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: Postmodern Warfare, published by lsusr on October 25, 2021 on LessWrong.

Nobody designing a financial system today would invent credit cards. The Western world uses credit cards because replacing legacy systems is expensive. China doesn't use credit cards. They skipped straight from cash to WeChat Pay. Skipping straight to the newest technology when you're playing catch-up is called leapfrogging.

A world-class military takes decades to create. The United States' oldest active aircraft carrier was commissioned in 1975. For reference, the Microsoft Windows operating system was released in 1985. The backbone of NATO's armed forces was designed for a world before autonomous drones and machine learning.

The United States dominates at modern warfare. Developed in WWII, modern warfare combines tanks, aircraft, artillery and mechanized[1] infantry to advance faster than the enemy can coordinate a response.

Modern warfare is expensive—and not just because of all that heavy machinery. Modern warfare delegates important decisions to the smallest unit capable of making them. Officers must be smart and they must be trained. Training officers to fight a modern war is hard. It takes a long time. There's constant turnover. It's a human resources nightmare. You can't just throw money at the problem.

Soon it will be possible to throw machine learning at the problem instead.

At the center of [China's] public discussions is a new and little-understood concept called “intelligentization (智能化),” which represents a new goal for the PLA’s progress in modernization.. Chinese theorists’ discussions about intelligentization overwhelmingly call for highly centralized decision-making structures. These strategists want operational commanders advised by advanced algorithms to perfectly direct intelligent swarms of autonomous battle systems to achieve campaign objectives. Chinese theorists believe this approach will consolidate command responsibility onto a few generals who can remain safely away from the frontlines of the battlefield, which is antithetical to the modern concept of mission command.

―Schrodinger’s Military? Challenges for China’s Military Modernization Ambitions

AI-centric postmodern warfare has advantages over human-centric modern warfare.

Human communication is a bottleneck for large organizations. Computer command systems can coordinate perfectly and instantly. Human beings cannot.

It's easier to mass-produce computers than human specialists.

AI-centric warfare is on the winning side of a ratchet. AI capabilities advance while human capabilities remain constrained by biology. Whenever an AI system gets better than human beings at a specific task it remains that way permanently.

Most importantly, AI-centric command is the only viable method for commanding swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are smaller and cheaper than piloted aircraft. A UAV can be remote controlled or it can be autonomous. Remote controlling a UAV takes a lot of bandwidth because the UAV must send back its sensory information to mission command. This works fine when you're controlling a handful of Predator drones. Remote control will not work when you're controlling a swarm of 10,000 small UAVs against a peer adversary. Direct communication is fragile and there isn't enough bandwidth in the radio spectrum for indirect transmission. UAVs swarms must be autonomous.

The disadvantage of postmodern warfare is that centralized computer-controlled systems are fragile in a different way. If critical systems get compromised (or just fail in an unexpected way) then the entire war machine breaks. I think the advantages are worth the risks. It's not like our critical infrastructure isn't already vulnerable to cyberattack. Moreover, distributed fault-tolerant architectures can help mitigate th...

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: Postmodern Warfare, published by lsusr on October 25, 2021 on LessWrong.

Nobody designing a financial system today would invent credit cards. The Western world uses credit cards because replacing legacy systems is expensive. China doesn't use credit cards. They skipped straight from cash to WeChat Pay. Skipping straight to the newest technology when you're playing catch-up is called leapfrogging.

A world-class military takes decades to create. The United States' oldest active aircraft carrier was commissioned in 1975. For reference, the Microsoft Windows operating system was released in 1985. The backbone of NATO's armed forces was designed for a world before autonomous drones and machine learning.

The United States dominates at modern warfare. Developed in WWII, modern warfare combines tanks, aircraft, artillery and mechanized[1] infantry to advance faster than the enemy can coordinate a response.

Modern warfare is expensive—and not just because of all that heavy machinery. Modern warfare delegates important decisions to the smallest unit capable of making them. Officers must be smart and they must be trained. Training officers to fight a modern war is hard. It takes a long time. There's constant turnover. It's a human resources nightmare. You can't just throw money at the problem.

Soon it will be possible to throw machine learning at the problem instead.

At the center of [China's] public discussions is a new and little-understood concept called “intelligentization (智能化),” which represents a new goal for the PLA’s progress in modernization.. Chinese theorists’ discussions about intelligentization overwhelmingly call for highly centralized decision-making structures. These strategists want operational commanders advised by advanced algorithms to perfectly direct intelligent swarms of autonomous battle systems to achieve campaign objectives. Chinese theorists believe this approach will consolidate command responsibility onto a few generals who can remain safely away from the frontlines of the battlefield, which is antithetical to the modern concept of mission command.

―Schrodinger’s Military? Challenges for China’s Military Modernization Ambitions

AI-centric postmodern warfare has advantages over human-centric modern warfare.

Human communication is a bottleneck for large organizations. Computer command systems can coordinate perfectly and instantly. Human beings cannot.

It's easier to mass-produce computers than human specialists.

AI-centric warfare is on the winning side of a ratchet. AI capabilities advance while human capabilities remain constrained by biology. Whenever an AI system gets better than human beings at a specific task it remains that way permanently.

Most importantly, AI-centric command is the only viable method for commanding swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are smaller and cheaper than piloted aircraft. A UAV can be remote controlled or it can be autonomous. Remote controlling a UAV takes a lot of bandwidth because the UAV must send back its sensory information to mission command. This works fine when you're controlling a handful of Predator drones. Remote control will not work when you're controlling a swarm of 10,000 small UAVs against a peer adversary. Direct communication is fragile and there isn't enough bandwidth in the radio spectrum for indirect transmission. UAVs swarms must be autonomous.

The disadvantage of postmodern warfare is that centralized computer-controlled systems are fragile in a different way. If critical systems get compromised (or just fail in an unexpected way) then the entire war machine breaks. I think the advantages are worth the risks. It's not like our critical infrastructure isn't already vulnerable to cyberattack. Moreover, distributed fault-tolerant architectures can help mitigate th...

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 Healthier Hens, published by lukasj10 on October 25, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Introduction

We are pleased to announce Healthier Hens, a new EA-aligned animal welfare organization. Our vision is to cost-effectively improve the well-being of millions of farmed egg-laying hens. We are investigating the potential of an intervention focused on improving the nutritional quality of layer hen feed, as recommended by the Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) research team. We are proud graduates of the CE Incubation Program’s 2021 cohort, and our initial work is supported by a $100,000 seed grant.

While impactful, the egg industry’s ongoing positive transition to cage-free systems does not address the deeply neglected issue of poor bone health in layer hens, a major welfare problem prevalent across all housing systems on commercial farms. We choose to act now and in doing so achieve unprecedented counterfactual impact.

Overview

We founded Healthier Hens because we believe that given the scale of suffering that egg-laying hens endure, there is still room for improving their welfare. Recent studies suggest that the chronic pain resulting from bone fractures is so severe that it causes egg-laying hens to enter depressive states. Even more alarming, bone fractures are prevalent across all types of housing systems. Such pain places a huge amount of stress on the individual birds, prevents them from carrying out their natural behaviors, and represents a significant fraction of their total lives spent in suffering, as shown by the Welfare Footprint Project below. Many solutions, including breed selection, perch placement, and chick training, are needed to completely eradicate this welfare issue on factory farms. Our current priority is addressing the inconsistent and often suboptimal nutrient levels in commercial feeds.

Feed fortification is the process of adding nutrients such as minerals and vitamins to feed to produce a nutritionally complete diet. The industry does apply this practice, but typically, only in order to maximize egg production, which may compromise health. Through our literature review, we found that increasing the levels of calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D3 can help hens develop stronger, healthier bones and reduce the risk of fractures. At this time, we consider optimal levels of these nutrients in feed to be 4% calcium, 0.3% available phosphorus, and 3000 IU/kg of vitamin D3. However, it is critical for us to be sure of what benefits such levels could yield and thus we plan to run a pilot of our feed fortification intervention during the next egg production cycle (starting Jan-Feb 2022).

Currently, we are in the final process of selecting a country to work in. Each co-founder will visit one of three countries under consideration (Germany, Kenya, and the USA), identified in earlier rounds of our geographical assessment. We want to make sure we choose a country in which Healthier Hens can achieve impact. We plan to speak to local farmers and feed experts as well as engage animal nutritionists and welfare researchers to best gauge the need for and feasibility of implementation. If you know anyone with experience in these areas who may be willing to connect, please reach out to us at [email protected]. Expert opinions and advice will be invaluable in helping us best progress towards Healthier Hens.

Ultimately, our endline goal is to influence the regulation and enforcement of optimal feed nutrient levels at scale. Our vision is to cost-effectively reduce the pain and suffering of at least 100 million hens over 10 years of our organization's operations.

Our thanks go to Aaron Gertler, Antonia Personette, Charles He, Haven King-Nobles, Karolina Sarek, and Ula Zarosa for their valuable feedback on this announcement. Any remnant errors are our ow...

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 Healthier Hens, published by lukasj10 on October 25, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Introduction

We are pleased to announce Healthier Hens, a new EA-aligned animal welfare organization. Our vision is to cost-effectively improve the well-being of millions of farmed egg-laying hens. We are investigating the potential of an intervention focused on improving the nutritional quality of layer hen feed, as recommended by the Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) research team. We are proud graduates of the CE Incubation Program’s 2021 cohort, and our initial work is supported by a $100,000 seed grant.

While impactful, the egg industry’s ongoing positive transition to cage-free systems does not address the deeply neglected issue of poor bone health in layer hens, a major welfare problem prevalent across all housing systems on commercial farms. We choose to act now and in doing so achieve unprecedented counterfactual impact.

Overview

We founded Healthier Hens because we believe that given the scale of suffering that egg-laying hens endure, there is still room for improving their welfare. Recent studies suggest that the chronic pain resulting from bone fractures is so severe that it causes egg-laying hens to enter depressive states. Even more alarming, bone fractures are prevalent across all types of housing systems. Such pain places a huge amount of stress on the individual birds, prevents them from carrying out their natural behaviors, and represents a significant fraction of their total lives spent in suffering, as shown by the Welfare Footprint Project below. Many solutions, including breed selection, perch placement, and chick training, are needed to completely eradicate this welfare issue on factory farms. Our current priority is addressing the inconsistent and often suboptimal nutrient levels in commercial feeds.

Feed fortification is the process of adding nutrients such as minerals and vitamins to feed to produce a nutritionally complete diet. The industry does apply this practice, but typically, only in order to maximize egg production, which may compromise health. Through our literature review, we found that increasing the levels of calcium, phosphorus, and vitamin D3 can help hens develop stronger, healthier bones and reduce the risk of fractures. At this time, we consider optimal levels of these nutrients in feed to be 4% calcium, 0.3% available phosphorus, and 3000 IU/kg of vitamin D3. However, it is critical for us to be sure of what benefits such levels could yield and thus we plan to run a pilot of our feed fortification intervention during the next egg production cycle (starting Jan-Feb 2022).

Currently, we are in the final process of selecting a country to work in. Each co-founder will visit one of three countries under consideration (Germany, Kenya, and the USA), identified in earlier rounds of our geographical assessment. We want to make sure we choose a country in which Healthier Hens can achieve impact. We plan to speak to local farmers and feed experts as well as engage animal nutritionists and welfare researchers to best gauge the need for and feasibility of implementation. If you know anyone with experience in these areas who may be willing to connect, please reach out to us at [email protected]. Expert opinions and advice will be invaluable in helping us best progress towards Healthier Hens.

Ultimately, our endline goal is to influence the regulation and enforcement of optimal feed nutrient levels at scale. Our vision is to cost-effectively reduce the pain and suffering of at least 100 million hens over 10 years of our organization's operations.

Our thanks go to Aaron Gertler, Antonia Personette, Charles He, Haven King-Nobles, Karolina Sarek, and Ula Zarosa for their valuable feedback on this announcement. Any remnant errors are our ow...

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: Donating money, buying happiness: new meta-analyses comparing the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers and psychotherapy in terms of subjective well-being, published by MichaelPlant on October 25, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This is a cross-post from the website of the Happier Lives Institute.

TL;DR: We estimate that StrongMinds is 12 times (95% CI: 4, 24) more cost-effective than GiveDirectly in terms of subjective well-being. This puts it roughly on a par with the top deworming charities recommended by GiveWell.

1. Background and summary

In order to do as much good as possible, we need to compare how much good different things do in a single ‘currency’. At the Happier Lives Institute (HLI), we believe the best approach is to measure the effects of different interventions in terms of ‘units’ of subjective well-being (e.g. self-reports of happiness and life satisfaction).

In this post, we discuss our new research comparing the cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy to cash transfers. Before we get to that comparison, we should first highlight the advantage of doing it in terms of subjective well-being; to illustrate that, it will help to flag some alternative methods.

We could assess the effect each intervention has on wealth, but this would fail to capture the benefits of psychotherapy. It’s implausible to think that treating depression is only good insofar as it helps you to earn more. We could assess their effects using standard measures of health, such as a Disability-Adjusted Life-Year (DALY), but it’s similarly mistaken to think that alleviating extreme poverty is only good insofar as it helps you to become healthier. We could make some arbitrary assumptions about how much a given change in income and DALYs each contribute to well-being; this would allow us to ‘trade’ between them. But this would just be a guess and could be badly wrong. If we measure the effects on subjective well-being, how individuals feel and think about their lives (e.g. "Overall, how satisfied are you with your life, nowadays?" 0-10), we can provide an evidence-based comparison in units that more fully capture what we think really matters.

Efforts to work out the global priorities for improving subjective well-being are relatively new. Nevertheless, the recent push to integrate well-being in public policy-making in countries such as Scotland and New Zealand, as well as the reach of publications such as the World Happiness Report (which started in 2012), indicates that this is a viable approach.

Earlier work conducted by HLI’s Director, Michael Plant, suggested that using subjective well-being might reveal different priorities for individuals and organisations seeking to do the most good, with mental health standing out as one area that is crucial and potentially neglected. Plant’s (2018, 2019 ch. 7) prior back-of-the-envelope calculations indicated that StrongMinds, a mental health charity that treats women with depression in Africa, could be as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charity recommendations.

These initial findings motivated us to do a much more rigorous analysis of the same interventions in terms of subjective well-being, so we undertook meta-analyses in each case. These aimed to address three questions:

Is assessing cost-effectiveness in terms of subjective well-being feasible: are there enough data that we can make these sorts of comparisons without making major assumptions to fill in the blanks?

Is this approach worthwhile: does it indicate new or different priorities?

Does this specific comparison between cash transfers and psychotherapy indicate that donors and decision-makers should change the way they allocate their resources, assuming they want to do the most good?

Our research focused specifically on studies in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Our meta-...

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: Donating money, buying happiness: new meta-analyses comparing the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers and psychotherapy in terms of subjective well-being, published by MichaelPlant on October 25, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

This is a cross-post from the website of the Happier Lives Institute.

TL;DR: We estimate that StrongMinds is 12 times (95% CI: 4, 24) more cost-effective than GiveDirectly in terms of subjective well-being. This puts it roughly on a par with the top deworming charities recommended by GiveWell.

1. Background and summary

In order to do as much good as possible, we need to compare how much good different things do in a single ‘currency’. At the Happier Lives Institute (HLI), we believe the best approach is to measure the effects of different interventions in terms of ‘units’ of subjective well-being (e.g. self-reports of happiness and life satisfaction).

In this post, we discuss our new research comparing the cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy to cash transfers. Before we get to that comparison, we should first highlight the advantage of doing it in terms of subjective well-being; to illustrate that, it will help to flag some alternative methods.

We could assess the effect each intervention has on wealth, but this would fail to capture the benefits of psychotherapy. It’s implausible to think that treating depression is only good insofar as it helps you to earn more. We could assess their effects using standard measures of health, such as a Disability-Adjusted Life-Year (DALY), but it’s similarly mistaken to think that alleviating extreme poverty is only good insofar as it helps you to become healthier. We could make some arbitrary assumptions about how much a given change in income and DALYs each contribute to well-being; this would allow us to ‘trade’ between them. But this would just be a guess and could be badly wrong. If we measure the effects on subjective well-being, how individuals feel and think about their lives (e.g. "Overall, how satisfied are you with your life, nowadays?" 0-10), we can provide an evidence-based comparison in units that more fully capture what we think really matters.

Efforts to work out the global priorities for improving subjective well-being are relatively new. Nevertheless, the recent push to integrate well-being in public policy-making in countries such as Scotland and New Zealand, as well as the reach of publications such as the World Happiness Report (which started in 2012), indicates that this is a viable approach.

Earlier work conducted by HLI’s Director, Michael Plant, suggested that using subjective well-being might reveal different priorities for individuals and organisations seeking to do the most good, with mental health standing out as one area that is crucial and potentially neglected. Plant’s (2018, 2019 ch. 7) prior back-of-the-envelope calculations indicated that StrongMinds, a mental health charity that treats women with depression in Africa, could be as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top charity recommendations.

These initial findings motivated us to do a much more rigorous analysis of the same interventions in terms of subjective well-being, so we undertook meta-analyses in each case. These aimed to address three questions:

Is assessing cost-effectiveness in terms of subjective well-being feasible: are there enough data that we can make these sorts of comparisons without making major assumptions to fill in the blanks?

Is this approach worthwhile: does it indicate new or different priorities?

Does this specific comparison between cash transfers and psychotherapy indicate that donors and decision-makers should change the way they allocate their resources, assuming they want to do the most good?

Our research focused specifically on studies in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Our meta-...

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: I’m Offering Free Coaching for Software Developers in the EA community, published by hibukki on October 25, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TL;DR: If you think this might be helpful for you, please email me at [email protected], or book a calendly meeting, or meet me at EAG (here's my swapcard).

I’m offering help with:

Improving technical skills.

Career development (including earning more and working at better positions).

Why do I think I’ll be useful?

These are conversations I’ve been doing with friends for years.

Some results that I [conservatively] think I helped happen at least one year earlier:

One raised their salary by over 100% in under 2 years.

One got an entry level position as a developer (they were an analyst).

One learned Fullstack and got accepted as a 1st employee in a funded startup.

Remember - these are cherry picked. Sometimes I talk to people and don’t help at all. But also note that I haven’t included hard-to-quantify results, such as helping someone get a better understanding of what they’re looking for, or turning something hard into something easy.

I’m currently mentoring two EA devs from Israel.

I’m getting a lot of positive feedback (you can ask them questions in the comments).

One got accepted to a relatively positive company (given the limited options here) that also fits many other parameters she was looking for in a job (some of the parameters were unclear to her before we spoke). We are not sure what the counterfactual is of course.

Should you contact me?

What kinds of problems do I think I’ll be useful with?

“There are so many things to do/learn, where to start?”

“Should I change jobs?”

“How much money to ask for?”

“How many questions to ask my colleagues?”

“Am I good enough?”

“How to approach learning about [technology X]?”

“How to handle a huge existing code base?”

“They gave me a product description, I’m in charge of the tech, what architecture should I build for it? What considerations should I even take into account?”

“I’m not a professional software developer but I do use code at work, how can I get it to cooperate with me?”

“How to improve my CV?”

What will the mentoring look like?

I’m offering long term mentoring where the first meeting will be over video, and most other communication will be with async text or voice messages.

No commitment, we can stop anytime.

I’m very informal. All my shirts have cats on them, such as:

My professional experience

See linkedin. TL;DR: I’ve been a professional developer for 14+ years.

I just left my last job hoping to work on an EA project, and this is one of the things I'm trying out.

Things I’m unsure about

Culture gaps

Different cultures give feedback / use social queues differently. These are usually conversations I've had with my friends and I'm only starting off with helping people who I’ve never met.

You’ll be helping me too as I make my first steps here.

How to measure myself?

The feedback cycle for improving someone’s career is pretty long, and many mentees will say they’re satisfied even if the mentor doesn’t provide much value.

To deal with this, I try asking for pretty detailed feedback, such as “what changed before and after the conversation”, as well as more “objective” metrics, such as salary increases.

How much will this help EA?

Reasons I think it would help:

Software developers would have more money to donate and better skills to apply in the future.

Some developers may move to EA orgs (though I won’t focus on this).

Maybe: Developers working in EA orgs could use more mentoring and support.

The main counter argument I see is that this is a very indirect intervention, so perhaps the bottom-line impact will be low.

Why do I think this is neglected?

I think that monetizing developer-mentoring is pretty hard, so the market mostly isn’t handling it. The main exception I s...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: I’m Offering Free Coaching for Software Developers in the EA community, published by hibukki on October 25, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

TL;DR: If you think this might be helpful for you, please email me at [email protected], or book a calendly meeting, or meet me at EAG (here's my swapcard).

I’m offering help with:

Improving technical skills.

Career development (including earning more and working at better positions).

Why do I think I’ll be useful?

These are conversations I’ve been doing with friends for years.

Some results that I [conservatively] think I helped happen at least one year earlier:

One raised their salary by over 100% in under 2 years.

One got an entry level position as a developer (they were an analyst).

One learned Fullstack and got accepted as a 1st employee in a funded startup.

Remember - these are cherry picked. Sometimes I talk to people and don’t help at all. But also note that I haven’t included hard-to-quantify results, such as helping someone get a better understanding of what they’re looking for, or turning something hard into something easy.

I’m currently mentoring two EA devs from Israel.

I’m getting a lot of positive feedback (you can ask them questions in the comments).

One got accepted to a relatively positive company (given the limited options here) that also fits many other parameters she was looking for in a job (some of the parameters were unclear to her before we spoke). We are not sure what the counterfactual is of course.

Should you contact me?

What kinds of problems do I think I’ll be useful with?

“There are so many things to do/learn, where to start?”

“Should I change jobs?”

“How much money to ask for?”

“How many questions to ask my colleagues?”

“Am I good enough?”

“How to approach learning about [technology X]?”

“How to handle a huge existing code base?”

“They gave me a product description, I’m in charge of the tech, what architecture should I build for it? What considerations should I even take into account?”

“I’m not a professional software developer but I do use code at work, how can I get it to cooperate with me?”

“How to improve my CV?”

What will the mentoring look like?

I’m offering long term mentoring where the first meeting will be over video, and most other communication will be with async text or voice messages.

No commitment, we can stop anytime.

I’m very informal. All my shirts have cats on them, such as:

My professional experience

See linkedin. TL;DR: I’ve been a professional developer for 14+ years.

I just left my last job hoping to work on an EA project, and this is one of the things I'm trying out.

Things I’m unsure about

Culture gaps

Different cultures give feedback / use social queues differently. These are usually conversations I've had with my friends and I'm only starting off with helping people who I’ve never met.

You’ll be helping me too as I make my first steps here.

How to measure myself?

The feedback cycle for improving someone’s career is pretty long, and many mentees will say they’re satisfied even if the mentor doesn’t provide much value.

To deal with this, I try asking for pretty detailed feedback, such as “what changed before and after the conversation”, as well as more “objective” metrics, such as salary increases.

How much will this help EA?

Reasons I think it would help:

Software developers would have more money to donate and better skills to apply in the future.

Some developers may move to EA orgs (though I won’t focus on this).

Maybe: Developers working in EA orgs could use more mentoring and support.

The main counter argument I see is that this is a very indirect intervention, so perhaps the bottom-line impact will be low.

Why do I think this is neglected?

I think that monetizing developer-mentoring is pretty hard, so the market mostly isn’t handling it. The main exception I s...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Dating profiles from first principles: heterosexual male profile design, published by Xodarap on October 25, 2021 on LessWrong.

Executive Summary

While romantic preferences are idiosyncratic, certain attributes are widely considered attractive by heterosexual women. The evidence for this is particularly strong in populations frequently studied by psychologists (i.e. psychology undergraduate students).

My general advice is to consider these frequently-desired attributes and orient your profile towards signaling that you are at least average in each of them. They are: aesthetics, mental health, social capital, wealth, physical attractiveness, and niceness.

There is some evidence that women are risk-averse rather than expectation maximizing, i.e. it's more important to indicate that you are at least acceptable on each of these dimensions than it is to indicate that you are exceptional on one of them.

If you only have two minutes

If you only have 2 minutes, I would suggest the following exercise:

Imagine it's after your first date. Your date goes home and texts her group chat "you won't believe it but I met the most amazing guy! He _____." What's that thing she is so excited about? Make sure that thing is immediately visible from your profile.

Epistemic Confidence

Part of why I'm writing this is that I think people are terrible at dating by default, so even mediocre advice is likely to make them better. I do not claim that this advice will make any man more attractive to any woman, but do think it's quite likely to make the median man more attractive to the median woman.

I have had writing this article on my to-do list for a while, and decided that I would never actually write it if every claim was individually cited. Instead, I am including a list of all works that I've drawn on at the bottom. It's important to emphasize that I think this information is more helpful than not to the median straight man, but psychology research is often not that rigorous (I somewhat recently found out that a paper I frequently mentioned had some of its major claims retracted), and even when it's good there is simply so much human variation that it's hard to make universal claims.

Basic principles

The secret to an attractive profile is:

Understand what your partner wants

Signal that dating you will give them that

This seems basic, but I'm surprised how few people understand it.

When someone asks me whether they should grow a beard or double text or go to a club on the first date, the answer is always: "well, what does the person you are trying to attract want?"

Figuring out what someone wants is a complicated skill, but this article attempts to summarize common preferences in heterosexual women. It draws heavily on academic psychological research, which means that the claims are most true for young undergraduates in top Western universities.

I believe the advice in this article will be helpful to the average single man, but it is no substitute for actually getting to know the person you want to attract.

Traits - Introduction

Thresholds and Homophily

We examine a variety of traits when evaluating potential romantic partners. Some traits have constant or even increasing marginal returns. For example, being more physically attractive will get you more romantic attention, and there's no "maximum" point at which being more attractive is not beneficial.

In contrast, other traits seem to have a "threshold". Frequently, this threshold is “the same as me”, i.e. we want partners who score at least as well as we do on some trait. Dating someone who is the same level as you is referred to as “homophily”; hypergamy and hypogamy are the terms for when your partner has more or less of the trait than you do, respectively. Some examples:

People prefer dating those who have approximately the same number 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: Dating profiles from first principles: heterosexual male profile design, published by Xodarap on October 25, 2021 on LessWrong.

Executive Summary

While romantic preferences are idiosyncratic, certain attributes are widely considered attractive by heterosexual women. The evidence for this is particularly strong in populations frequently studied by psychologists (i.e. psychology undergraduate students).

My general advice is to consider these frequently-desired attributes and orient your profile towards signaling that you are at least average in each of them. They are: aesthetics, mental health, social capital, wealth, physical attractiveness, and niceness.

There is some evidence that women are risk-averse rather than expectation maximizing, i.e. it's more important to indicate that you are at least acceptable on each of these dimensions than it is to indicate that you are exceptional on one of them.

If you only have two minutes

If you only have 2 minutes, I would suggest the following exercise:

Imagine it's after your first date. Your date goes home and texts her group chat "you won't believe it but I met the most amazing guy! He _____." What's that thing she is so excited about? Make sure that thing is immediately visible from your profile.

Epistemic Confidence

Part of why I'm writing this is that I think people are terrible at dating by default, so even mediocre advice is likely to make them better. I do not claim that this advice will make any man more attractive to any woman, but do think it's quite likely to make the median man more attractive to the median woman.

I have had writing this article on my to-do list for a while, and decided that I would never actually write it if every claim was individually cited. Instead, I am including a list of all works that I've drawn on at the bottom. It's important to emphasize that I think this information is more helpful than not to the median straight man, but psychology research is often not that rigorous (I somewhat recently found out that a paper I frequently mentioned had some of its major claims retracted), and even when it's good there is simply so much human variation that it's hard to make universal claims.

Basic principles

The secret to an attractive profile is:

Understand what your partner wants

Signal that dating you will give them that

This seems basic, but I'm surprised how few people understand it.

When someone asks me whether they should grow a beard or double text or go to a club on the first date, the answer is always: "well, what does the person you are trying to attract want?"

Figuring out what someone wants is a complicated skill, but this article attempts to summarize common preferences in heterosexual women. It draws heavily on academic psychological research, which means that the claims are most true for young undergraduates in top Western universities.

I believe the advice in this article will be helpful to the average single man, but it is no substitute for actually getting to know the person you want to attract.

Traits - Introduction

Thresholds and Homophily

We examine a variety of traits when evaluating potential romantic partners. Some traits have constant or even increasing marginal returns. For example, being more physically attractive will get you more romantic attention, and there's no "maximum" point at which being more attractive is not beneficial.

In contrast, other traits seem to have a "threshold". Frequently, this threshold is “the same as me”, i.e. we want partners who score at least as well as we do on some trait. Dating someone who is the same level as you is referred to as “homophily”; hypergamy and hypogamy are the terms for when your partner has more or less of the trait than you do, respectively. Some examples:

People prefer dating those who have approximately the same number of ...