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 about we don't all get COVID in London?, published by aaronb50 on April 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Note: It usually takes me quite a while to write and publish anything online, but this seems pretty pressing so I've done it in a hurry. Please excuse any omissions or mistakes and feel free to yell at me about it in the comments.

Summary

TL;DR: (If not for this post), I predict that the median EAG London attendee will be less COVID-cautious than they would be under ideal epistemic conditions and under their own values.

Ideal epistemic conditions means something like "if they were better informed about the current state of affairs vis-à-vis COVID in London and any other relevant descriptive facts, and thought long and hard about how much risk they'd like to incur given the costs and benefits of various interventions like masking, social distancing, and getting a last-minute booster." It does not mean "if they had same degree of risk tolerance as me or as I'd like others to have."

Point 1: case rates in London are likely higher than you think

Relevant info from the UK Office for National Statistics

The subtitle just above links to a report that was released two days ago on April 8, 2022.

In England, the percentage of people testing positive for coronavirus (COVID-19) remained high in the week ending 2 April 2022; we estimate that 4,141,600 people in England had COVID-19 (95% credible interval: 4,033,600 to 4,249,500), equating to 7.60% of the population or around 1 in 13 people.

In the week ending 3 April 2022, the Omicron BA.2 variant remained the dominant variant across all UK countries; the percentage of people with infections compatible with the Omicron BA.2 variant remained high in England and continued to increase in Wales, however the trend was uncertain in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

More concisely, it looks like almost 8% of the English population had COVID as of April 2.

According to Our World in Data, the UK and the US had pretty similar confirmed new case numbers until about March 1, when the UK's case rate started climbing but the US's did not.

Anyway, the point is that the UK positive rate looks to be about seven times the U.S. rate. For those of us flying in from the U.S., then, our day-to-day impression of how things are going at home is probably misleadingly benign.

Point 2: people have kinda stopped giving a shit

Until about a week ago, so had I. Then I:

Read that case rates on Georgetown's campus were increasing a lot

Realized that it would be bad for anyone in the GU group to get COVID and either (a) find out and stay home or (b) not find out, go to London, and risk passing it on to other EAG attendees, and

Assumed the role of the grumpy COVID hawk and ordered our group a bunch of rapid tests on Amazon for just over $7 a pop (or <1% the cost of a DCLondon rountrip flight) which were delivered the next morning.

I think the two takeaways from this story are best conveyed via meme:

It ain't 2021 no more

More generally, I have the pretty banal impression that (at least among EA's typical demographics) preventative measures like masking, frequent rapid testing, active ventilation, and further vaccination have largely fallen by the wayside. Given the state of the world (e.g., low case rates, Paxlovid) now, this makes total sense and I'm not condemning it.

But I am trying to point out that this limits the inductive validity of extrapolating from the epidemiological outcomes of previous in-person EA consortia how useful it is to conclude from the success of 2021-early '22 EA events that everything is going to be fine.

Maybe it will be fine, I don't know, but we're out of sample here! Never before has there been such a large EA event in a city with such a high COVID-positive rate with attendees from around the world, many of whom haven't ...

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 Brief Excursion Into Molecular Neuroscience, published by Jan on April 10, 2022 on LessWrong.

TL;DR: Poking fun at complicated nomenclature (p̴͓̂͘á̴̻͌s̶̻̗͋͑ṯ̸̹̈́̌à̶̳), identifying a pretty important signaling factor in the brain, and arbitrating (part of) the Guzey/Mendonça debate.

Previously in this series: How to build a mind - neuroscience edition.

The Emperor's New Ǫ̵͎͊G̶̦̉̇l̶͉͇̝̽͆̚i̷͔̓̏͌c̷̱̙̍̂͜k̷̠͍͌l̷̢̍͗̃n̷̖͇̏̆å̴̤c̵̲̼̫͑̎̆

(Ǫ̵͎͊G̶̦̉̇l̶͉͇̝̽͆̚i̷͔̓̏͌c̷̱̙̍̂͜k̷̠͍͌l̷̢̍͗̃n̷̖͇̏̆å̴̤c̵̲̼̫͑̎̆ is an intentionally garbled version of the word O-GlcNAc. The reasons for garbling it will hopefully become clear while reading this essay!)

Flashback: It's June 7th, 2017. The transformer architecture will drop on the arxiv in 5 days, Hugh Hefner will die in less than 3 months, and the computational neuroscience community is having a field day on Twitter. It started with this tweet from Michael Nitabach from Yale School of Medicine complaining about opaque jargon in theoretical papers:

There was a bit of goofy back and forth about the (un)importance of mathematical vocabulary in neuroscience, some attempts at explaining the term, and eventually the call for a workshop on "Manifold-splaining", which happened half a year later.

There are some things to be said here about how we use terminology or what manifolds actually are, but I'm bringing this up because I distinctly remember an offhand comment that someone made at that workshop. The comment was that it’s unfair that experimentalists get to write things like "O-GlcNAc signaling entrains the circadian clock by inhibiting BMAL1/CLOCK ubiquitination," and nobody gives them hell for writing their papers in Klingon. Or at least they are not getting enough hell for it.

When I was first confronted with the alphabet soup that calls itself molecular neuroscience, I was awed by my colleagues, who appeared to be fluent in speaking p̴͓̂͘á̴̻͌s̶̻̗͋͑ṯ̸̹̈́̌à̶̳. It took me a year or two to figure out that they also do not know what most of the terms mean - and for most abbreviations, there are only a handful of people in the world who can decode them. But nobody likes to acknowledge that they don't know what things mean publicly. Therefore everybody nods along when they read Ǫ̵͎͊G̶̦̉̇l̶͉͇̝̽͆̚i̷͔̓̏͌c̷̱̙̍̂͜k̷̠͍͌l̷̢̍͗̃n̷̖͇̏̆å̴̤c̵̲̼̫͑̎̆. So it's fine if you don't know what it means. Almost nobody does.

Let’s talk about BDNF.

Perhaps you are the kind of person that takes the preceding paragraphs as a challenge, and you’d like to learn to speak p̴͓̂͘á̴̻͌s̶̻̗͋͑ṯ̸̹̈́̌à̶̳ yourself. Or perhaps you like to read about different levels of abstraction, what we gain by using them, and how we can transition between them. Or perhaps you’re having a slow day and want to learn something funky. In all those cases, this essay is certainly for you.

But perhaps you are a very busy person, and you tend to be very selective about how you spend your time. Perhaps you want to be sure that if you’re going to dive into this mess of molecules, you’ll be able to get a Pareto-sized chunk of insight in return. Perhaps you’ve been hurt before and have difficulties trusting any molecule. In all those cases, this section is here to assuage you. Let me motivate why you might care about the protagonist of this essay, the "brain-derived neurotrophic factor" (BDNF).

Argument from interestingness.

BDNF has shown up repeatedly in the rationality-sphere over the last years:

Alexey Guzey's thesis about why you shouldn't sleep circles around BDNF.

Natália Mendonça's counter-thesis that you should sleep all the time attacks Guzey's claims about BDNF.

Scott Alexander explained a few years ago how an increase in BDNF plays a central role in the function of antidepressants.

Then there was a big Cell paper that argued for the importance of the canonical BDNF receptor (TrkB) rather than BDNF....

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: Crucial considerations in the field of Wild Animal Welfare (WAW), published by Holly Elmore on April 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Cross-posted from my blog, hollyelmore.substack.com

Wild animal welfare (WAW) is:

A paradigm that sees the wellbeing and experiences of individual animals as the core moral consideration in our interaction with nature

An interdisciplinary field of study, largely incubated by Effective Altruism (EA)

An EA cause area hoping to implement interventions

A crucial consideration is a consideration that warrants a major reassessment of a cause area or an intervention.

WAW is clueless or divided on a bevy of foundational and strategic crucial considerations.

The WAW account of nature

There are A LOT of wild animals

100 billion to 1 trillion mammals,

at least 10 trillion fish,

100 to 400 billion birds (Brian Tomasik,^^)

10 quintillion insects

Each year, there are 30 trillion wild-caught shrimp alone! (Rethink Priorities,^)

H/T Sami Mubarak via Dank EA Memes

In contrast, there are 24 billion animals alive and being raised for meat at any time

WAW: Nature is not already optimized for welfare

Though humans do cause wild animals to suffer, like the suffering of polar bears as their ice drifts melt due to anthropogenic climate change, suffering is more fundamentally a part of many wild animal lives

There are many natural disasters, weather events, and hardships

Sometimes animals have positive sum relationships (like mutualistic symbiosis), but a lot of times animals are in zero sum conflict (like predation)

Nature is an equilibrium of every different lineage maximizing reproductive fitness. Given that they evolved, suffering and happiness presumably exist to serve the goal of maximizing fitness, not maximizing happiness

Therefore, nature could, in theory, be changed to improve the welfare of wild animals, which is expected to be less than what it could be.

Foundational Crucial Considerations

Should we try to affect WAW at all?

Is taking responsibility for wild animals supererogatory?

Do we have the right to intervene in nature?

Can we intervene competently, as we intend, and in ways that don’t ultimately cause more harm than good?

What constitutes “welfare” for wild animals?

What animals are sentient?

What constitutes welfare?

How much welfare makes life worth living?

Negative vs. classical utilitarianism

What are acceptable levels of abstraction?

Species-level generalizations?

“Worth living” on what time scale?

A second?

A lifetime?

The run of the species?

How to weigh intense states

Purely affective welfare or also preference satisfaction?

How much confidence do we need to intervene?

Should irreversible interventions be considered?

Is it okay to intervene if the good effects outweigh some negative effects?

Are we justified in not intervening?

Status quo bias

Naturalistic fallacy

Strategic Crucial Considerations

Emphasis on direct or indirect impact?

Theory of Change: Which effects will dominate in the long run?

Direct impact or values/moral circle expansion? (Direct impact for instrumental reasons?)

How to evaluate impact?

Is WAW competitive with other EA cause areas?

Should we work on WAW if there aren’t direct interventions now that are cost competitive with existing EA interventions?

How much should EA invest in developing welfare science cause areas vs exploiting existing research?

What is the risk of acting early vs. risk of acting late?

How long is the ideal WAW timeline?

How much time do we have before others act?

How long do we have before AI will take relevant actions?

How will artificial general intelligence (AGI) affect WAW? How should AI affect WAW?

AGI could be the only way we could implement complex solutions to WAW

AGI could also have perverse implementations of our values

WAW value alignment problem:

We don’t know/agree 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: The Berlin Hub: Longtermist co-living space (plan), published by Severin T. Seehrich on April 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Tl;dr: Following the example of the EA Hotel, The Berlin Hub will be a co-living and event space hosting people who are interested in contributing to humanity’s long-term future. Features include a visiting scholars program, as well as stipends for selected early-stage researchers and mentors.

If you want to get involved, you can express your interest, or join our Discord.

Why we think this is needed

A growing number of people want to do longtermist direct work. We have mostly focused on AI alignment when assessing the demand for the hub, but already have several expressions of interest from individuals working on other causes as well.

Despite there being a significant number of people who want to work on alignment in Europe, there is a mainland Europe-shaped hole in the alignment organization landscape. This makes the on-ramp for people aspiring to do direct work challenging: It is hard for individuals to convince funders, find collaborators and mentors, deal with the unusual tax situation that comes with independent research, and sustain motivation to study and work without a knowledgeable and supportive social environment. Our preliminary research leaves us convinced that there would be sufficient demand for this in the AI alignment community alone to warrant starting this project.

What we offer

We aim to enable longtermists to fulfill their potential by converting a full hotel or similar building into a co-living space. We will offer food and accommodation at no or low cost both for long- and short-term guests. In addition, we strive to create an atmosphere and supporting structures that take care of peoples’ basic needs. We plan to help them skill up via mentorship, resources, cohorts, talks, and workshops so that they can successfully take on projects which shift the needle on making the future good. Once things are up and running, we will also welcome individuals who fit our values and culture and decide to live nearby to use our shared spaces, e.g. for co-working.

Community plan

We strive to become a center for the exchange of ideas instead of cultivating an intellectual monoculture. Our plans for achieving that include contacting potential visiting scholars and offering them an engaged audience, hosting (un)conferences, and setting up exchange programs with adjacent organizations, hubs, and group houses. Once the exchange program is operational, people staying with us could swap places with people from different EA-adjacent projects and communities, granting us helpful memetic exchange.

In addition, we are building partnerships with established researchers. These will help us assess applications, allow us to offer mentorship to the residents we selected, and may provide further room for synergy through the possibility of incubating new research groups and longtermist startups. An excellent example of the kind of project we would be enthusiastic to provide ops and infrastructure support to is Adam Shimi’s proposal to scale conceptual alignment research (which also has a well thought-out argument for why having an on-ramp in the Schengen Area would be valuable). He is considering us as a place to host a future version of this.

Community health is a central focus. Some projects and interventions we are exploring to ensure it include:

Encouraging interactions with the wider EA Berlin community, e.g. through open-to-public events at the hub

Setting things up so all residents have an easy way out if they want to leave (e.g. a fund for temporary external accommodation, encouraging everyone to come up with backup plans, and normalizing taking regular time away.)

Thinking carefully about how to avoid death spirals (and having that as...

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: If you ever feel bad about EA social status, try this, published by Jack Ryan on April 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

When I am feeling sad or anxious about the social status people in the EA community are assigning me, I've found it helps to try and focus on how well I am living up to my own beliefs and values.

To help with that, I generally think about what actions I have taken that I think were right or wrong.For any mistakes I think I made, I play the "find the policy update game" by:

Figuring out what behavior was responsible for the mistake occurring

Figuring out what behavior should replace the less-than-optimal behavior

Figuring out how to ensure that I actually change my behavior to the better behavior

Example behavior changes include:

Listen to people more

Notice when you are putting on airs to gain status

Think more about whether you think your sentences are true before saying them

See more of people's potential rather than their flaws

More examples (as well as the concept of "tortoise skills") here

I've found that making the behavior change often takes time. Though I've found that the thing that makes it work in general is just reflecting on the intended behavior change enough such that you begin to notice yourself making mistakes. I tend to reflect on the behaviors right after playing the policy update game, randomly, and sometimes as I am falling asleep.

Probably adding this sort of thing to a weekly reflection routine is a more robust strategy. I imagine just having to add my mistakes to a list might make me get over my in-the-moment status anxieties faster, but I'm not sure. I'd be curious if anyone's tried this. I'd also be curious to hear what other people have found helpful when they have status-related anxiety.

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: Convince me that humanity is as doomed by AGI as Yudkowsky et al., seems to believe, published by Yitz on April 10, 2022 on LessWrong.

I’ve been very heavily involved in the (online) rationalist community for a few months now, and like many others, I have found myself quite freaked out by the apparent despair/lack of hope that seems to be sweeping the community. When people who are smarter than you start getting scared, it seems wise to be concerned as well, even if you don’t fully understand the danger. Nonetheless, it’s important not to get swept up in the crowd. I’ve been trying to get a grasp on why so many seem so hopeless, and these are the assumptions I believe they are making (trivial assumptions included, for completeness; there may be some overlap in this list):

AGI is possible to create.

AGI will be created within the next century or so, possibly even within the next few years.

If AGI is created by people who are not sufficiently educated (aka aware of a solution to the Alignment problem) and cautious, then it will almost certainly be unaligned.

Unaligned AGI will try to do something horrible to humans (not out of maliciousness, necessarily, we could just be collateral damage), and will not display sufficiently convergent behavior to have anything resembling our values.

We will not be able to effectively stop an unaligned AGI once it is created (due to the Corrigibility problem).

We have not yet solved the Alignment problem (of which the Corrigibility problem is merely a subset), and there does not appear to be any likely avenues to success (or at least we should not expect success within the next few decades).

Even if we solved the Alignment problem, if a non-aligned AGI arrives on the scene before we can implement ours, we are still doomed (due to first-mover advantage).

Our arguments for all of the above are not convincing or compelling enough for most AI researchers to take the threat seriously.

As such, unless some drastic action is taken soon, unaligned AGI will be created shortly, and that will be the end of the world as we know it.

First of all, is my list of seemingly necessary assumptions correct?

If so, it seems to me that most of these are far from proven statements of fact, and in fact are all heavily debated. Assumption 8 in particular seems to highlight this, as if a strong enough case could be made for each of the previous assumptions, it would be fairly easy to convince most intelligent researchers, which we don’t seem to observe.

A historical example which bears some similarities to the current situation may be Godel’s resolution to Hilbert's program. He was able to show unarguably that no consistent finite system of axioms is capable of proving all truths, at which point the mathematical community was able to advance beyond the limitations of early formalism. As far as I am aware, no similarly strong argument exists for even one of the assumptions listed above.

Given all of this, and the fact that there are so many uncertainties here, I don’t understand why so many researchers (most prominently Eliezer Yudkowsky, but there are countless more) seem so certain that we are doomed. I find it hard to believe that all alignment ideas presented so far show no promise, considering I’ve yet to see a slam-dunk argument presented for why even a single modern alignment proposals can’t work. (Yes, I’ve seen proofs against straw-man proposals, but not really any undertaken by a current expert in the field). This may very well be due to my own ignorance/ relative newness, however, and if so, please correct me!

I’d like to hear the steelmanned argument for why alignment is hopeless, and Yudkowsky’s announcement that “I’ve tried and couldn’t solve it” without more details doesn’t really impress me. My suspicion is I’m simply missing out on some crucial c...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Finally Entering Alignment, published by Ulisse Mini on April 10, 2022 on LessWrong.

Background

Reading

Death With Dignity combined with recent advancements shortening my timeline has finally made me understand on a gut level that

nature is allowed to kill me. Because of this alignment has gone from "An interesting carrier path I might pursue after I finish studying" to "If I don't do something I'll die while there was something else I could have done."

A big part of writing this is to get tailored advice, so a bit about my current skills that could be useful to the cause

Intermediate programmer, haven't done much stuff in AI, but I'm confident I can learn quickly. I'm good with Linux and can do sysadmin-y things.

Know a good amount of math, I've read textbooks on real analysis and linear algebra. With some effort I think I can understand technical alignment papers though I'm far away from writing them.

I'm 17 and unschooled meaning I have nearly infinite free time and no financial obligations.

Babble

Inspired by Entering at the 11th Hour here's a list of some things I can do that may contribute (not quite "babble" but close enough)

Learn ML engineering and apply to AI safety orgs. I believe I can get to level talked about in AI Safety Needs Great Engineers in a few months of focused practice.

Deal with alignment research debt by summarizing results, making exposition, quiz games, etc.

Help engineers learn math. Hold study groups, tutor etc.

Help researchers learn engineering (I'm not an amazing programmer, but a lot of research code is questionable to say the least)

Donate money to safety orgs. (will wait till I'm familiar with all the options, so I can weight based on likelihood of success)

Host AI/EA/Rationality meetup. I live in the middle of nowhere, so this would be the only one

Try to convince some young math prodigies that alignment is important (I've run into a few in math groups before)

Make a website/YT/podcast debating AGI with people in order to convince people and raise awareness. (changing one person's carrier path is worth a lot)

Lobby local politicians, see if anyone I know has connections and can put a word in

Become active on LessWrong and ElutherAI in order to find friends who'll help along the way. Hard for me because of impostor syndrome right now (you don't want to know how long writing this post took).

Reflection

I most like (1), (2-4) and (6). (7) is something I'll do next time I have the chance.

I'm going to spend my working time studying the engineering needed to get hired at a safety org. If anyone here is good at programming and bad at math (or the converse) please contact me, I'd love to help (teaching helps me learn a subject too, so don't be shy).

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: Emotionally Confronting a Probably-Doomed World: Against Motivation Via Dignity Points, published by TurnTrout on April 10, 2022 on LessWrong.

This article was written in ignorance of the alignment community’s reaction to Eliezer’s “Death with Dignity” post. The first part of this article responds to how I suspect some people reacted to that post, while the second part is my take on the post itself.

I write against defeatism; I write against decline; I write against that internal slumping that sneaks in on the coat-tails of bad news. I do not dispute the balance of evidence—are we doomed, or not? Let us simply assume that we live in a relatively doomed world: It’s very improbable that we solve AI alignment in time.

What next?

We have been taught what comes next, in this kind of story. Since, by assumption, we won’t receive a “happily ever after”, we infer we are in a tragedy. Realizing this, we are disappointed and sad. The fellowship breaks and scatters, its once-proud and vibrant members downtrodden. And then occurs a miracle which we could have turned to our advantage, but for our civilizational incompetence and our own stupidity—smart enough to build AI, yet too dumb to align it. And then the laugh track plays. And then we die! The end!

As AI_WAIFU said: “Fuck. That. Noise.”

We do not live in a story. We can, in fact, just assess the situation, and then do what makes the most sense, what makes us strongest and happiest. The expected future of the universe is—by assumption—sad and horrible, and yet where is the ideal-agency theorem which says I must be downtrodden and glum about it?

Against retreat

In response to how I suspect some people reacted to "Death with Dignity."

Suppose we have ten years left. Some may consider a very natural response—to retreat. Spend the remaining time with your family and your friends, working whatever job you want—just do whatever.

But... Um... This sounds like an awful plan? I’d feel like a lazy bum, like a cornered animal. And for those of us doing direct work, this plan sounds stupid. It sounds like a great way to throw away worlds where we would receive a miracle, and yet couldn’t do anything about it anymore because we all went home.

How would I like to see those ten years spent? I’m looking for plans which involve playing to win, which are fun and edifying, which would make me proud to be me and to be part of this community.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me mention a concept called instrumental convergence. It’s something I like thinking about sometimes. In many situations, for many goals, the best actions look similar: Gather resources, build up strength, develop yourself. Following this pattern, good plans in probably-doomed worlds look a lot like good plans in hopeful worlds.

Communal edification

Even if the probable-end is bearing down—imagine having a vibrant social scene anyways, where people are having fun anyways, developing deep friendships anyways, expecting more of themselves anyways, pushing each other to break their boundaries anyways. Because that’s awesome, because that’s fun, because that makes us stronger, because that positions us to seize miracles, because that’s the kind of thing that makes me proud, dammit.

Our civilization is incompetent. Gee, that sucks. But we don’t have to suck too, do we? If a society of people-like-us would really be so great, why don’t we show it?

Set up communal institutions which actually have good incentives.

Build out infrastructure for alignment research and training, so that smart young people want to try their hand at alignment research.

Probably more people should skill up as managers, so we can have more capacity via high-quality organizations like Redwood Research. I don’t know how to do this, and cannot offer advice.

Set up infrastructure in areas where our society is decrepit—...

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: EA Forum's interest in cause-areas over time and other statistics, published by MathiasKB on April 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

The other day there was a discussion on whether global development had been deprioritized within EA. I had been wondering the same thing, and more broadly how EA's interests have developed and changed over time.So yesterday I downloaded all EA Forum posts and categorised them by tags to see if I could spot any trends. Here is what I found.

Which cause areas get the most posts?

If the plots are too small to read, you can right click the picture and press 'open image in a new tab' to see a full-size version.

The first thing that stood out to me, is that there are many more posts on meta subjects such as community building and rationality, than there are posts about specific cause areas. This is maybe not that surprising, as many cause-area specific analyses and reports might be not be posted on the EA Forum, but instead on the websites of the organisations that produce them, whereas there is no better place to share work on community building than the EA forum.In terms of cause-areas there have been roughly the same number of posts on each cause area (AI, animal welfare, catastrophic risks, and other causes) with the exception of global development which has about half. I think the most likely explanation as for why this is, is that EA global development reports are more likely to be solely published on the websites of the organisations that produce it.

How has interest in cause-areas changed over time?

The EA Forum has exploded popularity in recent years, which I had expected would result noticable changes to what is posted on the forum. This seems not to be the case, and interest in each area (measured by amount of posts) has largely remained the same.

For easier comparison between the years, here is the same plot but normalized

I was surprised to see how little change there have been in the make-up of posts over the years. Global development makes up a smaller percentage of the forum than it did in the early years, but has largely remained the same since 2016. The percentage of posts on animal welfare peaked in 2018-19 and has since decreased somewhat. Interest in AI looks to be going up, as are posts about career choices.

Which posts get the most engagement?

Posts criticising EA are on average the most highly upvoted!

They are also by far the most highly commented posts!

Posts on cause-areas in turn tend to be the least upvoted with the fewest comments. My best guess as to why, is that it is a matter of engagability. It's difficult to provide much input to a deep-dive on some animal welfare issue without being highly informed on the topic yourself. There is too much of an assymmetry between the knowledge of the author and average reader for these posts to generate a lot comments and debate.I do think it's a shame that cause-specific posts seem to get less engagement and upvotes. Reading throrough analyses and deep-dives are often the posts I learn the most from, it's a shame that the readership for this content isn't higher.

EA interests seem largely the same

My main takeway has been that there aren't any clear recent trends in EA I could deduce, at least based on how posts are tagged.Fluctuation in the amount of posts on each cause-area is within what can be attributed to noise. The different major cause areas get roughly the same level of engagement on the forum. Many of the trends that can be seen, can likely be explained away by noting that the EA Forum is a flawed representation of EA's interests.Are there any plots I didn't make you would like to see? If so, let me know and I'm probably happy to create them :)

If you're wondering which tags cause a post to be categorized as eg. 'other causes' or 'Moral Philosophy', I hav...

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: use The Nonlinear Library to listen to the top LessWrong posts of all time, published by KatWoods on April 9, 2022 on LessWrong.

Update #1: It’s a rite of passage to binge the top LessWrong posts of all time, and now you can do it on your podcast app.

We (Nonlinear) made “top of all time” playlists for LessWrong, the EA Forum, and the Alignment Forum. Each is around ~400 of the most upvoted posts:

LessWrong

EA Forum

Alignment Forum

Update #2: The original Nonlinear Library feed includes top posts from the EA Forum, LessWrong, and the Alignment Forum. Now, by popular demand, you can get forum-specific feeds:

LessWrong

EA Forum

Alignment Forum

Stay tuned for more features. We’ll soon be launching channels by tag, so you can listen to specific subjects, such as longtermism, rationality, animal welfare, or global health. Enter your email here to get notified as we add more channels.

Below is the original explanation of The Nonlinear Library and its theory of change.

We are excited to announce the launch of The Nonlinear Library, which allows you to easily listen to top EA and rationalist content on your podcast player. We use text-to-speech software to create an automatically updating repository of audio content from the EA Forum, Alignment Forum, LessWrong, and other EA blogs.

In the rest of this post, we’ll explain our reasoning for the audio library, why it’s useful, why it’s potentially high impact, its limitations, and our plans. You can read it here or listen to the post in podcast form here.

Listen here: Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Apple, or elsewhere

Or, just search for it in your preferred podcasting app.

Goal: increase the number of people who read EA research

A koan: if your research is high quality, but nobody reads it, does it have an impact?

Generally speaking, the theory of change of research is that you investigate an area, come to better conclusions, people read those conclusions, they make better decisions, all ultimately leading to a better world. So the answer is no. Barring some edge cases (1), if nobody reads your research, you usually won’t have any impact.

Research → Better conclusion → People learn about conclusion → People make better decisions → The world is better

Nonlinear is working on the third step of this pipeline: increasing the number of people engaging with the research. By increasing the total number of EA and rationalist articles read, we’re increasing the impact of all of that content.

This is often relatively neglected because researchers typically prefer doing more research instead of promoting their existing output. Some EAs seem to think that if their article was promoted one time, in one location, such as the EA Forum, then surely most of the community saw it and read it. In reality, it is rare that more than a small percentage of the community will read even the top posts. This is an expected-value tragedy, when a researcher puts hundreds of hours of work into an important report which only a handful of people read, dramatically reducing its potential impact.

Here are some purely hypothetical numbers just to illustrate this way of thinking:

Imagine that you, a researcher, have spent 100 hours producing outstanding research that is relevant to 1,000 out of a total of 10,000 EAs.

Each relevant EA who reads your research will generate $1,000 of positive impact. So, if all 1,000 relevant EAs read your research, you will generate $1 million of impact.

You post it to the EA Forum, where posts receive 500 views on average. Let’s say, because your report is long, only 20% read the whole thing - that’s 100 readers. So you’ve created 1001,000 = $100,000 of impact. Since you spent 100 hours and created $100,000 of impact, that’s $1,000 per hour - pretty good!

But if you were to spend, say 1 hour, promoting your report - ...