which I do a lot

on mandolin.

A key is the combination of a scale and a starting note. For example, "C major" is a major scale starting a C, while "D major" is the same but starting on a D. Mos...

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: Calling for Student Submissions: AI Safety Distillation Contest, published by Aris on April 24, 2022 on LessWrong.

At EA UC Berkeley, we’re launching an ongoing series of contests called the Artificial Intelligence Misalignment Solutions (AIMS) series. This second contest, the Distillation Contest, is now open to any student enrolled in a university/college: here are our interest and submission forms! The contest has prizes as large as $2,500 and closes on May 20th. If you’re interested, please fill out the interest form so that I can send you updates on resources and changes in the contest! This blog post restates the information that is on our website, with a bit more explanation of the contest's purpose.

(This is cross-posted on the EA Forum and Lesswrong.)

Purpose

AIMS Series

I think that it is currently difficult for university students to find tangible ways to engage with AI Safety. Generally, by creating a series of AI Safety contests, I hope to:

Help build social capital for students who are interested in Alignment and potentially good at it.

Create ways for people to test their fit for Alignment work.

Create a “brand” around my contests over time so that CS students recognize its name and winners recommend the contests to their friends. Hopefully, this name recognition would also increase the ability to create partnerships with CS orgs as well.

For this specific contest, I’m inspired by the arguments that the field of AI Alignment needs more distillers to improve communication within the field, as well as to make their research accessible to a wider audience. The Distillation Contest aims to produce value by:

Recruiting CS students who have never heard of EA or Alignment before (I will be doing this outreach at UC Berkeley through advertising, but other organizers are welcome to advertise to their own groups for recruitment).

Increasing the engagement of students who are already interested in Alignment.

Potentially producing useful distillations of Alignment research and increasing accessibility to said research.

Contest description

The Distillation Contest asks that participants:

1) Pick an article/post/research paper on AI Alignment/Safety (ideally from our list below) that would benefit from being more clearly explained.

2) Indicate which ideas or sections of their chosen research should be distilled. Applicants can either distill a whole post/article, a specific part of the post/article, or multiple posts/articles.

3) Create a distillation: a clearer explanation of the research, along with a new example or new application of the research.

4) Optionally: If there is a problem that is trying to be solved by the research you’re distilling, you can attempt to create an additional solution to the problem and include it in your response.

What makes a good distillation?

A good distillation would explain the most confusing part of another piece of writing – the use of distillation is found in creating new ways to understand confusing concepts or confusing technical writing. These distillations would also help readers infer how the distilled ideas relate to other Alignment research. Because of this, creating a good distillation will likely require participants to read related research outside of their distilled post in order to make sure they fully understand the ideas presented in the paper.

As an example of a great distillation, Holden Karnofsky, after creating the Most Important Century Series, created a roadmap to make the series more digestible and navigable. Additionally, Scott Alexander has distilled multiple complex dialogues (and even a meme) in order to make them more accessible.

Posts/articles that we would encourage applicants to choose for the Distillation Contest to distill include the following list. Applicants are allowed to propose their own post...

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: UK University Admissions Support Programme for EAs, published by Hannah Rowberry on April 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

A post for:

Young EAs looking to apply for undergraduate courses at top UK universities (e.g. Oxford & Cambridge)

EAs in contact with high school students who they may wish to refer for UK admissions support (e.g. students who have engaged with EA through outreach programmes or their local EA group)

I'm offering a free programme of 1:1 admissions support for EAs applying to top UK universities in the forthcoming admissions cycle.

Goals of the programme

To provide young EAs with support in preparing for UK university applications, particularly to the most elite and competitive universities such as Oxford & Cambridge. Rationale: by gaining admission to the most elite and high quality universities, EAs increase their chance of having impactful academic and career opportunities in the future.

To guide & mentor young EAs in degree course/major choices to best suit their interests and abilities, and to facilitate their long term academic/career goals. Rationale: by choosing the most appropriate degree course, EAs will be better placed to facilitate their future plans and optimise their future impact.

The Programme - Apply Here!

The programme is free of charge. Successful applicants will receive remote 1:1 support, with regular sessions to support with application preparation, including:

Choosing a degree course

Strategic university choices (& Oxbridge college choices)

Supercurricular development

Preparing the UCAS personal statement (& SAQ for Cambridge)

Preparing for admissions tests and interviews

If the programme is oversubscribed with eligible applicants, support may also be offered via group sessions, webinars, resources, and correspondence.

The programme is being run pro bono by Hannah Rowberry, a Cambridge graduate and former Oxford Admissions & Access Officer, now working as admissions consultant. Hannah developed her interests in EA through volunteering with SHIC, developing EA resources and programmes for schools.

Eligibility and selection priorities

You are eligible to apply for this programme if:

You are applying to UK universities for undergraduate courses in the forthcoming admissions cycle (i.e. October 15th 2022 or January 25th 2023 deadlines) If you are applying in subsequent years, but would like guidance on your current preparations for university, please get in touch.

You are interested in effective altruism, and would like to pursue this further within your studies and career

You have a strong academic profile and would be able to make a competitive application to top UK universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge (e.g. you have mostly 7/8/9s at GCSE, and are predicted A/As in your A levels)

Priorities in selection if oversubscribed:

Students with a strong commitment and interest in effective altruism, with clear intention to pursue this within their studies and careers

UK universities are your main (or equal) priority compared to other options globally

Students with fewer sources of support elsewhere (e.g. your school does not have much expertise in UK/Oxbridge admissions)

Students from backgrounds which are underrepresented in UK universities (minority ethnic background, first generation, low income household, disabled)

Note that all eligible students are encouraged to apply, the above prioritisation will only be used if oversubscribed, to prioritise the programme for students who will most benefit from support.

Application process

Please make an application via the Application Form. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis, however spaces are limited, so early application is recommended.

If you have any questions or would like to find out more, please feel free to get in touch or connect via LinkedIn.If you are...

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: Future Matters: April 2022, published by Pablo on April 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

The remedies for all our diseases will be discovered long after we are dead; and the world will be made a fit place to live in. It is to be hoped that those who live in those days will look back with sympathy to their known and unknown benefactors.

John Stuart Mill

Future Matters is a newsletter about longtermism. Each month we collect and summarize longtermism-relevant research, share news from the longtermism community, and feature a conversation with a prominent longtermist. You can also subscribe on Substack, listen on your favorite podcast platform and follow on Twitter.

Research

Scott Alexander's "Long-termism" vs. "existential risk" worries that “longtermism” may be a worse brand (though not necessarily a worse philosophy) than “existential risk”. It seems much easier to make someone concerned about transformative AI by noting that it might kill them and everyone else, than by pointing out its effects on people in the distant future. We think that Alexander raises a valid worry, although we aren’t sure the worry favors the “existential risk” branding over the “longtermism” branding as much as he suggests: existential risks are, after all, defined as risks to humanity's long-term potential. Both of these concepts, in fact, attempt to capture the core idea that what ultimately matters is mostly located in the far future: existential risk uses the language of “potential” and emphasizes threats to it, whereas longtermism instead expresses the idea in terms of value and the duties it creates.

Maybe the “existential risk” branding seems to address Alexander’s worry better because it draws attention to the threats to this value, which are disproportionately (but not exclusively) located in the short-term, while the “longtermism” branding emphasizes instead the determinants of value, which are in the far future.

In General vs AI-specific explanations of existential risk neglect, Stefan Schubert asks why we systematically neglect existential risk. The standard story invokes general explanations, such as cognitive biases and coordination problems. But Schubert notes that people seem to have specific biases that cause them to underestimate AI risk, e.g. because AI scenarios sound outlandish and counter-intuitive. If unaligned AI is the greatest source of existential risk in the near-term, then these AI-specific biases could explain most of our neglect.

Max Roser’s The future is vast is a powerful new introduction to longtermism. His graphical representations do well to convey the scale of humanity’s potential, and have made it onto the Wikipedia entry for longtermism.

Thomas Kwa’s Effectiveness is a conjunction of multipliers makes the important observation that (1) a person’s impact can be decomposed into a series of impact “multipliers” and that (2) these terms interact multiplicatively, rather than additively, with each other. For example, donating 80% instead of 10% multiplies impact by a factor of 8 and earning $1m/year instead of $250k/year multiplies impact by a factor of 4; but doing both of these things multiplies impact by a factor of 32. Kwa shows that many other common EA choices are best seen as multipliers of impact, and notes that multipliers related to judgment and ambition are especially important for longtermists.

The first installment in a series on “learning from crisis”, Jan Kulveit's Experimental longtermism: theory needs data (co-written with Gavin Leech) recounts the author's motivation to launch Epidemic Forecasting, a modelling and forecasting platform that sought to present probabilistic data to decisionmakers and the general public. Kulveit realized that his "longtermist" models had relatively straightforward implications for the COVID pandemic, ...

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: Slack gives you space to notice/reflect on subtle things, published by Raemon on April 24, 2022 on LessWrong.

Previously, I thought the reasons to preserve slack in your life (or in your organization) were to:

Avoid using up all of your resources

Avoid hitting a crisis where you suddenly have multiple surprise problems, and you have no choice but to either do a shitty job handling all of them, or deliberately not handle some of them at all (and deal with the consequences)

Avoid feeling really unpleasant

Allow you to live up to principles / be more pro-social.

This year in December/January, the Lightcone Infrastructure team (where I work) took on a large number of difficult projects at once. I was thinking about how wise/unwise this was, and chatting with John Wentworth about it. I listed the three problems-with-lack-of-slack.

He said (something like): "Oh, that's not the point of slack. Or, not the part I'm most interested in. The point of slack is to give you the space to notice subtle things and think about them."

A rough model is something like, here are three types of things you can do:

You can take actions on whatever stuff it is you like to do on-purpose. (Typically your day job, or fun projects, or whatever)

You can rest/recover/do-random-fun-things.

You can... be cognizant of stuff going that isn't immediately relevant to the first two things, and mull it over, and notice new, potentially fruitful trains of thought about them.

When you're got too many things to do and stuff is constantly exploding and demanding your attention, #3 is the first thing to go. You often need to be putting out fires (#1), and if you do that too much and did into energy reserves your body will eventually be like "No, screw that, time to burn out for a bit and spend a week tired and recovering." (#2)

But, there won't be a moment where you experience a clear failure-and-control-mechanism that pushes you to spend time on #3. You just... won't notice a thing that you might have noticed.

And this is particularly important when you're working on problems you don't understand how to solve (such as AI alignment, or how to improve institutions, or learn/teach rationality, or, just, any ol' problem in your life you're currently confused about, or maybe haven't even yet realized that you have)

In the explore/exploit dichotomy, when solving a problem-you-don't-understand, having a train of thoughts in "explore" mode is pretty valuable. Slack gives you space for your shower thoughts to be in explore mode.

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: Re: So You Want to Be a Dharma Teacher, published by lsusr on April 23, 2022 on LessWrong.

When I first started getting into Zen there was a brief period when I thought I wanted to be a dharma teacher. I remember telling my first teacher, Tim, I wanted to be a dharma teacher and he just gave me a look. It’s hard to describe that look, but I remember how it felt. And how that look felt is why I dropped the whole idea of becoming a dharma teacher.

Brad Warner

The same could be said for Rationality. You should not aspire to teach Rationality. There are two types of teaching:

Teaching young children. There's nothing wrong with aspiring to teach children. Teaching children is a noble, necessary profession.

Teaching adults. Aspiring to teach adults puts you on shaky ground. Aspiring to teach rationality to adults is downright dangerous.

Why? Because personal experience trumps pedagogical skill.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.

Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride the slight of what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heath and strength.

It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier.”

Citizenship in a Republic by Theodore Roosevelt

I do not learn rationality from "rationalists". I learn it from quants, from entrepreneurs, from artists, from physicists, from hackers like Tim Ferris and from political activists like Socrates.

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: Replicating and extending the grabby aliens model, published by Tristan Cook on April 23, 2022 on LessWrong.

Crossposted to the Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary

This report is the most comprehensive model to date of aliens and the Fermi paradox. In particular, it builds on Hanson et al. (2021) and Olson (2015) and focuses on the expansion of ‘grabby’ civilizations: civilizations that expand at relativistic speeds and make visible changes to the volume they control.

This report considers multiple anthropic theories: the self-indication assumption (SIA), as applied previously by Olson & Ord (2022), the self-sampling assumption (SSA), implicitly used by Hanson et al. (2021) and a decision theoretic approach, as applied previously by Finnveden (2019).

In Chapter 1, I model the appearance of intelligent civilizations (ICs) like our own. In Chapter 2, I consider how grabby civilizations (GCs) modify the number and timing of intelligent civilizations that appear.

In Chapter 3 I run Bayesian updates for each of the above anthropic theories. I update on the evidence that we are in an advanced civilization, have arrived roughly 4.5Gy into the planet’s roughly 5.5 Gy habitable duration, and do not observe any GCs.

In Chapter 4 I discuss potential implications of the results, particularly for altruists hoping to improve the far future.

Starting from a prior similar to Sandberg et al.’s (2018) literature-synthesis prior, I conclude the following:

Using SIA or applying a non-causal decision theoretic approach (such as anthropic decision theory) with total utilitarianism, one should be almost certain that there will be many GCs in our future light cone.

Using SSA, or applying a non-causal decision theoretic approach with average utilitarianism, one should be confident (~85%) that GCs are not in our future light cone, thus rejecting the result of Hanson et al. (2021). However, this update is highly dependent on one’s beliefs in the habitability of planets around stars that live longer than the Sun: if one is certain that such planets can support advanced life, then one should conclude that GCs are most likely in our future light cone. Further, I explore how an average utilitarian may wager there are GCs in their future light cone if they expect significant trade with other GCs to be possible.

These results also follow when taking (log)uniform priors over all the model parameters.

All figures and results are reproducible here.

Vignettes

To set the scene, I start with two vignettes of the future. This section can be skipped, and features terms I first explain in Chapters 1 and 2.

High likelihood vignette

In a Monte Carlo simulation of 106 draws, the following world described gives the highest likelihood for both SIA and SSA (with reference class of observers in intelligent civilizations). That is, civilizations like ours are both relatively common and typical amongst all advanced-but-not-yet-expansive civilizations in this world.

In this world, life is relatively hard. There are five hard try-try steps of mean completion time 75 Gy, as well as 1.5 Gy of easy ‘delay’ steps. Planets around red dwarfs are not habitable, and the universe became habitable relatively late -- intelligent civilizations can only emerge from around 8 Gy after the Big Bang. Around 0.3% of terrestrial planets around G-stars like our own are potentially habitable making Earth not particularly rare.

Around 2.5% intelligent civilizations like our own become grabby civilizations (GCs). This is the SIA Doomsday argument in action.

Around 7,000 GCs appear per observable universe sized volume (OUSV). GCs already control around 22% of the observable universe, and as they travel at 0.8c, their light has reached around 35% of the observable universe. Nearly all GCs appear between 10Gy and 18 Gy after the Big Bang.

If huma...

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: Ineffective Altruism, published by lsusr on April 23, 2022 on LessWrong.

There are many things I can put my time toward.

I started a company that provides a low-cost tool that helps people who pull their hair out.

I volunteer as a coach for my neighborhood highschool Robotics Club.

I frequently blog about rationality.

I sometimes blog about machine learning.

These do not have the same impact. My technology work helps more people per hour invested than my volunteering at Robotics Club. Does that mean I should put all of my time into inventing technology and none of it into Robotics Club?

No. That would be premature optimization. The root of all evil is premature optimization.

Occasionally someone who has used my inventions will message me and tell me it changed their life. Occasionally. Occasionally a reader of my blog will tell me they found it useful. Occasionally. When I help out at Robotics Club, the teenagers are happy to see me. Every. Single. Time.

I recently flew down to San Francisco to teach a class and give a speech. The organizers offered to put me in a fancy hotel. Instead, I found the cheapest AirBnb in the area and walked for an hour to the location. Partially I did this to save money, but I also did it to stay in touch with reality.

Evil happens when you are separated from the pain you inflict upon other people.

The host of my AirBnb was an elderly Black man. He grew up poor. His mother would clean white folks' houses all day to earn money and then clean his home to save money. His parents worked so hard to survive they had little time to raise their children. Two of his sisters became pregnant at age thirteen.

When I arrived at my host's home, he gave me a white towel with lots of visible stains. But it was clean. I immediately used it to wipe my face.

My AirBnb host is really into Black Power, but he never pushed his political beliefs on me. He wanted to know what it was like to be rich. I wanted to know what it was like to be poor. Were I to go to a fancy hotel, the system would make sure I never had to interact with a man like him.

Not that AirBnb didn't try. We communicated via SMS instead of AirBnb's website because AirBnb's website has an algorithm that scans our messages for keywords and punishes hosts it thinks did a poor job—regardless of the star rating a customer like me provides.

This man who was born before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already lives in a dystopia run by an AI.

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