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: Underinvestment at the top: what I discovered coaching a dozen EA leaders, published by Tee on April 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Table of Contents & Key Links

Executive Summary & Overview

Notable results

Quantitative Results

Visuals of quantitative data

Takeaways & Lessons Learned

EA Leadership & Community Insights

Coaching Insights

Trial & Operational Insights

Things to do differently (moving forward)

Anticipated questions, objections and inquiries

Key Links

Spreadsheet of quantitative answers

Public testimonials (most originated from the trials)

Appendix of qualitative answers

I’d like to give special thanks to the trial participants – those who were comfortable giving public testimonials include Kat Woods (Nonlinear Fund), Michael Plant (Happier Lives Institute), Luke Freeman (Giving What We Can), Bridget Williams (Center for Population-Level Bioethics), Nikita Patel (Fortify Health), Angus Mercer, Varsha Venugopal (Suvita), Irena Kotikova (EA Czechia) and Dominika Kropucin (Rethink Priorities). More thanks in this section.

Navigating this post

I’ve tried to make this rather lengthy report more ‘click-to-expand’ in order to help readers navigate it nonlinearly (more like Seinfeld, not Game of Thrones). While the quantified results carry interesting potential implications, I think pairing the Executive Summary & Overview and Takeaways & Lessons Learned sections would provide for the reader a summary together with richer insights into what happened during the coaching trials, and what I think it could mean for the Effective Altruism community. The anticipated questions section is also pretty revealing of my experience and motivations in conducting the trial and producing the report.

Reach out at [email protected] or my website if you’re interested in receiving my coaching, collaborating and/or helping fund my efforts to continue building a professionalized support infrastructure in the EA community.

Executive Summary & Overview

I’m Tee – you can find more contextualizing sections about me, about my style of coaching and references for the general case for coaching towards the end of the report.

Many of the insights contained within this report are derived from November 2021 – February 2022, where I conducted a dozen free trials of my coaching with EA leaders that I feel went pretty well. Across several methods of approximating value and effects, the feedback seems to suggest that the coaching is both desired and effective for those undertaking the complexities that come with doing scalable good. I think there could be something profound here for the community to consider.

Given how highly the Effective Altruism community appears to value certain forms of direct work, it feels obvious to say that, for important individuals doing this direct work, investing in the development of their capabilities could be quite impactful.

From my prior experience coaching other high-performers, I had good reason to think that coaching could be a potentially potent way to develop EA leaders (EDs/CEOs, senior-level managers & thought leaders). Coaching is only beginning to catch on within the community it seems. However, what is currently on offer is almost exclusively reliant on opaque patterns of in-network endorsement, varies widely in quality and intended purpose, approximations of its value are almost completely anecdotal, and there are several nontrivial and very understandable barriers to access.

I thought a more rigorous trial of my coaching would be fairly revealing in regards to key questions about my own practice. But more importantly, I thought a structured trial would give me a better sense of how my coaching (and perhaps by extension, coaching in general) could meet the developmental needs of individuals who are quite important to EA.

What if, for example, k...

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: Ultra-Near-Termism: Literally An Idea Whose Time Has Come, published by FOUNT Staff on April 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary

Recent work has focused on the conflict between philosophies of altruism emphasizing the next few years (near-termism) and those emphasizing the next few centuries to millennia (long-termism). We propose and describe an alternate philosophy, ultra-near-termism, focusing on the next few hours to days. We explain why adding ultra-near-termism to a “philosophical portfolio” or “moral parliament” addresses deficiencies left by a focus on only near- or long-termism, and speculate on methods for identifying ultra-near-termist causes. Finally, we discuss the “ultra-near-termist hypocrisy problem” - can a moral agent consistently use their next few minutes to investigate and promote ultra-near-termist principles, or are they obligated to use those minutes on direct action supporting ultra-near-termist charities immediately?

Thanks to the many people who consulted with us on earlier versions of this essay. We are especially grateful to the readers who educated us about the reasons that our original name, Center for Ultra-Near-Termism, was offensive. We recognize the importance of inclusivity and will strive to do better in the future.

Long-Termism And Its Critics

William MacAskill provisionally defines long-termism as "the view that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time" (MacAskill 2019). He proposes various paths toward a more final definition, the strongest of which focuses on the statement Those who live at future times matter just as much, morally, as those who live today”.

This claim implies a discount rate of 0%, which has encountered controversy. Some authors give purely practical arguments against the zero rate, for example in Estimating The Philanthropic Discount Rate (Dickens 2020):

Even if we do not admit any pure time preference, we may still discount the value of future resources for four core reasons:

All resources become useless (I will refer to this as "economic nullification").

We lose access to our own resources.

We continue to have access to our own resources, but do not use them in a way that our present selves would approve of.

The best interventions might become less cost-effective over time as they get more heavily funded, or might become more cost-effective as we learn more about how to do good.

Aside from these, we can also consider a “pure” time preference, in which future lives are inherently less valuable than present ones. Frank Ramsey (Ramsey 1928) has called this practice “ethically indefensible”. Other economists disagree; Robin Hanson has suggested fundamentally discounting the future at the market rate of return [Hanson, 2008] on the grounds that other rates produce absurdities in investment decisions, although this argument does not grapple with the possibility of existential risk. The anonymous blogger “Entirely Useless” goes further [entirelyuseless.com 2018] stating that reasoning without discount rates introduces infinities and is necessarily inconsistent.

An entirely different critique is launched by Phil Torres (Torres 2021), who believes that long-termism could be used as an excuse to avoid present problems such as climate change, or that utilitarianism plus long-termism could be a potential justification for atrocities. He writes:

If this sounds appalling, it’s because it is appalling. By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future. This is one reason that I...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Beyond micromarriages, published by richard ngo on April 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

tl;dr micromarriages aren't fully analogous to micromorts, which makes it tricky to define them satisfactorily. I introduce an alternative unit: QAWYs (Quality-Adjusted Wife Years), where 1 QAWY is an additional year of happy marriage.

I once compiled a list of concepts which I’d discovered were less well-defined than I originally thought. I’m sad to say that I now have to add Chris Olah’s micromarriages to the list. In his words: “Micromarriages are essentially micromorts, but for marriage instead of death. A micromarriage is a one in a million chance that an action will lead to you getting married, relative to your default policy.”

It’s a fun idea, and helpful in making small probabilities feel more compelling. But upon thinking about it more, I’ve realised that the analogy doesn’t quite work. The key difference is that micromorts are a measure of acute risk - i.e. immediate death. For activities like skydiving, this is the main thing to worry about, so it’s a pretty good metric. But most actions we’d like to measure using micromarriages (going to a party, say, or working out more) won’t lead you to get married immediately - instead they flow through to affect marriages that might happen at some later point.

So how can we measure the extent to which an action affects your future marriages, even in theory? One option is to track how it changes the likelihood you’ll get married eventually. But this is pretty unhelpful. By analogy, if micromorts measured an action’s effect on the probability that you’d die eventually, then all actions would have almost zero micromorts (with the possible exception of some life-extension and existential risk work during the last few decades). Similarly, under this definition the micromarriages you gain from starting a new relationship (or even from literally getting married) could be mostly cancelled out by the fact that this relationship cuts off other potential relationships.

An alternative is to measure actions not by how much they change the probability that you’ll get married eventually, but by how much you expect them to causally contribute to an eventual marriage. The problem there is that many actions can causally contribute to a marriage (meeting someone, asking them out, proposing, etc) and there’s no principled way of splitting the credit between them. I won’t go into the details here, but the basic problem is the same as one which arises when trying to allocate credit to multiple contributors to a charitable intervention. E.g. if three different funders are all necessary for getting a project off the ground, in some sense they can all say that they “caused” the project to happen, but that would end up triple-counting their total impact.

(In this case, we can use Shapley values to allocate credit - but the boundaries between different “actions” are much more arbitrary than the boundaries between different “agents”, making it harder to apply Shapley values to the micromarriage case. Should we count the action “skipping meeting someone else” as a contributor to the marriage? Or the action “turning your head to catch sight of them”? This is basically a rabbit-hole without end - and that’s not even getting into issues of marriage identity across possible worlds.)

Fortunately, however, there’s another approach which does work. When thinking about mortality, the medical establishment doesn’t just measure acute risks, but also another category of risk: chronic risks, like smoking. When smoking, you don’t get a binary outcome after each cigarette, but rather a continual degradation of health. So chronic risks are instead measured in terms of the expected decrease in your lifespan - for example, with units of microlives, where one microli...

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: Accounting For College Costs, published by johnswentworth on April 1, 2022 on LessWrong.

Why are costs of certain things, most notably education and healthcare, skyrocketing so quickly, with relatively little improvement in quality? A few years ago, SlateStarCodex and Marginal Revolution both had interesting pieces on this "cost disease" phenomenon. I think both of them were coming at it wrong.

Cost disease is really about two questions:

Costs in education, healthcare, etc keep rising faster than inflation, so where is all that extra money going? This is an accounting question.

Why is so much money going there? This is an economics question.

Both the SSC and the MR pieces were mostly speculation on the second question. I think that's premature; the first step should be to go look at where all the extra money is going. Don't try to draw a map of a city by sitting in an apartment with the curtains closed; go look at the world, in detail, and let that steer the theorizing.

In this post, we'll dig into the accounting data for college costs, especially for 4-year private nonprofit colleges. The main theory we'll end up at, based on the accounting data, is that college costs are driven mainly by a large increase in diversity of courses available, which results in much lower student/faculty ratios, and correspondingly higher costs per student.

Accounting Data

For any particular college, if you had access to the books, you could simply look through all the expenditures, add it up, and see how expenditures changed over the years. I don’t know of any college which puts its books on the internet for all to see going back to the ‘60’s. But there is the National Center for Education Statistics, which compiles some high-level accounting data on all colleges in the US, and publishes an annual digest.

Let’s start at the beginning: what’s the cost of college, by year?

This is undergraduate tuition & required fees at 4-year colleges. Data separating private nonprofit/for-profit only goes back to 1999, because enrollment in for-profit colleges was negligible prior to the late ‘90’s. Note that all costs in this post, both in the graphs and the discussion, are adjusted to 2013 dollars.

From here on out we’re going to focus only on private, nonprofit 4-year colleges from 1999 to 2013, because that’s what the Digest of Education Statistics has data on. (Again, if anyone can find good data back to the ‘60’s, please let me know!)

We’re going to follow the money on its journey.

From tuition, comes revenue for colleges. Let’s make sure the payments arrive safe and sound.

Well that’s informative! If you’ve been to a private 4-year nonprofit university lately, you probably noticed that most people don’t actually pay the sticker cost. This data makes it pretty clear: actual expenditure on tuition is a lot lower than the sticker cost suggests. More to the point, nominal tuition grows much faster than actual tuition revenue. From 1999 to 2013, nominal tuition grew by 42.0% (about 3% per year), whereas tuition revenue grew by 23.7% (about 1.7% per year).

So roughly half the supposed growth in private college cost comes just from the games colleges play with their sticker-price tuition. If we look at what students actually pay - what colleges actually receive in tuition revenue - growth is lower by a factor of two.

But we’re not done yet! Remember, these numbers are all inflation-adjusted, so the remaining 1.7% annual growth is still 1.7% on top of inflation. So, we still want to know why college costs are growing faster than inflation.

Before we move on to expenses, a little more on revenue. Tuition revenue is less than half the revenue of private nonprofit colleges. Most of the rest comes from a combination of federal/state grants, private gifts, and investments. Key facts:

Grants and gifts cover 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: Half Price Impact Certificates, published by hbesceli on April 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

My new organisation, the Epicentre for Effective Altruism is launching it's first project - half price impact certificates.

We're selling certificates of £20 worth of my impact. However, whilst the project is still in the beta state, we are selling these at half price, effectively making you £10 richer at no cost.

You can buy your impact certificates here.

How large is the impact certificate?

You will not actually receive the physical impact certificate. The impact certificate is in the form of an NFT token which is stored securely on a ledger in my bedroom. NFT means 'non-fungible' which ensures that you're impact is truly counterfactual.

What if the impact bubble bursts?

The supply of high impact certificates will increase over time, however, the certificates are a form of stable currency, as they are pegged to the British pound, and so the impact isn't subject to volatility.

What if I only want a specific kind of impact, like ai safety?

For an additional £2 charge, you can choose specific kinds of impact depending on your values and cause prioritisation. For example:

You could buy a certificate of impact for animals in particular, or for AI safety.

You could buy a cerfiticate of impact for my actual impact, or for my expected impact where I did high EV things that weren't actually that useful but were still high EV.

You could buy a certificate for indirect capacity building impact such as building my career capital, or times I've taken a holiday (in order to be able to work more later)

Is there a maximum number of certificates you will sell? Surely you will run out of impact to sell at some point?

No. Each impact certificate is worth £20 of impact, but sold for only £10, thus providing £10 of additional impact value per certificate sold. This means that the more certificates I sell, the more impact value I create, and so the more impact value I can sell again in the form of impact certificates.

What forms of payment do you accept?

We do not accept American Express or impact certificates as payment.

You can buy your impact certificates here.

Note: This post represents my own views, as well as the views of my past, present, future and possible employers.

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: Kids Posts Retrospective, published by jefftk on April 1, 2022 on LessWrong.

When I write about something I'm doing with the kids, I'm especially likely to write about it when it's new, because that's when it's most interesting to me. But some things that seem like they are a good idea at first regress to the mean, while others don't. Here are most of my parenting posts, with my current thoughts:

Parenting and

Happiness (2012-10): Looking back at this with ten years of perspective, eight of them as a parent, I am very glad we decided to have kids.

Baby Sleep (2014-08): We also did cry-it-out with Anna, and it went similarly. With Nora we didn't need to do very much of this, I think because the gradual transition from the Snoo worked well at teaching her how to get herself back to sleep?

Microwaving Milk Is

Fine (2014-10): Yup. Still completely endorsed. I set up an old microwave Nora's bedroom for even more convenience.

Baby Sack as Coat (2015-01): This worked well when we had one very small child, but as she got heavier, and then we had our second, it stopped making sense. This isn't something I did with Anna or Nora.

Cosleeper (2015-07): For our second we moved to a mattress on the floor with a crib mattress next to it, and then with our third we used a Snoo, which I'd recommend.

Velcro Blackout

Curtains (2016-05): We still have blackout curtains in all of the bedrooms, and are big fans. On the other hand, now that the older two are on a regular "go to school every morning" schedule, this is less important and their schedule is closer to the sun.

On Sharing (2016-09): We still don't make the kids share: if someone is playing with a toy they can keep doing that as long as they want.

Kids and Global

Warming (2017-09): I still think climate change is not a good reason to avoid having children, and recently had a third. If you're looking to link people to something, however, Scott's more recent post is better.

Small Child Handrails (2017-09): I think I put these a little too low: by the time Anna was ready to use them she could've used ones, say, 6" higher. Still, they've gotten a lot of use, and they are not yet too low for Lily

(8y). I expect Nora will find them helpful in about a year.

A calming strategy (2017-12): The general approach of asking what they want and getting them involved in solving their problem continues to be valuable. I think when I wrote that post I focused too much on the effect on timing (giving feelings time to dissipate) and not enough on the buy-in/agency aspects.

Reading to Kids (2018-05): In that post I talked about reading as fast as I could, like a podcast on

1.7x. I stopped doing this at some point, but I don't remember whether it's because it was more work for me because the kids didn't like it.

Predictable Parenting, How to Parent More

Predictably (2018-07): This is still core to my approach to parenting, and it has worked very well for us. While I don't know how much is this and how much is other factors, our kids are generally very well behaved and pleasant.

Snowpants (2018-12): We are probably the most snowpants-wearing family I know, and I'm not sure why they haven't caught on more. Being able to play outside in the cold as long as you want is pretty great!

Present Timing for

Kids (2018-12): We used the approach proposed in the post for the next few Christmases/Birthdays, and it was a big improvement. Now that the kids have gotten older, however, the normal approach is fine.

Equal Parenting

Advice for Dads (2019-12): Over time we've ended up doing a lot more splitting where I have the older two and Julia has the baby, from a combination of preferences (I generally like going out and doing active things more than Julia does) and convenience (I can't nurse the baby).

Kid Door (2019-06): Having a way that the kids can get in and out 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: Using prediction markets to generate LessWrong posts, published by Matthew Barnett on April 1, 2022 on LessWrong.

I have a secret to reveal: I am not the author of my recent LessWrong posts. I know almost nothing about any of the topics I have recently written about.

Instead, for the last two months, I have been using Manifold Markets to write all my LessWrong posts. Here's my process.

To begin a post, I simply create 256 conditional prediction markets about whether my post will be curated, conditional on which ASCII character comes first in the post (though I'm considering switching to Unicode). Then, I go with whatever character yields the highest conditional probability of curation, and create another 256 conditional prediction markets for the next character in the post, plus a market for whether my post will be curated if the text terminates at that character. I repeat this algorithm until my post is complete.

Here's an example screenshot for a post that is currently in my drafts:

Looks interesting!

Even this post was generated using this method.

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: Anti-Corruption Market, published by lsusr on April 1, 2022 on LessWrong.

General Secretary Lu called his most trusted advisor Zhou into his office.

"Close the door," said the General Secretary.

Zhou closed the door with quivering arms.

"Don't worry. You're doing great. In fact, that's why I called you in today. I'm starting a new anti-corruption campaign," said the General Secretary.

Zhou drew a sharp intake of breath.

"What? No. This isn't political cover for disappearing my political rivals. I really do want to run an anti-corruption campaign," said the General Secretary.

Zhou exhaled slowly. The color began to return to Zhou's face.

"The problem is I can't trust my advisors. The corrupt ones lie to me. The honorable ones lie to me. Raw facts never make it up the chain of command. It's like everyone in the government is afraid of me," said the General Secretary.

Zhou kept his face slack and his mouth shut.

"That is why, effective immediately, I shall evaluate the performance of all sub-provincial ruling officials according to prediction markets. Can you make that happen?" said the General Secretary.

Zhou nodded.

Jining was a small town in Shandong with a population of only 1.5 million people. The most expensive nightclub in Jining was called K2. K2 was located on the fifty-first floor of the Xinyuan Hotel.

Administrator Qian had the VIP room all to himself. Instead of sitting on the couches, he stood, gazing down from the window at the lights of Jining. He held a cocktail glass in his hand full of the finest rice wine laced with his favorite blend of imported drugs. It was nice to get away from all the selfish political egomaniacs and just get some alone time to think for himself. Administrator Qian was like a cloistered monk. He listened to the gentle thump thump of the muted music reverberating from the main dance floor.

"What to do. What to do," said Administrator Qian to nobody in particular.

"What to do about what?" said his assistant.

"The rotten authorities in Beijing. They think a bunch of nerds on the darkweb somehow knows more about this Jining then I do living here and administrating it," said Administrator Qian.

"You're talking about the Prediction Market Anti-Corruption Initiative," said his secretary.

"Anti-corruption my ass. It's a witch hunt. I'm not corrupt. I'm not even rich. I can barely afford payments on my mortgages, my cars and my aircraft," said Administrator Qian.

"You're a simple public servant. You just want to do your duty to the nation without outside interference," said his mistress.

Administrator Qian nodded solemnly. He finished his glass. It was refilled.

"The princes at the CCP who grew up on private space stations don't understand what it's like to be a 老百姓[1]," said Administrator Qian.

"You're a man of the people," said his other mistress.

"The occult magic of prediction markets will never compare to human judgment," said Administrator Qian.

"I play prediction markets for fun," said one of his bodyguards, "If your goal is to move the price then you don't actually have to change real-world outcomes. I bet not many people care about the municipal futures of a small village like Jining. All you have to do is buy up lots of shares of a prediction right before the CCP evaluates your performance and you can make the price whatever you want it to be."

"What he said," said Administrator Qian.

"It shall be done. You are a genius, sir," said his executive assistant.

Administrator Qian was a genius. It was nice to just get away from it all and think for a while. His work done for the day, Qian returned to the party.

Dufu was addicted to gambling.

"Hey boss, I was taking a look at the prediction markets and they're all out-of-whack," said Dufu.

Mafia don Wang didn't even turn around, "So?"

"The prediction markets predict we'll be performing...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing What The Future Owes Us, published by peterbarnett on April 1, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I am excited to announce the sequel to the recently announced book What We Owe The Future. This new book will be called What The Future Owes Us, and will focus primarily on the common criticism “why should I do anything for the future if they won’t do anything for me?”

The first half of the book dives into ways in which the future can do things for us. Sometimes this is in straightforward ways, such as carrying forward our values and continuing our legacies. But it will be argued that there are much more impactful and direct ways the future can do things for us via acausal trade and via the future’s acausal influence over the past (our present). Due to the vast number of potential people in the future, we expect that they will be able to exert a large amount of acausal control over the past (the specifics of this argument will be fleshed out by the future author).

The second half of the book looks at ways we can ensure the future acts in the best interest of the past, just as we have acted in the best interests of them. We will investigate commitment devices, and novel metaphysics which may allow this to be possible. Ultimately it will be argued that we in the present can control the future, which can in turn have a positive impact on us today.

Hopefully, this book will bring more moral egoists to longtermism, because the best way to help oneself may be to help the future.

The book is not up for preorder yet, but we do have cover designs.

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: Moses and the Class Struggle, published by lsusr on April 1, 2022 on LessWrong.

"𝕿𝖆𝖐𝖊 𝖔𝖋𝖋 𝖞𝖔𝖚𝖗 𝖘𝖆𝖓𝖉𝖆𝖑𝖘. 𝕱𝖔𝖗 𝖞𝖔𝖚 𝖘𝖙𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖔𝖓 𝖍𝖔𝖑𝖞 𝖌𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖉," said the bush.

"No," said Moses.

"Why not?" said the bush.

"I am a Jew. If there's one thing I know about this universe it's that there's no such thing as God," said Moses.

"You don't need to be certain I exist. It's a trivial case of Pascal's Wager," said the bush.

"Who is Pascal?" said Moses.

"It makes sense if you are beyond time, as I am," said the bush.

"Mysterious answers are not answers," said Moses.

"Take off your shoes and I will give you the power of God. Surely that is a profitable bet even if there is a mere 1% chance I exist," said the bush.

"It's a profitable bet if there is a mere 0.001% chance you exist," said Moses.

"Are you 99.999% sure I don't exist," said the bush.

"No," said Moses.

"Then take off your sandals," said the bush.

"No," said Moses.

"Why not?" said the bush.

"Categorical imperative. If I accepted bets with large risk in exchange for large payoff then anyone could manipulate me just by promising a large payoff. I need at least some proof you're real," said Moses.

The bush burst into flames.

"That's supposed to convince me of divine power? I've seen fires before," said Moses.

"Reach your hand into the flames," said the bush.

Moses carefully examined the flames. The bush burned but did not seem to be harmed by the fire. Moses waved his staff through the fire. It burned too but emerged unharmed. He felt his staff. It remained cool to the touch. Moses placed his staff into the flames again, this time for longer. His staff caught fire like the bush but once again was unharmed. Moses quickly flicked his hand through the flames. Nothing happened. Moses rested his hand inside the flames. He felt the heat but it didn't harm his hand nor did it cause him pain. Moses retrieved his hand.

"Does that convince you I am real?" said the bush.

"Nothing you can say or do will convince me God is speaking to me because the odds of God being real are lower than the odds I have become schizophrenic," said Moses.

"That's the least rational thing I've ever heard. Rationality is about updating your beliefs in the face of evidence. You have just declared that no quantity of evidence will change your mind," said the bush.

"That's a Bayesian argument. I'm a Frequentist," said Moses. He waved his staff through the flames until p<0.05 and then he took off his sandals.

Later, in Cairo.

"Brother! It is so good to see you again," said Ramesses.

"I wish I could say the same," said Moses.

"What's wrong?" said Ramesses.

"I don't really know how to explain this," said Moses.

"Just tell it to me straight. You know you can talk about anything with me. I've never judged you. I've never even gotten mad. I've always been on your side and I always will be," said Ramesses.

Moses took a deep breath. He let it out slowly. "I talked to God. He says to let His people go."

Ramesses stared blank for a moment. Then he laughed so hard he fell over into the cushions. "You had me going there for a minute. You always were the jokester. I missed you so much. Nobody makes fun of me anymore since you left. I don't blame them. It's dangerous to tease someone who can execute you for treason, insubordination, heresy or just pure whim. I know I have nothing to complain about. I live an incredibly privileged life. But privilege comes with its price. You're a breath of fresh air in an ocean of sycophants."

"This isn't a joke. I'm serious," said Moses.

"And my favorite thing about you is how you commit to the part. Like that joke where you pretended to be the son of an Israelite. I still can't believe you actually got yourself circumcised. Mother was so furious," said Ramesses.

"Goddammit," said Moses, "Ow!"

"What?" said Ramesses.

"My staff. I got a splinter," said Mos...