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: Aiming for the minimum is dangerous, published by tessa on December 9, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Effective altruism is often a maximizing philosophy. Not just “doing good better”, but “the most good you can do”. For many people, myself among them, this philosophy has a natural-feeling corollary: minimize anything non-altruistic in your life.

My goal in this post is to convince you that trying to spend as little time as possible on fun socializing, frivolous hobbies, or other leisure is a dangerous impulse. If you notice yourself aiming for the minimum amount of self-care, that's a sign that you should reorient and reprioritize.

Argument from anecdotal breakdowns (including mine)

A few years ago, I had read Replacing Guilt and Cheerfully, and I sort of acknowledged that being miserable all the time couldn't be sustained. Even though I wanted to live up to my altruistic values, I would need to make some room in my life for my friends and my frivolous hobbies.

How much room did I need, though? I felt a bit suspicious, looking at how I spent my time. Surely that long road trip wasn't necessary to avoid misery? Did I really need to spend several weekends in a row building a ridiculous LED laser maze, when my other side project was talking to young synthetic biologists about ethics?

I started tracking my time down to the half-hour, little colour-coded squares on a spreadsheet, and I would gaze across weeks of weak impact and feel despair. I started cancelling plans with friends unless we could co-work together, but I was still spending hours a week playing Dungeons and Dragons and talking on the phone with my long-distance partner.

It’s almost funny, looking back on my calendar from 2018. In addition to my engineering job, I was doing things like coordinating volunteers for EA Global SF and running East Bay Biosecurity events. Right now, I feel like I was doing plenty of valuable work, but at the time I felt basically worthless. I was sure that a more altruistic person, given the same skills and opportunities that I’d lucked into, would be able to do more. There were so many broken things in the world― how dare I waste so much of my time?

This kind of thinking― what I’m calling aiming for the minimum― was really unhealthy for me. It was a contributing factor to a mental health crisis I had in mid-2018, during which I had a breakdown, nearly landed in hospital, and had to spend a month under family supervision in Ontario. This section is titled anecdotal breakdowns, plural, because this mindset doesn’t seem all that different from what Julia Wise describes in Cheerfully:

“My happiness is not the point,” I told him.

A few years later, I was deeply bitter about the decision. I had always wanted and intended to be a parent, and I felt thwarted. It was making me sick and miserable. I looked at the rest of my life as more of an obligation than a joy.

So my husband and I decided that it wasn't worth having a breakdown over.

Or the section Toning Down the Singerian Approach in the 80,000 Hours podcast Having a successful career with anxiety, depression, and imposter syndrome:

I think that for many types of people, doing the act of constantly self-monitoring, where you’re always asking, “Is that thing I have a desire for a little bit unethical? Is that thing unethical?” Being in that frame and mode, doing this self-monitoring and building this habit of self-criticism I think for some people is very mentally unhealthy. ... And that’s actually really hard for me. And there’s a very long time where it both felt so clear to me that I ought to be living frugally and giving away as much as I could, and that I had no right to all the money that just happened to be in my bank account because my job paid it to me.

While recovering from my breakdown, conversations with friends an...

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: Aiming for the minimum is dangerous, published by tessa on December 9, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Effective altruism is often a maximizing philosophy. Not just “doing good better”, but “the most good you can do”. For many people, myself among them, this philosophy has a natural-feeling corollary: minimize anything non-altruistic in your life.

My goal in this post is to convince you that trying to spend as little time as possible on fun socializing, frivolous hobbies, or other leisure is a dangerous impulse. If you notice yourself aiming for the minimum amount of self-care, that's a sign that you should reorient and reprioritize.

Argument from anecdotal breakdowns (including mine)

A few years ago, I had read Replacing Guilt and Cheerfully, and I sort of acknowledged that being miserable all the time couldn't be sustained. Even though I wanted to live up to my altruistic values, I would need to make some room in my life for my friends and my frivolous hobbies.

How much room did I need, though? I felt a bit suspicious, looking at how I spent my time. Surely that long road trip wasn't necessary to avoid misery? Did I really need to spend several weekends in a row building a ridiculous LED laser maze, when my other side project was talking to young synthetic biologists about ethics?

I started tracking my time down to the half-hour, little colour-coded squares on a spreadsheet, and I would gaze across weeks of weak impact and feel despair. I started cancelling plans with friends unless we could co-work together, but I was still spending hours a week playing Dungeons and Dragons and talking on the phone with my long-distance partner.

It’s almost funny, looking back on my calendar from 2018. In addition to my engineering job, I was doing things like coordinating volunteers for EA Global SF and running East Bay Biosecurity events. Right now, I feel like I was doing plenty of valuable work, but at the time I felt basically worthless. I was sure that a more altruistic person, given the same skills and opportunities that I’d lucked into, would be able to do more. There were so many broken things in the world― how dare I waste so much of my time?

This kind of thinking― what I’m calling aiming for the minimum― was really unhealthy for me. It was a contributing factor to a mental health crisis I had in mid-2018, during which I had a breakdown, nearly landed in hospital, and had to spend a month under family supervision in Ontario. This section is titled anecdotal breakdowns, plural, because this mindset doesn’t seem all that different from what Julia Wise describes in Cheerfully:

“My happiness is not the point,” I told him.

A few years later, I was deeply bitter about the decision. I had always wanted and intended to be a parent, and I felt thwarted. It was making me sick and miserable. I looked at the rest of my life as more of an obligation than a joy.

So my husband and I decided that it wasn't worth having a breakdown over.

Or the section Toning Down the Singerian Approach in the 80,000 Hours podcast Having a successful career with anxiety, depression, and imposter syndrome:

I think that for many types of people, doing the act of constantly self-monitoring, where you’re always asking, “Is that thing I have a desire for a little bit unethical? Is that thing unethical?” Being in that frame and mode, doing this self-monitoring and building this habit of self-criticism I think for some people is very mentally unhealthy. ... And that’s actually really hard for me. And there’s a very long time where it both felt so clear to me that I ought to be living frugally and giving away as much as I could, and that I had no right to all the money that just happened to be in my bank account because my job paid it to me.

While recovering from my breakdown, conversations with friends an...

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: LessWrong discussed in New Ideas in Psychology article, published by rogersbacon on December 9, 2021 on LessWrong.

Hi LessWrong,

I wanted to let you know about a recent article in New Idea in Psychology written by myself and Dr. Dario Krpan (assistant professor of psychology at London School of Economics) that discusses LessWrong and Scott Alexander (Siskind) as examples of amateurs (or communities of amateurs) that make valuable contributions to psychology. In the article, we argue that psychology and behavioral science can benefit from increased participation in knowledge work (hypothesizing, experimentation, observational research, etc.) by amateurs. We highlight several “blind spots” in academic psychology (long-term projects, observational research, speculation, interdisciplinary research, taboo or uncommon subjects, and aimless projects) that amateurs might profitably focus on and discuss how we can support and facilitate amateurs to do research in psychology.

One point of clarification is the term “amateur”; this is not meant as derogatory in anyway (and indeed our title makes light of the denigrating phrase “amateur hour”), but is used to refer to anyone that is not a professional psychology researcher. Scott, although he is practicing psychiatrist, would still qualify as an amateur in our definition because he does not belong to an institution that pays him to do psychology research. I would also mention that this paper might the first in which an author lists his substack as his institution (Secretum Secretorum).

Here is the official link to the paper:

Here is the author copy which will be open access for the next 40 days or so:,GfNqbOWA

Below is the paragraph in which we discuss LessWrong.

Lastly, an example of a “quantified-self” amateur who has made valuable contributions in PBS is Alexey Guzey (2020), an independent researcher noted for conducting a self-experiment on the link between sleep and cognitive functioning. Guzey (2019) is also known for performing a rigorous fact-checking of the book Why We Sleep (Walker, 2017), which suggests that amateurs can also improve PBS by conducting thorough reviews of popular science books.

Both reviews of popular science books and self-experimentation by amateurs can also be commonly found on LessWrong.com, a hub of the rationalist community; for example, one can find posts that detail self-experiments on the effect of chocolate on sleep, metacognitive training (e.g., using heuristics, noticing emotions), the relationship between work output and hours of work, or romantic techniques.2 Amateur self-experimentation has a long history in PBS, beginning perhaps with Herman Ebbinghaus’ ground-breaking work on memory that led to the discovery of the forgetting curve. Though he would eventually gain recognition as an academic psychologist, at the time of his experiments Ebbinghaus was an amateur—he did not have a university position and wanted to advance psychological knowledge by researching himself (Boneau, 1998; Slamecka, 1985; Woodworth, 1909).

In another section, we mention a specific post as an example of a long-term observational research project.

For example, the “slow scholarship” movement highlights how scholars face a general intensification in the pace of work and an increasing pressure to publish (Harland, 2016; Hartman & Darab, 2012). Research indicates that the average number of publications at time of hiring for science faculty positions has been steadily rising in recent years (Pennycook & Thompson, 2018; Reinero, 2019; Van Dijk, Manor, & Carey, 2014); trends like this may influence researchers, especially early career researchers, away from projects that require dedication over a long period of time. This suggests that long-term research projects are generally a neglected area in academia (i.e., a blind ...

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: LessWrong discussed in New Ideas in Psychology article, published by rogersbacon on December 9, 2021 on LessWrong.

Hi LessWrong,

I wanted to let you know about a recent article in New Idea in Psychology written by myself and Dr. Dario Krpan (assistant professor of psychology at London School of Economics) that discusses LessWrong and Scott Alexander (Siskind) as examples of amateurs (or communities of amateurs) that make valuable contributions to psychology. In the article, we argue that psychology and behavioral science can benefit from increased participation in knowledge work (hypothesizing, experimentation, observational research, etc.) by amateurs. We highlight several “blind spots” in academic psychology (long-term projects, observational research, speculation, interdisciplinary research, taboo or uncommon subjects, and aimless projects) that amateurs might profitably focus on and discuss how we can support and facilitate amateurs to do research in psychology.

One point of clarification is the term “amateur”; this is not meant as derogatory in anyway (and indeed our title makes light of the denigrating phrase “amateur hour”), but is used to refer to anyone that is not a professional psychology researcher. Scott, although he is practicing psychiatrist, would still qualify as an amateur in our definition because he does not belong to an institution that pays him to do psychology research. I would also mention that this paper might the first in which an author lists his substack as his institution (Secretum Secretorum).

Here is the official link to the paper:

Here is the author copy which will be open access for the next 40 days or so:,GfNqbOWA

Below is the paragraph in which we discuss LessWrong.

Lastly, an example of a “quantified-self” amateur who has made valuable contributions in PBS is Alexey Guzey (2020), an independent researcher noted for conducting a self-experiment on the link between sleep and cognitive functioning. Guzey (2019) is also known for performing a rigorous fact-checking of the book Why We Sleep (Walker, 2017), which suggests that amateurs can also improve PBS by conducting thorough reviews of popular science books.

Both reviews of popular science books and self-experimentation by amateurs can also be commonly found on LessWrong.com, a hub of the rationalist community; for example, one can find posts that detail self-experiments on the effect of chocolate on sleep, metacognitive training (e.g., using heuristics, noticing emotions), the relationship between work output and hours of work, or romantic techniques.2 Amateur self-experimentation has a long history in PBS, beginning perhaps with Herman Ebbinghaus’ ground-breaking work on memory that led to the discovery of the forgetting curve. Though he would eventually gain recognition as an academic psychologist, at the time of his experiments Ebbinghaus was an amateur—he did not have a university position and wanted to advance psychological knowledge by researching himself (Boneau, 1998; Slamecka, 1985; Woodworth, 1909).

In another section, we mention a specific post as an example of a long-term observational research project.

For example, the “slow scholarship” movement highlights how scholars face a general intensification in the pace of work and an increasing pressure to publish (Harland, 2016; Hartman & Darab, 2012). Research indicates that the average number of publications at time of hiring for science faculty positions has been steadily rising in recent years (Pennycook & Thompson, 2018; Reinero, 2019; Van Dijk, Manor, & Carey, 2014); trends like this may influence researchers, especially early career researchers, away from projects that require dedication over a long period of time. This suggests that long-term research projects are generally a neglected area in academia (i.e., a blind ...

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: Conversation on technology forecasting and gradualism, published by Richard Ngo on December 9, 2021 on LessWrong.

This post is a transcript of a multi-day discussion between Paul Christiano, Richard Ngo, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rob Bensinger, Holden Karnofsky, Rohin Shah, Carl Shulman, Nate Soares, and Jaan Tallinn, following up on the Yudkowsky/Christiano debate in 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Color key:

12. Follow-ups to the Christiano/Yudkowsky conversation

12.1. Bensinger and Shah on prototypes and technological forecasting

[Bensinger][16:22] (Sep. 23)

Quoth Paul:

seems like you have to make the wright flyer much better before it's important, and that it becomes more like an industry as that happens, and that this is intimately related to why so few people were working on it

Is this basically saying 'the Wright brothers didn't personally capture much value by inventing heavier-than-air flying machines, and this was foreseeable, which is why there wasn't a huge industry effort already underway to try to build such machines as fast as possible.' ?

My maybe-wrong model of Eliezer says here 'the Wright brothers knew a (Thielian) secret', while my maybe-wrong model of Paul instead says:

They didn't know a secret -- it was obvious to tons of people that you could do something sorta like what the Wright brothers did and thereby invent airplanes; the Wright brothers just had unusual non-monetary goals that made them passionate to do a thing most people didn't care about.

Or maybe it's better to say: they knew some specific secrets about physics/engineering, but only because other people correctly saw 'there are secrets to be found here, but they're stamp-collecting secrets of little economic value to me, so I won't bother to learn the secrets'. ~Everyone knows where the treasure is located, and ~everyone knows the treasure won't make you rich.

[Yudkowsky][17:24] (Sep. 23)

My model of Paul says there could be a secret, but only because the industry was tiny and the invention was nearly worthless directly.

[Christiano][17:53] (Sep. 23)

I mean, I think they knew a bit of stuff, but it generally takes a lot of stuff to make something valuable, and the more people have been looking around in an area the more confident you can be that it's going to take a lot of stuff to do much better, and it starts to look like an extremely strong regularity for big industries like ML or semiconductors

it's pretty rare to find small ideas that don't take a bunch of work to have big impacts

I don't know exactly what a thielian secret is (haven't read the reference and just have a vibe)

straightening it out a bit, I have 2 beliefs that combine disjunctively: (i) generally it takes a lot of work to do stuff, as a strong empirical fact about technology, (ii) generally if the returns are bigger there are more people working on it, as a slightly-less-strong fact about sociology

[Bensinger][18:09] (Sep. 23)

secrets = important undiscovered information (or information that's been discovered but isn't widely known), that you can use to get an edge in something.

There seems to be a Paul/Eliezer disagreement about how common these are in general. And maybe a disagreement about how much more efficiently humanity discovers and propagates secrets as you scale up the secret's value?

[Yudkowsky][18:35] (Sep. 23)

Many times it has taken much work to do stuff; there's further key assertions here about "It takes $100 billion" and "Multiple parties will invest $10B first" and "$10B gets you a lot of benefit first because scaling is smooth and without really large thresholds".

Eliezer is like "ah, yes, sometimes it takes 20 or even 200 people to do stuff, but core researchers often don't scale well past 50, and there aren't always predecessors that could do a bunch of the same stuff" even though Eliezer agrees with "it often take...

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: Conversation on technology forecasting and gradualism, published by Richard Ngo on December 9, 2021 on LessWrong.

This post is a transcript of a multi-day discussion between Paul Christiano, Richard Ngo, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rob Bensinger, Holden Karnofsky, Rohin Shah, Carl Shulman, Nate Soares, and Jaan Tallinn, following up on the Yudkowsky/Christiano debate in 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Color key:

12. Follow-ups to the Christiano/Yudkowsky conversation

12.1. Bensinger and Shah on prototypes and technological forecasting

[Bensinger][16:22] (Sep. 23)

Quoth Paul:

seems like you have to make the wright flyer much better before it's important, and that it becomes more like an industry as that happens, and that this is intimately related to why so few people were working on it

Is this basically saying 'the Wright brothers didn't personally capture much value by inventing heavier-than-air flying machines, and this was foreseeable, which is why there wasn't a huge industry effort already underway to try to build such machines as fast as possible.' ?

My maybe-wrong model of Eliezer says here 'the Wright brothers knew a (Thielian) secret', while my maybe-wrong model of Paul instead says:

They didn't know a secret -- it was obvious to tons of people that you could do something sorta like what the Wright brothers did and thereby invent airplanes; the Wright brothers just had unusual non-monetary goals that made them passionate to do a thing most people didn't care about.

Or maybe it's better to say: they knew some specific secrets about physics/engineering, but only because other people correctly saw 'there are secrets to be found here, but they're stamp-collecting secrets of little economic value to me, so I won't bother to learn the secrets'. ~Everyone knows where the treasure is located, and ~everyone knows the treasure won't make you rich.

[Yudkowsky][17:24] (Sep. 23)

My model of Paul says there could be a secret, but only because the industry was tiny and the invention was nearly worthless directly.

[Christiano][17:53] (Sep. 23)

I mean, I think they knew a bit of stuff, but it generally takes a lot of stuff to make something valuable, and the more people have been looking around in an area the more confident you can be that it's going to take a lot of stuff to do much better, and it starts to look like an extremely strong regularity for big industries like ML or semiconductors

it's pretty rare to find small ideas that don't take a bunch of work to have big impacts

I don't know exactly what a thielian secret is (haven't read the reference and just have a vibe)

straightening it out a bit, I have 2 beliefs that combine disjunctively: (i) generally it takes a lot of work to do stuff, as a strong empirical fact about technology, (ii) generally if the returns are bigger there are more people working on it, as a slightly-less-strong fact about sociology

[Bensinger][18:09] (Sep. 23)

secrets = important undiscovered information (or information that's been discovered but isn't widely known), that you can use to get an edge in something.

There seems to be a Paul/Eliezer disagreement about how common these are in general. And maybe a disagreement about how much more efficiently humanity discovers and propagates secrets as you scale up the secret's value?

[Yudkowsky][18:35] (Sep. 23)

Many times it has taken much work to do stuff; there's further key assertions here about "It takes $100 billion" and "Multiple parties will invest $10B first" and "$10B gets you a lot of benefit first because scaling is smooth and without really large thresholds".

Eliezer is like "ah, yes, sometimes it takes 20 or even 200 people to do stuff, but core researchers often don't scale well past 50, and there aren't always predecessors that could do a bunch of the same stuff" even though Eliezer agrees with "it often take...

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 #5, published by Zvi on December 9, 2021 on LessWrong.

A few key questions determine our fate. We are rapidly getting closer to the answers. That doesn’t mean we have the magnitudes of the answers. The magnitudes matter, and they matter a lot. It’s still a stronger understanding than even a few days ago. Next time will be stronger still.

My guess is that that Omicron for now is on a bi-weekly schedule, and the next update will likely be on Monday, but it is subject to what happens.

So here are some things that, for all practical purposes, we know.

Does Omicron Have Substantial Immune Escape Properties?

Yes. Just yes. Wenowdis. The laboratory results are in. The results from who is testing positive are in. This isn’t a question anymore. 95% → 99%+.

Here’s Pfizer’s press release from December 8. They note that there’s a large decline in vaccine effectiveness, but also observe that those who are boosted seem to still have enough protection, and that two doses seems sufficient to provide at least some protection. They don’t want to come out and say yet that there’s protection against severe disease with two doses, but there’s plenty of other evidence on that.

Here’s a thread of two threads with the preliminary data. It’s clear that vaccine effectiveness is down, but not as far down as we feared, and definitely not to zero.

Here’s a thread from Muge Cevik describing the results. Again, not great, but not as bad as expected.

We are seeing large declines in antibody effectiveness, with numbers like 25x or 41x fold decline being thrown about, most commonly 41x.

The key is to remember that this is not a game of ‘exactly enough’ antibodies or antibody effectiveness getting it done and less not getting it done. This is a case of things varying by multiple orders of magnitude. It sounds scary to hear a 41x fold decrease in effectiveness – that’s 98% – but in terms of whether and how much you get sick, that’s a lot less than 98% less effective.

Also, Bloom Lab has come up with a way to estimate potential immune escape properties in advance, as a function of mutations. Neat.

Here’s another intriguing data point: Google trends data in South Africa doesn’t reflect an increase in searches for loss of taste and smell. I wonder if this will hold up.

Does Vaccination or Delta Infection Still Protect Against Severe Disease And Death from Omicron?

Yes. Just yes. Wenowdis. The laboratory results are in. The results from South Africa are clear. People keep showing up positive for Omicron despite vaccinations and being fine. If this wasn’t true, we would know, or at least have reasons to be concerned, by now. 95%+.

And if this somehow isn’t true (not that I can reconcile that with the lab results), then the only way to explain the strain looking as mild as it is would be if it really was as mild as the raw numbers suggest, modulo age adjustments, which might be even better.

Is Omicron Going To Become the Primary Strain?

Yes. Just yes. Wenowdis. Only way it doesn’t happen that I can think of is that another strain comes out of nowhere and takes over first. This is happening. It’s when, not if. We know it has a lot of immune escape, and it spreads easily otherwise, so I can’t see how this doesn’t happen. Barring a new strain, 95% → 97%.

It’s probably going to happen fast.

We know it’s happening in the United Kingdom and Denmark because they are actually looking. Other places aren’t looking, so it isn’t as directly obvious, but this is happening. It’s certainly interesting that the USA and other countries aren’t finding more cases yet, which is why I’m not even higher, but my presumption is that other places simply aren’t checking. It’s not like we have a SGTF graph for California or Germany or wherever that doesn’t show a rise in deletions, we simply don’t have any data at all.

He...

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 #5, published by Zvi on December 9, 2021 on LessWrong.

A few key questions determine our fate. We are rapidly getting closer to the answers. That doesn’t mean we have the magnitudes of the answers. The magnitudes matter, and they matter a lot. It’s still a stronger understanding than even a few days ago. Next time will be stronger still.

My guess is that that Omicron for now is on a bi-weekly schedule, and the next update will likely be on Monday, but it is subject to what happens.

So here are some things that, for all practical purposes, we know.

Does Omicron Have Substantial Immune Escape Properties?

Yes. Just yes. Wenowdis. The laboratory results are in. The results from who is testing positive are in. This isn’t a question anymore. 95% → 99%+.

Here’s Pfizer’s press release from December 8. They note that there’s a large decline in vaccine effectiveness, but also observe that those who are boosted seem to still have enough protection, and that two doses seems sufficient to provide at least some protection. They don’t want to come out and say yet that there’s protection against severe disease with two doses, but there’s plenty of other evidence on that.

Here’s a thread of two threads with the preliminary data. It’s clear that vaccine effectiveness is down, but not as far down as we feared, and definitely not to zero.

Here’s a thread from Muge Cevik describing the results. Again, not great, but not as bad as expected.

We are seeing large declines in antibody effectiveness, with numbers like 25x or 41x fold decline being thrown about, most commonly 41x.

The key is to remember that this is not a game of ‘exactly enough’ antibodies or antibody effectiveness getting it done and less not getting it done. This is a case of things varying by multiple orders of magnitude. It sounds scary to hear a 41x fold decrease in effectiveness – that’s 98% – but in terms of whether and how much you get sick, that’s a lot less than 98% less effective.

Also, Bloom Lab has come up with a way to estimate potential immune escape properties in advance, as a function of mutations. Neat.

Here’s another intriguing data point: Google trends data in South Africa doesn’t reflect an increase in searches for loss of taste and smell. I wonder if this will hold up.

Does Vaccination or Delta Infection Still Protect Against Severe Disease And Death from Omicron?

Yes. Just yes. Wenowdis. The laboratory results are in. The results from South Africa are clear. People keep showing up positive for Omicron despite vaccinations and being fine. If this wasn’t true, we would know, or at least have reasons to be concerned, by now. 95%+.

And if this somehow isn’t true (not that I can reconcile that with the lab results), then the only way to explain the strain looking as mild as it is would be if it really was as mild as the raw numbers suggest, modulo age adjustments, which might be even better.

Is Omicron Going To Become the Primary Strain?

Yes. Just yes. Wenowdis. Only way it doesn’t happen that I can think of is that another strain comes out of nowhere and takes over first. This is happening. It’s when, not if. We know it has a lot of immune escape, and it spreads easily otherwise, so I can’t see how this doesn’t happen. Barring a new strain, 95% → 97%.

It’s probably going to happen fast.

We know it’s happening in the United Kingdom and Denmark because they are actually looking. Other places aren’t looking, so it isn’t as directly obvious, but this is happening. It’s certainly interesting that the USA and other countries aren’t finding more cases yet, which is why I’m not even higher, but my presumption is that other places simply aren’t checking. It’s not like we have a SGTF graph for California or Germany or wherever that doesn’t show a rise in deletions, we simply don’t have any data at all.

He...

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: Exposure to 3m Pointless viewers- what to promote?, published by PatrickL on December 9, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I'm going to be a contestant on British quiz show Pointless! It's a popular quiz show which, I think, averages ~3 million views per episode - largely in the UK. I'd love to get in a promotion for EA or something EA-ish. There is a 20 second personal intro (e.g. at 3:24) and sometimes 5 seconds to talk about where your prize money would go.

Has anyone considered if there's anything effective to get across in a short time to a large general audience? Would be very interested if there are resources/previous discussions - and welcome opinions too. This isn't necessarily an elevator pitch for EA though- it may just be a brief reference in my personal intro (I'm unsure how formulaic the show is).

Initial thoughts are, I study AI so would probably talk plans to work on safe AI. Could talk about giving 10% to charity. I could also name-check CEA or 80,000 hours, or possibly someone like GovAI if I got as far as winning money.

I applied last night, had a pre-screening interview just now, and filming is on Monday - so haven't thought through much... Any advice on picking up lots of general knowledge in a weekend would be lovely too.

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: Exposure to 3m Pointless viewers- what to promote?, published by PatrickL on December 9, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I'm going to be a contestant on British quiz show Pointless! It's a popular quiz show which, I think, averages ~3 million views per episode - largely in the UK. I'd love to get in a promotion for EA or something EA-ish. There is a 20 second personal intro (e.g. at 3:24) and sometimes 5 seconds to talk about where your prize money would go.

Has anyone considered if there's anything effective to get across in a short time to a large general audience? Would be very interested if there are resources/previous discussions - and welcome opinions too. This isn't necessarily an elevator pitch for EA though- it may just be a brief reference in my personal intro (I'm unsure how formulaic the show is).

Initial thoughts are, I study AI so would probably talk plans to work on safe AI. Could talk about giving 10% to charity. I could also name-check CEA or 80,000 hours, or possibly someone like GovAI if I got as far as winning money.

I applied last night, had a pre-screening interview just now, and filming is on Monday - so haven't thought through much... Any advice on picking up lots of general knowledge in a weekend would be lovely too.

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