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: Exploring Finite Factored Sets with some toy examples, published by Thomas Kehrenberg on March 19, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum.

Seeing as there is little secondary literature for the Finite Factored Set formalism, I thought I’d write up my experience of exploring it through some toy examples that are classic examples in the Pearlian paradigm. My goal was to see how these models that I understood very well in the Pearlian paradigm would work in Finite Factored Sets.

As a warning, this doesn’t make any use of the more exciting properties of Finite Factored Sets. It’s just an exploration of how this formalism handles the mundane stuff. This also means that I’m using the factored set directly, without the abstractions of the orthogonality database. Which I think is fine here, because these are tiny toy examples whose structure is fully known. (However, it’s possible that I’ve missed the entire point of Finite Factored Sets.)

The first example is the 3-variable collider that is very central to Pearl’s formalism. It is given by the following Causal Diagram:

A, B, and C are all binary variables (0=false, 1=true).

The intended meaning of a Causal Diagram (or rather, function causal model) is that the value of a node xi is given by a deterministic function that takes as input the parents, pa(xi), (indicated by the arrows) and an “error”, or “noise”, variable ui that is governed by a probability distribution that is independent from the other error/noise variables: xi=fi(pa(xi),ui). Thus, the value of C is given by c=fc(a,b,uC) where uC is noise or uncertainty that is not explicitly modeled, which we can visualize like this:

We could also split up A and B into a deterministic and a random part, but as they are root nodes, there is little point. It would just be a=fa(uA).

The Pearlian formalism runs on graphs, but Finite Factored Sets run on the set S of all possible outcomes – the sample space. So, the goal is now to construct a sample space that is consistent to the above graph. After that, we’ll find a factorization of that sample space.

I think it should be clear that to cover the whole sample space S, it is sufficient to consider all possible combinations of the outcomes of A, B, and UC (but not C), because if we know the value of these three, then we also know the value of C, via fc.

So, we simply define S as the Cartesian product of the sets of possible values of A and B: A={0,1}, B={0,1}, and the possible values of UC: UC, which I’ll leave undefined for the moment (except to note that it must be a finite set): S=A×B×UC,(a,b,uC)∈S (We use the lowercase letters to represent elements of sets that make up the Cartesian product: a∈A, b∈B, and uC∈UC.)

Then – as is custom in the formalism of Finite Factored Sets – the variables A, B, UC are defined as partitions on S. For example, A is a partition consisting of two parts: 1) the set of elements of S where a=0 and 2) those where a=1: A={{(a,b,uC)∈S|a=0},{(a,b,uC)∈S|a=1}} This captures exactly what the variable A is supposed to represent: the question of whether the first element of the Cartesian product is 0 or 1. B is defined analogously: B={{(a,b,uC)∈S|b=0},{(a,b,uC)∈S|b=1}} And UC as well: UC={{(a,b,uC)∈S|uC=0},.} with an as of yet undefined number of parts in the partition.

Now, given the way we constructed S, the set of partitions G={A,B,UC} is a factorization of S: F=(S,G), because any element of S can be uniquely identified by knowing in which part of A, B, and UC it is, because S is just the Cartesian product of A, B, and UC.

Now that we have the set, let’s look at the probability distribution over S. Let P(A=a′) be shorthand for P({(a,b,uC)∈S|a=a′}), i.e., the probability that the outcome lands in the subset {(a,b,uC)∈S|a=a′} of the sample space S, where the first element of the Cartesian product is equal to a′. We ...

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: Which people get the least social rewards in EA?, published by CristinaSchmidtIbáñez on March 19, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Inspired by a discussion thread I saw recently I got curious about the following questions:

Which groups of people in the EA Community do you think get the least rewarded socially (by the community)?

Do you have any ideas how we can improve this? What actions can we take collectively/individually?

The thread in particular mentioned this "People often express gratitude to great ops people, but it doesn't seem to me that they get invited to the cool parties or involved in the cool conversations."/"I worry a bit that the movement toward "just get every researcher with a big brain a personal assistant" is exacerbating this dynamic. And it's even grosser when you consider the typical gender dynamics"

This seemed to me like something that should be brought to this forum in some shape or form, but I feel this is possibly just the tip of the iceberg. This seemed to me especially important as a lack of social reward can have (in aggregation) a great effect on how the community develops as a whole over the long-term.

If you'd prefer to share your answer(s)/input anonymously, you can do it here: I'll then post your answer here as a comment.

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: Nuclear Deterrence 101 (and why the US can't even hint at intervening in Ukraine), published by Darmani on March 18, 2022 on LessWrong.

This is a linkpost for/ . I found it a very good read for explaining the strategy behind the decisions and signaling in this war. I was inspired to post it as a supplement to , as this piece explains why it's in Zelensky's interest to continue to call for a no-fly zone that could turn into a hot war.

It also answered a question I've had since a child, visiting old friends of my mother from her childhood growing up on military bases, wondering what the US was doing in so many countries. The answer? Their job is quite literally to die to provoke a US response.

Some excerpts below:

One such method that Beaufre discusses is what he calls the ‘piecemeal maneuver,’ but is often in English referred to as ‘salami tactics’ – including in this absolutely hilarious bit from Yes, Prime Minister, which is also a surprisingly good explanation of the method. The idea is that to make gains while avoiding escalation, a state can break up the gains they would make into a series of smaller actions, each with its own exterior maneuver ‘cover,’ so that it doesn’t rise to the level of triggering nuclear escalation. Putting together several such maneuvers could allow a state to make those gains which had they all been attempted at once, certainly would have triggered such an escalation. Beaufre’s example, unsurprisingly, was Hitler’s piecemeal gains before his last ‘bite’ into Poland triggered WWII.

Beaufre notes that for piecemeal maneuvers to be effective, they have to be presented as fait accompli – accomplished so quickly that anything but nuclear retaliation would arrive too late to do any good and of course nuclear retaliation would be pointless: who is going to destroy the world to save a country that was already lost? Thus Beaufre suggests that the piecemeal maneuver is best accomplished as a series of coups de main accomplished with fast moving armored, mechanized and airborne forces seizing control of the target country or region before anyone really knows what is happening. The attacking power can then present the maneuver as fait accompli and thus the new status quo that everyone has to accommodate; if successful, they have not only made gains but also moved everyone’s red lines, creating more freedom of action for further piecemeal maneuvers.

Avoiding this problem is why NATO is structured the way it is: promising a maximum response for any violation, however slight, of the territory of any member. The idea is to render the entire bloc immune to piecemeal maneuvers by putting all of it behind the red line (or at least letting the USSR think it is all behind the red line). It is also why American forces are often forward deployed in effectively trivial numbers in key areas in the world in what are often referred to as ‘tripwire’ deployments. Those American forces, for instance, in Poland, the Baltics or on the Korean DMZ (and during the Cold War, in West Germany) were not there to win the war; their purpose was, in a brutal sense, to die in its opening moments and thus ensure that the United States was committed, whether it wanted to be or not.

And the reason to do that is to signal to both enemies and allies that any incursion into allied territory, no matter how trivial, will cause American deaths and thus incur an American military response. In that way you can shift the red line all of the way forward, obliterating the area of freedom of action, but only for countries where such a commitment is credible (which is going to generally be a fairly small group).

The logic of deterrence – in particular the fact that it is both very high stakes and also based entirely on perception – explains why NATO and especially the United States took any dire...

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: Early Reflections and Resources on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, published by SethBaum on March 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

The opening days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine brought a flurry of dramatic changes to the world. Now, three weeks into the war, conditions on the ground have somewhat stabilized. Further major changes remain very much possible, but meanwhile, there is now an opportunity to reflect on what has happened and what that means for the world moving forward. This post provides some reflections oriented mainly, but not exclusively, for a global catastrophic risk audience, with some emphasis on nuclear weapons.

General Thoughts

This one matters. The war itself poses significant risks and it has a variety of important implications for international affairs. People who work on global catastrophic risk and related issues will benefit from understanding this. One might wonder how much time to spend studying the war. While each person should decide based on their own circumstances, I can say that studying it is not a waste of time.

Whether to try getting involved to help on the immediate situation is a more complex matter. It’s already getting massive attention and effort, including from people who are highly trained to work on this sort of situation. I would be cautious about trying to get involved based on a limited understanding of the issues. For example, understanding the long-term moral importance of global catastrophic risk is a weak basis for making specific policy recommendations. There’s a lot of nuance that goes into international security policy that also needs to be accounted for.

For my part, I have focused on activities that are clearly beneficial and that are not already getting significant attention. On several occasions, I’ve gotten an idea for an activity only to find, upon closer inspection, that it’s a bad idea or that it’s already been done several times over by people more qualified than myself. This is despite the fact that do have some modest background on international security issues, especially nuclear weapons. I am a generalist who sometimes works on nuclear weapons, whereas there are communities of people who specialize on the topic. A healthy dose of humility has helped me avoid making some inappropriate contributions.

More detailed discussion is below. Links to suggested readings are at the end.

Nuclear War Risk

The possibility that nuclear weapons could be used in the ongoing war is a matter of grave concern. Several knowledgeable observers have postulated that the conflict could escalate to nuclear war. From a risk perspective, this raises the questions of what the probability of nuclear war is and how severe it would be. Some estimates of the risk of the Ukraine war escalating to nuclear war have been made by people who are active in geopolitical forecasting. As I discuss in a recent article on nuclear war risk analysis, attempts to quantify the ongoing risk raise significant methodological challenges.

First, nuclear war risk is an inherently difficult risk to quantify. It depends on highly complex and geopolitical factors. A lot of the relevant information is not publicly available. Nuclear war is more-or-less unprecedented; the only precedent, World War II, occurred under circumstances that no longer exist.

Second, the ongoing Ukraine war involves constantly changing circumstances. A risk estimate that is good one day may be bad another day. As an illustration, in the run-up to the war, Robert de Neufville’s estimate of the probability that Russia attacks Ukraine went from 65% to 25% in around one to three days circa Feb 12-15 due to apparent lower tensions. de Neufville is a superforecaster and a former colleague of mine at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, where we co-authored a GCRI paper 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: Apply for Red Team Challenge [May 7 - June 4], published by Cillian Crosson on March 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary

Red Team Challenge is a programme that calls small teams together to "red team" important ideas within effective altruism. The inaugural challenge will run from May 7 - June 4 2022.

This programme will provide training in “red teaming” best practices and then pair small teams of 2-4 people together to critique a particular claim and publish the results. It was directly inspired by this post (so please shower them in counterfactual karma).

There are three distinct parts:

Workshop

A 2-3 hour workshop focused on learning red teaming best practices.

Red Team

A 4 week period where teams of 2-4 people work to independently “red team” a specific idea.

Publication:

A small panel of experienced EA researchers will then judge each submission and select a winning team. Experienced EA researchers will judge & provide feedback to each team’s submission

Our goal is to help aspiring researchers test their fit and hone their reasoning ability while producing a concrete output which is useful to the EA community at large.

Express interest in joining the judging panel here.

Apply here by 15th April.

What is “red teaming”?

A red team is an independent group that challenges a particular organisation, idea or claim in order to improve it. Red teaming is the practice of using red teams.

Within effective altruism, "red teaming" refers to attempts to identify problems or errors in popular or prestigious views held by members of this community, such as views about the value of different causes or organizations. Related concepts include minimal-trust investigations, epistemic spot-checks, and hypothetical apostasy.

Red Team Challenge seeks to promote this practice within effective altruism. This will help break up groupthink, identify ways in which the EA community could be erring, and generally foster strong epistemic norms.

Goal

The goal of this programme is for participants to:

Test their fit for a career in EA-aligned research or an adjacent path

Build skills relevant to becoming a researcher

Working independently & autonomously, deconstructing ideas, identifying weaknesses in arguments, reasoning transparently, etc.

Publish a piece of low-stakes research to build career capital

An additional goal is to foster strong epistemic norms within the EA community, scrutinising new and existing ideas.

Structure of the programme

The program has three discrete parts:

Workshop

A 2-3 hour workshop focused on learning & applying red teaming best practises.

Red Team

A 4 week period where teams of 2-4 people work to independently “red team” a specific idea. The total time spent per person is estimated to be ~16 hours.

A list of suggested ideas will be provided by TFG but participants can choose to red team any idea of their choosing.

Groups can choose to participate together as a team, however we expect that the majority of participants will enter without an existing team.

Publication

We encourage all teams to publish their submissions publicly on the EA Forum.

A small panel of experienced EA researchers will then judge each submission and select a winning team.

Who should apply

Anyone who’s interested.

Whether you’re deeply familiar with effective altruism, have just finished reading Doing Good Better, currently work as a researcher, or have never used Google before, this programme is open to everyone.

However, we’ve specifically designed this programme for with the following group in mind:

Engaged with EA for at least ~30 hours (e.g. have participated in an Introductory EA Program).

However, we're also excited to see applications from people that have engaged with EA concepts for as many as 300+ hours.

Interested in pursuing a career in EA-aligned research

It's okay if...

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: Only needs a flying saucer, published by Mary Chernyshenko on March 18, 2022 on LessWrong.

This is a personal entry. I do not write it to convey much information, it's more of a point of view thing. I was asked for an inside view, but I guess that's not exactly it.

My mother, my son and I are now in the Czech Republic. This we owe to the goodwill and kindness of very many people, starting with a random guy on the way to the train station in Kyiv. To really describe it, I would need to put "incredible" before every second word, so, like. Let it just be "incredible people".

And now I am in a position to extend the invitation to another friend or family member. I have to choose between N., a mother with her two children and another N., also a mother with two children. Or between one of the mothers-and-kids sets and O., my pregnant sister. Or between O. and the bedridden son of A., the man to whom I owe not jumping out the window. (Not literally. Maybe even not nearly this. Don't know for sure. Only know for sure that A. is not going to leave Kyiv if his son is there. And there is this interesting detail that I am not in direct contact with his son's caretaker. So if anything happens to the man who talked me out of doing stupid things with my life, I will have no way of knowing if anything happens to his son. And I know that, and A. knows that. And A. asks for nothing. Well, he has asked if I have a flying saucer. I don't.)

And if anyone of them manages to come to Czech - it might take a week or more just to come here to Czech - my debt to the master of the house where we are staying grows, well, incredibly much more... My debt to the master of the house who wants himself a Ukrainian wife who knows how to cook and manage the household...

I will have to somehow find a job to help the household because the subsidy for hosting Ukrainians is capped at three Ukrainians. I don't know how I will do it. There is enough work about the house that some nights I don't read any news after dinner; I go to sleep.

My mother is unwell. She doesn't speak Czech. My ten-year-old son is going to start school here. He doesn't speak Czech. I don't speak Czech, and most people I have met here do not speak English, German, Ukrainian or Russian. Frankly, I have my hands full without a job.

And the people back home are hiding in their cellars from bombs falling overhead and hoping, hoping, hoping somebody would tell them they can come and not be alone.

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: Milan Griffes on EA blindspots, published by Gavin on March 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Milan Griffes (maɪ lɪn) is a community member who comes and goes - but so he's a reliable source of very new ideas. He used to work at Givewell, but left to explore ultra-neglected causes (psychedelics for mental health and speculative moral enhancement) and afaict also because he takes cluelessness unusually seriously, which makes it hard to be a simple analyst.

He's closer to nearby thinkers like David Pearce, Ben Hoffman, Andres Gomez Emilsson, and Tyler Alterman who don't glom with EA for a bunch of reasons, chiefly weirdness or principles or both.

Unlike most critics, he has detailed first-hand experience of the EA heartlands. For years he has tried to explain his disagreements, but they didn't land, mostly (I conjecture) because of his style - but plausibly also because of an inferential distance it's important for us to bridge.

He just put up a list of possible blindspots on Twitter which is very clear:

I think EA takes some flavors of important feedback very well but it basically can't hear other flavors of important feedback [such as:]

basically all of @algekalipso's stuff [Gavin: the ahem direct-action approach to consciousness studies]

mental health gains far above baseline as an important x-risk reduction factor via improved decision-making

understanding psychological valence as an input toward aligning AI

@ben_r_hoffman's point about seeking more responsibility implying seeking greater control of others / harming ability to genuinely cooperate

relatedly how paths towards realizing the Long Reflection are most likely totalitarian

embodied virtue ethics and neo-Taoism as credible alternatives to consequentialism that deserve seats in the moral congress

metaphysical implications of the psychedelic experience, esp N, N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT

general importance of making progress on our understanding of reality, a la Dave. (Though EA is probably reasonably sympathetic to a lot of this tbh)

consequentialist cluelessness being a severe challenge to longtermism

nuclear safety being as important as AI alignment and plausibly contributing to AI risk via overhang

EA correctly identifies improving institutional decision-making as important but hasn't yet grappled with the radical political implications of doing that

generally too sympathetic to whatever it is we're pointing to when we talk about "neoliberalism"

burnout & lack of robust community institutions actually being severe problems with big knock-on effects, @ben_r_hoffman has written some on this

declining fertility rate being concerning globally and also a concern within EA (its implications about longrun movement health)

@MacaesBruno's virtualism stuff about LARPing being what America is doing now and the implications of that for effective (political) action

taking dharma seriously a la @RomeoStevens76's current research direction

on the burnout & institution stuff, way more investment in the direction @utotranslucence's psych crisis stuff and also investment in institutions further up the stack

bifurcation of the experience of elite EAs housed in well-funded orgs and plebeian EAs on the outside being real and concerning

worldview drift of elite EA orgs (e.g. @CSETGeorgetown, @open_phil) via mimesis being real and concerning

psychological homogeneity of folks attracted to EA (on the Big 5, Myers-Briggs, etc) being curious and perhaps concerning re: EA's generalizability

relatedly, the "walking wounded" phenomenon of those attracted to rationality being a severe adverse selection problem

tendency towards image management (e.g. by @80000Hours, @open_phil) cutting against robust internal criticism of the movement; generally low support of internal critics (Future Fund grant-making could help with this but I'm skep...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Covid 3/17/22: The Rise of BA.2, published by Zvi on March 17, 2022 on LessWrong.

Omicron has made its way through every major country except one – China. Its time seems to have come. As I noted on Monday, China had already locked down 60 million people amid rapidly rising case counts. Unlike previous rounds where China was able to fully take extreme measures only it could take but that held the promise of physically working, this round’s efforts seem like the exact kind of hope that is not a strategy. They’ll help to slow things down, sure, absolutely, but I can’t find a physical model where they are enough. Things will get out to the rest of China, and locking down over a billion people Chinese-style is simply not an option for any length of time. The resources are not there.

Meanwhile, Europe and the United States are dealing with the rise of BA.2, which is overtaking BA.1. My estimate is it is 25% more infectious than BA.1, which means its raw numbers should indeed be increasing for now, putting as at risk for an additional wave. I do not expect anything that needs to be disruptive, and I expect little appetite for renewed restrictions, but we have indeed done stupider things many times.

So it’s not the best time to notice that it looks like the administration really is out of money for Covid-related things. The standalone bill to provide the funding seems unlikely to pass the Senate. We might actually soon be in a situation where the federal government can spend no money on either vaccine research, other pandemic preparedness or even things like testing and treating the uninsured. Alas, the restrictions that do harm are not the interventions the government will find itself unable to fund.

Executive Summary

BA.2 is taking over for BA.1, perhaps resulting in a small new wave.

China is probably about to be forced out of its Zero Covid policy.

A new highly promising therapeutic has been announced.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 170k cases (-25%) and 7,050 deaths (-22%).

Results: 190k cases (-16%) and 8,609 deaths (-6%).

Prediction for next week: 180k cases (-5%) and 6,300 deaths (-10%).

Note: Deaths excludes a -4,096 count in MA, and excludes 2,300 backlog deaths from SC.

After predicting too many cases for a few weeks running now I predicted too few. Part of that is the rise of BA.2, but the other half is adjustments from previous results causing me to doubt that our behaviors were adjusting as much as I expected to new conditions. It seems that has finally turned around. I expect both trends to continue, and we are probably near the local bottom.

The lack of a further decline in deaths is getting increasingly weird. The implied CFR keeps going up, no matter what pattern of time lag one uses. I do not understand it, but at some point one’s predictions have to fold even if there’s no explanation of why. The number of reported tests is declining but not enough to make us be missing that many more cases.

My new theory is that these are mainly ‘with Covid’ deaths rather than ‘from Covid’ deaths and the definition somehow includes anyone with recent Covid, so people who have actually fully recovered, who then died of something else, are being counted as Covid deaths. I haven’t heard that expressed elsewhere, but if that’s not true, then I got nothing. This number is too high and it does not make sense.

Deaths

This isn’t going to make more sense if I keep looking at it more. Something in the way this data is being tabulated is super fishy.

Cases

Things are still declining in most places, although they have begun creeping up here in New York, which makes sense given that we had our peak slightly earlier as well. Otherwise, the uniformity of timing is remarkable.

Europe, South Korea and Hong Kong

Cases in Europe are up, and a comm...

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: Where would we set up the next EA hubs?, published by mariushobbhahn on March 16, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

A question that we often asked ourselves is “where would be the best spot for a large EA hub?”. By this, we actually mean two questions. Firstly, “Where would be the optimal hub from first principles?” and secondly, “Which locations are currently neglected by the community?”

Recently, a lot of EAs suddenly live (temporarily) in the Bahamas. We think this mostly shows that there is a large number of EAs who have a high willingness to move as long as the outcome justifies it. However, we don’t think the Bahamas are a good long-term destination for an EA hub since they don’t fulfill many of the criteria below. Thus, we think it makes sense to (once again) think more deeply about the location question for EA hubs.

TL;DR: just skim the headlines and suggestions.

Context: The topic of location has been discussed before (see e.g. this 2020 LW post or this MIRI post). We decided to write this post anyway because a) the topic is always relevant, b) previous discussions left out important locations (e.g. Asia, mainland Europe) and c) recent developments (Covid, Bahamas, new companies) changed some considerations.

Of course, these are just preliminary thoughts and we’d be interested in your takes and, more importantly, location suggestions.

Criteria

Broadly sorted by how important we think they are and weighed by different use-cases, e.g. governance vs. industry vs. research. However, feel free to reorder them according to your preferences.

Local Culture & Social Environment

The entire point of having a hub is to be around like-minded people and benefit from the network effects. This becomes especially important when we want to collaborate with people outside of the EA community who do important work on similar problems, e.g. the Bay Area and AI research.

Furthermore, the location should probably have a culture that is compatible with (or at least tolerant of) EA. This often entails an interest in intellectualism that is found in cities with a large university or the entrepreneurial spirit of start-up scenes.

Quality of life

High quality of life usually depends on a lot of different factors such as the cost of living, how walkable a place is, the availability of health and child care, the quality of the internet connection, crime rates, the weather, the availability of housing, and much more.

There are a number of indices that rank cities according to a weighted sum of many factors such as the mercer city ranking, the where-to-be-born index and the most livable cities overview. While there is some disagreement between different rankings, they often rate the current EA hubs outside of their top ten and their top cities usually have a smaller EA presence (e.g., Tokyo, Auckland, Adelaide, Vancouver, Vienna). Of course, EAs could just have very different preferences but it might still be a good starting point to think about these questions from first principles.

The availability of healthcare differs strongly for trans people around the world. Since a non-trivial amount of the wider EA/rationality community is trans, it makes sense to look into this in more detail before building up the hub.

Economic regulatory framework

There is a growing demand for megaprojects in EA. In many countries, the laws for NGOs are made for smaller institutions and do not really allow for these large-scale endeavors. Therefore, either private companies (e.g. FTX, Alvea(?)) or private-public hybrids (e.g. Anthropic, Redwood Research) might become more and more prominent in EA. Thus, the specific economic regulatory framework matters a lot. It is important to be able to set up these hybrid companies in the first place, to be able to hire international workers easily, to allow for interna...

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: Concurso de ensayos sobre Riesgos Catastróficos Globales en Español, published by Jaime Sevilla on March 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

La estabilidad de nuestra sociedad depende de nuestra pericia para prevenir y sobrellevar eventos, de origen natural o humano, que puedan afectar a nuestro mundo a gran escala. Estos Riesgos Catastróficos Globales (RCGs) incluyen pandemias, cambio climático, riesgo nuclear, asteroides, volcanes y riesgos asociados a la inteligencia artificial avanzada, entre otros.

Queremos promover el talento dedicado a estudiar Riesgos Catastróficos Globales y la creación de contenido en español sobre el tema. Para ello, presentamos un concurso de ensayos sobre Riesgos Catastróficos Globales.

El concurso esta abierto hasta el 30 de Mayo de 2022. Se repartirán premios de hasta 1000€.

Más información en nuestra página web.

[English translation]

The stability of our society depends on our ability to prevent and cope with events, natural or man-made, that may affect our world on a large scale. These Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs) include pandemics, climate change, nuclear risk, asteroids, volcanoes, and risks associated with advanced artificial intelligence, among others.

We want to promote talent dedicated to studying Global Catastrophic Risks and the creation of content in Spanish on the subject. To this end, we present an essay contest on Global Catastrophic Risks.

The contest is open until May 30, 2022. Prizes of up to 1000€ will be awarded.

More information on our website.

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