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: Does needle anxiety drive vaccine hesitancy?, published by Matthew Barnett on February 11, 2022 on LessWrong.

Yesterday, Katja Grace asked, "Why do people avoid vaccination?" I suggested that the answer might be anxiety over getting stabbed with a needle. The main idea is that concern over bodily autonomy is common—indeed, it forms the basis of much of our legal system—but people are perhaps too embarrassed to talk about needle anxiety publicly, so they self-deceive themselves about the real reason why they don't want to get their shots.

Since commenting, I've looked into the issue a little bit, and have decided to share some of my findings.

First, although not strong evidence, it is striking to note that there is a strong relationship between age and vaccine uptake. The young, by and large, are more vaccine hesitant than the old, despite being generally more liberal politically.

This is probably explained to a large degree by the fact that Covid-19 is far more dangerous to older people, and older people are on average more trusting of their physicians.

But here's another fact that could help explain the data: needle anxiety is concentrated in the young, and declines sharply with age. From one meta-analysis, "The results of meta-regression indicated that, for every decade increase in age (years), there was an 8.7% (95% CI: 6.0%, 11.4%) decrease in the prevalence of needle fear (p<0.001)."

The same pattern can be observed across the genders. Women are both more likely to be needle phobic and more likely to be vaccine hesitant. The same meta-analysis concludes, "For needle fear, the pooled female:male prevalence ratio was 1.4 (95% CI: 1.1, 1.8) with I2 of 89.8% and τ2 of 0.067. For needle phobia, the pooled female:male prevalence ratio was 1.7 (95% CI: 1.3, 2.1) with I2 of 63.4% and τ2 of 0.038."

By comparison, one study that surveyed a "sample of almost six thousand adult Poles, which was nationally representative in terms of key demographic variables" asking about vaccine hesitancy. Here were their main results,

However, these results may not be robust cross-nationally. In the US, the gender gap looks smaller to me, with FiveThirtyEight even reporting that men were less likely to get the vaccine in June 2021. By September, however, those numbers might have reversed with Pew reporting rates of 74% and 71% having received at least a single dose for adult men and women respectively.

One source just authoritatively states,

Women were significantly more likely to express a desire to delay or reject the Covid-19 vaccine than men were, which is consistent with the existing literature on vaccine hesitancy.

Perhaps the most obvious way of resolving this question is to ask people directly about their needle anxiety and Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy. One study did this and reported,

In total, 3927 (26.2%) screened positive for blood-injection-injury phobia. Individuals screening positive (22.0%) were more likely to report COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy compared to individuals screening negative (11.5%), odds ratio = 2.18, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.97-2.40, p < 0.001.

They continued,

The population attributable fraction (PAF) indicated that if blood-injection-injury phobia were absent then this may prevent 11.5% of all instances of vaccine hesitancy, AF = 0.11; 95% CI 0.09-0.14, p < 0.001.

However, it is unclear to me whether this is a good estimate of the fraction of vaccine hesitancy that is explained by needle anxiety. As I stated earlier, I think many people may be silent about their needle anxiety for reasons of self-deception, as it's admittedly a flimsy reason to avoid taking a medicine that could save other people's lives.

One hypothesis states that people are hesitant because they are concerned that the vaccines were rushed, or that they don't trust the government. While ...

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: To Match the Greats, Don’t Follow In Their Footsteps, published by HoldenKarnofsky on February 11, 2022 on LessWrong.

People who dream of being like the great innovators in history often try working in the same fields - physics for people who dream of being like Einstein, biology for people who dream of being like Darwin, etc.

But this seems backwards to me. To be as revolutionary as these folks were, it wasn’t enough to be smart and creative. As I’ve argued previously, it helped an awful lot to be in a field that wasn’t too crowded or well-established. So if you’re in a prestigious field with a well-known career track and tons of competition, you’re lacking one of the essential ingredients right off the bat.

Here are a few riffs on that theme.

The next Einstein probably won’t study physics, and maybe won’t study any academic science. Einstein's theory of relativity was prompted by a puzzle raised 18 years earlier. By contrast, a lot of today’s physics is trying to solve puzzles that are many decades old (e.g.) and have been subjected to a massive, well-funded attack from legions of scientists armed with billions of dollars’ worth of experimental equipment. I don’t think any patent clerk would have a prayer at competing with professional physicists today - I’m thinking today’s problems are just harder. And the new theory that eventually resolves today’s challenges probably won’t be as cool or important as what Einstein came up with, either.

Maybe today’s Einstein is revolutionizing our ability to understand the world we’re in, but in some new way that doesn’t belong to a well-established field. Maybe they’re studying a weird, low-prestige question about the nature of our reality, like anthropic reasoning. Or maybe they’re Philip Tetlock, more-or-less inventing a field that turbocharges our ability to predict the future.

The next Babe Ruth probably won’t play baseball. Mike Trout is probably better than Babe Ruth in every way,2 and you probably haven't heard of him.

Maybe today’s Babe Ruth is someone who plays an initially less popular sport, and - like Babe Ruth - plays it like it’s never been played before, transforms it, and transcends it by personally appealing to more people than the entire sport does minus them. Like Tiger Woods, or what Ronda Rousey looked at one point like she was on track to be.

The next Beethoven or Shakespeare probably won’t write orchestral music or plays. Firstly because those formats may well be significantly “tapped out,” and secondly because (unlike at the time) they aren’t the way to reach the biggest audience.

We’re probably in the middle stages of a “TV golden age” where new business models have made it possible to create more cohesive, intellectual shows. So maybe the next Beethoven is a TV showrunner. It doesn’t seem like anyone has really turned video games into a respected art form yet - maybe the next Beethoven will come along shortly after that happens.

Or maybe the next Beethoven or Shakespeare doesn’t do anything today that looks like “art” at all. Maybe they do something else that reaches and inspires huge numbers of people. Maybe they’re about to change web design forever, or revolutionize advertising. Maybe it’s #1 TikTok user Charli d’Amelio, and maybe there will be whole academic fields devoted to studying the nuances of her work someday, marveling at the fact that no one racks up that number of followers anymore.

The next Neil Armstrong probably won’t be an astronaut. It was a big deal to set foot outside of Earth for the first time ever. You can only do that once. Maybe we’ll feel the same sense of excitement and heroism about the first person to step on Mars, but I doubt it.

I don’t really have any idea what kind of person could fill role in the near future. Maybe no one. I definitely don’t think that our lack of ret...

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: Theses on Sleep, published by guzey on February 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Published originally on my site:/

Summary for EA Forum: I used to sleep about 7.5 hours and, according to my sleep statistics, I've been sleeping just under 6 hours for the last 180 days. I'm gaining 33 days of wakefulness per year every year and my "effective lifespan" (time awake) has increased by ~9% as a result, with mild increase in sleepiness.

Interventions with such enormous effects on "effective lifespan" are difficult to come by and I believe it's worth thoroughly investigating whether there's a way to safely and sustainably decrease the amount of sleep one needs to get, by running, e.g. high-quality pre-registered RCTs on the topic.

My personal conclusion is that what I'm doing with sleep is healthy and I lay out my reasoning (sometimes based on analogies, sometimes on self-experiments, sometimes on the academic findings) for this conclusion.

Summary: In this essay, I question some of the consensus beliefs about sleep, such as the need for at least 7 hours of sleep for adults, harmfulness of acute sleep deprivation, and harmfulness of long-term sleep deprivation and our inability to adapt to it.

It appears that the evidence for all of these beliefs is much weaker than sleep scientists and public health experts want us to believe. In particular, I conclude that it’s plausible that at least acute sleep deprivation is not only not harmful but beneficial in some contexts and that it’s that we are able to adapt to long-term sleep deprivation.

I also discuss the bidirectional relationship of sleep and mania/depression and the costs of unnecessary sleep, noting that sleeping 1.5 hours per day less results in gaining more than a month of wakefulness per year, every year.

Note: I sleep the normal 7-9 hours if I don’t restrict my sleep. However, stimulants like coffee, modafinil, and adderall seem to have much smaller effect on my cognition than on cognition of most people I know. My brain in general, as you might guess from reading my site, is not very normal. So, be cautious before trying anything with your sleep on the basis of the arguments I lay out below.

Comfortable modern sleep is an unnatural superstimulus. Sleepiness, just like hunger, is normal.

In this section, I make the following analogy:

Experiencing hunger is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are not eating enough. Never being hungry means you are probably eating too much.

Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are undersleeping. Never being sleepy means you are probably sleeping too much.

Most of us (myself included) eat a lot of junk food and candy if we don’t restrict ourselves. Does this mean that lots of junk food and candy is the “natural” or the “optimal” amount for health?

Obviously, no. Modern junk food and candy are unnatural superstimuli, much tastier and much more abundant than any natural food, so they end up overwhelming our brains with pleasure, especially given that we are bored at work, college, or in high school so much of the day.

What if the only food available to you was junk food and candy?

If you don’t eat any, you starve.

If you eat just enough to be lean, you’ll keep salivating at the sight of pizzas and ice cream and feel distracted and hungry all the time. Importantly, in this situation, the feeling of hunger does not mean that you should eat more – it’s your brain being overpowered by a superstimulus while being bored.

If you eat it as much as you want, you’ll probably eat too much and become fat.

And if you eat way too much candy or pizza at once, you’ll be feeling terrible afterwards, however tasty the food was.

Most of us (myself included) sleep 7-9 hours if we don’t have any alarms in the morning and if we get out of bed when we feel ...

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: Low-Commitment Less Wrong Book (EG Article) Club, published by Jeremy on February 10, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

[I did not intent to post this as a question. I can't find a way to change it. If the moderators could help with that, that would be great!]

AllAmericanBreakfast brought up the idea of a low-commitment LW book club. I'd like to start the ball rolling and volunteer to at least help get it started (I am also happy for someone else to do it, but I want to make sure it happens). I invite anyone who's interested to comment below. Ideas for how it could work are also welcome. I suppose it could be as simple as a weekly link post that we comment on on the EA forum - that would certainly be low-commitment.

I'm currently doing the in-depth virtual program and enjoying the Zoom discussions. Not as low-commitment, but when that ends at the end of February, I would have time to host something like a weekly Zoom discussion of an article or two. It seems like that would work best for ~5 people, so if more were interested there could be multiple Zooms with multiple hosts.

And Zooms and link posts are certainly not mutually exclusive.

Once I have a general idea what people are interested in, I'll setup a few polls to vote on articles, format, etc.

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: CEA’s operations team is growing quickly! You might be a good fit, published by Josh Axford on February 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

CEA’s Operations team provides the financial, legal, administrative, grantmaking, logistical, and fundraising support that enables CEA, 80,000 Hours, the Forethought Foundation, EA Funds, the Centre for the Governance of AI and Giving What We Can to run efficiently.

We are rapidly increasing our capacity:

In 2022 we will support a budget of $80m, up from $50m last year. We currently employ over 60 staff and we expect that to grow to 110 in 2022. Just scaling up to handle this rapid growth has taken a lot of work.

To handle this, we’re growing our team. We are looking for:

A Grants Administrator to help us process over $30M in grants annually across multiple EA organisations.

An HR Associate to help support 80+ people across 7 major EA organisations.

A Salesforce Engineer to help us build a CRM that can automate key processes and help us better understand data from our programs.

Key progress:

Recent hires:

Andy Tao is joining our team as a Finance Associate, allowing us to support an increasing amount of financial activity across the legal entity.

In November, Callum Howard joined the operations team, leading on the finance associate hiring round and adding capacity to the team as a generalist.

Office management: The office is now fully up and running.

Jonathan Michel started as Office Manager and has had an immediate impact.

We’re still making improvements to the functionality of the office - lighting, catering and reconfiguring space to increase capacity.

Users seem happy, and we’ve recently surveyed them on overall satisfaction and possible further improvements.

Improvements to financial systems:

Audits were completed for both the UK and US

No significant issues were raised and there was a reduction in control points

The company card scheme (Soldo) continued to be rolled out and improved to allow for efficient business expenditure

Back end automated systems were developed to track reserves of each organization in real time

Integration between our grant making system and our accounts were established to reduce error rates in accounting

Automations were implemented to ensure that the EA Funds balances are accurate and updated in real time (including grants approved but not paid)

Budgets and financial forecasts: Budgets, financial forecasts and funding gaps were created and approved for all constituent orgs.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software:

An MVP (minimal viable product) was developed for the groups team to allow them to track key metrics of the various groups they are supporting. This was launched at the end of Q4 with the work continuing in Q1 2022.

A management hub was developed for group organizers - a beta version of this was tested by a user adoption team. After receiving valuable feedback the plans needed to be re-evaluated.

The focus switched to creating a lite version of a CRM tool for group organizers to manage their groups and an additional “data bridge” to allow for group organizers who use airtable to share their groups data.

Annual feedback:

As we did last year, we asked the people we support how satisfied they were. 100% responded and the average score was 8.6/10 (8.7 in 2021).

We identified a number of improvements and projects from the feedback we received.

Internal Wiki/handbook:

We are continuously updating this resource to reduce the amount of requests the ops team needs to address.

Visas:

We switched immigration support in the UK to a much more professional outfit.

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: My experience of returning to work after having a baby, published by rosehadshar on February 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

My first child was born in January 2021. In October 2021, I returned to work part time after ~9 months of parental leave. In this post, I want to share my experience of returning to work. I hope this might help potential parents to think about what working might ideally look like for them if/when they have a baby.

A few caveats:

Context matters a lot. I’m the main carer for my child, though I’m not a single parent, I took 9 months off work completely, and then went back to work 0.5FTE. Independently of my own salary I am financially well-off, and I have a strong EA network.

I’m particularly mindful that if I had had less money, some of the choices I made wouldn’t have been available to me.

Parental preference matters a lot. For basically all of the below I can imagine great parents having different preferences to me.

Age. My child is 1 year old and I have no idea what things are like with older children (or multiple children).

What follows are the main things I notice about my own experience of returning to work. I’ve put the points in rough chronological order. As I want to convey the texture of my experiences, not just factual points, I’ve gone into a fair bit of detail. I suggest you skim the headings, and read those which sound interesting/relevant to you.

I found it hard to predict when I’d want to return to work

Before I had a baby, I guessed I would want to take 6 months off.

Once the baby arrived, I thought maybe I would never go back to work. I found looking after him very fulfilling, and the horizons of my world contracted. I knew that x-risk was still a thing, but it seemed very far away and a bit unreal. I cared a lot more about caring for my family than about saving the world, and also had a much clearer sense of how to do the former than the latter.

When my baby was around 7 months old, I relatively suddenly started to want to work again.

This change happened over about 2 weeks.

Partly this was triggered by me having a few conversations with friends I hadn’t seen for a while. They had interesting things to say about their work and the world, and I wanted to have that too.

The experience was a bit like part of my brain turning back on. Suddenly I was interested in something beyond my family, and had ideas and thoughts and questions again.

This change roughly coincided with my baby sleeping a bit better at night. It’s plausible to me that really-sleep-deprived-me doesn’t have the capacity to think about much, and only-mildly-sleep-deprived-me does.

See this post for another parent who found it hard to predict when they’d want to return.

Switching jobs was easier than I expected

Before having a baby, I worked as a project manager at a research organisation. Originally I planned to return to this job, but when it came to it, changes at the organisation made me think that I’d find the work too stressful. So unexpectedly I found myself looking for work after a 9 month break.

There were things about this that I expected to be hard:

It was difficult to make progress finding work before I had childcare, but I also wanted to have work so I could pay for the childcare.

I hadn’t been thinking about work stuff for a long time, and I was out of the loop in terms of what others were working on and excited about.

Relative to pre-baby-me, I felt much less risk tolerant in a few different ways:

I had less emotional bandwidth for work, as

Having a child contributed to me wanting to buy a house. Having a permanent salary is useful for getting a mortgage, so I suddenly found I had new preferences about how I was paid.

I wanted to switch career path, or at least try out different kinds of work. I didn’t have strong track record in the things ...

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 EA book: “How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit” by Charity Entrepreneurship is now available worldwide in paper and eBook format., published by Joey on February 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TLDR: Our handbook How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit is available now on Amazon!

How did this book come to be?

This book was created out of content used for the annual CE Incubation Program, originally a list of blog post readings. That list evolved into a single document and was simplified into a far-too-long CE handbook, which was used by our 2020 cohort. It was always primarily aimed at a small, highly involved audience who was keen to found impactful projects. Over time, we have reworked and tweaked new editions based on the experiences of our charities and the content of our program. As we iterated, the handbook improved, and we now feel that, although far from perfect, it is at the stage where it could be useful for a broader audience than CE program participants alone.

The Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) handbook is an EA-aligned source of practical advice on early-stage project management and includes useful decision-making tools, templates, success stories, and the philosophical underpinnings of why charity entrepreneurship could be an impactful career path and how to run a project well.

We’re proud that Peter Singer wrote a short foreword message and recommended our book, stating: “Clear, thoughtful, engaging. Excellent advice for nonprofit entrepreneurs.”

You can buy the handbook on Amazon as an ebook or as a paperback (you can keep shipping costs down by ordering from your country’s specific Amazon account, like Amazon.co.uk, .de, or the one closest to you). All the proceeds of the book will directly support our work and help launch new charities through our Incubation Programs.

EA chapters and groups can get it for free through EA Books Direct. (If the book is not yet on your group’s order link, you can reach out to [email protected] to add it.)

Not just for charity entrepreneurs?

We believe that charity entrepreneurship is an incredibly impactful career path, and this belief has been the driving force behind this book’s creation. But we also believe that the contents can be useful to a larger pool of EAs.

Many EAs take on complex projects, typically in small teams, trying to drive ambitious results. If you’re collaborating with other EAs and constantly making decisions when the available information is incomplete and the stakes are high, or if you try to streamline your standard operating procedures and narrow down on optimal theories of change and endline goals, the Charity Entrepreneurship handbook might be helpful.

How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit covers:

Assessment of your personal fit for founding an organization

The decision-making tools you can apply to your most important decisions

Best practices in fundraising and building support

How to measure impact and optimize as you test and improve

Tips on choosing the right mentors, advisors, and board members

The fundamentals of daily operations, running legally, and registering as a charity

The range and value of the resources–from ready-made templates to critical applications–available to you.

The book also features interviews and contributions from past charity founders who share their experiences, inspiration, know-how, and advice. We certainly don’t have all the answers, and there is always more to learn. But we do move quickly and show real results, and we are confident that this material could help many people in EA accelerate their work and maximize their impact.

But wait, we’re never finished! We are always open to updating. If you’d like to get involved in making this book even better, please submit suggestions for improvements to future versions.

Please review the book on Amazon or ...

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 2/10/22: Happy Birthday, published by Zvi on February 10, 2022 on LessWrong.

Happy birthday. This week CNN’s home page literally led with a story about a boy trapped down a well, then pivoted to Olympic coverage with a side of continued complaining about Donald Trump. Two years into the pandemic, we have normality.

Well, almost. There’s still a bunch of unnecessary restrictions in place and various arguments about them. That is going to go on for a while. The BA.2 variant is going to take over, although I doubt it will cause major issues as it does. There’s also that whole convoy situation.

Still. With notably rare possible exceptions, there’s nothing we can’t cope with. For those worried about Long Covid, I wrote The Long Long Covid Post.

Thus, I’m going to take this week’s title to actually say: Happy birthday, dad.

Executive Summary

BA.2 will take over as dominant subvariant but likely changes little.

Deaths finally in decline.

Cases declining rapidly.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Prediction from last week: 1.49mm cases (-40%) and 18,000 deaths (+2%).

Results: 1.40mm cases (-43%) and 17,028 deaths (-3%).

Prediction for next week: 900k cases (-36%) and 14,700 deaths (-13%).

I see a few signs the decline in cases will slow as people adjust, including that the places in most rapid decline now have a much smaller share of remaining cases, and also there’s no reason to expect substantial speeding up from here so on average things will slow.

On deaths, we saw a slightly premature decline due to the Midwest peaking early. We’re looking at about a 20% decline in three-week-old cases, so we should see a modest decline here but the meteoric drops shouldn’t start until the week after next. Then again, we don’t know much about Omicron’s timing, so I am ready to be surprised.

Deaths

The Midwest dropping now seems early, which is likely why the number came in slightly low. The descent starts now. Once it does, the calls for lifting what restrictions remain should rapidly get louder.

Cases

In true case numbers news, here’s a study of unvaccinated measures how often they previously had Covid:

Of 1580 individuals invited to undergo serologic testing, 816 (52%) did so between September 24, 2021, and November 5, 2021. Participants had a mean age of 48.0 years, 421 (52%) were women, and 669 (82%) were White (Table). Fourteen percent reported routine mask use in public. Anti-RBD and anti-N antibody presence/absence were correlated (95%; Cohen κ=0.908).

Among 295 reported COVID-confirmed participants, 293 (99%) tested positive for anti-RBD antibodies (≥250 U/mL, 44%; ≥500 U/mL, 27%; ≥1000 U/mL, 15%). A median of 8.7 (IQR, 1.9-12.9; range, 0-20) months passed since reported COVID-19 diagnosis. The median anti-RBD level among those who tested positive was 205 (IQR, 61-535) U/mL. There was no evidence of association between time after infection and antibody titer (0.8% increase [95% CI, –2.4% to 4.2%] per month, P = .62) (Figure).

Among 275 reported COVID-unconfirmed participants, 152 (55%) tested positive for anti-RBD antibodies (≥250 U/mL, 18%; ≥500 U/mL, 12%; ≥1000 U/mL, 6%). The median level among those who tested positive was 131 (IQR, 35-402) U/mL.

Among 246 reported no-COVID participants, 11% tested positive for anti-RBD antibodies (≥250 U/mL, 2%; ≥500 U/mL, 2%; ≥1000 U/mL, 2%). The median level among those who tested positive was 82 (IQR, 19-172) U/mL.

So that’s:

11% of those who reported no Covid.

55% of those who reported unconfirmed Covid.

99% of those who reported confirmed Covid.

Sample collection here was beyond uncontrolled so we can’t say anything about sizes of the populations or that the samples are representative of the populations involved, so large error bars, but the headline measures seem right. Almost no false positives among confirmed tests...

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: Simplify EA Pitches to "Holy Shit, X-Risk", published by Neel Nanda on February 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TL;DR If you believe the key claims of "there is a >=1% chance of AI causing x-risk and >=0.1% chance of bio causing x-risk in my lifetime" this is enough to justify the core action relevant points of EA. This clearly matters under most reasonable moral views and the common discussion of longtermism, future generations and other details of moral philosophy in intro materials is an unnecessary distraction.

Thanks to Jemima Jones for accountability and encouragement. Partially inspired by Holden Karnofsky’s excellent Most Important Century series.

Disclaimer: I recently started working for Anthropic, but this post entirely represents my opinions and not those of my employer

Introduction

I work full-time on AI Safety, with the main goal of reducing x-risk from AI. I think my work is really important, and expect this to represent the vast majority of my lifetime impact. I am also highly skeptical of total utilitarianism, vaguely sympathetic to person-affecting views, prioritise currently alive people somewhat above near future people and significantly above distant future people, and do not really identify as a longtermist. Despite these major disagreements with some common moral views in EA, which are often invoked to justify key longtermist conclusions, I think there are basically no important implications for my actions.

Many people in EA really enjoy philosophical discussions and debates. This makes a lot of sense! What else would you expect from a movement founded by moral philosophy academics? I’ve enjoyed some of these discussions myself. But I often see important and controversial beliefs in moral philosophy thrown around in introductory EA material (introductory pitches and intro fellowships especially), like strong longtermism, the astronomical waste argument, valuing future people equally to currently existing people, etc. And I think this is unnecessary and should be done less often, and makes these introductions significantly less effective.

I think two sufficient claims for most key EA conclusions are “AI has a >=1% chance of causing human extinction within my lifetime” and “biorisk has a >=0.1% chance of causing human extinction within my lifetime”. I believe both of these claims, and think that you need to justify at least one of them for most EA pitches to go through, and to try convincing someone to spend their career working on AI or bio. These are really weird claims. The world is clearly not a place where most smart people believe these! If you are new to EA ideas and hear an idea like this, with implications that could transform your life path, it is right and correct to be skeptical. And when you’re making a complex and weird argument, it is really important to distill your case down to the minimum possible series of claims - each additional point is a new point of inferential distance, and a new point where you could lose people.

My ideal version of an EA intro fellowship, or an EA pitch (a >=10 minute conversation with an interested and engaged partner) is to introduce these claims and a minimum viable case for them, some surrounding key insights of EA and the mindset of doing good, and then digging into them and the points where the other person doesn’t agree or feels confused/skeptical. I’d be excited to see someone make a fellowship like this!

My Version of the Minimum Viable Case

The following is a rough outline of how I’d make the minimum viable case to someone smart and engaged but new to EA - this is intended to give inspiration and intuitions, and is something I’d give to open a conversation/Q&A, but is not intended to be an airtight case on its own!

Motivation

Here are some of my favourite examples of major ways the w...

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: Rituals and symbolism, published by TsviBT on February 10, 2022 on LessWrong.

[Context: In the seven years I've been living in the Bay Area, I've attended two Rationalist Solstices. Both times I basically hated the experience. I don't really know why, but in thinking about it I think I've understood something worth saying about rituals and symbolism. (I don't think what follows is a crux for me about Rationalist Solstice (I don't even know if it applies); I'd guess that has more to do with people gathering in large groups in general seeming harmful, distortive, or hostile or something.)]

On Friday evening--Erev Shabbat (= evening of the day of rest)--Jews light candles and say a brachah. I was told by adults that this is done to symbolize a separation between the week and the holy Shabbat. On Saturday evening, when Shabbat is over, Jews do Havdalah (= separating): they light another candle; smell spices; and say more brachot. I was told that the warmth and light of the candle serve to remember to us the warmth and light of Shabbat as we enter the week; and the spices, to carry the sweetness of Shabbat. On Sukkot, they build a sukkah (hut) with a roof of loose branches. That way you can see the stars and be open to the universe.

Nothing terribly wrong with all that, but it's not what the candles are for. Jews used to light candles on Erev Shabbat because they wanted to have light in the evening, and they couldn't (by the prohibitions of Shabbat) light candles after it got dark. They lit candles on Saturday evening for the same reason, just after Shabbat had ended. They ground or heated spices (and drank wine) as part of the evening meal just after Shabbat, and maybe then secondarily to show to people (create common knowledge) that the prohibition against grinding or heating things is lifted [1]. And the sukkah was a makeshift hut farmers used during harvest, maybe for shade, or to watch over vulnerable ripe crops at night.

A definition of ritual this suggests: A ritual is a form of an originally purely functional action, stereotyped and exaggerated to strengthen an effect on observers that the original action already had. Stereotyped--as in conventionalized, meaning that the action is done with some incidental features fixed; e.g. grinding spices could just as well have been grinding something else, but it's stereotyped to be grinding spices, and that secondary feature takes over the signaling role (so much that the spices aren't even usually ground (let alone heated)). Exaggerated--e.g. the Torah isn't just read, it's chanted out loud, up front on stage where everyone is gathered, with a whole rigamarole before, during, and after, making it very very clear that something important is happening.

Effect on observers--e.g. threatening stances in ritualized animal combat playing off fear of an actual attack, or prohibitions against burning things being lifted by people seeing an authority burning something so they know it's ok now.

This contrasts with rituals that are created like this: there's a message that someone wants to communicate, so they choose actions which obliquely "symbolize" the message; or, someone wants to make a ritual which is "resonant", so they choose actions which are "symbolically resonant". I'm not aware of liking rituals that are made this way. Not that anyone asked me, but my recommendation to people trying to create rituals would be to focus on things that either are overtly communicative (such as reading the Torah, or some of the speeches in Solstice) or are actions that are good to do apart from any symbolic/communicative meaning, e.g. because of the non-social effects they have (such as, IDK, building a house for someone, or something).

[1] This is sort of speculation (esp. the part about grinding). See://www.jstor.org/stable/23255448 , p5-6 ...