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: Manhattan project for aligned AI, published by Chris van Merwijk on March 27, 2022 on LessWrong.

One possible thing that I imagine might happen, conditional on an existential catastrophe not occurring, is a Manhattan project for aligned AGI. I don’t want to argue that this is particularly likely or desirable. The point of this post is to sketch the scenario, and briefly discuss some implications for what is needed from current research.

Imagine the following scenario: It is only late that top AI scientists take the existential risk of AGI seriously, and there hasn't yet been a significant change in the effort put into AI safety relative to our current trajectory. At some point, there is a recognition among AI scientists and relevant decision-makers that AGI will be developed soon by one AI lab or another (within a few months/years), and that without explicit effort there is a large probability of catastrophic results. A project is started to develop AGI:

It has an XX B$ or XXX B$ budget.

Dozens of the top AI scientists are part of the project, and many more assistants. People you might recognize or know from top papers and AI labs join the project.

A fairly constrained set of concepts, theories and tools are available that give a broad roadmap for building aligned AGI.

There is a consensus understanding among management and the research team that without this project, AGI will plausibly be developed relatively soon, and that without explicitly understanding how to build the system safely it will pose an existential risk.

It seems to me that it is useful to backchain from this scenario to see what is needed, assuming that this kind of alignment Manhattan project is indeed what should happen.

Firstly, my view is that if this Manhattan project would start in intellectual conditions similar to today’s, there wouldn't be very many top AI scientists significantly motivated to work on the problem, and it would not be taken seriously. Even very large sums of money would not suffice, since there wouldn't be enough of a common understanding about what the problem is for it to work.

Secondly, it seems to me that there isn't enough of a roadmap for building aligned AGI for such a project to succeed in a short time-frame of months to years. I expect some people to disagree with this, but looking at current rates of progress in our understanding of AI safety, and my model of the practical parallelizability of conceptual progress, I am skeptical that the problem can be solved in a few years even by a group of 40 highly motivated and financed top AI scientists. It is plausible that this will look different closer to the finish line, but I am skeptical.

On this model, I have in mind basically two kinds of work that contribute to good outcomes. This is not a significant change relative to my prior view, but in my mind it constrains the motivation behind such work to some degree:

Research that makes the case for AGI x-risk clearer, and constrains how we believe the problem occurs, in order to make it eventually easier to convince top AI scientists that working in such an alignment Manhattan project is reasonable, and to make sure there is a team that's on the same page as to what the problem is.

Research that constrains the roadmap for building aligned AGI. I'm thinking mostly of conceptual/theoretical/empirical work that helps us converge to an approach that can then be developed/refined and scaled by a large effort over a short time period.

I suspect this mostly shouldn't change my general picture of what needs to be done, but it does shift my emphasis somewhat.

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: Why I am looking for an executive assistant, published by Max Roser on March 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Hi! My name is Max Roser and I'm the founder and editor of Our World in Data. When I mentioned that I am looking for an executive assistant several people in the EA community suggested that I share this job here on the EA Forum.

You can find the full job description here.

When I started Our World in Data I worked on this project by myself for many years. With time the project has grown, many outstanding people have joined, and today our team is much larger than I ever imagined.

I am extremely grateful and happy about the excellent team that is working with me – it is the best thing that has happened to this project. Together we are able to do much more than I could have ever hoped for when I was working alone.

Tens of thousands of publications rely on OWID every year. Our team’s work is referenced in about 50,000 media articles annually, and now during the pandemic we are producing the datasets and infrastructure that inform billions of people around the world. Millions of people visit OWID every month and our data has an even wider reach because it is used by institutions like Google, the WHO, and the New York Times. In the end it reaches billions of people. Our reach is much larger than I ever imagined.

This amazing growth and visibility of our work has led to a challenging situation for myself. As the director of OWID I am responsible for setting the direction, as well as managing public communications and overseeing the team’s work across research, design, and engineering.

My background is in research, and as a researcher I want to write and do research; but in addition to research I need to spend much of my time on communications, operations and administration. Many researchers, journalists, and policymakers get in touch, but I have hardly any time to consider their requests and offers. And internally it is also challenging for me to be as present and helpful to the team as I would like to be.

I am very optimistic about the future of our work. There is so much important work that we can do. Our funding situation is solid and the team could not be better.

However, after the rapid growth in recent years my time and energy are a major constraint going forward. This is why I am looking for support.

That’s what this job is about: I am looking for an Executive Assistant who can support me in terms of internal and external communications, in my writing, in administration and operations, and general prioritization so that the team’s and my work are as useful as possible for those who rely on us.

As my Executive Assistant you will be involved in a wide range of topics and interact with a very diverse group of people. I work with academics, journalists, policymakers, and leaders in nonprofit organizations, tech startups and much more.

In terms of topics, my research interests include the range of topics that OWID covers, with a particular focus on global poverty, data visualization, and the production of open access scientific publications.

To get an idea for how I think about our work you could read my text about OWID’s mission or listen to my interview on the ‘80,000 Hours’ podcast in which I discussed the history of OWID, the work that the team did during the pandemic, and my vision for what is ahead of us. I hope this gives you some idea of how much I like my work, and why I think this role is important and hopefully also fulfilling and interesting for you.

This is the first time that I am able to look for an assistant and I am excited about it. It would be fantastic to work with a great colleague by my side. Since I have never worked with an assistant before I think that previous experience in an assistant role is desirable; but I am open to hiring s...

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: AI safety starter pack, published by mariushobbhahn on March 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

There are a ton of good resources for AI safety out there. However, conversations with people trying to get into the field revealed that these materials are often unknown. Therefore, I want to provide a very basic overview of how to start. My claim is that a person who invests ~2-3 hours a week to study the recommended material will have a good understanding of the AI safety landscape within one year (if you are already familiar with ML you can get there in ~3 months, e.g. by doing the AGI safety fundamentals fellowship). This post is primarily designed for people who want to get into technical AI safety. While it might be still helpful for AI governance it is not specifically geared towards it.

I want to thank Jaime Sevilla, Alex Lawsen, Richard Ngo, JJ Hepburn, Tom Lieberum, Remmelt Ellen and Rohin Shah for their feedback.

I intend to update this post regularly. If you have any feedback please reach out.

Motivation & mental bottlenecks

When I look back on my own (still very young) journey in AI safety, the biggest bottlenecks were not the availability of resources or a lack of funding. My biggest bottlenecks were my own psychological barriers. For example, I had vague thoughts like “AI safety is so important, I’m not up for the task”, “If I dive into AI safety, I’m doing it properly--fully focused with a clear mind” (which meant I always delayed it) or “AI safety is so abstract, I don’t know where to start”. To be clear, I never explicitly and rationally held these beliefs. They were mostly subconscious but nevertheless prevented me from doing more earlier.

I think there are a few simple insights that make joining the field much easier.

AI safety is still in its infancy: If you believe that AI safety might be one of the biggest or even the biggest problem of humanity, then the “correct” number of people working on it is at least 1000x larger than it currently is. The position for which you are a good fit might not even exist yet but it probably will in the future---possibly by your own creation.

AI safety is multi-disciplinary: AI safety doesn’t just require technical people. It needs social scientists, it needs community builders to grow the field, it needs people in governance, it needs people thinking about the bigger picture, and many more. You don’t need to be good at math or coding to be able to contribute meaningfully.

You can contribute relatively quickly: The field is young and there are a ton of low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked. There are organizations like the AI Safety Camp that facilitate these projects but you can usually find small online projects throughout the year.

Lastly, there are some simple tips that make the start of your journey easier and more fun

Find others & get help: Working with others is more fun, you learn faster and it creates positive accountability. I can generally recommend it and the AI safety community is usually very friendly and helpful as long as you are well-intentioned. If you realize that you are emotionally bottlenecked, ask others for their experiences and let them help you--you are not the only one struggling. To find a community more easily, check out the resources of the AI safety support group such as the AI safety slack (see below).

Build habits: In general (not only for AI safety), building habits is a good way to get into a field. You could start by setting a daily alarm that reminds you to check the alignment forum, the EA forum or LessWrong. You don’t even have to read an article, just skimming the headlines is already enough to build up the habit.

Don’t overload yourself: You don’t need to read everything all the time and it’s completely fine to ignore the latest trend. In many ways, this document is in...

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: Go apply for 80K Advising - (Yes, right now), published by Devansh Pandey on March 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This post was prompted by the fact that so many EAs I think could be promising have not applied for 80k coaching yet even though they want to and intend to.

This is your reminder to go apply. Yes, right now. Otherwise, there is far too big of a chance that it will end up on your eternal to-do list, and you might even develop an ugh field around it, and that would be terrible because many more people should go talk to 80k.

From my understanding, they can do a lot more than just career advice - like connecting you to relevant people, or opening your mind to entirely new tracks you hadn't considered before.

Go apply here if this is a relevant call-to-action. This post is meant to get this task off your to-do list—so getting it done ASAP is probably a good idea.

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: Duels & D.Sci March 2022: It's time for D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-data!, published by aphyer on March 25, 2022 on LessWrong.

This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles where players are given a dataset to analyze and an objective to pursue using information from that dataset.

STORY (skippable)

You may have experienced a meteoric rise to be the billionaire CEO of DataCorp, but you can still enjoy the finer things in life. Like children's card games.

The world-famous gaming company 'Sorcerers of the Shore' is about to release a new card game, supposedly based upon the 'Ancient Sumerian Game of Shadows'. They're holding an opening tournament next week, and you mean to attend.

Rumors that the game absorbs the souls of its players, and can destroy them if they lose, are obvious nonsense. That strange lady who appeared in your DataCorp office out of a cloud of mist and warned you that 'you unleash a power beyond your comprehension' was a transparent con artist. You're not sure how she got in past your security unnoticed, or how she got back out afterwards, but you don't have time to worry about that! You need to submit your deck list for the opening tournament!

Unfortunately, the Sorcerers of the Shore have been very tight-lipped about the whole thing. They haven't actually published the ruleset of the game, only the names of cards available for you to select from. (They said something about how you should select 'the cards that call out to your soul.' This is also clearly nonsense. You don't want cards your soul is somehow compatible with. You want cards that will win.)

Fortunately, the ruleset is apparently 'unchanged from the ancient Sumerian game', and so you have funded a series of archeological expeditions to look for records of past plays of this game. (Is this a good use of your DataCorp billions? Of course! This is Serious Business!)

Your expeditions have come back with...quite impressive results, actually. Apparently they've uncovered a wider Ancient Sumerian civilization than anyone anticipated, with more advanced technology than anyone expected. The archeological community is fascinated, but more importantly for you, you've uncovered a very large dataset of games. Apparently this game was used by the Sumerians for a wide variety of things - there are records of it being used for gambling, divination, as a justice system in trials, and apparently 'holding back the Great Devourer lest it bring an end to this earth'. You're not quite sure what this last one means - you think your archaeologists have probably messed up the translation.

Even more fortunately, it appears the Sumerians had some strange ritual around selecting cards for this game - they have done so entirely randomly, giving you a very clean sample. This is fortunate, because you've just heard that your long-time rival will be attending the tournament as well. (Some would call it undignified for a billionaire CEO to have an ongoing rivalry with a middle schooler who is 3 feet tall, or 4 if you count his hair. Some would call it more undignified that you keep losing.)

Your rival has declared his intention to bring a deck with one of every card available. This pathetic deck should be easy for you to beat - is he just hoping that he can get lucky and draw exactly the right card whenever he needs it? He does get lucky annoyingly often though - you want to make sure your odds of winning are as high as possible, to make sure you beat him this time even if he gets lucky again.

DATA & OBJECTIVE

You need to build a deck of 12 cards from the following available cards:

Alessin, Adamant Angel

Bold Battalion

Dreadwing, Darkfire Dragon

Evil Emperor Eschatonus, Empyreal Envoy of Entropic End

Gentle Guard

Horrible Hooligan

Kindly Knight

Lilac Lotus

Murderous Minotaur

Patchy Pirate

Swo...

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: Nuclear Risk Overview: CERI Summer Research Fellowship, published by Will Aldred on March 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I’m Will Aldred, and I’ve written this post in my role as Nuclear Risk Programme Coordinator at CERI. This is my very first post on the EA Forum; I very much welcome comments and feedback.

This post introduces the nuclear risk cause area stream within the Cambridge Existential Risks Initiative (CERI) summer research fellowship (SRF) 2022. Potential applicants: for an overview of the CERI SRF, please see our SRF announcement post, and to apply, go here. Potential mentors: please complete this short form if you’re interested in supervising a research project in this programme, and we’ll be in touch with you in due course.

The post is split into two halves. First, I will give some details specific to the nuclear risk SRF. Second, I give a brief summary of the nuclear risk landscape and how I see CERI as hopefully contributing toward solving (or at least mitigating) the nuclear risk problem.

I imagine my subsection on doing nuclear research now to skill-build for future higher impact in AI governance might be seen as the most original/interesting/controversial part of this post, ergo my highlighting it at this point. I especially welcome comments and feedback relating to this subsection.

For potential applicants

Project ideas

Some of the highest-impact projects a CERI fellow could undertake are listed in 'Nuclear risk research ideas' (Aird & Aldred, 2022a). And for many of these research ideas, accompanying guidance is given on how one might begin tackling them, which makes this possibly one of the best resources for nuclear risk project inspiration.

But there are other projects one could undertake, and I do not wish to limit applicants to only considering project ideas from the above list if one feels they are a better fit for another project they’d like to propose, and/or if one holds a strong inside view that their own project idea scores highly for impact.

Some reasons for doing a nuclear risk project

This section is mainly aimed at generalist-type potential applicants on the fence between nuclear risk and another cause area stream.

Before I dive into giving reasons for why one might consider doing a summer project in nuclear risk, I’ll first state two reasons against: personal fit and higher impact elsewhere. 'Personal fit: why being good at your job is even more important than people think' (Todd, 2021a) is my recommendation for those interested in reading more on personal fit. As for higher impact elsewhere, my take is that potential applicants who are a good fit for nuclear risk research likely also have good fit for AI strategy and governance, biorisk policy, and possibly other highest-impact areas.[1] I shall return to the interrelation I perceive between nuclear risk and AI governance research pipelines later on in this section, in my third and final reason for considering a summer project in nuclear risk.[2] I now discuss my reasons in order.

Low-hanging fruit via neglectedness

Work going into nuclear risk reduction within the existential risk (x-risk) community has been neither large in quantity nor diverse in scope: nuclear x-risk has around 12 full-time equivalents (FTEs), and around two-thirds of this total comes from one organisation - ALLFED (Aird & Aldred, 2022b). Therefore, there are still low-hanging fruit to be picked. And a junior-level researcher working on a nuclear risk project over a summer is probably, all else equal and relative to working in another x-risk cause area, more likely to produce something directly impactful (i.e., novel, relevant to important decisions, and easy for key decision-maker(s) to use). See 'Nuclear risk research ideas' for why I think this direct impact is attainable. Note that I am not di...

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: Some benefits and risks of failure transparency, published by Vaidehi Agarwalla on March 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Key takeaways

The goal of this post is to discuss some heuristics on when it makes sense to discuss our own and other’s failures and mistakes in the EA community. I also recap the state of failure discourse in EA, including the recent interest and activity around red-teaming. (Read More)

Benefits of failure transparency

Building a more accurate map of the world so that resources are better allocated, we can identify and highlight trends in mistakes, and also help the broader world outside of EA improve. (Read More)

Creating a strong and trustworthy signal of our values (Read More)

Creating a stronger community (Read More)

Risks and Costs

Opportunity costs (Read More)

Reputational costs (Read More)

If we engage in discourse less responsibly, there is a risk of harming existing discourse norms, which could result in less failure discourse in the long run. (Read More)

Transparency being used against you or unfairly advantaging others (Read More)

When to engage in discourse

When considering our own mistakes, keep in mind the relevance of the mistake, the value of information you could gain from reflecting further on it or getting external opinions, whether others would find it valuable, and if you’re ready to hear your mistakes. If you’re higher status in the community, it may make sense to have a lower bar for sharing mistakes. If you’re in a competitive field outside of EA, it may be worth having a higher bar. (Read More)

When considering others’ mistakes, consider what you are hoping to achieve with the feedback, and how likely the other actor is to be open to feedback. Also consider whether the appropriate forum of engagement is private of public. It may also be worth factoring in the status of the actor you’re criticising. If you choose to communicating publicly, be careful when expressing your level of confidence and extrapolating. (Read More)

A few links that might be more concretely helpful when you’re actually trying to talk about failure (Read More)

Linguistic note: I refer to organisations and individuals collectively as “actors”. I also use the terms “failure” and “mistakes” somewhat interchangeably throughout this post. But I try to stick to “failure” for the most part.

Thanks to Arjun Khandelwal for extensive copyediting and review, and Adam Gleave for brainstorming on whiteboards. Thanks to Nathan Young, Abi Olvera, Ben Millwood, Arjun & Adam for many (many) helpful suggestions and comments. I’ve tried to cite in the footnotes where possible but I’m sure I’ve forgotten a bunch!

Introduction

The goal of this post is to discuss some heuristics on when it makes sense to discuss our own and other’s failures and mistakes in the EA community. I hope it provides a balanced and fair view of the considerations.

Failures are pretty complex and can be caused by a lot of different things. Some are caused by mistakes that were knowable in advance, others by things that could not have been predicted or were out of someone’s control. Some failures are related to not living up to one’s values and causing harm to other people, while other mistakes negatively impact one’s own productivity or growth without causing direct harm to anyone else. It seems like all of the above are valuable, depending on who is reading. People external to EA might particularly care about value-related failures, while those working at EA organisations might benefit from knowing how other organisations have made mistakes that negatively harmed their productivity.

Failure discourse in EA currently

This section might be most useful to those new to the community or interested in a summary of failure discourse in the EA community.

The EA community can be keen to learn from ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The role of academia in AI Safety., published by PabloAMC on March 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

AI Safety started as a realization some rationalists had about the possibility of building up powerful general intelligent systems, and how we may control them. Since then, however, the community has grown. My favorite version of the bottom line is something like

We want to build intelligent systems because we believe they could bring up lots of wonderful things, and it will become one of the most important technologies humankind has ever invented. We further want to make sure that powerful AI systems are as beneficial to everyone as possible. To ensure that is indeed the case, we need to make sure AI systems can understand our desires and hopes, both as individuals and as a society, even when we do not have a clear picture of them or they conflict. AI Safety is about developing the techniques that allow AI systems to learn what we want, and how we can fulfill this future.

On the other hand, in the community, there is a lot of focus on existential risk, which is a true thing, but it is definitely not necessary to make the point about the importance of AI Safety. Maybe the focus on quantities will appeal to very rational-oriented people but has the stark risk of making people feel they are being Pascal mugged (I certainly did the first time). For this reason, I think we have to change the discourse.

Similarly, I think much of the culture of the early days persist today. It was focused on independent research centers like MIRI or independent researchers because the early community thought academia was not ready for the task of creating a new research field centered on understanding intelligence. Alternatively, perhaps because of the influence of Silicon Valley, startup stood up as a sexy place to work on AI Safety too.

However, I think that the time has come to make sure AI Safety becomes a respected academic field. I know that we don't like many things about academia: it is bureaucratic, credentialist, slow to move, too centered on ego, promoter of publication races to the bottom and of poor quality of peer reviews. But academia is also how the world perceives science and how they tell knowledge from quackery. It is a powerful machine forcing researchers to make concrete advances in their field of expertise, and most of the time if they do not it is because science is very hard, not because the incentives do not push them brutally to do so.

I also know people believe AI Safety is preparadigmatic, but I argue we have to get over it, or risk building castles in the air. There does not need to be a single paradigm, but we certainly need at least some paradigm to push forward our understanding. It's ok if we have many. This would allow us to solve subproblems in concrete ways, instead of staying in high-level ideas about how we would like things to turn out. Let's have more academic (peer-reviewed) papers, not because blog posts are bad, but because we need to show good and concrete solutions for concrete problems, and publishing papers forces us to do so. Publishing papers provides the tight feedback we seek if we want to solve AI Safety, and academia the mentoring environment we need to face this problem. And in fact, it seems that the lack of concreteness of the AI Safety problems is one key aspect that may be holding back extraordinary researchers from joining efforts in a problem that they also believe to be important.

Instead of academia, our community relies sometimes on independent researchers. It is comforting that some of us can use the money we have to carry out this important research, and I celebrate it. But I wished this were more the exception than the rule. AI Safety might be a new field, but science nowadays is hardly a place where one can make any...

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: Cause profile: Cognitive Enhancement Research, published by George Altman on March 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Short summary

This post is a first attempt at analysing cognitive enhancement research using the ITN framework and cost-effectiveness estimates. Several interventions enhance cognitive functions such as intelligence and decision making. If we identify effective, cheap and scalable cognitive enhancement interventions, they may be competitive with GiveWell charities.

In the long term, cognitive enhancement may act as an accelerator for technological development. There are concerns that this rapid development could increase the ability of small groups to cause harm and therefore increase anthropogenic existential risk. However, improved decision making in the long term would be desirable.

The two barriers to tractability are poor coordination in the research field and regulatory barriers to licensing medications. Current developments in cognitive enhancement have happened mainly as byproducts of other research fields. It lacks a cohesive scientific community. There are no apparent evolutionary barriers to solvability. However, there are significant regulatory barriers as new medicines must be licensed to treat a specific medical condition.

Cognitive enhancement research is neglected in comparison to similar fields. There is considerable uncertainty around funding from non-public, pharmaceutical and government sources. Overall, there may be impactful funding opportunities for effective altruists in cognitive enhancement research.

About me

I am currently a Junior Doctor working in the UK. I wrote about cognitive enhancement for my medical ethics dissertation and became interested in it as a cause area. Subsequently, I have worked with Jan Brauner and Fabienne Sandkühler on trials investigating the effectiveness of creatine as a cognitive enhancer. Although I am not an expert in cause prioritisation or cost-effectiveness estimates, I hope this post will be helpful as a first attempt at assessing this cause area.

Funding

I have received funding from EA Funds to work on this cause profile and on creatine RCTs with Jan Brauner.

Introduction

Cognitive enhancement research is not currently a focus area for organisations within effective altruism, although it has been written about extensively by writers associated with effective altruism.1–5

I use the functionalist definition of cognitive enhancement: something which “...improves the ability of a person to perform a specific task, either by improving an existing capacity or by creating a new capacity.”6 Many interventions within effective altruism aim to increase cognitive abilities, such as salt iodisation, de-worming, and lead exposure elimination. However, unlike cognitive enhancement, these are generally treatments for a disease or deficiency.

There are many forms of cognitive enhancement. Considered broadly, many common interventions such as schooling, writing, optimising sleep and computer software can be a cognitive enhancement. Other novel technologies, such as genetic interventions, transcranial magnetic stimulation and neural implants, may also be cognitive enhancers. However, I will only consider pharmacological cognitive enhancement in this post. I also include ‘nutraceutical’ interventions such as creatine, where dietary supplementation may have cognitive effects. I don't include broad interventions because they have been covered extensively elsewhere. I don’t consider novel interventions such as transcranial magnetic stimulation or neural implants as I cannot accurately assess them. Further work evaluating the relative importance of each of these interventions would be valuable.

This post will include an attempt to estimate the cost-effectiveness of developing new cognitive enhancement inter...

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: Do a cost-benefit analysis of your technology usage, published by TurnTrout on March 27, 2022 on LessWrong.

If an unaligned entity invests billions of dollars into an application which you use, where they benefit from wasting your time, and you haven’t at least done a cost-benefit analysis so that your usage minimizes your costs and maximizes your benefits—You are probably getting fucked over.

Mistake: Motivatedly avoiding thinking about the issue

Last summer, my friend Kurt Brown told me about Digital Minimalism. The modern world is mired in attention-sucking apps which compete to waste as much of your time as possible. The book’s remedy: stepping back from non-essential internet usage, so that you can evaluate what really matters to you. After a month has come and gone, you add back in those digital activities which are worth it to you.

Unfortunately, this is the part of the story where we all cringe at my past behavior. I gave Kurt some excuses, demurring from his implicit recommendation that I read the book. I asked more questions, but so that I could learn more about what he’d been up to. I wasn’t going to actually do it. I think it sounded monastic and uncomfortable and I’m not one of those people who needs it, I already have lots of locks on my devices.

And locks I had. I restricted my iPhone with a password only known by a friend, so that I was unable to access eg Reddit without wiping my device, or asking my friend for the code. My phone was in black and white to minimize how appealing it would be, I had an outdated model to make using my phone less enjoyable. I didn’t have notifications for anything but phone calls. I still wasted several hours a day on my phone, although I was always (motivatedly) surprised by this. I thought I was spending at least 70% of my phone-time productively, by reading LessWrong and Wikipedia, or engaging in work communication. In this scenario, I didn’t want to upend my life for a month in order to save less than an hour a day (even though it still would have been worth it in the long run).

This school year, I’ve had problems focusing and relaxing. I tried exercise, different medication, but nothing hit the spot. I wasn’t reading textbooks like I wanted to, my attention was fractured, I often felt behind my schedule. I was still doing my job and making progress—just not as much as I wanted.

This spring, I read a LessWrong post which mentioned Digital Minimalism. Luckily, this triggered my “if several reasonably smart EAs swear by the benefits of X, investigate X” trigger-action plan.

Digital Minimalism

I listened to the first half of the book on Audible in one night. As I wrote above:

If an unaligned entity invests billions of dollars into an application which you use, where they benefit from wasting your time, and you haven’t at least done a cost-benefit analysis so that your usage minimizes your costs and maximizes your benefits—You are probably getting fucked over.

I was immediately convinced that this thesis is correct, and resolved to start my month-long “digital declutter” the next day.

Time costs

Consider why you originally bought a cell phone. It was probably to call people, to text people, to take photos, to get GPS navigation. Would you have bought it if you foresaw how you would feel an urge to check it even during a dinner with a friend you hadn’t seen in a long time? Would you have bought it if you knew you would take impatiently take it out of your pocket dozens of times a day, staring at it 2+ hours daily?

The point isn’t “phone bad, never use phone, quit now.” My phone provides me with enormous benefits. The point is where was the cost-benefit analysis, what tf has happened to us?!

Readers of this forum are probably better about their usage. Let’s be (too) generous and cut that to a mere two hours wasted daily on ...