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: Policy Work in the European Parliament - Impressions from my Internship, published by EP intern on March 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

From September 2021 to February 2022, I worked as a trainee in the European Parliament for one of the political groups. In this post I am reflecting on my perceptions of the influence of political advisors working in the Parliament and on some other aspects of work there. My overall judgement is that political advisors can have some beneficial influence in some situations given the wide reach of EU legislation among other factors.

Working as a political advisor in the European Parliament

There are two types of political advisors in the European Parliament: advisors working directly for a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and advisors working for a political group. The former are known as Accredited Parliamentary Assistants (APA) and I will refer to the latter as “group advisors”. The word assistant in APA is a bit deceptive, because APAs usually play a key role in the MEP's political work. Few perform exclusively administrative activities (although many are also responsible for administration). Each political group in the European Parliament also employs advisors who do not work for individual MEPs, but for the group as a whole and in a specific committee. Advisors working for the group tend to be older and more experienced than APAs; often they have previously worked as APAs.

Much of the day-to-day work of advisors consists of drafting amendments to proposed regulations or draft resolutions, negotiating such amendments with advisors from other groups to create majorities, consulting with MEPs on amendments, coordinating the group's position across committees and assessing amendments from other groups with regard to the position of their own group or MEP.

Important qualities of advisors are focus and speed because they often work under time pressure. Advisors also need to communicate well and should be fine with submitting to the authority of MEPs.

The influence of political advisors

Advisors have very limited influence on any issue on which there is a party line (and this includes most of the big topics of politics). Then there are other questions which do not directly affect political battle lines. These are topics that are unexciting to the wider public (which need not always mean they are not important) or practical questions relating to a more prominent issue. Most of the work occupying MEPs and advisors probably goes into this category. My impression is that an experienced advisor can make a difference here, because MEPs are to a certain extent dependent on advisors' input: they don't have enough time to deal with all matters in as much detail as advisors and moreover, unlike MEPs, advisors are recruited based on their ability and experience. (However, I'm not suggesting that most MEPs are incompetent.)

A capable advisor who genuinely wants to make a difference can do so by putting in more effort in such a situation than an average advisor and providing different input. (However, I do believe that many advisors are motivated beyond professional incentives to do a good job.) Of course, an advisor can also make a positive contribution to legislation through special expertise in unpoliticized areas, especially since the counterfactual advisor is likely a generalist, not an expert.

I have not had direct experience of the work of APAs but I have had exchanges with several of them and asked them in particular about their advisory role. The unanimous answer was that MEPs do care about their opinions and advice. Their advantage relative to the group’s political advisors may be that they can establish a far closer relationship to their MEP, possibly making their advice count more. A disadvantage is that APAs’ productivi...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How to Lumenate (UK Edition), published by cmessinger on March 13, 2022 on LessWrong.

When my partner and I decided to move in together, I promised I would make our home bright and lumenated and optimized in ways that matter. So early on I bought three lamps (and fairy lights for the bedroom) and bought the brightest possible lightbulbs in lumens I could get on Amazon and made a lot of mistakes because it turns out in the UK there are like 4 kinds of standard lightbulbs including like mini ones with mini little threads that made me feel like I had bought a toy and tried to install it into a real life electronic device.

And I asked him if it was good, and he said it was.

And then four months later, I thought, "but couldn't it be a lot brighter in here?" and he said "yes" and I realized I had not held to my promise at all, so I doubled the number of lamps in the living room, and I asked him if it was good, and he said it was.

And then two months after that, I thought "but couldn't it be a lot brighter in here?" and he said "yes" and I realized I had not held to my promise at all and I decided to Actually Try and apply as much Dakka as it took and follow the instructions here but they weren't that helpful because it's the wrong Amazon, so I found equivalents and made mistakes and did a bunch of arts and crafts and this is what I now have in my apartment. It's likely nowhere near ideal, and I would be thrilled to get to add better options.

Important Information:

Lightbulb thread types: check the specs when you buy

E27/E26: which is what I consider "normal" and is what you'd expect if you bought a standard lightbulb in the US. E26/27 are apparently interchangeable?

Googled it: E26 vs E27, what's the difference? E26 stands for 26 mm and the E27 for 27 mm in diameter. These two standards are interchangeable, meaning a US E26 will fit in a European E27 base, and E27 will fit in a E26 base. The only difference is the voltage (for light bulbs).

B22: No, don't buy these for anything I suggest below, they have two stick out pieces on either side of the base and no thread, some lights in my apartment take these but nothing I suggest below.

E14: weirdly small cylinder as a base, with threading

General information:

Lumens are brightness, the more the better for this purpose. I aimed for 2000 lumens with each light and rarely found it

Lighting color temperature is measured in Kelvin, the higher the number the cooler and more like daylight. I aimed for as high as I could get for the bright lights, usually got 5000K or 4000K, and got 2700 for soft light, but didn't put that much thought into it. The 2700 are too yellow for my preference if I was being picky. Chart here.

I bought the dimmer as recommended in the original article but most lightbulbs that fit my purposes on Amazon UK were nondimmable so I don't recommend one here

Products

[x2] Lamp with two lightbulb holders:

The key thing here is that you need different kinds of lightbulbs for the two sockets. I used the two sockets to have cool light in the top one and warm light in the bottom one.

The top socket uses E27 threading, the bottom one uses E14 threading

[x2] Lamp with one lightbulb holder:

Uses E27 threading

A lamp that came with the apartment that takes E27 lightbulbs

This string of sockets:

I alternated warm lightbulbs and cool lightbulbs

Note: it's meant for outdoors, looks a little ridiculous inside, especially because it's so long I have it looped around my command hooks which gives a funny effect I've grown to like, but it's not top notch aesthetics

Caveat emptor: it takes E27 threaded lightbulbs (and comes with its own, which are dimmable but not very bright) but it turns out that the Litake brand which I bought first doesn't quite reach long enough into the socket to get the threads to meet, and so I had to return ...

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: Book review of "Mengzi", published by Anonymous on March 12, 2022 on LessWrong.

Book review of “Mengzi: With Selections From Traditional Commentaries”, trans. Bryan W. Van Norden

This is a review of a classical Chinese philosophical text with a heavy focus on virtue ethics and politics. I don’t have any knowledge of Classical Chinese, I’m not a philosopher, and I’m not very virtuous. You may instead want to read the SEP entry on Mengzi, or just buy the book and read it – 2300 years of Confucian scholars can’t be wrong!

Introduction

The Confucian or Ruist tradition within Chinese philosophy seems underrated in the West. Everybody likes Buddhism and Daoism. People particularly love pretty-sounding mistranslations of the Daodejing by authors who don’t know any Chinese. People love Zen (or Chan, in the Chinese reading of the character). People have even heard of Zhuangzi and/or a butterfly.

But almost nothing from Confucianism has percolated into the popular culture. Everyone knows there was a guy named Confucius who went around saying wise stuff, but nobody even knows any of the aphorisms (even though they're often great), let alone actually reading any of the Confucian canon.

I think the explanation for this is pretty obvious. Eastern philosophy really started taking off in the West during the 60s. But at that time, there was just no market for a philosophy saying you should obey your parents and elder siblings, be loyal to the state, patiently study old books, and cultivate temperance and good manners.

That's still going to be unappealing to a lot of people today (especially to LessWrong readers, who are probably more likely than average to distrust authority, to dislike formal schooling, and to think there is little value in tradition).

But I think Confucian philosophy does offer an interesting perspective that is of increasing value. After all, it was developed by and for highly educated scholars who also wanted to have a real-world impact.

These were people who were carefully trained from a young age to excel at high-stakes standardized tests that determined their entire future. They studied hard to become intellectuals, yet at the same time wanted to do good in the real world. It even turns out many of them (increasingly so in the Song-Ming period) were interested in mindfulness meditation, with a focus on personal effectiveness rather than the Buddhist focus on enlightenment. After their years of study, they ended up in practical careers, and had to stand in front of powerful officials and try to persuade them to do good, against the forces of corruption and political expedience.

I think there may be something of interest to learn from this tradition. And van Norden says: "When people ask me which Confucian classic to read first, I answer without hesitation: the Mengzi."

Review of the Book Itself As a Text

The book itself consists of a translation of the text of the Mengzi, followed by translations of selected traditional commentaries on the Mengzi. Those commentaries are essential, as Van Norden points out. First, people for many centuries learned the Mengzi alongside its commentaries; and second, many common interpretations of Mengzi in fact come from the commentaries but are often mistakenly read into the text itself. It helps to have them there.

A particularly important commentary is that of Zhu Xi, who lived in the 12th century AD, and usually gets compared to a Chinese version of Thomas Aquinas. The Mengzi along with his commentary became one of the four books that formed the basis of the Chinese civil service exam for many centuries to come.

Van Norden also throws in his own commentaries from time to time, which has to be fun for a scholar of Confucianism – he gets to participate in this ancient textual tradition.

The translation is extremely clear and rea...

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: Challenges to Yudkowsky's Pronoun Reform Proposal, published by Zack M Davis on March 13, 2022 on LessWrong.

Go, Soul, the body's guest, Upon a thankless errand: Fear not to touch the best; The truth shall be thy warrant: Go, since I needs must die, And give the world the lie.

"The Lie" by Walter Raleigh

Summary

In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns: as a matter of language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw: you shouldn't be required to commit to a stance on what sex someone is in order to say a grammatical sentence about her or him.

This seems fine as a critique of the existing English language. However, Yudkowsky then goes on to proclaim, in connection with pronouns for transgender people, that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just is the normative definition. Because it is logically rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition into the very language protocol we are using to communicate."

However, this allegedly "simplest and best" proposal fails to achieve its stated aim of avoiding baking controversial claims into the language grammar. The reason trans people want others to use their designated pronouns is because they're trying to control their socially-perceived sex category and English speakers interpret she and he as conveying sex-category information. Yudkowsky's proposed circular redefinition is functionally "hypocritical": if it were actually true that he simply referred to those who take the pronoun he, then there would be no reason for trans people to care which pronoun people used for them.

The "meaning" of language isn't some epiphenominal extraphysical fact that can be declared or ascertained separately from common usage. The word "dog" means what it does because English speakers use the word that way; if you wanted "dog" to mean something different, you'd need to change the way English speakers behave. Thus, circularly redefining he and she as purportedly referring to pronoun preferences rather than sex doesn't work, if people are still in practice choosing pronouns on the basis of perceived sex.

Given that she and he do in fact convey sex category information to English speakers, some speakers might perceive an interest in refusing demands to use pronouns in a way that contradicts their perception of what sex people are. This does not constitute a philosophical commitment that pronouns can be "lies" as such.

In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky seemingly denies that pronouns convey sex category information to English speakers, claiming, "I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." This self-report is not plausible, as evidenced by previous writings by Yudkowsky that treat sex and pronouns as synonymous.

I'm not claiming that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun usage policy. I agree that misgendering all trans people "on principle" seems very wrong and unappealing. Rather, I'm claiming that policy debates should not appear one-sided: in order to be politically neutral in your analysis of why someone might choose one pronoun usage policy over another, you need to acknowledge the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties. It can simultaneously be the case that pressuring speakers to use pronouns at odds with their perceptions of sex is a cost to those speakers, and that failing to exert such pressure is a cost to trans peopl...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Projects I'd Like to See, published by finm on March 13, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Below is a list of EA project ideas which I've been thinking a bit about over the last few months. I'd be interested if people think I should take turn any of these ideas into top-level posts or shortform posts (and in future whether posts for individual ideas are better than a long list like this). Thanks!

I expect this will end up being part 1 of N, where E(N)≈3 this year. Note that the order is mostly arbitrary.

If you could see yourself actually working on one of these, please do let me know. I might be able to connect you to other people who could work with, elaborate on details, or help you find funding.

Longtermist visualisations

Imagine a ‘timeline of everything’, showing major events (astronomical, geological, historical) from the Big Bang to the end of time. Users can zoom in and out, much like existing apps that show the scale of the universe.

Appreciating the vast amount of time ahead of us, and the relatively brief period of time that all of recorded human history makes up, is a key underlying intuition for longtermist arguments. The website could explain longtermist ideas as link to relevant reading, like The Precipice.

Various timelines of the universe have been made in video or graphic form, such as here. But I suspect being able to navigate through different scales of time yourself might be a very different experience.

Ultimately, you could imagine a website hosting a series of visualizations illustrating various longtermist ideas. These visualisations and graphics, some interactive, some updated with live data, could be tied together with essays about key longtermist topics, amounting to a kind of undirected, highly visual introduction to ideas from effective altruism and longtermism. You could imagine a handful of ‘tracks’ (e.g. big history, existential risks, technological progress, human progress) which tie together these graphics, once enough are made. I am excited by the prospect of Our World In Data adding new charts which could be of special interest from a longtermist perspective. But I do think this project could be different enough to warrant being separate, because the visualisations could be more creative, various in form, and perhaps less squarely data-driven.

I made a small start on this idea last year, and made plans to hire for it, but left it by the wayside because I got distracted.

Meta book ideas

Book grantmaking

As I understand it, a lot of involved work is required to secure a book deal, and ∴ to start on the process of writing the book. Before you can get an advance from one of them, you need to shop an idea around publishers, or find an outside agent you can trust to do so. The author typically needs to put a lot of their own time into this process, and in any case will need to wait before a deal goes through to begin writing with the confidence that their time is being put to good use. First-time or more obscure authors have it especially bad, since they have little to show to prospective publishers. This is presumably bad, at best because it uses up the time of people who's time is valuable and could be used just writing the book; and at worst because it makes potentially impactful books less likely to happen in the first place, for this reason.

In this new context for EA where money appears to be much less of a constraining factor, I wonder if this problem can be fixed. Imagine a group of evaluators with (i) a good amount of context on EA ideas, and (ii) a decent understanding of the world of publishing. As a prospective EA author, you apply with your book idea to this team, and if the pitch meets a basic threshold, then you quickly receive an advance. After that, the work of finding a publisher falls to this team of specialist...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: New GPT3 Impressive Capabilities - InstructGPT3 [1/2], published by WayZ on March 13, 2022 on LessWrong.

Summary

InstructGPT3 (hereafter IGPT3), a better version of GPT3 has recently been released by OpenAI. This post explores its new capabilities.

IGPT3 has new impressive capabilities and many potential uses. Among others, it can help users:

Brainstorm

Summarize the main claims made by a scientific field, an author or a school of thought.

Find an analogy or a metaphor for something hard to explain

I emphasize some of IGPT3's limits, especially situations where It provides very plausible fake answers.

A Twitter (more entertaining) version of the summary:

Introduction

This post has been crossposted from the EA Forum.

Epistemic status: I spent about ~12h with IGPT3. So I’d say that I now have a pretty good sense of some of its key features. I tried several examples to ensure that I was not overfitting on a single example for the most important claims I made. That said, this is a huge model so there is probably a lot more to be discovered. FYI I had spent a decent amount of time playing with the past GPT3, especially with the Davinci (175b params) and the Curie (6b params) models, so I had a clear idea of "what it is like to try to get nice completions from GPT3". That may be one reason why I’m so amazed by this one.

Here's the first post of a series of 2 blog posts exploring some of the IGPT3 (I) new capabilities and (II) epistemic biases.

This first post will focus on some interesting uses I had of IGPT3. It also gives a sense of how good it is in various domains. Let me tell you: I'm amazed by its new capabilities. I find it really impressive that most of the time, the first result I get, without any tuning (either of the parameters or of the prompt) is great. You can try it yourself here.

The blogpost is organized as follow:

A few general observations

2 mains parts (Examples of Potential Uses / Limits)

The last part entitled “Many more prompts than you wanted to read” where I put robustness checks, I test how sensitive IGPT3 is to unique words variations, I compare IGPT3 and GPT3 and I show how you can have fun with IGPT3.

Acknowledgment: Thanks to JS and Florent Berther for the proofreading, to Ozzie Gooen for the suggestion to make a post out of my comments on his post and to Charbel-Raphaël Segerie for some nice ideas.

General Features

Here are some general features of IGPT3:

Compared to GPT3, you need to spend much less time prompt-tuning on IGPT3. You just need to be clear enough.

When the temperature (a parameter to control the randomness of the completion) is greater than 0, you need to try less than 2 completions to find a satisfactory answer when IGPT3 has one. And most of the time, a single completion is enough. A temperature of 0 also works very well, so I personally use that for most uses.

IGPT3 now knows when to stop so you can put a huge maximum limit of tokens and he will generally only use a small part of it to answer your question. Given this new feature, you just have to ask him if you want something specific. Here are some examples:

If you want many suggestions, you can ask for it explicitly: "Give me the five best arguments".

If you want something more specific, you can explicitly ask for it: "I don't understand X, can you elaborate ?"

Examples of Potential Uses

Brainstorming

IGPT3 is very useful to brainstorm. I personally use it more and more because it enables me to quickly generate a lot of ideas on anything I want to think about.

Project Names

IGPT3 is useful to sometimes suggest associations of concepts you hadn’t thought of. That way, it can help find good names.

Differences and Similarities between Concepts

Rapidly Accessing Information

I use IGPT3 more and more to make sure that I didn’t miss a big argument on a topic because IGPT3 is ve...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: A new media outlet focused on philanthropy, published by teddyschleifer on March 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Hi all

Longtime reader, first time poster. I'm probably delinquent in making this pitch, but some EA friends of mine encouraged me to write in under the logic that if you're interested in effective altruism, you may find what we're building at Puck, our new publication, to be of value.

Puck is a new investor-backed media outlet focused on the inside conversation in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street and Washington, and I am one of the founding partners over there. I came to Puck after about five years covering donors and their work in politics and philanthropy (first at CNN, and then at Vox); at Puck, I'm continuing to write about the world of Silicon Valley wealth, trying to report out a specific question at the heart of the Forum — how can people with resources do the most good for the world? I describe myself as EA-sympathetic, although I find myself driven primarily by a desire to equip the public with new information about a philanthropic sector that is not as transparent as many of us would like.

Over the last few months, for instance, we've written about a lot of EA topics — such as the pandemic preparedness efforts of Sam Bankman-Fried; the political activities of Dustin Moskovitz and Open Phil; and broken news about lots of the big philanthropists, such as MacKenzie Scott, Peter Thiel and Laurene Powell Jobs. A particular area of interest of mine, and perhaps to some of you, is the collision between EA and Democratic politics, or how Democratic donors can bring EA principles to campaigns and outside groups.

Anyway, you'll see that the links above are paywalled in pursuit of building a new media model, but you can read one article for free by trading an email address, and I'd be happy to email you any full story you're interested in ([email protected]) If you'd like to sign up to receive this reporting straight in your inbox, you can enter your address here.

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: Community Builder Writing Contest: $20,000 in prizes for reflections, published by Akash on March 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TLDR: I am running a writing contest for community builders.

The judges and I are looking for reflections that achieve one of the following goals:

Help you improve your community-building efforts (e.g., by gaining clarity on your theory of change, planning your career, or reflecting on an event/project you recently completed).

Help others improve their community-building efforts (e.g., by sharing a strategy, lesson, or story that others would benefit from).

Note that we are especially excited about submissions that focus on longtermist community-building. However, reflections that focus on general community-building efforts and neartermist community-building efforts will also be considered.

EDIT: Submissions received by April 30, 2022 will be reviewed (note that submissions received by March 31, 2022 will be eligible for early-bird prizes). Each person (or team) can submit up to three entries.

Note that the deadline has been extended in response to feedback.

What kinds of submissions are you looking for?

Broadly, we are looking for submissions that either help you or help others improve as a community-builder.

Reflections that help you:

We understand that the prompt “write reflections that help you become more impactful” is rather broad. Here are some examples of things we’d be excited to see:

Write down your theory of change

Reflect on a key uncertainty

Find ways to achieve your goals more effectively

Imagine a future version of yourself two years from now that is 10X more impactful than your present self

Reflect on career aptitudes you’re hoping to test/develop (see also this exercise)

Engage in structured career planning

Take a project idea and consider if there are ways to pursue it 10X more ambitiously or 10X faster.

Apply goal factoring (or other techniques) to help you make a decision

Identify bugs that currently reduce your productivity.

Reflections that help others:

Experienced community builders often have access to models and strategies that could help others, but these insights often don’t get shared widely.

Examples in this category include posts like Lessons Learned from Running Stanford EA and SERI, Get in the Van, and Simplify EA Pitches to “Holy Shit, X-Risk”.

(Note that these are just examples– you can absolutely submit entries that use a different style. As a general rule, do whatever might help you or others become more impactful).

What are the prizes?

We will distribute up to $20,000 in prizes.

1st place- $3,000

2nd place- $2,000

3rd place- $1,000

4th and 5th place- $750 each

Other high-quality submissions- $500 each

Top 3 submissions received by March 31- $1000 each

If we receive more than 30 high-quality submissions, we may expand the prize pool to reward additional semifinalists.

EDIT: We will be awarding three early-bird prizes ($1000 each) to the three best submissions received by March 31.

Who is eligible to participate?

Community-builders (individuals involved in building the effective altruism community) will be best-suited for this contest, but anyone is eligible to participate.

How will submissions be judged?

The judging panel will consist of me (Akash Wasil) and a panel of experienced movement builders.

Broadly, we are looking for submissions that demonstrate high-quality reasoning, truth-seeking, and an impact-oriented mindset.

Here are some tips:

Demonstrate strong reasoning transparency.

Acknowledge why you believe what you believe (note that in some cases this might be “because other people who I trust say so” or “because I have observed this at several student group meetings.”)

Indicate how confident you are in your claims and which of your claims are most important.

Write about topics that ar...

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: Ways to invest your wealth if you believe in a high-variance future?, published by Alex Altair on March 11, 2022 on LessWrong.

I largely follow standard financial advice, for example I have a moderate fraction of my wealth in retirement accounts. But I also put substantial weight on the future being... extremely high variance, such that I think there's a pretty good chance that "putting money away" will end up having been useless or at least not very useful. Generally I think it would be a pretty bad idea to have a specific belief about how the future is going to be extremely different and therefore wildly go against currently accepted financial best practices. But it seems highly reasonable, if one believes in the most important century hypothesis, to somehow change your investment plans for that. Here are some relevant futures I can imagine;

A straight-up fast-take-off singularity.

There's a mini-armageddon that causes some societal infrastructure to collapse. Maybe banks fail and I lose that money, or maybe people stop using USD and start bartering with petroleum and gold.

Society moves toward post-scarcity in a way that makes money less useful.

The legislative landscape changes. Maybe congress appropriates retirement accounts for emergency use. Or maybe longevity tech is going really well, and people's lifespans are longer congress extends the age at which you can take the money out. Maybe they retroactively change capital gains such that investing money was useless.

One problem I'm having is that while it's easy to come up with ideas that are useful in some of these scenarios (e.g. build a nuclear bunker) they're totally wasted in the other scenarios. It feels like there should be some way to convert current money into a non-abstract asset that would be always useful, and also fungible in the future. Like can I... somehow buy and store a ton of joules? Or can I somehow... buy 10 years worth of non-perishable food, to make sure I don't starve? When I try to think through these, the logistics seem to be more costly than any expected benefit.

The category that feels most promising to me is something like, invest in making myself a person more able to handle those high-variance scenarios. Gain skills in operations, negotiation, maintain good health, etc. But like, "become a stronger person" is just the kind of thing I'm always trying to do anyway, and it mostly seems to require time and cognitive resources. The thing I'm trying to figure out is how to convert money into being a stronger person.

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: Let Russians go abroad, published by Viktoria Malyasova on March 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Once Putin launched a full-scale invasion on Ukraine, many countries all over the world decided to come to Ukraine's aid. They gave Ukraine weapons, imposed sanctions on Russia and offered refuge to Ukrainians fleeing bombings. Voters call on their governments to do more, but the leaders do not want to risk a nuclear war.

I have heard that there are some EAs involved in policy in NATO countries, and I want to suggest a policy your countries can implement. It carries no risk of nuclear escalation, does not cost anything and will only make your countries richer, would weaken Russia's economy, reduce Putin's conscription base and steal his technical talent. It will not be enough to stop the war by itself, but it will help.

Just like the header says, just let Russians enter your country. Open borders would be ideal, but any simplification of the visa process will help.

[PSA: I know a brilliant Russian ML researcher who was working on an AI safety grant before the war started. The grant was cancelled due to sanctions, and this is your chance to hire him to work abroad or remotely.]

Why will this be an effective measure against Putin?

The first effect is on the armed forces. Men who don't want to fight will be able to avoid conscription. Soldiers will find it easier to desert if they AND their family can escape the country, since the regime sometimes targets dissenters' families.

The second effect is to weaken the economy. People leaving the country will stop paying taxes that sponsor the war. And these are not just random people leaving. The emigrants tend to be the people with savings, higher education, in-demand skills, foreign language knowledge and a good grip on reality. The brain drain created by emigration will further undermine Putin's ability to make weapons.

It may also undermine Putin's internal propaganda. People who watch Russian TV sound convinced that everyone hates Russians abroad, I had to reassure my dad that I am not abused in Berlin. This may make people feel that they have no choice left but to stick with their president, but offering refuge to Russians will make it obvious that it's untrue.

In addition to hurting Putin's regime, immigration can be beneficial to your own country.

The benefits of immigration to your country- Immigration increases GDP.- Immigrants are highly entrepreneurial. For example, USA immigrants launch new companies at twice the rate of native-born Americans and create large numbers of jobs. - Immigrants are more likely to be young and working than native citizens, so they provide net benefit to government revenues and improve the social safety net for an aging population.

I'll try to answer some objections that might be raised against this policy.

What if Putin just closes the border?

He might, but then all the soldiers guarding the border cannot be fighting in Ukraine at the same time.

Won't some Russian immigrants be spies?

Yes. But, as the science writer and aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin points out, anyone doing classified work has to go through a security-clearance process. I am advocating for the policy of letting Russians into the country, not for the policy of giving all Russians access to all secrets.

We should cut off escape routes to Russians, in order to incentivize them to overthrow their government!

This argument assumes that overthrowing the government is a matter of being courageous and motivated enough. Below you see a famous picture of an courageous Chinese man stopping tanks on June 5th, 1898, the day after the Tiananmen massacre.

Around 100,000 students participated in those protests, thousands of them were killed, and the protests were suppressed. As Bruce Bueno de Mescita explains in "Dictator's Hand...