TYPE III AUDIO (All episodes)

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client: 80000_hours
project_id: articles
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 3h00m
qa_time: 1h15m
---
In a nutshell: People in operations roles act as multipliers, maximising the productivity of others in the organisation by building systems that keep the organisation functioning effectively at a high level. As a result, people who excel in these positions require significant creativity, self-direction, social skills, and conscientiousness. If you’re a good fit, operations could be the highest-impact role for you.
This career review is based largely on our 2017 survey of talent needs and input from 12 people who have worked in these roles (often in leadership positions) — you can see the full list of contributors in the online version of this article. However, the views presented here do not necessarily reflect those of everyone listed.

Original article:
https://80000hours.org/articles/operations-management/

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client: 80000_hours
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narrator: pw
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narrator_time: 2h30m
qa_time: 0h30m
---
Many of the highest-impact people in history have been communicators and advocates of one kind or another.
Take Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, sparking a protest which led to a Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional. Parks was a seamstress in her day job, but in her spare time she was involved with the civil rights movement. After she was arrested, she and the NAACP used widely distributed fliers to launch a total boycott of buses in a city with 40,000 African Americans, while simultaneously pushing forward with legal action. This led to major progress for civil rights.
Communication can be aimed at a broad audience (like in Parks’s case) or a narrow influential group. This means there are also many examples of important communicators you’ve never heard of, like Viktor Zhdanov.
In the 20th century, smallpox killed around 400 million people — far more than died in all the century’s wars and political famines.
Although credit for the elimination of smallpox often goes to D.A. Henderson (who directly oversaw the programme), it was Viktor Zhdanov who lobbied the World Health Organization to start the elimination campaign in the first place — while facing significant opposition from the members of the World Health Assembly (the proposal passed by just two votes). Without his involvement, smallpox’s elimination probably would not have happened until much later, costing millions of lives, and possibly not at all.
So why has communicating important ideas sometimes been so effective?

Original article:
https://80000hours.org/articles/communication/

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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
feed_id: ai, ai_safety, ai_safety__technical
narrator: pw
qa: km
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TL;DR

Anomalous tokens: a mysterious failure mode for GPT (which reliably insulted Matthew)

• We have found a set of anomalous tokens which result in a previously undocumented failure mode for GPT-2 and GPT-3 models. (The 'instruct' models “are particularly deranged” in this context, as janus has observed.)
• Many of these tokens reliably break determinism in the OpenAI GPT-3 playground at temperature 0 (which theoretically shouldn't happen).

Prompt generation: a new interpretability method for language models (which reliably finds prompts that result in a target completion). This is good for:

• eliciting knowledge
• generating adversarial inputs
• automating prompt search (e.g. for fine-tuning)

In this post, we'll introduce the prototype of a new model-agnostic interpretability method for language models which reliably generates adversarial prompts that result in a target completion. We'll also demonstrate a previously undocumented failure mode for GPT-2 and GPT-3 language models, which results in bizarre completions (in some cases explicitly contrary to the purpose of the model), and present the results of our investigation into this phenomenon. Further detail can be found in a follow-up post.

Original article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPeJE8bSo6rAFoLqg/solidgoldmagikarp-plus-prompt-generation

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client: german_ea
narrator: ur
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ABSTRACT. Mit sehr fortschrittlicher Technologie könnte eine sehr große Population von Personen, die glückliche Leben leben, in der erreichbaren Region des Universums aufrechterhalten werden. Daraus ergeben sich entsprechende Opportunitätskosten für jedes Jahr, um das sich die Entwicklung solcher Technologien und die folgliche Kolonialisierung des Universums verzögert: Ein potenzielles Gut, nämlich das lebenswerter Leben, wird nicht realisiert. Unter plausiblen Annahmen sind diese Kosten extrem groß. Jedoch lautet die Lehre für den Standardutilitaristen nicht, dass wir die Geschwindigkeit des technologischen Fortschritts maximieren sollten, sondern dass wir seine Sicherheit maximieren sollten, d. h. die Wahrscheinlichkeit, dass die Kolonisierung des Weltalls tatsächlich stattfinden wird. Dieses Ziel hat eine so hohe Utilität, dass Standardutilitaristen all ihre Energie darauf verwenden sollten. Utilitaristen der „personenbezogenen“ Sorte sollten eine modifizierte Version dieser Schlussfolgerung akzeptieren. Manch andere ethische Sichtweisen, welche utilitaristische Erwägungen mit anderen Kriterien kombinieren, werden zu einem ähnlichen Fazit kommen. 

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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 0h40m
qa_time: 0h15m
---
Writing down something I’ve found myself repeating in different conversations:

If you're looking for ways to help with the whole “the world looks pretty doomed” business, here's my advice: look around for places where we're all being total idiots.

Look for places where everyone's fretting about a problem that some part of you thinks it could obviously just solve.

Look around for places where something seems incompetently run, or hopelessly inept, and where some part of you thinks you can do better.

Then do it better.

Original article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zp6wG5eQFLGWwcG6j/focus-on-the-places-where-you-feel-shocked-everyone-s

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client: ea_forum
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 1h00m
qa_time: 0h30m
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This post outlines the capability approach to thinking about human welfare. I think that this approach, while very popular in international development, is neglected in EA. While the capability approach has problems, I think that it provides a better approach to thinking about improving human welfare than approaches based on measuring happiness or subjective wellbeing (SWB) or approaches based on preference satisfaction. Finally, even if you disagree that the capability approach is best, I think this post will be useful to you because it may clarify why many people and organizations in the international development or global health space take the positions that they do. I will be drawing heavily on the work of Amartya Sen, but I will often not be citing specific texts because I’m an academic and getting to write without careful citations is thrilling.

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zy6jGPeFKHaoxKEfT/the-capability-approach

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client: ea_forum
project_id: summaries
narrator: cs
---

Original article:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hzc26vGa4RLns7TvK/ea-and-lw-forum-weekly-summary-23rd-29th-jan-23

This is part of a weekly series summarizing the top posts on the EA Forum — you can see the full collection here. The first post includes some details on purpose and methodology. Feedback, thoughts, and corrections are welcomed.

Narrated by Coleman Jackson Snell. Summaries written by Zoe Williams (Rethink Priorities).

Published by TYPE III AUDIO on behalf of the Effective Altruism Forum.

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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
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This post is meant to be a linkable resource. Its core is a short list of guidelines (you can link directly to the list) that are intended to be fairly straightforward and uncontroversial, for the purpose of nurturing and strengthening a culture of clear thinking, clear communication, and collaborative truth-seeking.

"Alas," said Dumbledore, "we all know that what should be, and what is, are two different things.  Thank you for keeping this in mind."

There is also (for those who want to read more than the simple list) substantial expansion/clarification of each specific guideline, along with justification for the overall philosophy behind the set.

Original article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPv4sYrKnPzeJASuk/basics-of-rationalist-discourse-1

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client: lesswrong
project_id: curated
narrator: pw
qa: mds
narrator_time: 2h15m
qa_time: 1h15m
---

Casus Belli: As I was scanning over my (rather long) list of essays-to-write, I realized that roughly a fifth of them were of the form "here's a useful standalone concept I'd like to reify," à la cup-stacking skills, fabricated options, split and commit, and sazen.  Some notable entries on that list (which I name here mostly in the hope of someday coming back and turning them into links) include: red vs. white, walking with three, setting the zero point[1], seeding vs. weeding, hidden hinges, reality distortion fields, and something-about-layers-though-that-one-obviously-needs-a-better-word.

While it's still worthwhile to motivate/justify each individual new conceptual handle (and the planned essays will do so), I found myself imagining a general objection of the form "this is just making up terms for things," or perhaps "this is too many new terms, for too many new things."  I realized that there was a chunk of argument, repeated across all of the planned essays, that I could factor out, and that (to the best of my knowledge) there was no single essay aimed directly at the question "why new words/phrases/conceptual handles at all?"

So ... voilà.

Original article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PCrTQDbciG4oLgmQ5/sapir-whorf-for-rationalists

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narrator_time: 0h45m
qa_time: 0h15m
---

I think that EA [editor note: "Effective Altruism"] burnout usually results from prolonged dedication to satisfying the values you think you should have, while neglecting the values you actually have.
Setting aside for the moment what “values” are and what it means to “actually” have one, suppose that I actually value these things (among others):
 
True Values:

•     Abundance
•     Power
•     Novelty
•     Social Harmony
•     Beauty
•     Growth
•     Comfort
•     The Wellbeing Of Others
•     Excitement
•     Personal Longevity
•     Accuracy

One day I learn about “global catastrophic risk”: Perhaps we’ll all die in a nuclear war, or an AI apocalypse, or a bioengineered global pandemic, and perhaps one of these things will happen quite soon.

I recognize that GCR is a direct threat to The Wellbeing Of Others and to Personal Longevity, and as I do, I get scared. I get scared in a way I have never been scared before, because I’ve never before taken seriously the possibility that everyone might die, leaving nobody to continue the species or even to remember that we ever existed—and because this new perspective on the future of humanity has caused my own personal mortality to hit me harder than the lingering perspective of my Christian upbringing ever allowed. For the first time in my life, I’m really aware that I, and everyone I will ever care about, may die.

Original article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pDzdb4smpzT3Lwbym/my-model-of-ea-burnout

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