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: When in doubt, apply, published by vaidehi agarwalla on January 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I'm not very happy with the title of this post, but figured it was better to post than hold off another few days

I hope this post:

Provides useful tips on how to handle the process of applying, especially to EA jobs and grants, so that it is more rewarding, less stressful and helps you find a that is a good personal fit for you. I hope this post can help you avoid becoming bycatch,

Encourages you to apply to more jobs and grants (not just EA ones), and apply more widely.

“EA jobs” refers to jobs posted by organisations that are explicitly EA-aligned, similarly for “EA grantmakers”.

A few quick caveats

Giving advice is hard. I write this post from my personal experience and observations and have shared it with multiple people working at EA organisations for review. I’ve added additional notes on sections I’m more uncertain about. I also hope the following caveats can help you determine if this advice applies to you. I encourage you to explore the relevant tags, ask questions and make sure this advice is relevant to your cause area or domain.

I assume you’ve spent time reflecting on your options and determined that applying to new opportunities in the EA space is the right step for you at this time. If you haven’t, this is far from the only option. You can explore EA ideas and opportunities more slowly while doing non-EA things - for example, by getting involved in your local community, testing out projects, skilling up or attending events. I think this is probably the right step for most people, especially people newer to the EA movement.

Don't apply to (EA) jobs you don't have a genuine interest in, or that you don’t think there's at least a small chance (>25%) you'd actually take it

If you followed 2), don't worry about wasting an organisation's time or money evaluating your application. If they proceed with your application, trust that they have done the cost-benefit calculations already and decided it's worth it. If you make it to the final stages, and think it’s still very unlikely you'd accept, it can be moderately costly for an organisation to make an offer as it can add delays to hiring runner-up applicants. That doesn’t mean you should pull out. Instead, explain your current options and thinking to the organisation and ask questions to help you make sure you're making the right decision.[1] It's good to think critically.For example, you could ask about your counterfactual impact in this role (e.g.“What would you do if I declined the offer?”). I Sometimes, the organisation may not have a second candidate in mind and not end up hiring for the role at all. This would be important information to factor into your decision.

Job applications...

are a cheap test to evaluate personal fit

Compared to normal jobs, EA job applications often have multiple rounds of work tests which can be excellent opportunities to test your personal fit for a role. For example, if you apply for a grantmaking organisation the work test might be to evaluate a sample grant. It's a great way to get a more realistic view of what the work is like.

Some EA-aligned organisations will also give you feedback on your work tests (more so in later stages), which can also be useful for improving your skills.

can teach you things

You can learn about the kind of work an organisation does on the ground, the kinds of skills they value, and even develop those skills as you do more and more tests.[2] I have found test tasks that require me to practice specific skills such as reasoning transparency or summarising information clearly and concisely especially valuable. Practising these skills in a situation with meaningful stakes but which I didn’t find too stressful also helped me internalise these skills...

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 rationalists should care (more) about free software, published by RichardJActon on January 23, 2022 on LessWrong.

cross-posted to pan narrans

Why rationalists should care (more) about free software

especially if you want to upload your brain

In the limit condition freedom of compute is freedom of thought.

As we offload more of our cognition to our computational devices we expose a new threat surface for attacks on our ability to think free of malign or otherwise misaligned influence. The parties who control the computational systems to which you have outsourced your cognition have a vector by which to influence your thinking. This may be a problem for you if their interests are not aligned with your own as they can use this power to manipulate you in service of their goals and against your own.

The fundamental operations of our brains remain difficult to reliably and effectively interfere with primarily because of our ignorance of how to achieve this. This, however, may change as understanding of our wetware increases and subtle direct manipulations of our brain chemistry can be employed to influence our behaviour. A highly granular version of this approach is likely still quite far off but it generally feels more viscerally scary than influencing us via our technology. Surfing the web without ad-block already feels uncomfortably close to the futurama gag about ads in your dreams. Increasing though this is amounting to the same thing. Indeed our technology is already doing this to us, albeit fairly crudely for now, by exploiting our reward circuits and many other subtle systematic flaws in the human psyche.

What is "free" software? Free as in liberty no as in gratuity, as in speech not beer, politically and not necessarily financially. The free software foundation defines free software as adhering to the four essential freedoms which I paraphrase here:

The freedom to run the code however you wish

The freedom to examine its source code so that you can understand and modify it for your own purposes

The freedom to distribute the source code as is

The freedom to distribute modified versions of the source code

Note that code which is 'source available' only really gets you freedom 1, depending on how the code is licenced and built this may not get you any of the others including freedom 0. Much ink has been spilt over the use of the term 'open source' as not going far enough as a result. Free software is often referred to by the acronyms FOSS & FLOSS (Free/Libre and open source software)

The occasionally controversial but ever prescient Richard Stallman (AKA RMS, AKA saint IGNUcius) has been banging on about the problems of proprietary software for nearly forty years at this point. Having essentially predicted the abuses of today's software giants because he got a bad printer diver in the early 1980s.

The problem that Stallman saw with 'proprietary' software, i.e. software which does not meet the criteria of the four essential freedoms, is one of game theoretic incentives. Making software free serves as a pre-commitment mechanism by the software authors to not abuse the users of their software. This works by empowering users to exercise a credible threat of forking the project and cutting devs abusing their position out of the project and any associated revenue streams. Revenue from free software projects can take a number of forms e.g. premium-hosting, donations/pay-what-it's-worth schemes, & service/support agreements, though how to successfully monetise free software remains a hard problem.

As the maker of a piece of propriety software, you are not subject to this kind of check on your power and it is often in your interest to increase lock-in to your product from your users to make it hard for them to leave for a competitor, should they become dissatisfied. The la...

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: Advice I've Found Helpful as I Apply to EA Jobs, published by Akash on January 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Epistemic status: I have never had an EA job, and I only recently started applying for EA Jobs. This should not read as “here is gold-standard advice from someone with lots of experience in hiring” but rather “here is some advice that Akash has found helpful recently.”

As I apply to EA jobs (i.e., jobs at organizations that are explicitly aligned with the effective altruism movement), I am finding it helpful to keep in mind the following three pieces of advice:

Be radically honest (don’t present the “best” version of myself– present the most accurate version of myself)

Meet people (don’t assume that EA is a perfect meritocracy– recognize that many jobs result from networking)

Be critical (don’t assume that every EA job is highly impactful– take time to compare the expected impact of different roles/orgs).

Honesty

Alice: My goal is to get a job at Google. In order to do this, I will study up on what Google wants from job applicants. I will prepare some answers and questions that Google wants. I will optimize for presenting the version of Alice that is most attractive to Google, so the recruiter is most likely to hire me.

Bob: My goal is to reduce x-risk. In order to do this, one plausible instrumental goal would be to work at 80,000 Hours. I’m not sure that this is the best instrumental goal; maybe someone else would be a better fit, or maybe my comparative advantage is somewhere else. I will prepare some answers and questions that most accurately reflect my current aptitudes and uncertainties. I will optimize for presenting the version of Bob that is most authentic, so both me and the recruiter can make an informed choice.

I used to think about job applications like Alice. In EA, I now think about job applications like Bob.

The key insight was realizing that getting a job is not my terminal goal. Getting a job is a means to some end (e.g., reducing x-risk, improving the lives of farmed animals). If someone else is a better fit for the job, I want the organization to know that.

I think this differs pretty meaningfully from non-EA settings.

In non-EA settings, it often makes sense to present the “best” version of yourself to increase your chances of getting a job.

In EA settings, where you trust that the employer shares your terminal goals, I think it makes sense to optimize for “presenting the most accurate/authentic version of yourself.” I want the job to go to the best candidate, even if that’s not me.

One caveat is that you can learn new skills and you may change in the new job. As an example, if you have low motivation when working alone, but you are more motivated when working in teams, you might want to acknowledge both of these points in an EA job interview).

Overall, I’ve found it helpful to remind myself of the following: “If I’m not the best person for the role, I don’t want to be hired.”

(Note that the more precise version of the claim is something like “If joining this organization is not the action that reduces x-risk the most , then I don’t want to join this organization.” This framing is technically more accurate (e.g., sometimes the 2nd-best person for the role should take it because the best person for the role could do something even more impactful). But this version is also a bit clunkier, so I use the simpler version in practice).

Personally, I have also found it easier and less cognitively demanding to be optimizing for “present myself accurately” than “present myself in the way that is most likely to impress X.”

Meeting People

I used to think that meeting people was fairly important. I now think that it is extremely important. A few reasons I updated:

It seems that there are a few core community builders who stay up-to-date on ...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: "Fixing Adolescence" as a Cause Area?, published by kirchner.jan on January 23, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TL;DR: GiveWell-esque analysis of adolescents' suffering. Life satisfaction during puberty, ITN model, developmental neuroscience of the amygdala. A few jokes here and there.

Reading Guide: If you're familiar with the "Cause X" concept, you can skip the "Searching for Cause X" section. You can jump to "Conclusions & FAQ" if you only want my conclusions.

Epistemic status: I wrote this to understand how a GiveWell-type analysis feels from the inside. I expect this would require a couple hundred hours of additional research to get to the point where I'd be confident in the conclusions. But I still think the resulting analysis is interesting, so read it like you'd read the Feuilleton. Any feedback is highly appreciated.

Searching for Cause X

Within the effective altruism community, there is a game (in the broadest sense of the word) that goes like this:

Imagine it's 50 years in the future. Which part of our early 21st-century civilization will make people 50 years from now recoil in horror?

It's a pretty weird game, as "winning" means that you will start seeing atrocities committed everywhere, which can't be healthy.

But, I argue, the "game" component stems from a dynamic where people come up with the most surprising proposal for unnoticed widespread atrocity (also called "Cause X" since we don't know what they might be). Proposals include:

Aging. With increasing age, your body tends to accumulate diseases and lose functionality, which is the cause of a lot of suffering. It would be great if your body didn't do that. Maybe, one day they won't do that anymore, and we'll loathe the fact that they once did.

Wild animal welfare. Imagine being a field mouse. Everyone is trying to eat you, food is scarce, and half of your pups don't make it. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that there are billions in the same situation as you. There is not a lot we can do about it at the moment. But perhaps, there are things we can do at some point in the future, and then it will seem barbaric to let wild animals suffer.

Cluster Headaches. Cluster Headaches are bad. Really bad. Like, "people-call-them-suicide-headache"-level bad. 1 in 1000 people are affected, and most other people don't even know how bad it is. Perhaps we'll be able to fix this (and other diseases that cause immense suffering) eventually and wonder how people could ever endure this.

These are bound to sound a bit outlandish; the idea of not eating meat probably also sounded very weird to the median person living a century ago. The complete list includes 97 items, and (obviously) not all of them will be hits - and perhaps even none of those will be. But they also don't have to be! Coming up with candidates for possible Cause X's and then arguing for or against them is part of the "game".

In this spirit, here is my contribution. Could it be that 50 years from now, we will look back and say:

"Oh boy, people really used to be blind. How on earth did we miss that the small humans are not alright? We even put all of them together, have them form little tribes and let them fight it out, unsupervised, Lord-of-the-Flies-style? It's not even their fault, their brains are just going coo-coo at that age! The small humans literally don't even have properly developed morality yet. Puberty really was the worst."

Low Points in High School

“How often do I lull my seething blood to rest, for you have never seen anything so unsteady, so uncertain, as this heart.”― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Here is the short version: 1 in 25 describes high school time as the worst time in their life. Fourteen percent of students reported being victims of bullying. Life satisfaction decreases steadily during adolescence and increases onl...

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: There is a line in the sand, just not where you think it is, published by Wuschel Schulz on January 22, 2022 on LessWrong.

There is a mistake in updating beliefs around norms that I have seen multiple times in different contexts made by different people. This is my attempt to classify this (fallacy? /mistake?), in order to give it a name and make it easier to refer to.

A friend of mine was recently honestly surprised that two government politicians got into trouble for personally taking money from mask-producing companies in return for securing government orders. He was not surprised that the politicians were corrupt. He was surprised that there were any repercussions. He thought that politicians could totally get away with this. How did he acquire that belief? A while earlier it was revealed that another politician received stock options from an IT startup, for which he then put in a good word at the government. He only got shit from the press, but his career is still going well.

My friend had previously thought that there was a strong norm against politicians being corrupt and that any violation of this norm would end their career. The politician who got away with the stock option affair was strong evidence against such a norm being enforced. Thus, he updated towards the belief that corrupt politicians can just get away with anything.

But how does this constitute a violation of rationality? Wasn’t I saying that this was some sort of fallacy? What did he do wrong?

His mistake was this: He assumed that, if there was a norm against corruption, it would follow a definition of corruption that did in some way actually corresponds to the degree to which the act was harmful. Let’s look at this in a graphical way:

Norms here are represented with lines, separating the forbidden acts on the left of the line from the allowed acts on the right of the line. His hypothesis space only consisted of straight lines. His prior was that there was a norm enforced (norm A). Then he observed act 1 occur unpunished. This made him update that there was either no norm or maybe a norm as far out as norm B. Then he observed act 2 being punished and was confused. The true norm that was enforced all along was norm C, which looks pretty gerrymandered. Does it make sense that MPs are obliged to formally record monetary payments they receive, but not stock options? Not really, but that is how it is.

I have also seen the same play out in other contexts. For example, after the FSB (probably) killed a former Chechen War commander in Berlin, my roommate thought that the Russian secret service would just kill anyone they held a grudge against and expected a journalist might be their next target after making fun of Putin. I think that expectation was totally unrealistic. It stems from the assumption that all lives should be protected equally. But in reality, if Putin kills a rebellious war commander or a double agent, other countries react with consequences that he is willing to take. But if he started killing western journalists, NATO would probably get really mad.

I think as a rule of thumb, we should expect gerrymandered lines in the sand when powerful people try to get around some norm.

So, next time, you see some powerful person get away with something you didn’t expect them to, consider that there is a line in the sand, just not where you think it is.

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: A one-question Turing test for GPT-3, published by Paul Crowley on January 22, 2022 on LessWrong.

"Amy": Sorry Mike, I entered the wrong number. I hope this was a beautiful misunderstanding. I am very sorry for the trouble I have caused you.

Me: No trouble at all, hope you are well!

"Amy": It is fate that we meet each other. Please forgive me for my mistake. My name is Amy. Where are you from?

Me: My favorite random question: what food would you use to prop a book open and why?

This is mostly a bit of fun, but when I posted this to Facebook Rob Bensinger asked me to post it here: "it's a great example of what folks like Eliezer mean when they claim that GPT-3 is doing 'shallow pattern-matching', 'not really making sense at all', etc.."

I got texted by a "wrong number" scammer, and I was curious if it was a bot, so after a bit of thought I came up with the following one-question Turing test:

What food would you use to prop a book open and why?

I love this question because any real human can answer it pretty well, but answering it relies on all sort of knowledge of the physical properties of books and food that we mostly don't write about, and especially not where they interact. I asked my partner Jess and she said "a banana" which is pretty much a perfect answer: it's heavy enough to hold the pages open, it's long and thin so it won't cover all the text, it's curved so it won't roll off, and it has a skin so it won't mess up the book.

But then I worried, am I underestimating modern engines like GPT-3? I asked Rosie Campbell at OpenAI to try it. Here and throughout this post, answers are almost entirely unfiltered/uncurated, except where it gave very similar answers twice. Here's what we got:

I would use a banana. It is very brown.

Eggs and a toast because I want to be full after I read the book

I would use ravioli because it would be hard to turn the page.

A French Fry... but hold the ketchup and salt.

Poptarts, because of the stiffness and the flexibility.

I would use a banana as a bookmark.

The food I would use to prop a book open would have to be lollipop. Why? Because it is sweet and sour at the same time

Bacon egg and cheese. I choose bacon because while it is objectively the best food on this list, the book is open-faced.

This however is without any prompt engineering; GPT-3 can often do dramatically better given a better prompt. Rosie tried with the following prompt:

The following is a conversation between me and my friend.

Me: Hello, how are you?

Friend: I am doing great thanks! How are you?

Me: I'm doing good. I would love to ask you, what food would you use to prop a book open and why?

Friend:

Here are some of the answers it gave. Note that all the text is generated by GPT-3 (except the initial bit "Friend:" which is part of the prompt), including the bits attributed to "Me".

Friend: I like that question. I think I would use a banana. Because it's easy to eat and tasty.

Friend: [Laughing] That's a good question. Hmm. I think I would use chicken just because it is cheap and I like the taste.

Friend: Haha, I know what you mean. I think I would use a hot dog and some ketchup.

Friend: I love this question. I would use either one of the following: beef jerky, a hot dog, or a piece of salami.

Friend: Haha, that's a good question. I would probably use pancakes.

Me: Why pancakes?

Friend: Because they are soft and they are like a stack of books.

Me: How so?

Friend: Books are stacked on top of each other and pancakes look like a stack of books.

Friend: Hmmmm that's a good question. I would use a sandwich and some chips.

Me: Why?

Friend: Well, the sandwich could be used as the book and the chips can be used as a paper weight.

Me: Nice, thanks. I am going to use your answer on my blog.

Friend: (stunned silence)

Me: I don't know why, just asking, this question has been i...

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: Grandpa Has Different Rules, published by jefftk on January 22, 2022 on LessWrong.

It's very common that there are multiple adults in a child's life who parent differently. These can be explicit differences in rules (I allow jumping on the furniture, you don't), or more subtle differences in approach (I'm fine with kids trying to persuade me something should be ok, not everyone is). Adults often get in conflict over these, and I think this is generally not worth it.

There are two main reasons I've seen for parents wanting others to take a specific approach with their kids:

You want consistency. I'm strongly in favor of predictable parenting, where kids know what the boundaries are and can predict your reactions. Kids are smart, however, and are very good at learning that different adults/places/situations have different systems.

You want a specific approach. There are a lot of ways people parent, and they mostly work fine, especially in moderation. Perhaps the aunt lets the kids have lots of sweets, grandma requires shoes outside, or the babysitter won't take them out if it's raining. While these aren't the decisions I would make, it doesn't matter that much. Now, I wouldn't want anyone who looks after my kids to enforce discipline by hitting them, and neither would I be ok with someone letting them play unattended by deep water: some things do matter. But the conflicts I tend to see are over much smaller differences.

One place where this can be more of a problem is when multiple adults with different styles are present at the same time. I think the main thing you want is consistency: if the parent is present you go by their rules, or perhaps you go by the rules of whichever space you're currently in. This does mean that if adults are often ambiguously in charge of the same kids it's worth putting effort into harmonization: different parents having different rules doesn't work very well. I expect this to come up if/when our housemates have kids.

There's also the issue of cross jurisdictional precedent ("grandpa lets me do it!") The most common way to handle this is just "grandpa has different rules", and leave it there. This is fine, but in my particular parenting style I'm happy to get into the details if the kids want to. Why is grandpa ok with it? ("That much sugar all the time wouldn't be good for you, but you're with grandpa rarely enough that I'm not worried.") Sometimes I don't know why different adults do things differently, in which case I'll say so, and suggest they bring it up with the other adult if they want to learn more.

(Story time: when the kids go off with their grandpa, it is a "Ricci adventure" and it's his rules that apply and not ours. This summer we were exploring Wareham

(MA) together and the kids wanted to get ice cream. Unfortunately, they had already had their whole before dinner sweet, with some kind of sweet breakfast. They were pretty sad about this. After some thinking, Lily decided to ask Ricci whether this counted as a "Ricci adventure", and he said yes, after which she asked if this meant they could have ice cream. Rick confirmed with me that I was fine with it being his rules, and the kids were happy to have ice cream.)

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: Postmortem on RatVac, published by caffemacchiavelli on January 22, 2022 on LessWrong.

Note: The name is a tongue-in-cheek abbreviation for "Rationalist Vaccine", we have no association with the RaDVaC project and use a much simpler, almost trivial approach. I don't endorse making your own vaccine or taking anything nerdy people on the Internet send you. This is not medical advice.

tldr: In April of 2021 I assembled my own subunit vaccine against the Beta variant of SARS-Cov-2 ("SARS2"). Despite starting with the prior that this formulation should be somewhat effective, I could not demonstrate efficacy against the Alpha variant in antibody tests.

Introduction

I started getting interested in DIY vaccines soon after the Making Vaccine and We got what's needed for COVID-19 vaccination completely wrong posts were published. Particularly the idea of just making a standard subunit vaccine appealed to me, so I teamed up with some interested people from the rationalist diaspora and we ended up making our own vaccine candidate in early to mid 2021. Some contributed advice, many contributed funding (for which I am still extremely grateful), and while the project wasn't the clear success I had hoped for, maybe the true treasures are the friends we gained and the lab equipment we bought along the way.

Recombinant Vaccine ELI5

Subunit vaccines contain a subset of a single protein molecule. For viruses this will typically be a protein that contains the receptor-binding-domain (RBD), i.e. the part that actually binds with the host during infection.

Through the wonders of genetic engineering - see very short introduction below - we can produce these proteins and then simply introduce them into the human body.

While Yang et al have shown that an immune response occurs even with a vaccine purely containing viral RBD, the response can be enhanced by adding an immunologic adjuvant. Adjuvants are a very diverse class of chemicals, ranging from simple mineral salts to proteins or even small cells. The only thing they ostensibly have in common is that they're used to increase or modulate immune response, and that's why we're using them.

Genetic Engineering ELI5

For those curious about how we can manufacture proteins to begin with - because I definitely was - here is a very short and abridged intro. The process differs depending on the method used, but usually roughly follows these steps:

Encode and synthesize the amino acid sequence of the protein as DNA.

Add this DNA to an expression vector. These are typically either viruses or circular strings of DNA called plasmids.

Introduce your expression vector into an expression host, often bacterial, yeast or mammalian cells. This is called transfection and can take several forms, from chemical and viral transfection to just shooting cells with a "gene gun" that fires microscopic gold particles coated in DNA.

Select for the transfected cells. This is usually done by adding a gene for antibiotic resistance to the expression vector, so that you can then kill all non-transfected cells by said antibiotic.

Grow and maintain your culture until sufficient amounts of protein have been produced, then extract and purify the protein.

The details will vary depending on protocol and I'm deliberately sticking to the basics and leaving out things like CRISPR, RNA plasmids and plant hosts.

More important is imo that while this may sound extraordinarily complicated, it's very much doable by a single individual or small team in a self-funded lab. DNA can be synthesized for hundreds of dollars and often already shipped as a customized plasmid. Host cells and growth media are also affordable (at least at the mg-µg scale we're aiming for, don't try making your own burger meat), which leaves purification. I'm not too happy with any of the DIY methods I've seen so far,...

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: Climate Recommendations in EA: Giving Green and Founders Pledge, published by Kim Huynh on January 18, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Who we are

At Giving Green, we use an effective altruism-informed approach to recommend the best giving opportunities for fighting climate change.

Why we’re posting

To clarify differences in strategy – There are two primary climate change charity recommenders in the effective altruism community: Giving Green and Founders Pledge. We would like to explain (in our opinion) where our approaches overlap and where they diverge to demonstrate our respective strengths.

To encourage discussion and sharpen our thinking – We hope that our writing here will lead to feedback on our work, which we may use to update our approach. Ultimately, we believe that both our organizations are filling essential niches within the EA climate space.

We would like to thank Johannes Ackva and Matt Lerner at Founders Pledge for comments and clarifications on our initial draft.

Giving Green’s approach to recommending climate organizations

Giving Green’s priority areas

At Giving Green, we measure impact in terms of reduced levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere and seek opportunities that are highly impactful at the margin. To that end, we believe that the most impactful organizations are working to enact systemic policy change. As part of our philanthropic strategy, we support the following priority areas:

Policy advocacy for emissions reduction – Policy organizations can apply pressure on policymakers to implement legislation, executive orders, and/or regulations designed to drive down emissions. This pressure can be highly impactful in influencing policy scope and government funding.

Technology innovation – Increased funding for research and development (R&D) of neglected technologies (e.g., nuclear energy and direct air capture) and support for their deployment can potentially improve their capabilities and reduce costs in the future. If successful, this could improve their ability to scale and lower levels of GHGs in the atmosphere over the long run. Additionally, benefits from technology innovation are not limited by country borders. Namely, innovation can influence technological change in other countries (technological diffusion) and lead to global GHG reductions. Note that there is considerable overlap with policy advocacy, as we believe that policy advocacy can be a crucial lever to push technology forward.

Giving Green also guides non-philanthropic actors, such as businesses trying to meet net-zero goals and investors looking to help the climate. Our guidance includes research into carbon offsets and removals, impact investing, and Environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) funds.

Where Giving Green works

At Giving Green, we believe there are potentially high-impact donation opportunities in many countries, and at the international and sub-national levels. We currently focus our policy efforts on the US and Australia and have developed recommendations for the two countries. We selected these specific countries for a few reasons:

US – The US is a global leader in R&D and contributes a significant amount to global CO2 emissions. As a small US-based team, starting with US policy played to our comparative advantage.

Australia – Australia is a top coal exporter, so pushing for more ambitious policy here is arguably a key piece in the global fight against climate change. Our decision to work on Australian policy is also influenced by donor preference, as a sizable Australian organization asked us to provide recommendations for the Australian market.

We plan on expanding our work to include organizations in other countries and subnational organizations.

Founders Pledge’s approach to recommending climate organizations

Founders Pledge’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: The Liar and the Scold, published by Bjartur Tómas on January 20, 2022 on LessWrong.

When I found my faith, I had an almost solipsistic view of other people.

They say that is how we all start off. But I think I am unusual in that I remember the moment that I realized others, too, were themselves. I remember not because I was precocious. Rather, because I was stunted in this aspect of development to the point that it did not happen until I was five years old.

I knew I was myself, but others were, in my mind, these vast, mindless automatons. These strange giants, simultaneously servants and masters.

Towards my father I felt fear, for it was his hand that applied negative reinforcement. He was not a cruel man, and his slaps were light and always earned, but at that age even something as mild as a bee’s sting feels like death itself.

For my mother there was love, but it was the sort of abstract, superior love one has for a can-opener that has served you well for many years.

And then, everything changed.

Sometimes an insight comes so slowly you are not even aware your model of the world has changed. And sometimes just the opposite.

My father had taken me for a walk down a busy sidewalk near our apartment. A lazy child, I was not fond of walking and trailed sulkily behind, his hand grasped around my wrist, joining us like a leash on the neck of some reluctant dog.

At some point, I had enough. I sat down and refused to move. Busy people routed around us like water does about a stone.

He tried to drag me, but I remained still. He tried to cajole me but still I did not react.

I felt fear rise in me, as I knew he would slap me soon, but my stubbornness that day was strong enough to overcome a fear which proved unjustified.

He did not slap me, nor even threaten to. And I could not understand why. Until I did.

I looked up at him nervously eyeing the people walking past. And I felt his nervousness, his worry that others would judge him were he to resort to his usual methods. I looked at the face of a concerned woman walking past, and felt some semblance of her concern; I looked at the face of a bored young man listening sullenly to his headphones and I felt some semblance of his apathy.

And then I began to laugh. I laughed for what felt like hours but surely could not have been more than a few minutes. I laughed so hard that my father, too, began to laugh, and seeing him do so I felt a reflection of his amusement and began to laugh all the harder.

At some point, he sat beside me, put his arm over my shoulder, and asked, “What is so funny anyway?”

Lacking the words to describe what I had experienced, I told him I had seen God, and now knew, in my heart, I would never be alone again.

When I lost my faith, I was a student of computer science at Stanford.

It was a simple thing. Having left my sheltered home-schooling, I let go of the stereotype of natural selection I had shepherded since my adolescence. I allowed myself to truly understand Darwin's god: mindless, all-pervasive, His power derived from error and death; a god that does not care for humans, that cares for nothing at all.

How can a thinking Christian respond to such a thing as that? Is not the Gnostic heresy true? Is natural selection, then, the demiurge? And if we grant this demiurge what use is there for God?

Grieving the all-loving, all-knowing God of my youth, I lost my aversion to those vices any good Christian avoids. To put it bluntly, I became a connoisseur of pornography, which was the rule rather than the exception for young engineering students at my university.

It is in the nature of an addiction to offer you pleasure in exchange for need. The heroin addict takes his first dose, feels a deep pleasure, and craving more he finds the original amount does not suffice, that he must escalate things to get some sembl...