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: Things I often tell people about applying to EA Funds, published by MichaelA on October 27, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

I wrote this post quickly, drawing on some emails/messages I’d previously sent. You can use the headings to work out which section (if any) are relevant to you. If people find this useful, maybe I’ll put more time into structuring and editing it.

Epistemic status: I’m a guest manager on the EA Infrastructure Fund, I think what I say here mostly applies to the Long-Term Future Fund and maybe the Animal Welfare Fund, and I think other fund managers would mostly agree with what I say here. But I could be wrong, I haven’t properly run this doc by other EA Funds people, and this definitely is not an official EA Funds post.

See also:

Apply for Funding from EA Funds

List of EA funding opportunities

Apply!

This is the single most important point in this doc.

Applying is very often worthwhile in expectation, because:

Applying should be quick

EA Funds’ impact is more constrained by good applications than by funding available

If you do have a project worth funding, getting it funded could be really fantastic for the world

Your application can be quick and unpolished

Writing EA Funds applications is in theory meant to take <2 hours, setting aside the time required to actually come up with the plan etc.

I know applicants often spend more than that, but they really don't have to - polish isn't important. Some of our grantees spent just 10 minutes on their application. (Though conceiving and planning the project is important, and isn't included in the 2 hours.)

Relatedly, some people feel happy to reach out to a fund manager for a call or to share a doc outlining their plans, but don’t feel ready to make an application. You can indeed talk to EA Funds before applying, and sometimes that’s the best move. But you can also jump straight to applying, even with similarly rough ideas, and just flag in the application that you're happy to resubmit if what you submitted is insufficiently detailed or thought through. You can see such an application as analogous to sharing a rough doc with 1 fund manager.

Your application can leave some questions open, can suggest multiple possible scenarios, and can “start a dialogue”

The application can be a "dialogue": you can apply without a 100% fleshed out idea or 100% explained reasoning, and just explicitly flag that and say you're happy to elaborate on things but that you wanted to get the application process started because it's time-sensitive.

Relatedly, you can list a range of possible scenarios and say how you'll decide etc. It may indeed be that the fund managers would then say they require more clarity/certainty before deciding, in which case they'll just tell you that and wait for your response.

If the evaluator decides they want you to clarify or expand on something, or wants you to focus on some subset of your projects, they'll probably just reach out to you with questions/suggestions.

It’s also often good to consider whether you could have more impact with more money, and/or to consider applying for a range of levels of funding and possible purposes. E.g., you can say the most important thing is $3000 to buy a laptop, but if you also got $10,000 you could do [other cool thing, which might be useful for some particular reason].

Here it’s worth noting that the fund managers are basically nice people who want to be helpful and increase the number of great projects which happen, so if your idea is actually promising, they’re unlikely to reject your application just because some points were insufficiently clear or some aspects should be changed.

Maybe think about pilots and proxies

Maybe think about whether there’s a way you could do a smaller version of something and get info on how useful the thing is, how best 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: X-Risk, Anthropics, & Peter Thiel's Investment Thesis, published by Jackson Wagner on October 26, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This story is cross-posted from my blog, jacksonw.xyz.

Summary: I analyze an essay by Peter Thiel, in which he explains:

How markets are incentivized to ignore the risk of civilizational collapse.

How this introduces distortions in both market prices and our thinking.

How to attempt to correct for these distortions using "The Optimistic Thought Experiment"

A big-picture view of financial history as a single "Great Boom" built on the uncertain hope that capitalist civilization will ultimately be proven viable and achieve existential security.

I then add my own musings about how these ideas might usefully connect with the goals of longtermist Effective Altruism.

EA Portfolio Design: An Unsolved Problem Way Over My Head

Effective altruists have discussed whether EA values and beliefs should affect how we invest the wealth that we eventually plan to donate:

For altruistic donations, the utility of money is roughly linear with increasing wealth, rather than having diminishing returns like with increasing personal wealth. This probably means that we should be willing to use more leverage and invest in a higher-risk, higher-expected-return portfolio?

Popular types of "socially-responsible investing" are sadly not very effective by EA lights, but this could be changed. Conversely, divestment is often considered to be an ineffective strategy, but done in the right way perhaps it could work well.

Or perhaps we should do the opposite, using the logic of "mission hedging" to investing in bad things so we have more money to deploy in worlds where bad things grow larger. (More details on mission hedging here.)

Perhaps we could pursue a variant of mission hedging that is less related to divestment and "sin funds" and more based on prediction-market hedging of specific events, like how a presidential election might change the tractability of a certain cause.

There is a rich discussion around the idea of "patient philanthropy" or "investing to give". Investing money now and waiting to spend it later might be a good idea simply because of the growth rate of the economy, or because it allows us to wait and identify better opportunities for impact later, or to ensure the long-term health and viability of the EA movement, or perhaps even because having a store of capital around means that we can employ some of the other do-gooder financial schemes on this list! (See a detailed report on patient philanthropy here.)

If we believe that transformative AI technology could be right around the corner, perhaps (in addition to freaking out) we should find some way to invest in the coming market foom.

I consider myself reasonably savvy about financial topics, but I would be in way over my head if I tried to synthesize all these competing claims and produce the One True EA Portfolio Theory.

However, I think it's an important unsolved problem in EA where further progress could likely be made, and thus should be taken very seriously. To some extent, the entire concept of longtermist EA is driven by a financial/values "edge" of buying the far future cheap because other people don't care as much about the far future. In this and other ways, EAs (including non-longtermists who care more about suffering of distant beings than most folks, and to a lesser extent rationalists more broadly who have unique beliefs about AI, etc) have different beliefs and different priorities than the typical investor, which should present many opportunities to bet on those beliefs and arbitrage the difference in values.

(PSA: For anyone reading who is totally new to finance & investing topics, stop reading this post and instead read up on the basics — here is a helpful, charismatic, rational...

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: X-Risk, Anthropics, & Peter Thiel's Investment Thesis, published by Jackson Wagner on October 26, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This story is cross-posted from my blog, jacksonw.xyz.

Summary: I analyze an essay by Peter Thiel, in which he explains:

How markets are incentivized to ignore the risk of civilizational collapse.

How this introduces distortions in both market prices and our thinking.

How to attempt to correct for these distortions using "The Optimistic Thought Experiment"

A big-picture view of financial history as a single "Great Boom" built on the uncertain hope that capitalist civilization will ultimately be proven viable and achieve existential security.

I then add my own musings about how these ideas might usefully connect with the goals of longtermist Effective Altruism.

EA Portfolio Design: An Unsolved Problem Way Over My Head

Effective altruists have discussed whether EA values and beliefs should affect how we invest the wealth that we eventually plan to donate:

For altruistic donations, the utility of money is roughly linear with increasing wealth, rather than having diminishing returns like with increasing personal wealth. This probably means that we should be willing to use more leverage and invest in a higher-risk, higher-expected-return portfolio?

Popular types of "socially-responsible investing" are sadly not very effective by EA lights, but this could be changed. Conversely, divestment is often considered to be an ineffective strategy, but done in the right way perhaps it could work well.

Or perhaps we should do the opposite, using the logic of "mission hedging" to investing in bad things so we have more money to deploy in worlds where bad things grow larger. (More details on mission hedging here.)

Perhaps we could pursue a variant of mission hedging that is less related to divestment and "sin funds" and more based on prediction-market hedging of specific events, like how a presidential election might change the tractability of a certain cause.

There is a rich discussion around the idea of "patient philanthropy" or "investing to give". Investing money now and waiting to spend it later might be a good idea simply because of the growth rate of the economy, or because it allows us to wait and identify better opportunities for impact later, or to ensure the long-term health and viability of the EA movement, or perhaps even because having a store of capital around means that we can employ some of the other do-gooder financial schemes on this list! (See a detailed report on patient philanthropy here.)

If we believe that transformative AI technology could be right around the corner, perhaps (in addition to freaking out) we should find some way to invest in the coming market foom.

I consider myself reasonably savvy about financial topics, but I would be in way over my head if I tried to synthesize all these competing claims and produce the One True EA Portfolio Theory.

However, I think it's an important unsolved problem in EA where further progress could likely be made, and thus should be taken very seriously. To some extent, the entire concept of longtermist EA is driven by a financial/values "edge" of buying the far future cheap because other people don't care as much about the far future. In this and other ways, EAs (including non-longtermists who care more about suffering of distant beings than most folks, and to a lesser extent rationalists more broadly who have unique beliefs about AI, etc) have different beliefs and different priorities than the typical investor, which should present many opportunities to bet on those beliefs and arbitrage the difference in values.

(PSA: For anyone reading who is totally new to finance & investing topics, stop reading this post and instead read up on the basics — here is a helpful, charismatic, rational...

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: Harry Potter and the Methods of Psychomagic | Chapter 2: The Global Neuronal Workspace, published by Henry Prowbell on October 26, 2021 on LessWrong.

White marble the floors, ochre the sculptured walls and grey the vaulted ceilings. Harry and Hermione walked together through the maze of ancient corridors that was Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

“I must say Harry, I wasn’t expecting this. I thought you were all about logic and rational thinking – not emotions,” said Hermione. “I really don’t know how to feel about this. It’s either a really positive development or the start of something truly disastrous.”

They rounded another corner passing a painting that showed a group of dogs sitting around a table playing exploding snap. Harry was sure they had walked past this one before but Hogwarts had a way of arranging its corridors so that you tended to reach your destination if you just walked with sufficient confidence towards the place where you felt a room should be.

“The start of something truly disastrous?” asked Harry.

“Well, aren’t you afraid this might, you know, turn out really really bad? Using magic to mess with your mind – don’t you see how that could go wrong?”

“That is something that I’ve thought about. But I don’t see how magical research into psychology should be any more dangerous than research into physics which is what we’ve been doing so far – in fact there are good arguments that researching physics should be much more dangerous”

Hermione was growing visibly more worried so he quickly changed tack. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. All I’m suggesting we do is work through this book.”

Of all the magic they could learn it had been obvious that boosting their ability to think more effectively should be the first they focused on, if it indeed existed. But it wasn’t immediately obvious that it did. A cursory survey of the library hadn’t thrown up any spells like that.

And Harry’s Hufflepuff part did think Hermione had a point. Brute forcing a massive change to your neural architecture did sound like something that could go very wrong. Would disrupting the balance between the billions of interacting neurons in his brain immediately trigger some kind of mental breakdown?

Assuming it was possible to do safely, would he even want to do something that could modify his values, memories and personality in an instant? Sure, you changed slowly over months and years – hopefully in positive ways – but your sense of self had continuity through time. You were always only a slight modification of your previous self. A spell that changed your mind in an instant: how was that any different from dying and replacing yourself with somebody completely different?

So that had been one of the main principles in their new research programme. They were aiming for something like magical psychotherapy, not magical lobotomy. Magic that could help him understand his mind better, magic that could temporarily remedy the most obviously broken parts of human psychology and magic that could help him think more rationally more of the time. Psychomagic for Beginners had been Harry's best lead so far. A small foothold on that still dauntingly vast project.

He handed Hermione the book. “It’s kind of hard to describe. It’s not really like any of the other books in the library. Maybe that’s why Dumbledore keeps it in his private collection.”

“Dumbledore gave you this?” Hermione gasped.

“Yes. he didn’t really explain why. But then he couldn’t explain the rock either.”

Hermione raised an eyebrow.

“I’ll tell you about that some other time. Here we are.”

They opened the door onto the 7th floor study room. This had quickly become their favourite place to meet for magical research: far away enough that nobody would interrupt them or come running if something exploded, well furnished wit...

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: Harry Potter and the Methods of Psychomagic | Chapter 2: The Global Neuronal Workspace, published by Henry Prowbell on October 26, 2021 on LessWrong.

White marble the floors, ochre the sculptured walls and grey the vaulted ceilings. Harry and Hermione walked together through the maze of ancient corridors that was Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

“I must say Harry, I wasn’t expecting this. I thought you were all about logic and rational thinking – not emotions,” said Hermione. “I really don’t know how to feel about this. It’s either a really positive development or the start of something truly disastrous.”

They rounded another corner passing a painting that showed a group of dogs sitting around a table playing exploding snap. Harry was sure they had walked past this one before but Hogwarts had a way of arranging its corridors so that you tended to reach your destination if you just walked with sufficient confidence towards the place where you felt a room should be.

“The start of something truly disastrous?” asked Harry.

“Well, aren’t you afraid this might, you know, turn out really really bad? Using magic to mess with your mind – don’t you see how that could go wrong?”

“That is something that I’ve thought about. But I don’t see how magical research into psychology should be any more dangerous than research into physics which is what we’ve been doing so far – in fact there are good arguments that researching physics should be much more dangerous”

Hermione was growing visibly more worried so he quickly changed tack. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. All I’m suggesting we do is work through this book.”

Of all the magic they could learn it had been obvious that boosting their ability to think more effectively should be the first they focused on, if it indeed existed. But it wasn’t immediately obvious that it did. A cursory survey of the library hadn’t thrown up any spells like that.

And Harry’s Hufflepuff part did think Hermione had a point. Brute forcing a massive change to your neural architecture did sound like something that could go very wrong. Would disrupting the balance between the billions of interacting neurons in his brain immediately trigger some kind of mental breakdown?

Assuming it was possible to do safely, would he even want to do something that could modify his values, memories and personality in an instant? Sure, you changed slowly over months and years – hopefully in positive ways – but your sense of self had continuity through time. You were always only a slight modification of your previous self. A spell that changed your mind in an instant: how was that any different from dying and replacing yourself with somebody completely different?

So that had been one of the main principles in their new research programme. They were aiming for something like magical psychotherapy, not magical lobotomy. Magic that could help him understand his mind better, magic that could temporarily remedy the most obviously broken parts of human psychology and magic that could help him think more rationally more of the time. Psychomagic for Beginners had been Harry's best lead so far. A small foothold on that still dauntingly vast project.

He handed Hermione the book. “It’s kind of hard to describe. It’s not really like any of the other books in the library. Maybe that’s why Dumbledore keeps it in his private collection.”

“Dumbledore gave you this?” Hermione gasped.

“Yes. he didn’t really explain why. But then he couldn’t explain the rock either.”

Hermione raised an eyebrow.

“I’ll tell you about that some other time. Here we are.”

They opened the door onto the 7th floor study room. This had quickly become their favourite place to meet for magical research: far away enough that nobody would interrupt them or come running if something exploded, well furnished wit...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: New beta version of the Probably Good website, published by sella on October 27, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TL;DR

The Probably Good website just updated to its beta version, with more than double the content, a new design, and a new section of core concepts.

Though the site is still fairly preliminary, we now believe it can provide value to visitors. If you think of people who could benefit from it, feel free to share the link (ProbablyGood.org)!

We still believe the vast majority of people would benefit more from being introduced to 80,000 Hours as their first impact-focused career guidance resource. However, we believe that specific audiences (detailed below) might benefit from being initially introduced to Probably Good.

We are currently hiring paid positions as well as volunteers for a wide range of roles.

We are interested in any feedback you might have, which can be provided in the website’s feedback page or in the comments below.

What’s New?

We’re incredibly excited to share our biggest update yet to the Probably Good website, which includes the following:

4 new chapters in our career guide

2 new career path profiles (on Grantmaking and People Management)

A new Core Concepts section, with introductions to 10 concepts critical for impact-focused career decision-making

A brand new design for the whole site

Who Should I Share This With?

In our alpha launch we were primarily interested in feedback from the community, and didn’t advocate for sharing the site more broadly. Even now, no one knows better than us that we still have a lot of work before our site is a comprehensive resource for career decision-making. However, we think the site is ready to be shared more broadly, for two main reasons:

We believe each one of our sections: the career guide, the career path profiles, and the core concepts, are mature enough to provide value for a significant portion of people - especially those new to the EA community.

Feedback and consultation can only get us so far, and we are approaching the stage where we need to see how more “natural” visitors interact with our site to see what works, what doesn’t, and where we should invest in the future.

As a result, we’d extremely appreciate you sharing ProbablyGood.org with your relevant networks, including people not familiar with or involved in Effective Altruism. Specifically, we’d recommend sharing the site in the following settings:

As an additional resource to 80,000 Hours, which continues to be unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, quality and effectiveness. This is particularly relevant for people considering careers matching any of our career path profiles.

As a first introduction to impact-focused career decision-making only in cases where you have a specific reason why you might hesitate to prioritize 80,000 Hours above our material (e.g. for someone who has an aversion to longtermism).

We’d particularly appreciate experimentation by community organizers introducing these materials to their communities or individual newcomers. If you’re interested, feel free to also contact us directly for support on this (on the forum or via the website).

Who Made This Possible?

There’s a long list of people who contributed to this launch. We’d like to thank those that have had an exceptional contribution, and we could not have reached this stage without them:

Our advisors - we’ve been privileged to receive the time and expertise of many in the EA community. We’d like to particularly thank our advisory board - Julia Wise, Michelle Hutchinson, and Joey Savoie - for extremely valuable guidance, feedback, connections, and strategic advice.

Our volunteers - we’ve only been able to produce this much content and reach this level of professionalism thanks to the kindness of our new volunteers donating their time and skills. We’d pa...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: New beta version of the Probably Good website, published by sella on October 27, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TL;DR

The Probably Good website just updated to its beta version, with more than double the content, a new design, and a new section of core concepts.

Though the site is still fairly preliminary, we now believe it can provide value to visitors. If you think of people who could benefit from it, feel free to share the link (ProbablyGood.org)!

We still believe the vast majority of people would benefit more from being introduced to 80,000 Hours as their first impact-focused career guidance resource. However, we believe that specific audiences (detailed below) might benefit from being initially introduced to Probably Good.

We are currently hiring paid positions as well as volunteers for a wide range of roles.

We are interested in any feedback you might have, which can be provided in the website’s feedback page or in the comments below.

What’s New?

We’re incredibly excited to share our biggest update yet to the Probably Good website, which includes the following:

4 new chapters in our career guide

2 new career path profiles (on Grantmaking and People Management)

A new Core Concepts section, with introductions to 10 concepts critical for impact-focused career decision-making

A brand new design for the whole site

Who Should I Share This With?

In our alpha launch we were primarily interested in feedback from the community, and didn’t advocate for sharing the site more broadly. Even now, no one knows better than us that we still have a lot of work before our site is a comprehensive resource for career decision-making. However, we think the site is ready to be shared more broadly, for two main reasons:

We believe each one of our sections: the career guide, the career path profiles, and the core concepts, are mature enough to provide value for a significant portion of people - especially those new to the EA community.

Feedback and consultation can only get us so far, and we are approaching the stage where we need to see how more “natural” visitors interact with our site to see what works, what doesn’t, and where we should invest in the future.

As a result, we’d extremely appreciate you sharing ProbablyGood.org with your relevant networks, including people not familiar with or involved in Effective Altruism. Specifically, we’d recommend sharing the site in the following settings:

As an additional resource to 80,000 Hours, which continues to be unparalleled in its comprehensiveness, quality and effectiveness. This is particularly relevant for people considering careers matching any of our career path profiles.

As a first introduction to impact-focused career decision-making only in cases where you have a specific reason why you might hesitate to prioritize 80,000 Hours above our material (e.g. for someone who has an aversion to longtermism).

We’d particularly appreciate experimentation by community organizers introducing these materials to their communities or individual newcomers. If you’re interested, feel free to also contact us directly for support on this (on the forum or via the website).

Who Made This Possible?

There’s a long list of people who contributed to this launch. We’d like to thank those that have had an exceptional contribution, and we could not have reached this stage without them:

Our advisors - we’ve been privileged to receive the time and expertise of many in the EA community. We’d like to particularly thank our advisory board - Julia Wise, Michelle Hutchinson, and Joey Savoie - for extremely valuable guidance, feedback, connections, and strategic advice.

Our volunteers - we’ve only been able to produce this much content and reach this level of professionalism thanks to the kindness of our new volunteers donating their time and skills. We’d pa...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: EA Survey 2020 Series: Donation Data, published by david reinstein on October 26, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Introduction and summary

Charitable donation (and earning-to-give) has been, and continues to be a prominent, prevalent, and impactful component of the Effective Altruism movement. The EA Survey has been distributed between 2014 and 2020, at roughly 15 month intervals. As a result, surveys were released at various points in the year, ranging from April to August, and no survey was released in 2016. In each survey we asked EAs about their charitable donations in the previous year, and their predicted donations for the year of the survey. Our work in this post/section reports on the 2020 survey (2019 giving), but our analysis extends to all the years of the EA survey.

In this post (and the accompanying bookdown supplement chapter), we consider donation responses, presenting both raw numbers, and descriptive, predictive, and causally-suggestive analysis. We present simple numbers, statistical comparisons, vizualisations, and descriptive and 'predictive' (machine learning) models. We cover a range of topics and concerns, including:

the total magnitude of EA giving and its relationship to non-EA giving,

career paths and 'earning to give',

the broad relationship between EA giving and individual characteristics (such as employment status and country, and income),

donations versus income trends across recent years,

which causes EAs are donating to, and

EA's donation plans versus realized donations (and future plans).

Our modeling work work considers how donations (total, share-of-income, and 'donated over 1000 USD') jointly relates to a range of characteristics. We first present 'descriptive' results focusing on a key set of observable features of interest, particularly demographics, employment and careers, and the 'continuous features' age, time-in-EA, income, and year of survey. We next fit 'predictive', allowing the 'machine learning' models themselves to choose which features seem to be most important for predicting donations.

Note: A 'dynamic version' of this document (an R-markdown/Bookdown), with folded code, margin notes, some interactive graphs and tables, and some additional details, can be found here. This may be helpful for anyone that wants to dig into this more deeply, and perhaps for those who are data, code, and statistics-inclined.

Note: In the narrative below, we simply refer to "donations" rather than "reported donations" for brevity. Unless otherwise mentioned, all figures simply add, average, or otherwise summarize individual responses from the EA Survey years mentioned.[1]

Summary (some key results and numbers)

55.5% of EAs in the 2020 survey reported making a charitable donation in 2019, 13.7% reported making zero donations, and 30.8% did not respond to this question. (Thus, of those who responded, 80.3% reported making a donation in the prior year.)

Participants reported total donations of 10,695,926 USD in 2019 (cf 16.1M USD in 2018).

However, the number of survey participants has declined somewhat, from 2509 in 2019 (1704 of whom answered the donation question) to 2056 (1423 answering the donation question) in 2020.

Over the past years, we see no strong trend in median or mean donation amounts reported.[2]

The median annual donation in 2019 was 528 USD (cf 683.92 USD in 2018).

The mean (reported) annual donation for 2019 was 7,516 USD (cf 9,370 for 2018) or 8,607 USD excluding those who joined in 2020 (cf 10,246 USD for 2018 excluding those who joined in 2019).

The median annual donation in 2019 excluding those who joined EA in 2020 was 761 USD (cf. 990 USD for the comparable median for 2018/2019 and 832 USD for 2017/2018). (See 'donation and income trends in EA' for more details).

In 2019 1.3% of donors accounted for $6,437,404 in...

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: Impressive vs honest signaling, published by adamzerner on October 26, 2021 on LessWrong.

Cross posted on my personal blog.

Epistemic status: Musings.

One thing that I am particularly happy with in my life is my girlfriend Alex. Here is the story of how we met.

I was 23 years old and had never had a girlfriend before. Heck, I never even dated. It's not that I wasn't interested. I was less interested than most, but I had some interest. I just didn't think I'd be able to find someone who I'm compatible with.

A friend of mine encouraged me to give Tinder a shot. I had been off and on about it. I had a few conversations but didn't really take it seriously and didn't spend much time with it. Then I had a job interview in Vegas, and I figured it could be fun to try meeting someone to date while I was there.

I went about it much differently from how others use Tinder. I mostly paid attention to the profile descriptions. Very few people actually wrote anything in their profiles. I wasn't interested in that. If you only write a sentence or two on your profile, I feel like that says something about either how deep you are, or, more charitably, what you're looking to get out of Tinder.

Anyway, I would swipe through, rejecting everyone who had these two sentence profiles. Then when people had longer profiles, I would skim them. If they weren't interesting, I'd reject. If they were, I'd read them in full, and then make a decision.

There weren't many people who I liked, but there were a few. Then when I came across Alex's profile, I was really excited. She had a somewhat long profile. It touched on rationality, self-improvement, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. And she was cute. So I super liked her.

To my surprise, she liked me back! I actually remember where I was. I was in the Luxor hotel. The one that looks like a pyramid and has that super powerful light beam that shoots up into the sky. I remember walking off to the side and writing out this really long message to her.

I talked about all of these wacky things that people don't talk about in initial messages to people you connect with on Tinder. Actually, my mind is fuzzy on the details. It definitely had a lot to do with how rationality and self-improvement is very important to me. And how I have crazy ideas of making a ton of money with startups and figuring out how to use that money to "save the world". I think I might have mentioned that I don't envision ever getting married or having kids.

To my surprise again, she messaged me back and was really interested! Almost six years later, we're still together.

In contrast, I remember when my cousin was dating, he would tell me about how he was frustrated with how girls would reject him without giving him a chance. Eg. he would match with them on some online dating site, exchange a few icebreaker-type messages, and then they'd ghost him.

He's a smart guy and also pretty honest. His assessment was that it couldn't have been something he had said. It's not like they had any important new information about him that could rationally be a good reason to reject him. "Oh, you seemed kinda cool at first, but now that you said X, Y and Z, I interpret those as bad signals, and now I'm not interested enough to continue talking to you." It wasn't like that, is what my cousin was saying. There was nothing he said that plausibly could have been an X, Y or Z.

It never made sense to me why he was so frustrated with this though. If you disagree so strongly with how the girl went about this, then she's doing you a favor by rejecting you. She probably isn't right for you. Would you rather realize that you guys aren't compatible after a few bad dates? Or have a few dates but then when things get more serious and you're in a relationship, go through a nasty break up? I know I would rather just know ahead of...

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: Impressive vs honest signaling, published by adamzerner on October 26, 2021 on LessWrong.

Cross posted on my personal blog.

Epistemic status: Musings.

One thing that I am particularly happy with in my life is my girlfriend Alex. Here is the story of how we met.

I was 23 years old and had never had a girlfriend before. Heck, I never even dated. It's not that I wasn't interested. I was less interested than most, but I had some interest. I just didn't think I'd be able to find someone who I'm compatible with.

A friend of mine encouraged me to give Tinder a shot. I had been off and on about it. I had a few conversations but didn't really take it seriously and didn't spend much time with it. Then I had a job interview in Vegas, and I figured it could be fun to try meeting someone to date while I was there.

I went about it much differently from how others use Tinder. I mostly paid attention to the profile descriptions. Very few people actually wrote anything in their profiles. I wasn't interested in that. If you only write a sentence or two on your profile, I feel like that says something about either how deep you are, or, more charitably, what you're looking to get out of Tinder.

Anyway, I would swipe through, rejecting everyone who had these two sentence profiles. Then when people had longer profiles, I would skim them. If they weren't interesting, I'd reject. If they were, I'd read them in full, and then make a decision.

There weren't many people who I liked, but there were a few. Then when I came across Alex's profile, I was really excited. She had a somewhat long profile. It touched on rationality, self-improvement, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. And she was cute. So I super liked her.

To my surprise, she liked me back! I actually remember where I was. I was in the Luxor hotel. The one that looks like a pyramid and has that super powerful light beam that shoots up into the sky. I remember walking off to the side and writing out this really long message to her.

I talked about all of these wacky things that people don't talk about in initial messages to people you connect with on Tinder. Actually, my mind is fuzzy on the details. It definitely had a lot to do with how rationality and self-improvement is very important to me. And how I have crazy ideas of making a ton of money with startups and figuring out how to use that money to "save the world". I think I might have mentioned that I don't envision ever getting married or having kids.

To my surprise again, she messaged me back and was really interested! Almost six years later, we're still together.

In contrast, I remember when my cousin was dating, he would tell me about how he was frustrated with how girls would reject him without giving him a chance. Eg. he would match with them on some online dating site, exchange a few icebreaker-type messages, and then they'd ghost him.

He's a smart guy and also pretty honest. His assessment was that it couldn't have been something he had said. It's not like they had any important new information about him that could rationally be a good reason to reject him. "Oh, you seemed kinda cool at first, but now that you said X, Y and Z, I interpret those as bad signals, and now I'm not interested enough to continue talking to you." It wasn't like that, is what my cousin was saying. There was nothing he said that plausibly could have been an X, Y or Z.

It never made sense to me why he was so frustrated with this though. If you disagree so strongly with how the girl went about this, then she's doing you a favor by rejecting you. She probably isn't right for you. Would you rather realize that you guys aren't compatible after a few bad dates? Or have a few dates but then when things get more serious and you're in a relationship, go through a nasty break up? I know I would rather just know ahead of...