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: Evaluating 2021 ACX Predictions, published by Zvi on January 25, 2022 on LessWrong.

Sources: Scott’s evaluations (includes original predictions), my buy/sell/hold post.

Remember: Evaluating Predictions in Hindsight

As a yearly tradition, when Scott Alexander comes out with his yearly predictions, I do a buy/sell/hold post, where I say what I would do if given the opportunity to trade against Scott’s probabilities, and outlining how I think about the questions.

Then, when the results come in, I look back at what happened, and evaluate the predictions from both of us in a holistic manner. This is that post.

Scott grades himself on calibration. Calibration is important, and if your calibration is off it is important to notice that and adjust, but it is a small part of making good predictions. When making up one’s own questions, there’s no numerical evaluation that tells you how you are doing, because you can choose easier or harder questions. One must look at reasoning. I’d love if Scott shared more of his reasoning on at least some questions, but this is still a very good exercise, so I certainly can’t complain.

Anyway, here we go. I list my original commentary, then my reaction now.

[FALSE] means did not happen, [TRUE] means did happen, [MU] means neither.

If I skip a question, it’s because I didn’t have anything to say about it due to it being a personal matter or other issues involving private information.

1. Biden approval rating (as per 538) is greater than 50%: 80% [FALSE]

Biden’s approval rating is clearly steady. There’s always some honeymoon effect, but it would take a surprising event to send it that far down. 80% seems like it’s in the ballpark. Hold.

This was a bad prediction. My reasoning was that Democrats outnumber Republicans, and in today’s partisan age would approve pretty much no matter what, and that’s simply wrong. Democrats noticed things not going great on many fronts, and responded accordingly, and also there’s a traditional slump around now when voters realize the big promises from the campaign are not going to happen. I do think there was some chance that the original hypothesis was right, but I put way too much weight on it. A chance of 50% or so here seems reasonable, with the default being ‘you can’t actually please the whole coalition at once and often there’s still a pandemic and people will blame you for it.’

2. Court packing is clearly going to happen (new justices don’t have to be appointed by end of year): 5% [FALSE]

Indeed do many things come to pass, and ‘clearly going to happen’ isn’t a clear definition. If this is ‘legislation expanding the size of the court has passed’ then this seems high to me because not only does it seem unlikely Biden gets 50 votes on this, it seems unlikely he’d get them this quickly with so much else on the agenda, but also they’re talking about it, Biden’s already gone gangbusters on giant bills and 5% isn’t that high. So I can’t disagree strongly. Hold.

On reflection 5% does seem like the right ballpark here. Good (but easy) prediction.

3. Yang is New York mayor: 80% [FALSE]

Yang is only at 69% on PredictIt, although PredictIt tends to be too low on favorites in this range (although not enough to justify trading on its own). He’s ahead, but he’s prone to rather silly things and there’s plenty of time to mess up, so I think I’m with PredictIt on this and I’ll stick with 70%. Sell.

Selling to market is never a huge mistake but this feels like a situation where the market was making a dumb prediction and one should call them on it in theory, even if the carrying and transaction involved don’t justify betting. Yang was not a proven politician, his previous success was a wedge campaign, he was a strange match for New York and there were a lot of candidates and a lot of time left in a very strange year. Logic ...

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: Patron Saint Holidays, published by Raemon on January 26, 2022 on LessWrong.

Elizabeth recently wrote this as a comment on the Vavilov day post. I thought it was important enough to be worth pulling out as a separate topic of discussion.

I don't love the process for generating rationalist holidays right now and tentatively think it would be better to switch to a patron saints model. People who want to can have their own hero or event that's especially close to their heart (and maybe a few secondary ones, or ones important to their friends), and if several people who like each other pick the same one they do stuff together, and if a lot of people pick the same one that becomes a more shared holiday (although still not mandatory).

One reason for this is there are just actually a lot of heroes in the world, with wildly varying resonances for a given individual, and the number of holidays the community can adopt and take seriously is pretty small. People only have so much time, and are often sharing their holiday budget with religious or more widespread secular holidays.

But the more important reason is that I really want some holidays that challenge or are demanding of people, and people vary a lot in how much of what kind of challenge they can safely take on at a given time. A cultural push for fasting could be really bad for people with eating disorders, even if there's a well respected medical or practicality exemption. Mass Winter Solstice is in constant conflict over how dark to go, given people's different needs. Lots of people felt they'd been injured by being mailed doomsday codes for LW or EAF for Petrov day...

But if you take away everything that could possibly hurt someone, you're left with parties (and even those aren't fun for everyone), and that feels sad and unfulfilling to me. So I think letting holidays exist and be respected without automatically scaling them would decrease damage done to people while upping the ceiling on what's achievable to those that want it.

If any particular hero/event does end up being so overwhelmingly popular it becomes a mass holiday, that seems fine, but letting it be an emergent process rather than an immediate bid for universality seems so much better.

I don't know that this needs to be characterized as a switch to Patron Saints model vs universal holidays. I think "big universal Schelling time" is one useful thing for holidays to do, and "niche celebration of a particular thing" is another useful thing they do. I also think "Patron Saint" isn't always quite the right frame. But I think there is something important about allowing holidays to be smaller, and let them grow organically if appropriate.

I think it's often good to experiment with things before scaling them up. Some things in fact don't make sense to scale up, ever. And I think there are indeed way more heroes worth celebrating than there are slots in the year for large public cultural holidays.

(I've actually felt this ever since the first Petrov Day ceremony – it seemed important, but I expected there to be a lot of other important stories and virtues worth celebrating. Petrov Day has since grown in prominence and I think "prevent nuclear war" is pretty high up there among things worth honoring. But my initial orientation to Petrov Day was "This seems like a holiday I'd like to celebration in rotation with other holidays. Maybe some years I want to celebrate Norman Borlaug or Smallpox Eradication." And that still seems like a fine way for many holidays to be.)

It seemed useful to separate out discussion about this from the discussion of Elizabeth-in-particular's approach to Vavilov-Day-in-particular.

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: Writing about my job: Operations Manager, published by Joy Bittner on January 26, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I’m fairly new to EA, and this is my first contribution to the forum, mostly because I didn’t feel particularly expert enough on any EA topic to weigh in. However, I’m not new to the world of ‘operations’ and have found that I’ve been approached by a variety of people who want a better understanding of what is meant by operations and help deciding if it would be a good career choice for them.

There has already been a bit of past discussion of ops on the forum; EA Norway’s posts do a great job of breaking down the skills needed, Eli_Nathan’s post shares some thoughts on alignment and personal fit and finally, this AMA post gets a bit more into the weeds for those who are more interested in some of the specifics. Also, this 80,000 Hours podcast is quite inspiring.

This post is intended to be a summary of the broad advice and suggestions I would say to someone considering operations.

Why I am qualified to write this article

I definitely don’t claim to be an operations ‘expert;’ these are more just the thoughts of someone who’s been doing this for a while, in my case, going on about 14 years, specifically working in younger, small-sized orgs. I’m currently the Operations Manager for the Happier Lives Institute and also working on launching a separate mental health project (teaser- watch for a future post).

How I got here

I started out by going the formal studies route: first through a master’s in social work with a concentration in social service administration (basically how to manage a nonprofit) where I took classes on topics such as grant-writing and HR. Then, I did a second masters/postgraduate degree in Nonprofit Management (Administración de las organizaciones sin fines de lucro, for my beloved Spanish speakers) from the Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires (should anyone be interested) where we went even more in depth on topics like org charts (lots of Drucker), finances for NGOs, and marketing etc. Unless you want to specialize in a particular one area, you don’t have to study formally for these sorts of roles, but like anything, it helps.

What do operations people do?

If you google ‘what does an operations manager do?’ (which I just did) you’ll find the descriptions extremely vague and will include terms like ‘design, maintain, and improve organization operations.’ The reason for this is that operations will vary tremendously across industries and the size of the industry.

When I worked for a handmade fair trade jewelry company, I thought a lot about details like “does this barcode sticker have the right size font to meet the corporate warehouse requirements?” “How can I create a color chart to ensure that every time a customer buys earrings in ruby red, they get ruby red and not crimson red?’

Whereas, when I worked for a human rights org doing work in the Amazon, I would research what type of anti-venom the team should have in the first aid kit they took into the field.

Working now with HLI, some of the most fun moments to date have been organizing and running our team retreat. We spent time hanging out and cooking together in a quirky condo while collaboratively defining the organization’s big picture ‘moonshot’ goals..and I also forced everyone to take a ‘team-building’ hike off my personal bucket list (the sneaking secret advantage of being the one to set the agenda).

In summary, my definition of operations is: keep the internal bits of the organization functioning smoothly. I’ve noticed in EA, as they tend to be fairly small / young ogs, the term operations manager is used to encompass all the random backend administration tasks that an org needs to do to keep operating. This will likely include some variety of:

Human resources (HR):...

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: [Intro to brain-like-AGI safety] 1. What's the problem & Why work on it now?, published by Steve Byrnes on January 26, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum.

1.1 Post summary / Table of contents

This is the first of a series of blog posts on the technical safety problem for hypothetical future brain-like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems. So my immediate priority here is saying what the heck is "the technical safety problem for brain-like AGI" and what do those words even mean and why on earth should I care.

Summary of this first post:

In Section 1.2, I define the “AGI technical safety problem”, put it in the context of other types of safety research (e.g. inventing passively-safe nuclear power plant designs), and relate it to the bigger picture of what it will take for AGI to realize its potential benefits to humanity.

In Section 1.3, I define “brain-like AGI” as algorithms with big-picture similarity to key ingredients of human intelligence, presumably (though not necessarily) as a result of future people reverse-engineering those aspects of the human brain. What exactly that means will be clearer in future posts. I will also bring up the counterintuitive idea that “brain-like AGI” can (and probably will) have radically nonhuman motivations. I won’t explain that here, but I’ll finish that story by the end of Post #3.

In Section 1.4, I define the term “AGI”, as I’m using it in this series.

In Section 1.5, I discuss the probability that people will eventually make brain-like AGIs, as opposed to some other kind of AGI (or just not invent AGI at all). The section includes seven popular opinions on this topic, from both neuroscientists and AI / machine learning experts, and my responses.

In Section 1.6, I’ll address AGI accidents, which is something we should expect if we don’t solve the AGI technical safety problem. I’ll argue that these kinds of accidents can be catastrophic indeed, including human extinction. This topic is a minefield of confusion and miscommunication, and I will frame my discussion around responses to eight common objections.

In Section 1.7, I’ll address the more specific question of why we should think about AGI safety right now. After all, there is a prima facie good case for waiting, namely: (1) AGI doesn’t exist yet, (2) AGI will exist someday in the future, and (3) it will be easier to do AGI safety research when we know more about the AGI, and easier still when we actually have AGI code that we can run tests on. There is indeed something to that argument, but I’ll argue that there is nevertheless a lot of safety work that can and must be done ASAP.

In Section 1.8, I’ll suggest that brain-like-AGI safety is a fun, fascinating, and fruitful topic, even if you don’t buy the idea that it’s important for the future.

1.2 The AGI technical safety problem

AGI is short for “Artificial General Intelligence”—I’ll get back to the definition of AGI in Section 1.4 below. AGI doesn’t exist right now, but I’ll argue in Section 1.7 that we can and should be preparing for AGI even today.

The part I’ll be talking about in this series is the red box here:

Specifically, we zoom in on a single team of humans who are trying to create a single AGI, and we want it to be possible for them to do so without winding up with some catastrophe that nobody wanted, with an out-of-control AGI self-replicating around the internet or whatever (more on which in Section 1.6).

Blue boxes in this diagram are things that I won’t talk about in this series. In fact, I’m not working on them at all—I have enough on my plate already. But I very strongly endorse other people working on them. If you, dear reader, want to work on them, godspeed!! I’m cheering you on! And here are a few links to get you started: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Back to the red box. This is a technical problem, callin...

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: Moral Uncertainty and Moral Realism Are in Tension, published by Lukas Gloor on January 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This is the sixth post in my moral anti-realism sequence; I wrote it as a standalone piece.

This post explains why I think confident belief in moral realism and moral uncertainty don’t go together. Since moral uncertainty often comes up in a moral realist context, I think this causes some problems for the concept.

In this sequence’s final post, titled Metaethical Uncertainty, Uncertainty Over What To Value, and Under-Defined Values, I will present three related but more cleanly defined concepts with which to potentially replace “moral uncertainty:”

Valuing moral reflection (and uncertainty over one’s reflection outcome)

Having under-defined values (deliberately or by accident)

Metaethical uncertainty (and wagering on moral realism)

My goal is for these concepts (alongside further distinctions and caveats) to capture as much of the original meaning of “moral uncertainty” as we can salvage.

What is moral uncertainty?

In a moral realist context, “moral uncertainty” means uncertainty about what we all-things-considered morally ought to do (MacAskill, Bykvist and Ord, 2020).

Moral anti-realists may use the same phrase, but to my knowledge, there’s been little discussion on how to conceptualize moral uncertainty under anti-realism. That will be the subject of my sequence’s final post, where I’ll also discuss how to allow for metaethical uncertainty (in case moral realism is correct after all).

Why I consider the concept unsatisfying

Moral realism implies the existence of a speaker-independent moral reality. Being morally uncertain means having a vague or unclear understanding of that reality. So there’s a hidden tension: Without clearly apprehending the alleged moral reality, how can we be confident it exists?

Moral realists may give various replies to this challenge. However, as I will argue in the following section, I think the only path to moral realism worthy of the name involves gaining clarity on the true object-level morality.

Note that philosophers use “moral realism” to mean different things. In this sequence’s first post (What Is Moral Realism?), I explained how I’m reserving the term for views that have action-relevant implications for effective altruists.

Also, note that my claim isn’t that moral uncertainty is altogether unworkable. Instead, I argue that moral uncertainty almost by necessity[1] implies metaethical uncertainty,[2] that is, uncertainty between moral realism and moral anti-realism.

Three inadequate replies

Below, I’ll describe three responses people might give in reply to my challenge and discuss why I find them inadequate.

(1) We know at least some moral facts, but certain aspects of morality could be forever unknowable

One way to disagree with me and claim that confident belief in moral realism and moral uncertainty do go together relies on the concept “irreducible normativity.” (See this post for a detailed discussion of the concept.) Proponents of irreducible normativity face a challenge. They have to explain how their concepts even operate, how normative concepts can be “irreducible” yet still meaningful. They must also explain how irreducible normative statements can successfully refer to a “normative reality.” I don’t think that a successful explanation exists, but I’ll now describe how someone could attempt to provide one and how it would relate to moral uncertainty.

A proponent of irreducible normativity might argue that we can ground moral realism in the introspective analysis of moral concepts, specifically of morally self-evident statements like “Torturing innocent children is wrong.” Their claim, then, is twofold:

(1) Moral statements are statements about a speaker-independent normative reality. (2) Some s...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Vavilov Day Starts Tomorrow, published by Elizabeth on January 25, 2022 on LessWrong.

Content note: discussion of fasting.

Three weeks ago, I announced a plan to fast from the 25th to the 27th, in honor of Nikolai Vavilov and the staff of his botany institute, several of whom starved to death in the service of ending famine (and were partially successful, although far from the sole contributors). The goal was to test/improve my own ability to do hard things in the service of worthy projects.

I had wanted to put much more research in the original post than I did, but decided it was more important to get the announcement out quickly and I should save something for the day-of post anyway. Since then, a lot has happened. Over three weeks I had 3 or 4 urgent demands around the size of “my furnace is maybe poison and my landlord is being difficult about it”. Everything is fine now, but it was a lot of effort to get it that way. I also had some emergency work drop in my lap for an extremely worthy project. I’m glad I got the opportunity to contribute and I’d make the same decision again but it ate up all of the slack I had left. And then my cell phone broke.

The immediate impact of this is there’s I’m not writing the highly researched post on Vavilov I wanted to. The internet is full of articles of the quality I could produce in the time I have available, there’s no reason to add to them.

But the more important impact is that I said I wanted to test my ability to do hard things, and then I did that, before the fast even started. My capacity was not as high as I wanted but more than I feared, and my capacity to respond to my limits gracefully instead of failing explosively exceeded my hopes.

So in a lot of ways the purpose of the fast has already been served. I thought about letting myself out of it, but there are a few dimensions this month hasn’t tested and I still want to play with those. However in light of the fact that I am starting from a place of much lower slack and much higher time value than anticipated, I will be removing some of the rules, such as “I have to work a normal workday” and “I have to do at least one physical activity”. Those rules were for someone who didn’t expend all her reserves doing intense cognitive work on no notice while angry people made horrible noises banging on her furnace for three days straight. As of writing this (Monday night) I haven’t made up my mind on relaxing the calorie restriction to allow for ketone esters, which for me are a small source of calories that greatly reduce the cognitive and emotional costs of fasting.

Tomorrow (the 26th) is the 69th anniversary of Nikolai Vavilov’s death. The day after is the 68th anniversary of the end of the siege of Leningrad, which meant the institute staff no longer needed to starve themselves to protect their seed bank. I will be fasting from 10PM tonight (the 25th) to 10AM on the 27th, but no promises on doing more than that. And if that high-value project needs more no-notice immediate-turnaround work from me and the ketone esters aren’t enough, I don’t even promise to keep fasting. Because this was never about pain for pain’s sake, it was about testing and increasing my ability to follow through on my own principles, and one of those principles is “don’t pointlessly incapacitate yourself when high impact time-sensitive work is waiting”.

unknown Vavilov Institute scientist

“.it was hard to wake up, it was hard to get on your feet and put on your clothes in the morning, but no, it was not hard to protect the seeds once you had your wits about you. Saving those seeds for future generations and helping the world recover after war was more important than a single person’s comfort.”

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

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Why do we need a NEW philosophy of progress?, published by jasoncrawford on January 25, 2022 on LessWrong.

I’ve said that we need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. But why a new philosophy? Why can’t we just return to the 19th-century attitude towards progress, which was pretty enthusiastic?

In short, the view of progress that persisted especially through the late 19th century and up until 1914 was naive. It fell apart because, in the 20th century, it met challenges it could not answer. We need to answer those challenges today.

What follows is a hypothesis that needs a lot more research and substantiation, but I’m putting it forward as my current working model of the relevant intellectual history.

The 19th-century worldview

Here are a few key elements of the Enlightenment-era worldview:

Nature was an obstacle to be conquered. Nature was imperfect; human reason could improve it—and it was fitting and proper for us to do so. Kipling wrote, “We hold all Earth to plunder / All time and space as well.” Nature was a means to our ends.

There was a deep belief in the power of human reason both to understand and to command nature. Especially by the end of the century, the accomplishments in science, technology and industry seemed to confirm this.

As a corollary of the above, there was an admiration for growth and progress: in science, in the economy, even in population.

(I’m basing this mostly on writings from the time, such as Macaulay or Alfred Russel Wallace; contemporary newspaper editorials; popular speeches given, e.g., at celebrations; poetry of the era; etc. For future research: what were the historians, philosophers, etc. of the time saying about progress? I’m familiar with some of the thought from previous centuries such as Bacon and Condorcet, but less so with that from 19th-century figures such as Mill or Comte.)

On the face of it, at least, these seem very much in sympathy with the core ideas of the progress movement as I have outlined them. So what did the 19th century get wrong?

Mistakes

Here are just some examples of things that many people believed in the late 19th century, which would later be proved quite wrong:

That technology would lead to world peace. Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet had forecast progress in morality and society just as much as in science, technology and industry. By the late 1800s, this seemed plausible. The previous century had seen monarchy and aristocracy replaced by democratic republics, and the end of slavery in the West. Economic growth was making everyone richer, and free trade was binding nations together, giving them opportunities for win-win collaboration rather than destructive, zero-sum competition. The telegraph in particular was hailed as an invention that would unite humanity by allowing us to better communicate. Everything seemed to be going relatively well, especially after 1871 (end of the Franco-Prussian War), for over 40 years.

That “improvements on nature” would avoid unintended consequences. (This one may have been implicit.) It’s good to try to improve on nature; it’s bad to go about it blithely and heedless of risk. One striking example is the popularity of “acclimatization societies”, “based upon the concept that native fauna and flora were inherently deficient and that nature could be greatly improved upon by the addition of more species.. the American Acclimatization Society was founded in New York City in 1871, dedicated to introducing European flora and fauna into North America for both economic and aesthetic purposes. Much of the effort made by the society focused on birds, and in the late 1870’s, New York pharmacist Eugene Schieffelin led the society in a program to introduce every bird species mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.” (Emphasis added.) These importations led to inva...

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: ELK First Round Contest Winners, published by Mark Xu on January 26, 2022 on The AI Alignment Forum.

Thank you to all those who have submitted proposals to the ELK proposal competition. We have evaluated all proposals submitted before January 14th[1]. Decisions are still being made on proposals submitted after January 14th.

The deadline for submissions is February 15th, after which we will release summaries of the proposals and associated counterexamples.

We evaluated 30 distinct proposals from 25 people. We awarded a total of $70,000 for proposals from the following 8 people:

$20,000 for a proposal from Sam Marks

$10,000 for a proposal from Dmitrii Krasheninnikov

$5,000 for a proposal from Maria Shakhova

$10,000 for proposals from P, who asked to remain anonymous

$10,000 for a proposal from Scott Viteri

$5,000 for a proposal from Jacob Hilton and Holly Mandel

$10,000 for a proposal from Jacob Hilton

We would have also awarded $15,000 for proposals from Holden Karnofsky, however he is on ARC’s board and is ineligible to receive the prize.

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: Introducing Animal Empathy Philippines, published by Ging Geronimo on January 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Hi, everyone! I am excited to announce the launch of Animal Empathy Philippines (AEP), a spin-off organization of Effective Altruism Philippines. We are a new organization dedicated to community building work on effective animal advocacy (EAA) in the Philippines.

Grant from the EA Animal Welfare Fund

As EA Philippines’ incubatee, AEP is supported by a $64,000 grant from the EA Animal Welfare Fund. Last December, three of us at EA Philippines (Kate Lupango, Janaisa Baril, and I) received a 1-year, 1.53 FTE grant from them to do community building work on EAA in the Philippines. The grant is split into the following:

0.73 FTE for me

0.4 FTE for Kate Lupango

0.4 FTE for Janai Baril

Shifting to An Animal Advocacy Career

I (Ging Geronimo) learned about EA after joining EA Philippines’ 9-week Intro to EA Discussion Group held last May to July 2020. I took the Giving What We Can Pledge and started volunteering for 5-6 hours/ week at EA Philippines in December 2020.

Prior to launching AEP, I worked for five years at the National Economic and Development Authority, the Philippines’ socioeconomic planning body, as a Communications and Stakeholder Engagement Associate. Since September 2021, I've been engaged as a Consultant for the World Bank’s Technical Assistance project to the Department of Agriculture.

Kate Lupango is one of the co-founders of EA Philippines. She's a Funding Accountant at World Vision International and taking Master’s in Community Development at University of the Philippines Diliman. Kate was a former intern at Faunalytics and has over four years of experience in farmed animal advocacy.

Janaisa Baril is a Communication and Events Volunteer at EA Philippines. She has helped with EA PH’s Local Charity Effectiveness Research, social media content, and monthly newsletters. Janai attended our 9-week Intro to Effective Animal Advocacy Fellowship, which motivated her to take action for farmed animals. She has a degree in Development Communication from University of the Philippines Los Baños.

Why work on Farm Animal Welfare in the Philippines?

The Philippines ranks 10th worldwide in terms of total farm animals alive, most of which are finfish and chickens, and yet there’s relatively very little work being done on farmed animal welfare.

As of December 2021, there are only four organizations working on farmed animal welfare (FAW) in the Philippines. These include the Philippine Welfare Society (PAWS), Animal Kingdom Foundation (AKF), Fish Welfare Initiative (FWI), and Tambuyog Development Center.PAWS has been at the forefront of animal advocacy in the Philippines. They recently introduced a set of standards called The Better Chicken Option to educate local restaurants and consumers on better broiler chicken welfare.

We’ve had meetings with PAWS, AKF, and FWI and we learned that the lack of high-quality candidates for jobs was the biggest bottleneck for establishing new programs or scale-up of those existing ones. Thus, it was clear to us that doing community building work on EAA is how we can make the greatest positive impact on farmed animals.

Focusing on community building will enable us to multiply our impact by increasing the number of Filipinos who will take action for farmed animals.

Why we launched and what our goals are

Animal Empathy Philippines was conceived after EA Philippines conducted its first EAA fellowship last year. We thought that building a community of effective animal advocates would spark Filipinos’ interest in farmed animal advocacy.

Through AEP, we aim to:

Build, grow, and sustain a community of effective animal advocates;

Expand talent pool in EA-aligned animal welfare organizations; and

Kick-start a coalition of local farm...

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 write better blog posts, published by mariushobbhahn on January 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

About two years ago I started my personal blog and then branched out to the EA forum and LessWrong. My experience was overwhelmingly positive (much better than anticipated). This post is intended to encourage people, share some lessons and make it easier to start.

I’d like to thank Max Räuker, Moritz Hanke and Simon Grimm for their feedback.

Clarification: these tips are intended for less experienced writers. I don’t claim to know everything and am interested in improving further. Feedback and discussions are welcome. Also, there is a forum post called “How to use the forum” (2018) but I don’t think most people know it exists. So it makes sense to reiterate some of their guidelines.

TL;DR: writing blog posts is good for lots of reasons, e.g. gaining clarity, education, interaction with others and career building. There are different tips and tricks to write better ranging from cutting content aggressively to quantifying uncertainty. The most important one is to just start writing and then iterate. If you dislike having your own blog, write posts on the forum and hop on other people’s projects.

Why write a blog post?

You learn a lot: Aiming at writing a post is a way of gaining clarity on what you know and what you don't know. It will structure your thinking and lead you to research more thoroughly. Expecting others to read your post will likely also give you extra motivation to improve the article. Furthermore, I think people underestimate how much you can learn with 20 hours of focused googling, reading abstracts, skimming papers or videos, etc. By now, when I want to get a better grasp of a topic, I start writing a blog post.

It’s a positive experience: Most of my initial intuitive concerns were very wrong. The world didn’t fall apart after sharing the first post and the feedback I got was positive. Most of the time, not that many people read your first posts and they are usually part of some ingroup, thus more forgiving. On the other hand, once my blog posts got better, the experience just became more and more satisfying. People responded to my posts, answered important questions, reached out via DM or mail, etc. It makes me feel like I contribute something to solving important problems, which is a great experience.

You help others: We don’t have the time and energy to research every topic or think about every question in detail. However, we can read a 10-minute summary to get a sufficiently good grasp of the issue. If you did a decent job with your post, most people will be very thankful for that.

It might get you a job: Work trials at some EA organizations are comparable to writing a blog post, i.e. you are supposed to research a question and write down your results in a given amount of time. Having experience with that type of work is beneficial. Furthermore, your blog can already function as a signal for motivation and quality to potential future employers. I personally know of cases where people were hired because of blogposts they wrote.

What should I write about?

Here are some suggestions. I mostly chose example posts that are of very high quality in my opinion. I would frame them as something to aspire to, not the threshold for starting.

Write about obvious things. We have a hard time understanding how large the understanding gap between experts and non-experts really is. Thus, extracting and summarizing your latent knowledge is super useful for others. A good example is Neel Nanda’s post “AI alignment a bird’s eye view”.

Your latest research: Research speed increases by sharing your latest findings. A positive example of such a post is Ajeya Cotra’s “Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning”.

Clarifying beliefs: Writing down bel...