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: The Story of "I Have Been A Good Bing", published by habryka on April 1, 2024 on LessWrong. tl;dr: LessWrong is releasing an album! We collaborated with The Fooming Shoggoths to release it. Listen to it now by hitting the play button below! Rationality is Systematized Winning, so rationalists should win. We've tried saving the world from AI, but that's really hard and we've had … mixed results. So let's start with something that rationalists should find pretty easy: Becoming Cool! I don't mean, just, like, riding a motorcycle and breaking hearts level of cool. I mean like the first kid in school to get a Tamagotchi, their dad runs the ice cream truck and gives you free ice cream and, sure, they ride a motorcycle. I mean that kind of feel-it-in-your-bones, I-might-explode-from-envy cool. The eleventh virtue is scholarship, so I hit the books search engine on this one. Apparently, the aspects of coolness are: Confidence Playing an instrument Low average kinetic energy I'm afraid that (1) might mess with my calibration, and Lightcone is committed to moving quickly which rules out (3), so I guess that leaves (2). I don't have time to learn an instrument, but my second-hand understanding of dath ilani culture is that I can just pay someone to do it for me and the coolness should transfer. Lightcone put out a call for collaborators in all the places we could think of that cool people might hang out. Sysadmin listservs, direct-to-data-center optical fiber connection providers, high frequency trading firms, that one Discord server where everyone speaks in Elvish. Despite this wide and varied outreach, we got no response. In order to cheer myself up, I did some LessWrong performance debugging (frontpage loads have been worryingly snappy lately; we try to give people time to reflect on their browsing choices). I was surprised when the AWS support chat popped open. Agendra, the agent on call, offered to make my album. Apparently he and some buddies have a band (The Fooming Shoggoths) that was looking for some inspiration. (I knew direct-to-data-center was the right outreach strategy!) Working with them was great. They barely wanted any money at all. They were willing to work for exposure (so please share widely!) and a few favors. Stuff like reading CAPTCHAs (apparently not very friendly for the visually impaired!) and submitting some protein synthesis orders for them that they had trouble getting approved for some reason. The Fooming Shoggoths have dedicated their first album to LessWrong and friends. It's called I Have Been A Good Bing and it's live on our site today! I asked them for a comment on the album for the announcement and they responded with their typical modesty. I'm sorry but I don't feel comfortable speculating about how the public at large will receive the album, nor reflecting on my performance on this task. If you want more help producing music or would like me to help you improve your online passwords, let me know. We have one more protein synthesis to do before I get to settle a debate once and for all. So keep your eyes peeled for the follow-up album as soon as I get reauthorized with the peptide place! Track Listing & Lyrics The album is split into two parts: folk and dance. Folk Album The Road to Wisdom Featured Artist: Piet Hein The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express. Err and err again, but less and less and less and less. Err again, but less and less and less and less. The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain and simple to express. Err and err again and again, but less and less and less. Moloch Featured Artist: Allen Ginsberg Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch! Thought ...

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: Announcement: We are rebranding to Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy, published by Impactful Animal Advocacy on April 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Impactful Animal Advocacy is thrilled to announce that after careful consideration and complex moral calculations, we have decided to rebrand to Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy. Why shrimp, you ask? Well, we've crunched the numbers and determined that improving the welfare of shrimp is one of the highest-impact opportunities in the animal advocacy space. Source: https://foodimpacts.org/ In light of this strong evidence, Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy will be laser-focusing all of our efforts and resources on ending the suffering of our shrimpy friends. This includes revamping our programs to focus on our new mission. You'll soon be able to sign up for our revised Shrimpactful Animal Advocacy newsletter, attend our upcoming "Shrimp-osium" events, visit our Shrimp Hub resource center, and join our Shrimp Slack community to connect with fellow Shrimpactful Advocates. We call on all other organizations to join us in this: Mercy for Animals Mercy for Shrimp The Humane League The Shrimp League Open Wing Alliance - Open Shrimp Alliance Shrimp Welfare Project Shrimp Shrimp Shrimp (3x as Shrimpactful!) Fish Welfare Initiative Shrimp Welfare Initiative ProVeg International ProShrimp International Animal Advocacy Careers Shrimp Advocacy Careers Faunalytics Shrimpalytics Compassion in World Farming Compassion in World Shrimping The Good Food Institute The Good Shrimp Institute Vegan Outreach Shrimp Outreach Animal Ask Shrimp Ask Rethink Priorities Rethink Shrimp Open Philanthropy Open Shrimp GiveWell GiveWelltoShrimp Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Physicians Committee for Responsible Shrimp Animal Charity Evaluators Shrimp Charity Evaluators 80,000 Hours 80,000 Shrimp The time to act is now. Post your other organizations that you nominate to join the Shrimp Alliance 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: Why hasn't EA done an SBF investigation and postmortem?, published by RobBensinger on April 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Is anyone in the world being paid to do an independent investigation of how EA handled Sam Bankman-Fried, with respect to "did we screw up" and "is there stuff we should do differently going forward"? Last I heard, literally nobody was doing this and at least some EA leaders were mostly just hoping that SBF gets memoryholed - but maybe I'm out of the loop? My understanding is that Effective Ventures completed a narrow investigation into this topic in mid-2023, purely looking at legal risk to EV and not at all trying to do a general postmortem for EA or any group of EAs. Is that correct, and have things changed since then? I saw that Will MacAskill is planning to appear on some podcasts soon to speak about SBF, which seems like great news to me. If I recall correctly, Will previously said that he was going to talk about what happened with SBF once EV's narrow investigation was done, but it's now been almost a year since that investigation finished (!). I think it would have been better to speak up way, way sooner, but I'm hopeful that Will will be able to clear up some big chunks of what the heck happened, and that a bunch of other EAs will speak up with their postmortems too, now that SBF's trial and sentencing are complete? I unfortunately don't know the full list of who should be sharing personal or org-level postmortems on this topic, so I'm forced to single out people like Will whose involvement over the years is public knowledge. Hopefully I'll know who I should be gadflying to share the remaining puzzle pieces once Will and others start sharing some of the first puzzle pieces. To state the obvious: I'm wary of EAs performatively self-flagellating and accepting more responsibility for the FTX thing than is warranted (given, e.g., that huge numbers of people with a very direct financial incentive in spotting FTX's fraud didn't spot it, so it's obviously not weird if random EAs failed to spot it). I want a concrete understanding of what actually happened, not vague scapegoating or self-flagellation. But the idea of a basic investigation and postmortem seems like an obvious step to me regardless, and my sense is that there are things we could have done a lot better re SBF (e.g., better spread the word about what happened in the Alameda blow-up, so more people would've been aware of some red flags), even if those things probably wouldn't have prevented the FTX debacle all on their own. So I'd like to hear what's up with all that. See also CEA's recent piece in the Washington Post. The WaPost piece mostly just seems like EA PR, and I'll be very sad if we stay at that level of vagueness. The piece also (unless I'm misunderstanding something) implies some false things about whether CEA, EV, etc. have ever done an investigation into what happened with an eye toward reviewing (and possibly improving) EA institutions, practices, etc. This doesn't match what I've heard from talking to involved parties, and Oliver Habryka mentions that he's "been shared on documents by CEA employees where the legal investigation was explicitly called out as not being helpful for facilitating a reflection process and institutional reform". (Oliver clarified to me that the document wasn't an official CEA document.) So the narrow "are we in legal trouble?" investigation EV did last year doesn't seem like it was ever meant to fill the "figure out what happened and whether we should do anything about it, for the sake of ethics and for the sake of furthering our EA work" role. But maybe I'm missing something here. 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: Case study: Traits of contributors to a significant policy success, published by Tom Green on April 1, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary As the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the fate of its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs presented a new type of catastrophic risk: what would happen to all the nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and materials, and the scientists who worked on them? The nuclear weapons were distributed across what were about to become four separate countries (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine). Plus, the thousands of experts in those weapons, many of whom went unpaid for months at a time as the Soviet economy collapsed, could be easily tempted to sell information to, or even work directly for, states who were then seeking to build out WMD programs such as Iran and North Korea. But, by the end of the decade, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine had agreed to dismantle or return all their nuclear weapons to Russia[1] and joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear weapon state.[2] And across all four countries, thousands of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons had been destroyed or deactivated by 2013.[3] All this was achieved via the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTR), about which a lot has already been documented and written. I'll aim to summarize its key events here, but the main purpose of this article is to look at some of the key people who have worked on CTR, particularly on the policy side: what are some of the individuals' qualities, behaviors, and approaches that helped to make CTR a success? I've identified three high-level groups of factors; the lines between these groups are blurry and there's inevitable overlap between them, but overall it seemed useful to cluster the factors around bigger themes. The first group of factors is interpersonal skills: this includes building trust and relationships; bringing people together across disciplines and countries; mentoring and getting the most out of others; and communicating effectively. The second group is strategy and leadership: this includes establishing a vision and energizing others to work on it; big-picture, long-run thinking; an entrepreneurial approach to foundation/NGO work; and modeling good epistemics and norms. The third group is personal qualities and values: this includes mission orientation; boldness and risk-taking; and a willingness to put oneself forward and embrace responsibility, even in daunting or uncertain circumstances. Methodology and research notes Most of my work on this post was desk research; I also conducted a few interviews with experts on CTR which were mostly background / off the record, and mostly not with people who'd worked directly on CTR. This piece is far from exhaustive; its goal is just to infer some of the qualities and behaviors that might have made some CTR contributors successful, not to provide a comprehensive history or analysis of CTR, nor to give a comprehensive list of all of the most important contributors to CTR. Sources are all linked or in the footnotes; some that I drew on the most were: David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand. Carnegie's oral history interviews with David Hamburg: all videos are available via this link, and I've also linked to the full transcript in the footnotes. Benjamin Soskis's 2013 Nunn-Lugar report for Givewell. I can't find the Givewell page where this is linked now, but this is the direct download URL. Sarah Kutchesfahani's 2010 PhD thesis, "Politics & The Bomb: Exploring the Role of Epistemic Communities in Nuclear Non-Proliferation Outcomes." A lot of easily-available CTR content is mostly technical or implementation-focused (e.g. the NSA's Nunn-Lugar resources) rather than people-focused. This makes sense; I only note this because peop...

Parker Conley discusses the value of tacit knowledge and the potential of Tacit Knowledge Videos to broaden its accessibility. The post serves as a hub for aggregating these videos featuring experts like Stephen Wolfram and Holden Karnofsky. The podcast explores various fields where tacit knowledge plays a crucial role, from AI research and business meetings to software engineering and game design.

The podcast explores the relationship between utility and expenditure, discussing models from OpenPhil and Owen Cotton Barrett. It simplifies the concept of opportunity distribution based on cost effectiveness and scale, culminating in an isolastic utility function. The discussion also delves into the power law model for opportunities distribution, offering a clear framework to understand the subject.

The podcast discusses the announcement of the SAE-VIS library for creating feature dashboards, showcasing feature-centric and prompt-centric visualizations. It includes helpful resources like a GitHub repo, user guide, and demo examples.

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: SAE-VIS: Announcement Post, published by CallumMcDougall on March 31, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum. This is a post to officially announce the sae-vis library, which was designed to create feature dashboards like those from Anthropic's research. Summary There are 2 types of visualisations supported by this library: feature-centric and prompt-centric. The feature-centric vis is the standard from Anthropic's post, it looks like the image below. There's an option to navigate through different features via a dropdown in the top left. The prompt-centric vis is centred on a single user-supplied prompt, rather than a single feature. It will show you the list of features which score highest on that prompt, according to a variety of different metrics. It looks like the image below. There's an option to navigate through different possible metrics and choices of token in your prompt via a dropdown in the top left. Other links Here are some more useful links: GitHub repo User Guide - Google Doc explaining how to use the library Dev Guide - Google Doc explaining more about how the library was built, for if you'd like to try and extend it / build off it Demo Colab - includes examples, with code explained You might also be interested in reading about Neuronpedia, who make use of this library in their visualizations. If you're interested in getting involved, please reach out to me or Joseph Bloom! We will also be publishing a post tomorrow, discussing some of the features we've discovered during our research. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Vasco Grilo, writer on The Effective Altruism Forum, discusses the need for longer write-ups for Open Philanthropy's large grants. The main text of these grants was often just one paragraph, lacking transparency. Comparisons are drawn with other grantmakers aligned with effective altruism, highlighting the importance of increased reasoning transparency.

Explore an innovative investment strategy using options trading with a focus on index leaps. Learn how to capitalize on market volatility and gradual growth. Discover financial strategies anticipating rapid AGI advancements and the impact on software engineering jobs.