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 Publication: Effective Altruism and Religion, published by dominicroser on January 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

A new volume with essays on EA from a religious perspectives is out. The volume is open access. The first three chapters - after Lara Buchak's foreword - provide a general take on EA from a Buddhist, Christian, and Orthodox Jewish perspective. Among the other chapters, I would particularly like to highlight Stefan Riedener’s chapter. Given the focus on extinction risks in EA, his clear and helpful analysis from a Christian (more specifically: Thomist) perspective is a very valuable contribution. How you can help: if you know academics in the field of religion, you can point them towards the volume or to one of these chapters. If you know anyone whom I should send a physical copy, let me know. This volume is not the final word on the intersection of EA and Religion. It mostly consists of the written versions of papers given at the first - and exploratory - academic workshop on this theme. The book's main purpose is to get the ball rolling.

Its aim is for EA to be taken seriously as a provider of important ideas in an area – religion – where altruism has long played a central role but where many EA themes (such as effectiveness, empirical evidence, etc) are often absent. Important: this is an academic book about effective altruism rather than an outreach book making the case for effective altruism. However, for a Christian audience the latter is in the works as well. We hope to finish it in a couple of months. Thus, if you’d like to pass on something to Christian friends and family, this latter book will be the useful thing to pass on. We will post about it on the Forum once it’s out.

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: Long Term Charities: Apply for SFF Funding, published by Zvi on January 25, 2022 on LessWrong.

In the last funding round of the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF), I was one of the recommenders whose evaluations helped distribute millions of dollars in charitable grants. I wrote up my experiences here.

Now that applications for the next round are open, I want to strongly encourage more charities whose work plausibly benefits the long term future, especially charities that do not interact much with the rationalist or effective altruist ecosystems and networks, to apply for funding. SFF has no official connection with the effective altruism movement (EA), aside from sometimes recommending grants to support EA-branded charities; and, many involved are actively seeking opportunities to support projects not connected with the EA social network.

You’ll need a 501(c) charity in order to apply. If you don’t have a 501(c) but would otherwise consider applying, it’s too late for this round but there will be others, so consider getting a 501(c).

The application is not as quick and easy as it could be (I’m hoping to get that to change) but it’s not bad. Filling out such applications can be daunting, and requires much gumption. But the expected value of doing so, if you have any kind of plausible case, is very high. Your odds are remarkably good. There is a lot of money being distributed here, and a lot of money being distributed elsewhere, and a shortage of known worthy causes to which to distribute the money.

You could even get immediate gratification in the form of a speculation grant. A number of people, including myself and also Scott Aaronson, have been given $200k budgets to give out as we see fit. He’s inviting quick pitches for this. If you want to pitch me, the comments here are the place to do it, and I’ll give a quick estimate of how likely I would be to give the organization a speculation grant if they apply. My bar for saying yes if I don’t already know you will be high, but not infinitely high. Try to do this within the week.

This post is an attempt to help charities decide whether applying is worthwhile. Not every cause will be a good fit.

It also aims to tell them how, in my model, to ensure that if they should be funded, they get funded.

And most importantly, it should help you not stress so much and not spend as much time on the application, so it happens at all.

General disclaimer: This is me talking, and I have zero official capacity, and those who make the decisions would likely disagree with some of this, and some of this is probably lousy advice if it were for some bizarre reason taken as advice, and (to cover every possible legal base) this is not any kind of advice.

Jaan’s Philanthropic Priorities

Jaan Tallinn is currently the primary funder of the S-process. He (by design) doesn’t have any direct say in the allocation, but the process reflects his priorities, which you can read here.

This is the headline information.

The primary purpose of my philanthropy is to reduce existential risks to humanity from advanced technologies, such as AI. I believe that this cause is (as per the ITN framework):

important: existential risks are fundamentally important almost by definition — as far as I know, all other philanthropic causes assume continued existence of humanity as their prerequisite;

tractable: since scientific and technological progress is (for better or worse) concentrated in relatively few institutions, I believe it is more tractable than more “diffuse” problems, such as global warming. furthermore, having worked on this topic since 2009, I feel I have a comparative advantage in identifying productive initiatives in this field;

neglected: despite more than a decade of robust growth, still a disproportionately little amount of resources go to reducing ex...

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: CE Is Launching a Pilot Training Program for Grantmaking Foundations, published by Joey on January 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Charity Entrepreneurship is building and running a foundation program, and we are keen to connect with foundations who might be a good fit to attend.

Why a program for foundations?

Starting and running a family foundation or other grantmaking organization is challenging. Decisions are often high-stakes with significant uncertainties. Few resources teach how to run an evidence-based and highly effective foundation.

Over the past 4 years, at CE, we have helped launch 18 new nonprofits, several of which are on track to becoming field leaders in their respective areas (e.g., recommended by GiveWell). An unpredicted learning from this work is that our content, approach, and handbook have been useful to a number of foundations and grantmakers. They have improved their prioritization, decision-making, their clarity of mission and, ultimately, their impact (particularly in the early stages of setting up a foundation or granting department).

With this in mind, we incubated 1 grantmaking foundation in 2021, which proved successful. This, combined with the number of interested foundations, has led us to launch a grantmaking-foundation-focused program specifically for 2 to 6 foundations in 2022.

The Purpose

The goal of the program is to help you take your grantmaking foundation from just starting out to an established field leader in its respective area.

The How

Leveraging our experience, this month-long intensive bootcamp will focus on building solid frameworks for making key decisions when the stakes are high and more information is needed. We will look at:

How to have an impact across a number of cause areas

How to distinguish between high- and low-quality research and experts

Cost-effectiveness analysis

How to compare cause areas, interventions, and people

Hiring early-stage staff

How to evaluate the opportunity cost of funding

How to coordinate with other funders

How to evaluate early-stage projects (one of our particular areas of expertise)

We will favor broad heuristics and general rules over techniques specific to a cause area or single value set. We will share tools, frameworks, and examples, but we are not the arbitrators of a foundation’s values.

The learning will be active and practical with highly applied assignments, discussions, introductions to experts, and 1 to 1 coaching (backed up by video-based and written materials, readings, and podcasts).

Who might be a good fit for this program?

Given our historical focus and expertise is on early-stage organizations, our content and program will be best suited for grantmaking foundations either just starting out or undergoing a large-scale pivot. We will aim for a pool of foundations that share some common cause-area interests, would be in a position to fill a key gap in the philanthropic ecosystem, and would benefit from high level interaction with each other. The program will be best fit for the founder of the foundation or the first program officer, although it might also fit new department leads or the champions of an interorganizational pivot. CE has already been approached by foundations interested in a structured and dedicated program, so we encourage you to contact us in the next few weeks if this is something you might fit with. We are still developing the details of the program (e.g. the month it will run) and initial conversations with foundations will affect the program as it builds on the needs of the attendees.

The free program is open to foundations from around the globe and will run online.

Output of the program

A coordinated, talented group of foundations that have a sense of how to measure impact and create a particularly large amount of impact per dollar, as well ...

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: Lives of the Cambridge polymath geniuses, published by Owain Evans on January 25, 2022 on LessWrong.

Delicious Facts

Russell

Grandfather was British prime minister

Told Virginia Woolf his devotion to serious intellectual work came to an end when “my passions got hold of me”

Met Lenin on a visit to Russia. This visit turned him against the Russian Revolution

Wittgenstein

His Austrian family was one of the richest in the world

Was at same (obscure) school at same time as Hitler

His family paid off the Nazis using their fortune to be classified as “mixed” rather than “full Jews” (and avoided the Holocaust)

Three of his four brothers died by separate acts of suicide

Tried to move to the Soviet Union to work as a laborer

Haldane

Aristocratic family, father was a prominent biologist

Introduced the primordial soup theory of the origin of life

For a period, he was a Stalinist and defended Lysenkoism on BBC radio

Moved to India late in life and renounced British citizenship

Needham

As a professor of biochemistry, at age 37 he began an improbable pivot into Sinology when he fell in love with his Chinese grad student and started learning Chinese

In China he befriended Zhou Enlai and met Mao

He was part of a commission investigating whether the US had used biological weapons in the Korean War and was fooled into believing the US had

Turing

Would occasionally run 40 miles from Bletchley to London for meetings and tried out for British Olympic team

Apparently he took fortune-telling seriously

Biographies

Russell: Autobiography; Monk

Keynes: Skidelsky,

Wittgenstein: Monk

Haldane: Subramanian

Needham: Winchester

Turing: Hodges

Also see:

Biopic film on Turing from the BBC

Wittgenstein movie, which includes Russell and Keynes as characters:

Logicomix: graphic novel feature Russell, Turing, and Wittgenstein (coauthored by computer scientist)

Why I found these figures interesting

They made exceptional and creative intellectual contributions (helping to found new fields). Turing’s contributions seem most important.

They had dramatic, full-bodied involvement in wars

They spent significant periods working outside academia

For their time, they had highly unconventional romantic lives and were eccentric in other ways

Russell and Haldane were self-described rationalists

Interactions

Russell acted as Wittgenstein’s PhD supervisor but felt Wittgenstein surpassed him already as a student. Keynes invited Wittgenstein to join the Apostles and helped him get British citizenship during WW2. Turing attended Wittgenstein’s lectures on the philosophy of mathematics. Needham succeeded Haldane as Reader in biochemistry at Cambridge.

Russell on Keynes:

Keynes's intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.

Keynes on Russell and Wittgenstein:

The first impression conveyed by the work of Russell was that the field of formal logic was enormously extended. The gradual perfection of the formal treatment at the hands of himself, of Wittgenstein and of Ramsey had been, however, gradually to empty it of content and to reduce it more and more to mere dry bones, until finally it seemed to exclude not only all experience, but most of the principles, usually reckoned logical, of reasonable thought. Wittgenstein’s solution was to regard everything else as a sort of inspired nonsense, having great value indeed for the individual, but incapable of being exactly discussed.

Wittgenstein on Russell:

Russell's books should be bound in two colours.those dealing with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue – and no one should be allowed to read them.

Russell wrote a long essay (“Icarus or The Future of Sci...

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: Free money from New York gambling websites, published by robirahman on January 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Content warning: gambling is addictive and generally loses money. Please don't make any bets with negative expected value.

tl;dr: New York State recently legalized online sports gambling, so casinos are offering large incentives for signing up on their websites. I got about $4,400 out of this (you can probably do better; see below) and will be donating it to GiveWell. You must be located in New York or another eligible state while signing up and making the bets.

How to exploit this

There are various casinos, sportsbooks, and other gambling establishments located in New York State. Online sports gambling was legalized there in January 2022, so they are giving out introductory offers where they will match your deposits or give you free bets when you sign up. Basically, you can open an account on each site, deposit the minimum amount required to qualify for the promotion, make one bet, and then withdraw your initial deposit plus the bonus and any winnings from the bet. (I strongly recommend only betting the bonus amounts and not your own deposited money.) The expected value from doing these six bonuses in this screenshot is $5,800, and there are probably others I don't know about. I recently spent a day in NYC and a friend insisted I sign up for two of them while I was there, which took about 20 minutes each.

FAQ

Q: Isn't gambling immoral?

A: Not in this case. These sites are offering these bonuses to try to get people addicted to gambling, and will probably earn a large profit despite giving away lots of money upfront. I think it would be unethical not to do this, because it reduces their profits and redirects the money to altruistic causes.

Q: Does this entail any financial risk?

A: No. As long as you only bet the bonus money and don't gamble your own funds, there's no way to end up with less than you started. I recommend making one bet on each site, then withdrawing your money and closing your accounts immediately after each bet ends.

Q: What's the catch?

A: You'll need to temporarily deposit around $2,000 but will get it back once the bets resolve. It takes about half an hour of setup and maybe a day of waiting. They might ask for a photocopy of your government-issued identification. You must be located in New York or a few other eligible US states while placing these bets. You must be at least 21 years old.

Q: Online gambling is illegal where I live. Can I still do this?

A: Yes. I did this while I was transiting through New York yesterday. Hat tip to Daniel Gold and Michael Bogaty from NYC EA, who are really smart, won't shut up about sports, and insisted I do it. The minimum time commitment if you're out of state would be to go to New York for a few hours, sign up and wait for your deposits to clear, place bets, leave, and cash out when the bets resolve.

Q: What outcomes should I bet on?

A: Depends on the type of bonus and your level of risk aversion. For sites that do deposit matching, I recommend betting on a very likely outcome, which will only pay out a little extra if you win but guarantees you can cash out the bonus and then withdraw the money. For sites that offer a free bet as the incentive, I suggest betting an unlikely outcome because this maximizes your expected payout (but if you are very risk-averse, you can get a higher chance of some winnings at the cost of lower EV by betting on a likely outcome). You can improve this by hedging with friends and each betting on different, mutually exclusive, unlikely outcomes, which will both maximize EV and guarantee one of you wins.

Q: I don't follow sports at all and don't know which teams are good.

A: Neither do I. Just go on fivethirtyeight and look at their predicted outcomes for some upcom...

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: List of Probability Calibration Exercises, published by KingSupernova on January 23, 2022 on LessWrong.

I recently spent a while looking at how different people had designed their probability calibration exercises (for ideas on how to design my own), and they turned out to be quite difficult to find. Many of the best ones were the least advertised and hardest to locate online. I figured I'd compile them all here in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar position. Please let me know about any I missed and I'll add them to the post.

http://acritch.com/credence-game/

http://confidence.success-equation.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/20100529074053/http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/tom/?p=129

http://credencecalibration.com/

http://www.2pih.com/caltest/

http://web.archive.org/web/20161020032514/http://calibratedprobabilityassessment.org/

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: CICO is a weird reference class, published by Chad Nauseam on January 23, 2022 on LessWrong.

People tend to form what I guess I'm going to call default-hypothesis-reference-classes. This is what they see as the "default" hypothesis that new hypotheses have to compete against. Obviously this isn't how a perfect bayesian reasoner would act, but we're only human.

These weird reference classes can be tricky, because you can get "sucked into them" and stop noticing that they're weird.

I started thinking of this when thinking about the CICO model of weight gain/loss. Calories-in-calories-out sounds obviously true under thermodynamics. There's about 2 × 1010 Calories in a gram of matter, and humans need about 2000 Calories per day, so make sure not to eat more than a tiny fraction of a gram per day and you're sure to lose weight.

Well, not quite. In my opinion, the most "natural" default reference class for weight gain or loss is mass-in-mass-out (MIMO), which is obviously true, if not super useful. This has to be true - everything we know about physics tells us it's impossible for your body to gain or lose mass unless it comes from or goes somewhere.

What people mean when they say CICO is that different foods have different amounts of bioavailable energy, and weight gain is dependent on difference between the bioavailable energy you eat and the amount of heat your body produces. This doesn't seem like it necessarily has to be true! People gain weight when they grow, and that's partially because they're eating actual minerals that are deposited into their bones. (And these minerals largely don't go anywhere once they're deposited.) So that's a straightforward counterexample to CICO.

We could imagine the same thing happening with fat gain or loss. Your body could store energy by accumulating fat, but not remove the actual fat molecules from your body when their chemical energy is consumed. (I'm not saying that this actually happens, just that it's not forbidden by thermodynamics.) Or our model for what kinds of energy are bioavailable could be wrong, and if so we'd give wrong predictions when trying to apply CICO even if the theory itself were true.

What I'm trying to say is, if your previous "default" reference class for models of weight gain was MIMO, CICO would seem weird and not that special to you. CICO is very likely more useful than MIMO, but it wouldn't intuitively seem like it should be the default theory all other theories are at best a special case of.

Once I started looking for weird reference classes, I started seeing them all the time. For example, I once saw some people discussing a study that examined the effect of new housing on "the asking price for 3-bedroom condos". What seemed weird to me is that the study chose a refencence class, "the asking price", which intuitively seems like not the thing we usually want to talk about, which is the sale price.

I think this one was discussed more broadly, but at the beginning of the pandemic I saw a lot of people saying "this country had good outcomes, but their population density is very low" or things like that. But population density is an imperfect metric for what we really care about, which is how clustered a population is. Canada's population density is very low, but you could delete 90% of canada and probably only lose 10% of their population. This fictional decimated-canada would probably have had similar covid outcomes to real-canada, but with a 9x higher population density. So the reference class of "the difficulty of managing covid in a country is dependent on the country's population density" seems like a sketchy choice for a default reference class of covid-management-difficulty prediction generators.

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

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 Analysis of the German Coalition Agreement 2021–2025, published by Yannick Muehlhaeuser on January 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

On 24 November 2021 three German parties (SPD, FDP and the Greens) agreed on a coalition agreement (PDF in German) that sets the German government’s plans for the next four years. Here, we will analyse this agreement with effective altruist considerations in mind.

We hope this post will improve the effective altruist community’s model of the new German government and what to concretely expect for various cause areas.

Epistemic Status:

Overall we expect to have a positive bias towards the new government’s plans. Furthermore, all of us are non-experts in the covered policy fields, limiting the depth of our analyses. Across all authors we’ve spent around 40-50h on this post.

As every government is incentivised to present itself in the best possible light, we expect our methodology of focussing solely on the coalition agreement to slightly—though systematically—overrate the coalition. Planning fallacies on the government’s side will likely also limit some policy proposals’ full execution and impact.

Max Räuker, Jasper Götting, Marius Hobbhahn, Simon Grimm, Ludwig Bald and Yannick Mühlhäuser contributed equally to this project.

Executive Summary

Across the government’s agenda we found only a few concrete policy proposals on core EA topics.

We considered the following proposals particularly promising:

Plans to increase PPE stockpiles

Measures to enhance farmed animal welfare

Increased and more sophisticated state investments in R&D

Streamlining permitting procedures and addressing NIMBYism

(largely) technology-agnostic climate change mitigation

The government’s continued stance against nuclear energy strikes us as a mistake. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, we also found the lack of ambition on biosecurity surprising.

The coalition agreement puts significant focus on shortening and streamlining permitting procedures and other bureaucratic hurdles, which we welcome.

German policy-making currently seems more in flux than usual. Hence, the case for EA engagement with German politics arguably got stronger (see conclusion).

Background

Germany is the wealthiest and most populous member of the EU and plays a key role in international affairs. Germany has high favorability ratings throughout the world and relatively high state capacity. We therefore think that the plans of the next German government are particularly relevant for effective altruists focused on policy.

The new government consists of three parties:

SPD: center-left social democratic party

Greens: progressive party with major focus on climate change

FDP: socially liberal, fiscally conservative party

All three parties are in general supporters of stronger European integration and social liberalism. Remaining differences are biggest in climate and fiscal policy. The Greens favour a more expansionary fiscal policy, which the FDP opposes. The FDP supports more moderate free-market solutions on climate change, while the Greens endorse more ambitious state-directed projects.

We have the impression that coalition agreements are a relatively honest representation of the government’s goals, though the language is often very finely crafted and might hide disagreement. Nevertheless, according to one estimate the last government fulfilled around 80% of its promises—we expect similar to slightly lower results for this government.

The rest of this post will first focus on major EA cause areas; further below you will find a summary of other policy changes we thought notable.

Core EA Issues

Artificial Intelligence

Overall, the government’s stance is very vague, e.g. it is not clear how they want to balance regulation and innovation. There is no explicit stance on AGI or AI safety.

The government ...

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: Excessive Nuance and Derailing Conversations, published by Alexander on January 23, 2022 on LessWrong.

Overview

I've observed my interlocutors—and sometimes myself—applying excessive nuance to irrelevant points during some discussions. This misplaced nuance results in the derailing of conversations towards rabbit holes and dead ends.

High-Level Description

When I bring a new supporting but tangential idea into a discussion (e.g. mention a widely accepted scientific theory), my interlocutor applies excessive nuance to this new idea at the expense of the salient points in the discussion. This misplaced and excessive nuance takes the form of nitpicking or questioning the underlying framework underpinning that newly introduced idea.

This is rarely fruitful because almost always, none of the participants is at the cutting-edge of the relevant fields to add any new insights. I'm all for rational inquiry and open discourse, but nitpicking oftentimes comes across as pretentious and unconstructive.

The effect of this conversation style is the unchecked growth of the stack of topics. We often forget to go back down the stack to revisit the original points that instigated the discussion unless someone cares sufficiently to intentionally apply enough pressure to steer the conversation back down the stack. Such discussions usually quickly end up in rabbit holes, and no one gets anything out of them.

Example

Suppose that you are having a conversation about "what it feels like when your worldview is shattered." Your interlocutor is a fellow rationalist and mentions that they read a book about climate denial and describes to you what it felt like to almost have their worldview shattered by a professional motivated-skeptic and evidence-cherrypicker. They explain how difficult it is for us mere mortals to notice this black magic being applied to our minds and how easy it is to be deceived by a professional charlatan.

To add to this discussion, you contribute the idea that this feeling is similar going the other way. For example, a profoundly religious person reading a science book on biological evolution will feel similar to how you—a rigorous rationalist—felt reading about climate denial, anti-vax, or a well-constructed pseudoscientific theory.

Both of you agree that evolution is a widely accepted theory with plenty of evidence going for it. Still, your interlocutor decides that they want to show you how much they know about the philosophy of science, so they say, "Playing devil's advocate, evolution is still just a theory." In the back of your mind, you would like to stay on topic, but rationalist verve takes over you, and you engage with all your heart in a fraught debate.

Now, suddenly, you find yourself debating the truth of biological evolution. You're both embroiled in the weeds of the philosophy of science, and other participants in the conversation are becoming visibly uninterested. You are no longer talking about "what it feels like when your worldview is shattered."

Conversational Etiquette

Conversation and Social Status

I read "The Elephant in the Brain" recently, and at some point, it talks about human conversation. Hanson and Simler explore why we humans are so eager to talk even when keeping information to ourselves gives us a competitive advantage.

We’re so eager to speak, in fact, that we have to curb our impulses via the norms of conversational etiquette. If speaking were an act of giving, we would consider it polite for people to “selflessly” monopolize conversations. But in fact, it’s just the opposite. To speak too much or “hog the mic” is considered rude, while the opposite behavior—inviting someone else to take the floor, or asking a dinner guest about one of her hobbies—is considered the epitome of good manners.

Improving conversational etiquette has a very hig...

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 and how to be excited about megaprojects, published by MichaelA on January 24, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

tl;dr: We should value large expected impact rather than large inputs, but should get especially excited about megaprojects anyway because they're a useful tool we're now unlocking.

tl;dr 2: It previously made sense for EAs to be especially excited about projects with very efficient expected impact (in terms of dollars and labour required). Now that we have more resources, we should probably be especially excited about projects with huge expected impact (especially but not only if they're very efficient). Those projects will often be megaprojects. But we should remember that really we're excited about capacity to achieve lots of impacts, not capacity to absorb lots of inputs.

We should be excited about the blue and green circles, including but not limited to their overlaps with the orange circle. We should not be excited about the rest of the orange circle. Question marks are because estimating impact is hard, man. For more on refuges, see Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big).

A lot of people are excited about EA-related megaprojects, and I agree that they should be. But we should remember that megaprojects are basically defined by the size of their inputs (e.g., "productively" using >$100 million per year), and that we don't intrinsically value the capacity to absorb those inputs. What we really care about is something like maximising the expected moral value of the world. Megaprojects are just one means to that end, and actually we should generally be even more excited about achieving the same impacts using less inputs & smaller projects (if there are ways to do that).

How can we reconcile these thoughts, and why should we in any case still get excited about - and pay special attention to - generating & executing megaproject ideas?

I suggest we think about this as follows:

Think of a Venn diagram with circles for megaprojects, projects with huge expected impact, and projects with very efficient expected impact.

Very roughly speaking, something like "maximising moral goodness" is the ultimate goal and always has been.

Given that we have limited resources, we should therefore be especially excited about efficient expected impact, and that has indeed been a key focus of EA thus far.

Projects like 80,000 Hours, FHI, and the book Superintelligence were each far smaller than megaprojects, but in my view probably had and still had huge expected impact, to an extent that'd potentially justify megaproject-level spending if that'd been necessary. That's great (it's basically even better than actual megaprojects!), and we'd still love more projects that can punch so far above their weight.

But efficiency is just a proxy. Always choosing the most cost- or labour-efficient option is not likely to maximise expected impact; sometimes it's worth doing something that's less efficient in terms of one or more resources if it has a sufficiently large total impact.

Meanwhile and in contrast, larger projects or large amounts of inputs is also a useful proxy to have in mind when generating/considering project ideas, for three main reasons:

Many things that would achieve huge impact and are worth doing will be large, costly, expensive projects.

As a community and as individuals, we've often avoided generating, considering, or executed such ambitious ideas, due to our focus on efficiency and perhaps our insufficient ambition/confidence. This leaves "megaprojects" as a fairly untapped area of potentially worthwhile ideas.

Coming up with, prioritizing among, and (especially) executing large projects involves some relatively distinct and generalisable skills, so the more we do that, the more we unlock the ability to do more of it in future.

This is bas...