The Nonlinear Library

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: Today is World Malaria Day (April 25), published by tobytrem on April 25, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Malaria is massive. Our World in Data writes: "Over half a million people died from the disease each year in the 2010s. Most were children, and the disease is one of the leading causes of child mortality." Or, as Rob Mather, CEO of the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) phrases it: the equivalent of seven jumbo jets full of children die of Malaria each day. But I don't see malaria in the news that much. This is partly because it was eradicated from Western countries over the course of the 20th century, both because of intentional interventions such as insecticide, and because of the draining of swamp lands and building of better housing. But it's also because malaria is a slow catastrophe, like poverty, and climate change. We've dealt with it to varying degrees throughout history, and though it is an emergency to anyone affected by it, to the rest of us, it's a tropical disease which has been around forever. It can be hard to generate urgency when a problem has existed for so long. But there is a lot that we can do. Highly effective charities work on malaria; the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) distributes insecticide treated bed-nets, and a Malaria Consortium program offers seasonal malaria chemoprevention treatment- both are GiveWell Top Charities. Two malaria vaccines, RTS,S and the cheaper R21[1], have been developed in recent years[2]. Malaria is preventable. Though malaria control and eradication is funded by international bodies such as The Global Fund, there isn't nearly enough money being spent on it. AMF has an immediate funding gap of $185.78m. That's money for nets they know are needed. And though vaccines are being rolled out, progress has been slower than it could be, and the agencies distributing them have been criticised for lacking urgency. Malaria is important, malaria is neglected, malaria is tractable. If you want to do something about malaria today, consider donating to Givewell's recommendations: AMF, or the Malaria Consortium: Related links I recommend Why we didn't get a malaria vaccine sooner; an article in Works in Progress. WHO's World Malaria Day 2024 announcement. The Our World in Data page on malaria. Audio AMA, with Rob Mather, CEO of AMF (transcript). From SoGive, an EA Forum discussion of the cost-effectiveness of malaria vaccines, with cameos from 1DaySooner and GiveWell. For more info, see GiveWell's page on malaria vaccines. The story of Tu Youyou, a researcher who helped develop an anti-malarial drug in Mao's China. What is an Emergency? The Case for Rapid Malaria Vaccination, from Marginal Revolution. More content on the Forum's Malaria tag. ^ R21 offers up to 75% reduction of symptomatic malaria cases when delivered at the right schedule. ^ Supported by Open Philanthropy and GiveWell. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Sustainable fishing policy increases fishing, and demand reductions might, too, published by MichaelStJules on April 25, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary Where there's overfishing, reducing fishing pressure or harvest rates - roughly the share of the population or biomass caught in a fishery per fishing period - actually allows more animals to be caught in the long run. Sustainable fishery management policies are generally aimed at maximizing or maintaining high levels of catch - the biomass of wild aquatic animals caught - in the long run. More restrictive policies that would actually reduce long-run catch generally seem politically infeasible, and less restrictive policies that increase long-run catch don't seem like a stepping stone to more restrictive ones that decrease it. Demand reductions for wild-caught aquatic animals may increase or decrease actual catch, and it's very unclear which. My highly uncertain tentative best guesses are that they seem slightly more likely to increase than increase catch in the near term but bioeconomic "long run", e.g. over the next 10-20 years, and persistent demand reductions and cumulative work towards them seem slightly more likely to decrease than increase catch over longer timelines with more sustainable fishery management and eventual population decline, but it's not clear if and when catch would actually be consistently lower on average than otherwise. Acknowledgements Thanks to Brian Tomasik, Ren Ryba and Tori for their feedback, and Saulius Šimčikas for his supervision on an earlier unpublished project. All errors are my own. Basic terminology I use 'fishing' to include the capture of any wild aquatic animal, including crustaceans, not just fish. I refer to the long run (and long-run) in fishing as long enough for all production factors, including the number of boats/vessels, amount of fishing equipment, employment and the number of fishing companies or businesses to increase or decrease and approximately reach a new equilibrium in response to a permanent shift in prices, supply or demand. I'd expect this to typically be less than a decade. This is a standard term in economics. Introduction Reductions in fishing pressure or harvest rates - roughly the share of the population or biomass caught in a fishery per fishing period - can result from reductions in demand or from improvements in fishery management, like the use of quotas, smaller fishing net mesh sizes, seasonal closures or restrictions on fishing vessels or their numbers. However, these reductions can also lead to increases in catch where there's overfishing, by allowing stocks to recover, resulting in more fish to catch. Fishery management policies that preserve or increase stocks are also typically aimed at increasing long-run catch. If we're concerned with reducing total exploitation, injustice or harm caused by humans or moral/rational agents, then this would count against this kind of work (see also Tomasik, 2015, who made this point earlier). The same could hold for a (weighted) average level of exploitation, injustice or harm by humans across all animals or moral patients.[1][2] I don't personally take exploitation or harm by humans in particular to be worse than other types of harms, independently of their effects on subjective welfare,[3] but this seems to be a common position. Furthermore, harm caused by humans might matter more for indirect reasons related to subjective welfare in practice, tracking our willingness to help or make other sacrifices for other animals.[4] Or, if fishing deaths are particularly bad compared to natural deaths and will continue to be so (e.g. humane capture and humane slaughter won't become widespread), and bad enough to be worth preventing regardless of the population effects and effects on natural deaths, then...

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: The first future and the best future, published by KatjaGrace on April 25, 2024 on LessWrong. It seems to me worth trying to slow down AI development to steer successfully around the shoals of extinction and out to utopia. But I was thinking lately: even if I didn't think there was any chance of extinction risk, it might still be worth prioritizing a lot of care over moving at maximal speed. Because there are many different possible AI futures, and I think there's a good chance that the initial direction affects the long term path, and different long term paths go to different places. The systems we build now will shape the next systems, and so forth. If the first human-level-ish AI is brain emulations, I expect a quite different sequence of events to if it is GPT-ish. People genuinely pushing for AI speed over care (rather than just feeling impotent) apparently think there is negligible risk of bad outcomes, but also they are asking to take the first future to which there is a path. Yet possible futures are a large space, and arguably we are in a rare plateau where we could climb very different hills, and get to much better futures. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: New core career advice series from Probably Good!, published by Probably Good on April 25, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We recently published a new core career advice series. It provides a concise, accessible intro to some of the most important ideas for planning an impactful career. Check it out on our site! What is the core advice series? The core advice series distills the most important ideas from our in-depth career guide and repackages them with a more accessible framing. It was born out of the question: "If I have less than an hour to learn about pursuing an impact-focused career, what do I need to know?" We ended up with a series of 7 short articles that could be read in one sitting. Each article takes about 5 minutes to read and covers a critical concept we think is important to pursuing an impactful career, including: Taking a scale-sensitive approach to helping others Comparing and assessing specific job opportunities Prioritizing and exploring important causes While many of our readers want to engage with our more in-depth material, we also want to provide an option for those who can't afford the time. This series is intended to be a helpful on-ramp for someone who wants to make a positive impact but hasn't been exposed to tools to think about their career decisions strategically. How you can help If you know someone who could benefit from accessible, impact-focused career advice, please share this with them! As always, if you have feedback, thoughts on future content, or questions about how Probably Good could support you, your organization, or your community, feel free to get in touch. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Inner Ring by C. S. Lewis, published by Saul Munn on April 25, 2024 on LessWrong. Note: In @Nathan Young's words "It seems like great essays should go here and be fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm. There is possibly a copyright issue here, but we aren't making any money off it either." What follows is a full copy of the C. S. Lewis essay "The Inner Ring" the 1944 Memorial Lecture at King's College, University of London. May I read you a few lines from Tolstoy's War and Peace? When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. "Alright. Please wait!" he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly understood - what he had already guessed - that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system - the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system. When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude, however unlikely the conclusion seems, that you have a taste for middle-aged moralising. I shall do my best to gratify it. I shall in fact, give you advice about the world in which you are going to live. I do not mean by this that I am going to talk on what are called current affairs. You probably know quite as much about them as I do. I am not going to tell you - except in a form so general that you will hardly recognise it - what part you ought to play in post-war reconstruction. It is not, in fact, very likely that any of you will be able, in the next ten years, to make any direct contribution to the peace or prosperity of Europe. You will be busy finding jobs, getting married, acquiring facts. I am going to do something more old-fashioned than you perhaps expected. I am going to give advice. I am going to issue warnings. Advice and warnings about things which are so perennial that no one calls them "current affairs." And of course everyone knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. But one of this trio will be enough to deal with today. The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone. The association between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep as I wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of confusion, if not of identification. I begin to realise the truth of the old proverb that he who sups with that formidable host needs a long spoon. As for the Flesh, you must be very abnormal young people if you do not know quite as much about it as I do. But on the World I think I have something to say. In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admi...

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: This is Water by David Foster Wallace, published by Nathan Young on April 25, 2024 on LessWrong. Note: It seems like great essays should go here and be fed through the standard LessWrong algorithm. There is possibly a copyright issue here, but we aren't making any money off it either. What follows is a full copy of "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace his 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?" This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning. Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think." If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious. Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, ...

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: Changes in College Admissions, published by Zvi on April 24, 2024 on LessWrong. This post brings together various questions about the college application process, as well as practical considerations of where to apply and go. We are seeing some encouraging developments, but mostly the situation remains rather terrible for all concerned. Application Strategy and Difficulty Paul Graham: Colleges that weren't hard to get into when I was in HS are hard to get into now. The population has increased by 43%, but competition for elite colleges seems to have increased more. I think the reason is that there are more smart kids. If so that's fortunate for America. Are college applications getting more competitive over time? Yes and no. The population size is up, but the cohort size is roughly the same. The standard 'effort level' of putting in work and sacrificing one's childhood and gaming the process is dramatically up. So you have to do it to stay in place. There is a shift in what is valued on several fronts. I do not think kids are obviously smarter or dumber. Spray and Pray and Optimal Admissions Strategy This section covers the first two considerations. Admission percentages are down, but additional applications per student, fueled by both lower transaction costs and lower acceptance rates, mostly explains this. This means you have to do more work and more life distortion to stay in place in the Red Queen's Race. Everyone is gaming the system, and paying higher costs to do so. If you match that in relative terms, for a generic value of 'you,' your ultimate success rate, in terms of where you end up, will be unchanged from these factors. The bad news for you is that previously a lot of students really dropped the ball on the admissions process and paid a heavy price. Now 'drop the ball' means something a lot less severe. This is distinct from considerations three and four. It is also distinct from the question of whether the sacrifices are worthwhile. I will return to that question later on, this for now is purely the admission process itself. The size of our age cohorts has not changed. The American population has risen, but so has its age. The number of 17-year-olds is essentially unchanged in the last 40 years. GPT-4 says typical behavior for an applicant was to send in 1-3 applications before 1990, 4-7 in the 1990s-2000s, 7-10 in the late 2000s or later, perhaps more now. Claude said it was 3-5 in the 1990s, 5-7 in the early 200s and 7-10 in the 2010s. In that same time period, in a high-end example, Harvard's acceptance rate has declined from 16% to 3.6%. In a middle-range example, NYU's acceptance rate in 2000 was 29% and it is now 12%. In a lower-end example, SUNY Stony Brook (where my childhood best friend ended up going) has declined from roughly 65% to roughly 44%. The rate of return on applying to additional colleges was always crazy high. It costs on the order of hours of work and about $100 to apply to an additional college. Each college has, from the student's perspective, a high random element in its decision, and that decision includes thousands to tens of thousands in scholarship money. If you apply to a safety school, there is even the risk you get rejected for being 'too good' and thus unlikely to attend. Yes, often there will be very clear correct fits and top choices for you, but if there is even a small chance of needing to fall back or being able to reach, or finding an unexpectedly large scholarship offer you might want, it is worth trying. As colleges intentionally destroy the objectivity of applications (e.g. not requiring the SAT, although that is now being reversed in many places, or relying on hidden things that differ and are hard to anticipate) that further decreases predictability and correlation, so you have to apply to more places, which f...

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: Your feedback for Actually After Hours: the unscripted, informal 80k podcast, published by Mjreard on April 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. As you may have noticed, 80k After Hours has been releasing a new show where I and some other 80k staff sit down with a guest for a very free form, informal, video(!) discussion that sometimes touches on topical themes around EA and sometimes… strays a bit further afield. We have so far called it "Actually After Hours" in part because (as listeners may be relieved to learn), I and the other hosts don't count this against work time and the actual recordings tend to take place late at night. We've just released episode 3 with Dwarkesh Patel and I feel like this is a good point to gather broader feedback on the early episodes. I'll give a little more background on the rationale for the show below, but if you've listened to [part of] any episode, I'm interested to know what you did or didn't enjoy or find valuable as well as specific ideas for changes. In particular, if you have ideas for a better name than "Actually After Hours," this early point is a good time for that! Rationales Primarily, I have the sense that there's too much doom, gloom, and self-flagellation around EA online and this sits in strange contrast to the attitudes of the EAs I know offline. The show seemed like a low cost way to let people know that the people doing important work from an EA perspective are actually fun, interesting, and even optimistic in addition to being morally serious. It also seemed like a way to highlight/praise individual contributors to important projects. Rob/Luisa will bring on the deep experts and leaders of orgs to talk technical details about their missions and theories of change, but I think a great outcome for more of our users will be doing things like Joel or Chana and I'd like to showcase more people like them and convey that they're still extremely valuable. Another rationale which I haven't been great on so far is expanding the qualitative options people have for engaging with Rob Wiblin-style reasoning. The goal was (and will return to being soon) sub-1-hour, low stakes episodes where smart people ask cruxy questions and steelman alternative perspectives with some in-jokes and Twitter controversies thrown in to make it fun. An interesting piece of feedback we've gotten from 80k plan changes is that it's rare that a single episode on some specific topic was a big driver of someone going to work on that area, but someone listening to many episodes across many topics was predictive of them often doing good work in ~any cause area. So the hope is that shorter, less focused/formal episodes create a lower threshold to hitting play (vs 3 hours with an expert on a single, technical, weighty subject) and therefore more people picking up on both the news and the prioritization mindset. Importantly, I don't see this as intro content. I think it only really makes sense for people already familiar with 80k and EA. And for them, it's a way of knowing more people in these spaces and absorbing the takes/conversations that never get written down. Much of what does get written down is often carefully crafted for broad consumption and that can often miss something important. Maybe this show can be a place for that. Thanks for any and all feedback! I guess it'd be useful to write short comments that capture high level themes and let people up/down vote based on agreement. Feel free to make multiple top-level comments if you have them and DM or email me (matt at 80000hours dot org) if you'd rather not share publicly. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Three Reasons Early Detection Interventions Are Not Obviously Cost-Effective, published by Conrad K. on April 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary For pandemics that aren't 'stealth' pandemics (particularly globally catastrophic pandemics): Reason 1: Not All 'Detections' Are Made Equal: there can be significant variation in the level of information and certainty provided by different detection modalities (e.g. wastewater surveillance vs. syndromic surveillance), and the efficacy of early detection is heavily dependent on the ability to quickly trigger an epidemiological response. Thus, the nature of the detection signal is probably an important factor affecting the time required to confirm an outbreak and take action. There should probably be a greater prioritisation of plans for public health response to different types and levels of detection signals. Reason 2: 'Early' Might Not Be 'Early' (or Cheap) Enough: for highly transmissible pathogens, early detection systems may only provide a lead time on the order of days to weeks compared to "naive detection" from symptomatic spread, and the costs to achieve high confidence of detection can be prohibitively expensive (on the order of billions). Improving cost-effectiveness likely requires carefully targeting surveillance to high-risk populations and locations. Methodological uncertainties make it difficult to have high levels of confidence about how valuable early detection interventions are for a range of pathogen characteristics, particularly for GCBR-level threats. Reason 3: Response Strategies Matter, A Lot: the cost-effectiveness of early detection is highly dependent on the feasibility and efficacy of post-detection containment measures. Factors like public compliance, strength of the detection signal, degree of pathogen spread, and contingencies around misinformation can significantly impact the success of interventions. The response strategy must be robust to uncertainty around the pathogen characteristics in the early stages of a pandemic. More work is needed to ensure readiness plans can effectively leverage early detections. Background I want to start this post by making two points. Firstly, I think it is worth flagging a few wins and progress in pathogen-agnostic early detection since I began thinking about this topic roughly nine months ago: The publication of 'Threat Net: A Metagenomic Surveillance Network for Biothreat Detection and Early Warning' by Sharma et al., 2024. The publication of 'Towards ubiquitous metagenomic sequencing: a technology roadmap' by Whiteford et al., 2024. The publication of 'A New Paradigm for Threat Agnostic Biodetection: Biological Intelligence (BIOINT)' by Knight and Sureka, 2024. The publication of the preprint, 'Quantitatively assessing early detection strategies for mitigating COVID-19 and future pandemics' by Liu et al., 2023. The Nucleic Acid Observatory continued its work, publishing several notebooks, resources, white papers, reports, and preprints and even creating a tool for simulating approaches to early detection using metagenomics. The UK government published its biological security strategy in June 2023, which included goals such as the establishment of a National Biosurveillance Network and the expansion of wastewater surveillance. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced actions the department will take following National Security Memorandum 15, signed by President Biden, including accelerating advanced detection technologies. The Armed Forces Health Surveillance Division's Global Emerging Infections Surveillance branch hosted its first Next-Generation Sequencing Summit. Various funding opportunities for improving diagnostic technology were announced, including: The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering'...

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: Is there software to practice reading expressions?, published by lsusr on April 24, 2024 on LessWrong. I took the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test test today. I got 27/36. Jessica Livingston got 36/36. Reading expressions is almost mind reading. Practicing reading expressions should be easy with the right software. All you need is software that shows a random photo from a large database, asks the user to guess what it is, and then informs the user what the correct answer is. I felt myself getting noticeably better just from the 36 images on the test. Short standardized tests exist to test this skill, but is there good software for training it? It needs to have lots of examples, so the user learns to recognize expressions instead of overfitting on specific pictures. Paul Ekman has a product, but I don't know how good it is. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org