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: Two (very different) kinds of donors, published by Duncan Sabien on December 22, 2021 on LessWrong.

This post describes a very simple and very important distinction between two kinds of donors/two kinds of donations.

I apologize if the content of this (short) post is obvious to you. Repeated experience has led me to believe that it is not obvious to many people, and can sometimes be something of an epiphany for them, so it seems worth sharing in linkable form. A disagreement that is tightly analogous to this one is currently wrecking my parents' marriage, for instance, and they each independently found this to be a concretely useful metaphor.

There are (at least) two very different kinds of donors, and they give very different kinds of donations, and they do not always tag themselves or their donations as such. In part, this is because many people are unaware that [the other kind of donor] exists at all, and so they don't know that they need to identify themselves as being of a particular type. Both types, in my experience, assume themselves to be the default.

The first kind of donor is donating to the mission. They attend a CFAR workshop, for instance, and enjoy themselves immensely, and believe that the experience will be valuable for others. They want [more of that], so they donate to CFAR.

Whether they say so explicitly or not, they are donating to cause [more of that]. They believe and expect that their money will be used in ways which are legibly about causing [more of that]. Thus, while they may not actually earmark their donation in any particular way, if CFAR's books were to become public, they would expect to see expenditures like:

Venue costs

Food and catering costs

Subsidies for promising workshop attendees

Salaries for instructors and other staff

Continuing education for instructors and researchers (e.g. conference fees, program tuition, travel expenses directly related to such)

Staff retreats (for curriculum development)

I call these donors "legibles."

The second kind of donor is donating to an agent. They attend a CFAR workshop, for instance, and enjoy themselves immensely, and believe that the experience will be valuable for others. They think to themselves "the people who caused this to happen are doing something good in the world. I want to see more stuff like this. I want to unlock these people, so that they are free to pursue their ambitions."

Whether they say so explicitly or not, they are delegating. They believe and expect that the people they've given money to will be better at using that money than they would themselves (at least for those particular marginal dollars). They have no particular expectations about how their money will be spent.

I call these donors "patrons."

Imagine that for some reason, an organization like CFAR uses donor dollars to purchase fifty rubber dildos.

(This example is deliberately chosen to be a specific kind of "outrageous." To be clear, nothing like this ever happened with CFAR money to the best of my knowledge; this is a hypothetical and I'm using CFAR as my example org simply because I worked there (and learned about the distinction between different kinds of donors while working there).)

Legibles, if they discover this fact, will be shocked. They may very well feel personally betrayed. They may demand an investigation, and in their culture they are entirely correct to do so. If they discover multiple other purchases that are similarly wildly divorced from "the sorts of things one would reasonably expect are involved in developing and running applied rationality workshops," they may demand their money back, or call for the firing of various executives, or launch a campaign to have CFAR dissolved.

Patrons will not be shocked. They may be curious. They will very likely be confused. But their overall response will ...

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: Bayesian Mindset, published by Holden Karnofsky on December 21, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This piece is about the in-practice pros and cons of trying to think in terms of probabilities and expected value for real-world decisions, including decisions that don’t obviously lend themselves to this kind of approach.

The mindset examined here is fairly common in the “effective altruist” and “rationalist” communities, and there’s quite a bit of overlap between this mindset and that of Rationality: A-Z (aka The Sequences), although there are some differing points of emphasis.1 If you’d like to learn more about this kind of thinking, this piece presents a ~20-minute read rather than the >1000 pages of Rationality: A-Z.

This piece is a rough attempt to capture the heart of the ideas behind rationalism, and I think a lot of the ideas and habits of these communities will make more sense if you’ve read it, though I of course wouldn’t expect everyone in those communities to think I’ve successfully done this.

If you’re already deeply familiar with this way of thinking and just want my take on the pros and cons, you might skip to Pros and Cons.

This piece is about the “Bayesian mindset,” my term for a particular way of making decisions. In a nutshell, the Bayesian mindset is trying to approximate an (unrealistic) ideal of making every decision based entirely on probabilities and values, like this:

Should I buy travel insurance for $10? I think there's about a 1% chance I'll use it (probability - blue), in which case it will get me a $500 airfare refund (value - red). Since 1% $500 = $5, I should not buy it for $10.

(Two more examples below in case that’s helpful.)

The ideal here is called expected utility maximization (EUM): making decisions that get you the highest possible expected value of what you care about.2 (I’ve put clarification of when I’m using “EUM” and when I’m using “Bayesian mindset” in a footnote, but it isn’t ultimately that important.3)

It’s rarely practical to literally spell out all the numbers and probabilities like this. But some people think you should do so when you can, and when you can’t, use this kind of framework as a “North Star” - an ideal that can guide many decisions even when you don’t do the whole exercise.

Others see the whole idea as much less promising.

I think it's very useful to understand the pros and cons, and I think it's good to have the Bayesian Mindset as one option for thinking through decisions. I think it's especially useful for decisions that are (a) important; (b) altruistic (trying to help others, rather than yourself); (c) “unguided,” in the sense that normal rules of thumb aren’t all that helpful.

In the rest of this piece, I'm going to walk through:

The "dream" behind the Bayesian mindset.

If we could put the practical difficulties aside and make every decision this way, we'd be able to understand disagreements and debates much better - including debates one has with oneself. In particular, we'd know which parts of these disagreements and debates are debates about how the world is (probabilities) vs. disagreements in what we care about (values).

When debating probabilities, we could make our debates impersonal, accountable, and focused on finding the truth. Being right just means you have put the right probabilities on your predictions. Over time, it should be possible to see who has and has not made good predictions. Among other things, this would put us in a world where bad analysis had consequences.

When disagreeing over values, by contrast, we could all have transparency about this. If someone wanted you to make a certain decision for their personal benefit, or otherwise for values you didn’t agree with, they wouldn’t get very far asking you to trust them.

The "how" of the Bayesian mindset - what kinds of practic...

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: Experiences raising children in shared housing, published by juliawise on December 21, 2021 on LessWrong.

Crosspost from The Whole Sky.Sometimes I see posts about people’s hope to raise children in a group housing situation, and it often seems overly optimistic to me. In particular they seem to expect that there will be more shared childcare than I think should be expected.Today I talked to another parent who lived in a co-op when her child was a newborn. She didn’t get into specifics, but her summary was “We didn’t even make it a year.”

Jeff and I have lived in several group situations with kids. I’ll describe each of them at the end, but first some takeaways:

The main benefits of parenting in shared housing have been:

Adult company. Compared to most nuclear families where you have maybe one other adult to talk with at the end of the day, we like having several of us at dinner and some hanging out at other times.

Less housework in general. We’ve always had a dinner rotation with each adult cooking roughly once a week. Shared grocery shopping, taking out the trash, and cleaning get some economies of scale. Our kids produce a lot of the mess, so we try to account for that in doing housework.

More intergenerational contact. I think it’s good for the kids to know more adults than their parents and teacher, and I hope the housemates enjoy having some kid time in their life.

The main downsides:

In addition to whatever other housing preferences people have, it’s harder to find a space that works in terms of lead safety, layout with children’s spaces not too noisy for other housemates, and access to outdoor play space.

Kid noise bothering other housemates. To some extent this is just an inevitable reality of apartment living, but it’s more intense when you see each other all the time. We’ve had a couple of housemates who are particularly sensitive to kid yelling / foot noise. In one case we tried to mitigate it by padding the floor and eventually Jeff heavily soundproofing their ceiling, but it wasn’t enough and they eventually moved out. I’m sure this is unpleasant for the housemates, and it’s unpleasant for me to feel like I need to police kids doing normal kid things (not just yelling and running, but also things like tapping feet on the floor while doing homework, or in one case, stirring a bowl of cookie dough too loudly for the person downstairs). Jeff finds this kind of thing less anxiety-producing than I do.

Mess. This hasn’t actually been much of a problem in our house, but with some combinations I expect it would be. Kids create messes and usually have a lot of stuff and leave it everywhere. I can imagine in some situations this would bother tidy housemates and stress parents who feel pressure to do more cleaning/tidying than they would prefer.

Other thoughts:

We haven’t lived with other parents since becoming parents, but one thing I imagine might bother us is living with other parents who have a really different disciplinary style. Both Jeff and I find it grating when other parents do stuff like threaten punishments they obviously don’t mean.

I think it’s important that other housemates are allowed to set limits with the kids (“That’s too loud,” “The cat doesn’t like that,” “Leave my headphones on the shelf, they are not for playing with.”) I wouldn’t want to live with kids I couldn’t set limits with.

The situation we’re now in is easier for us because Jeff and I own the house, and we won’t have to leave if something really doesn’t work out. Needing to move is a bigger deal with kids, especially if they’re in local schools. I’d be more cautious about trying out group living as a parent if the kids are the interlopers rather than part of the family that has the lease / mortgage.

Recommendations:

If possible, try some time living together (maybe a long visit) befo...

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: Perpetual Dickensian Poverty?, published by jefftk on December 21, 2021 on LessWrong.

Several of my friends have been sharing screenshots of this Twitter post:

Time for your annual reminder that, according to A Christmas Carol, Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that's. $530.27/wk, $27,574/yr, or $13.50/hr.

Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory for destitution.

Chris Thompson.

It's wrong, but it's wrong in an interesting way!

A Christmas. Carol came out in 1843. The Bank of England Inflation Calculator, which incredibly goes back to. 1209, estimates £1 in 1843 is equivalent to £130 in 2020. Since there were 20 shillings to the pound, 15s/wk in 1843 makes. £98/wk in 2020. Cratchit would have been working six days a week at perhaps ten hours a day, so we get £1.63/hr or $2.15/hr. The post gave $13.50/hr; where's the factor of six coming from?

There are multiple ways to figure inflation. The most common one, and the one I use above, is purchasing power: what can you buy with your. £? While I can't replicate Thompson's number exactly, I think he's instead using using labor value: how many hours of someone's time can you buy? 15s/wk in 1843 is, deflated by the cost of labor, £611/wk in 2020, or $807/wk. For a 60hr week that's $13.45/hr.

The problem is, no matter how much richer we get, using the cost of labor to adjust worker pay for inflation will always show that workers are paid the same amount. It's saying "Cratchit was paid X% of a typical wage for 1843, which you can think of as if he were paid X% of a typical 2020 wage, which is $13.45/hr." This sort of adjustment makes sense if you're trying to understand the social position of the Cratchit family, but since what we care about here is their absolute level of poverty, purchasing power is the right measure.

(Thanks to Marcus for pointing this out.)

Comment via: facebook

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 a New Course on the Economics of AI, published by akorinek on December 21, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

After having researched the topic as part of the Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI) for several years, I have made a six-week course on "The Economics of AI" freely available on Coursera, supported by a grant from the EA Long-Term Future Fund. The course covers how transformative artificial intelligence will affect our economy and society, labor markets, inequality, growth, and economic policy.

You can check out an intro video here:

Economics is a social science that is well-suited to modelling social processes, to examine how to intervene in them and how to make our society work better. It has long been a favorite subject to study for effective altruists. As artificial intelligence is starting to transform our world, the question of how to positively shape its economic impact has also received growing attention in the EA community. My course focuses on the long-term effects of AI on our economy and society, on economic policy solutions, and on governance structures that will be useful under transformative AI scenarios.

To sign up for the course and learn more about these topics, please go to

Course Structure

The course consists of six modules that introduce you to the cutting-edge research in the economics of transformative AI. Each module is dedicated to a specific topic that we will be covering via short videos, exercises, and readings.

The first module starts by analyzing the nature of intelligence, how it relates to our economy and how AI will transform it. This part is accessible to anyone with a social science background. The remainder of the course is targeted at people with a background in economics or a similar level of analytical skills, i.e. graduate students or advanced undergraduates. Others may enjoy the non-technical parts of the course.

The second module connects the analysis of the nature of intelligence to models of production and technological change in economics and examines how these processes are affected by AI. Then we turn to how technological change drives aggregate economic growth, covering a range of scenarios including a potential singularity in growth. We also study the impact of AI-driven technological change on labor markets and workers, evaluating whether fears about technological unemployment are well-founded and what to do about them. Next we investigate how to steer progress in artificial intelligence in a direction that benefits humanity. Finally, we analyze the potential for transformative progress in AI to lead to significant disruptions, and we use the methods of economics to study the question of how humans can control highly intelligent AI algorithms.

Please click here to sign up for the course, and please share this post with others who may be interested in the topic.

If you have any questions, suggestions or other feedback, please email me at [email protected].

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: Demanding and Designing Aligned Cognitive Architectures, published by Koen Holtman on December 21, 2021 on The AI Alignment Forum.

This post is to announce my new paper Demanding and Designing Aligned. Cognitive Architectures, which I recently presented in the PERLS workshop (Political Economy of Reinforcement Learning)] at NeurIPS. 2021.

In this post, I will give a brief overview of the paper, specifically written for this forum and the LW/EA communities. I will highlight some of the main differences with the AI alignment approaches and outlooks more often discussed here.

The comment section below can be used for general comments and Q&A about the entire paper.

Scope of the paper

The main focus of this paper is to improve the global debate about the medium-term alignment problems in purple below.

In the last few years, these two problems have moved inside society's. Overton window, not only in the West but also in China. So it is topical to write papers which focus specifically on improving the debate about these two problems.

But I also have more long-term, x-risk related motivation for discussing these two problems. If society develops better tools and mechanisms for managing them, I expect that it will also become better at managing the long-term x-risk problems on the right.

Alignment as a policy problem

The word demanding describes a political act, whereas designing is a technical act. The phrase 'Demanding and Designing' in the paper title gives a hint that there will be a cross-disciplinary discussion inside. This discussion fuses insights about running political processes with insights about AI technology.

On this forum and in the broader Rationalist/EA web sphere, it is common to see posts which treat all political activity as a source of irrationality and despair only. In the paper, I develop a very different viewpoint.

I treat politics as the sum total of activities in society that contribute to creating, updating, and legitimizing social contracts. Social contracts can be encoded in law, customs, institutions, code, or all of the above. They aim to produce mutual benefit by binding the actions of society's stakeholders.

In this framing, AI alignment policy making is the activity of having a broad debate that will update our existing social contracts. Updates of social contracts are preferably decided on in a debate that will involve all affected stakeholders at some stage, or at least involve their representatives.

These are all pretty standard Enlightenment ideas. Crucially, these ideas can applied to both global and local policy debates.

Social contract theory does not absolutely require that every stakeholder has to be consulted or satisfied, in order for a new contract to be legitimate. In this, it stands apart from another approach to legitimacy which is often mentioned on this forum: the approach of seeking legitimacy for proposals by claiming that they represent a Pareto improvement. I have have been in applied politics. In my experience, the strategy of trying to offend nobody by seeking Pareto improvements almost never works.

So much for discussing moral and political theory. In the paper, I only discuss theory in one small section. The paper devotes much more space to applied politics, to topics like understanding and controlling the prevailing narrative flows in the alignment debate.

The participants in the AI alignment policy debate will have to overcome many obstacles. Many of these obstacles are of course no different from those encountered by the participants in the global warming debate, in the global debate about improving cybersecurity, etc.

In the paper, I am not wasting any ink on enumerating these general obstacles. Instead, I start by saying that I will cover three only three obstacles, three obstacles which happen to be specific to...

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: S-risk Intro Fellowship, published by stefan.torges on December 20, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

We, the Center on Long-Term Risk (CLR), will run an Intro Fellowship to Risks of Astronomical Suffering (s-risks). It is intended to help interested effective altruists get up to speed with our thinking on s-risks.

Logistics

The fellowship will most likely take place over six weeks, starting during the week of February 7, 2022 (until the week of March 14). The exact days will be coordinated with the participants in advance to ensure as many as possible can participate.

The fellowship will be held remotely using Zoom.

Each week, participants will likely read relevant material, attend a session (different formats), and have 1:1 calls with people working on s-risks. We expect the time commitment to be between 3h and 5h total per week (including reading).

We will cover what we currently consider to be the most important s-risks (TAI conflict & cooperation, risks from malevolent actors) and we plan to give concrete guidance on how to contribute to reducing s-risks with your career. We will finalize the program based on the needs of the participants.

Target audience

We think this event will be useful for you if:

You are interested in s-risks and are at least seriously considering to make this cause a priority for your career; and

You have not interacted extensively with CLR (staff) yet, e.g., you have talked with us for less than 10h.

If you’re interested in applying for our Summer Research Fellowship later in the year, this fellowship is a good opportunity to learn more about our work and improve your application due to having a better understanding of what we do and how to contribute.

There might be more idiosyncratic reasons to apply and the criteria above are intended as a guide rather than strict criteria.

Application details

You can apply to participate in this seminar by filling out this short Google Form. The deadline is January 12, 2022, at 23:59pm in any timezone. In some cases, we might ask applicants for a short interview (10-15 minutes).

We expect to make final application decisions by January 21, 2022.

If you have any questions about the event or are uncertain whether to apply, you can comment on this post, reach out to [email protected].

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: Prizes for last year's 2019 Review, published by Raemon on December 20, 2021 on LessWrong.

About a year ago, LessWrong held its second annual review, where we looked over the best posts from 2019. The LessWrong team offered $2000 in prizes for the top post authors, and (up to) $2000 in prizes for the best reviews of those posts.

Once again, some things came up and we got pretty sidetracked in actually getting around to awarding those prizes. Apologies to authors and reviewers. (I'm setting in motion some processes so that this year's prizes are given out in a much more timely fashion)

Prizes for Posts

The $2000 in prizes for posts this year are awarded to:

$200 to Paul Christiano, for What Failure Looks Like

$600 (divided evenly) among Evan Hubinger, Chris van Merwijk, vlad_m, Joar Skalse and Scott Garrabrant, for Risks from Learned Optimization

$200 to Abram Demski, for Parable of the Predict-o-matic and Selection vs Control

$200 to John Wentworth, for Being on the Pareto Frontier

$200 to Scott Alexander, for Book Review: Secret of our Success and Rule Thinkers in, not Out

$200 to Kaj Sotala, for Unlocking Emotional Brain

$200 to Zvi Mowshowitz, for Asymmetric Justice

$200 to Zack Davis, for Heads I Win, Tails I Never Heard of Her

The above authors are chosen primarily by the outcome of the vote (on which they all scored very highly). I'm also making a moderator call to award $100 to Benquo for Reason Isn't Magic, essentially coming out of our review-prize-budget. I thought it was a good review of the Secrets of Our Success post, which I think warranted special attention (see below).

Prizes for Reviews

Reviewing generally seems unglamorous compared to authoring posts. To compensate,I awarded more prize money here per unit-of-effort than I did for posts.

I particularly went out of my way to reward reviews that attempted a factual epistemic spot check – not because I think those are most important overall, but because they seem undersupplied to me, and more effortful. (AFAICT we only had 2-3?)

That said, much of LessWrong's content is in the domain of philosophy or theory, where epistemic spot checks aren't quite the right frame.

Secrets of Our Success

Book Review: Secrets of Our Success was an interesting case that stood out to me when reflecting on last year's process. Fiddler's review basically argues "This post mostly quotes cherry picked anecdotes, without distinguishing which of those anecdotes Scott endorses, and some of those cherry picked anecdotes don't even check out." No one rebuts Fiddler's review.

This seems worthy of investigation. I talked to some people about how they felt about Secrets of Success. A few people I respect said they agreed with some criticisms, and nonetheless voted for it because it contributed an important frame for looking at the world.

I'm still mulling over how I personally think about the concept. Meanwhile, it seemed valuable for our community reward signal to highlight critical discussion of the post, since it was rated as the #4 post in the review vote.

The awards for review prizes are:

$500 to John Wentworth both for writing several in-depth, valuable reviews, as well as being very comprehensive in his reviews. Notable shout out for his review of Coherent Decisions Imply Consistent Utilities, and Seeking Power is Often Convergently Instrumental in MDPs.

$300 to Zvi for writing a large set of reviews and nominations, covering a number of topics, demonstrating useful judgment on each of them.

$200 to Adam Shimi for several in-depth reviews on alignment related topics.

$200 to Turntrout for his review on But Exactly How Complex and Fragile, as well as the surrounding discussion.

$200 to Fiddler for his review of Book Review: Secret of Our Success, as well as several other nuanced reviews.

$100 to Rohin for engaging in debate in J...

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: Omicron Post #8, published by Zvi on December 20, 2021 on LessWrong.

I have fallen mildly ill, as have my wife and son. So far we don’t have a positive Covid-19 test, and everyone is maximally vaccinated, but given the timing the obvious conclusions do seem likely. Wish me well, and hopefully Christmas will not be cancelled and I can keep the posts mostly going. I do have winter break to help me out.

Omicron continues to take over. Official reactions have been relatively mild, with only the Netherlands entering a lockdown that I have seen. Private reaction has been more robust, which is the best way to do it, and there are some early signs it could be having a substantial effect in the UK, although I’m guessing that is probably a mirage. As usual, we’ll know one way or another in a few days, only to have a new set of mysteries on our hands.

The big argument in the last few days was over severity. A new study on infectiousness in the UK was essentially misappropriated, and its 24 (!) hospitalized Omicron patients (0.15% of all cases, versus 0.7% of other cases, before controlling for things, then when controlling for things they mostly evened out) were cited as strong evidence that Omicron is not less severe than Delta. Whereas what the study actually said on the topic was mostly nothing, because there wasn’t enough data yet.

Thus the big row over the idea of there being ‘no evidence’ for things, and how that turns into those things being known to be wrong (or right!) at the whim of those who control the narrative, Scott Alexander writing how The Phrase ‘No Evidence’ Is a Red Flag for Bad Science Communication, and me writing up my previous harsher but fairer proposal for the Law of No Evidence that the claim that there is ‘no evidence’ for something is evidence of bullshit.

As usual, we’ll look at South Africa, the UK, Denmark and select other places, then survey other aspects, then update our probabilities.

South Africa

Here’s a news dashboard with good charts for South Africa. Looks like things may have somehow peaked there, at least in the most hard-hit areas, and that there will be far fewer ventilated patients than in previous waves.

This is one of the many ways we have more data. That doesn’t mean we’re closer to understanding it.

This new wave is milder per case but we already knew that. That’s not the question. Ventilator use or deaths seem better than hospitalizations since hospitalizations are partly about capacity, so 16% is encouraging, but the lag is also a thing, so the ‘could get to 20%+’ is the even more encouraging bit.

The most exciting and confusing thing is that the outbreak seems to be peaking already, at least at its point of origin in Gauteng, as usual not for any obvious reason?

Here’s an excellent interview with Trevor Bedford looking into that question. He lists five potential causes: Lack of testing, underreporting due to mildness, faster generation time, network patterns and differential vulnerability. Faster generation times are the most interesting one here. It’s worth noting that Trevor’s methods of modeling that are failing now worked for Delta in the same region, so factors that would also apply to Delta seem less plausible as explanations here.

There’s also a sixth.

Here’s a Twitter thread with an optimistic perspective on the South African data on severity. One note is that it’s important to properly understand what this chart means:

As I understand it, in South Africa they test everyone admitted to the hospital for Covid-19 and those cases will count as admissions here. So the initial thought is that this spike could be explained by that, but maybe not?

And of course there’s this, which corrects for age although not prior immunity, which does seem likely to be promising:

United Kingdom

The UK files daily reports, which can be found...

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: An organic pitch for undergrads: do it when people ask what your major is, published by Nikola on December 20, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Epistemic status: pretty certain that this is useful for undergrads

In short: When asked what you want to study, say that you're trying to optimize your impact, and keep building up to EA as long as the person seems very interested. Then pitch EA to them.

The approach

During my first semester as a student I've found it very useful to use my initial introductory conversation with someone as an opportunity to pitch EA. It mostly goes like this:

Person: What do you want to study?Me: Not sure, I'm trying to find what to study so I can have as good of an impact as possible.

(with slight variations of vocabulary based on what I know about the person, for instance, with CS majors, I might say something like "I'm trying to optimize my career for positive impact on the world")

After I say this, it seems quite easy to see how eager people are to continue the conversation. They might reply with "That's such an interesting way to think about it!" or "Oh okay". If their level of enthusiasm stays high or grows, pitch an intro fellowship or a reading group to them, or set up a one-on-one meeting!

Pros and cons

This seems like a really low cost to do outreach on new people if you're good at reading enthusiasm levels, because most people will not have jumped through all the hoops that lead to the actual pitch. There's also the fact that you have to introduce yourself anyways, so might as well do it this way.

Of course, this method shouldn't be relied on for outreach. It's just a good way to catch insta-EAs. I suspect more than half the people who could become highly engaged within months would get caught if you tried this on them.

Also, this mostly applies to schools where majors are flexible and are either not picked before starting college, or can be changed after starting without much cost.

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