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: Webinar: How to use Rethink Priorities' new effective giving tools, published by Rethink Priorities on July 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Introducing the tools How can we optimize our charitable giving while accounting for complex factors about effectiveness and philosophy? Rethink Priorities' Worldview Investigations Team developed two free tools to help address this question: 1. The portfolio builder 2. The moral parliament simulation Both tools are described in the new Charitable Resource Allocation Frameworks and Tools (CRAFT) Sequence, which is a part of the Team's ongoing efforts to improve resource allocations. Learn more Join Rethink Priorities' Senior Research Manager Bob Fischer and Researcher Arvo Muñoz Morán for a virtual workshop on how to use these new tools. The one-hour event will cover: • An overview of why the CRAFT Sequence tools were developed. • A virtual walkthrough of the Portfolio Builder Tool and the Moral Parliament Tool. • A practical session on how you can apply these tools to your own giving strategies. • A question-and-answer session to address your questions and provide further insights. Come explore how the Portfolio Builder and Moral Parliament tools can help you build effective giving portfolios and make informed philanthropic decisions! Details The webinar will be held on Monday, August 5 at noon PT / 3 pm ET / 8 pm BT / 9 pm CET. Please register here to receive the Zoom link to join the event. If you cannot attend but would like a recording of the discussion, reach out to henri[at]rethinkpriorities.org. Note: For a sneak peek, check out a recorded 2-minute intro ( moral parliament, portfolio builder) or 5-minute intro ( moral parliament, portfolio builder). Rethink Priorities (RP) is a think-and-do tank that addresses global priorities by researching solutions and strategies, mobilizing resources, and empowering our team and others. Henri Thunberg wrote this post. Thank you to Rachel Norman for her input. We invite you to explore more RP research via our database and stay updated on new work by subscribing to our newsletter. 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: You should go to ML conferences, published by Jan Kulveit on July 24, 2024 on LessWrong. This is second kind of obvious point to make, but if you are interested in AI, AI safety, or cognition in general, it is likely worth going to top ML conferences, such as NeurIPS, ICML or ICLR. In this post I cover some reasons why, and some anecdotal stories. 1. Parts of AI alignment and safety are now completely mainstream Looking at the "Best paper awards" at ICML, you'll find these safety-relevant or alignment-relevant papers: Stealing part of a production language model by Carlini et al. Probabilistic Inference in Language Models via Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo by Zhao et al. Debating with More Persuasive LLMs Leads to More Truthful Answers by Khan et al. Genie: Generative Interactive Environments Bruce et al. which amounts to about one-third (!). "Because of safety concerns" is part of the motivation for hundreds of papers. While the signal-to-noise ratio is even worse than on LessWrong, in total, the amount you can learn is higher - my personal guess is there is maybe 2-3x as much prosaic AI safety relevant work at conferences than what you get by just following LessWrong, Alignment Forum and safety-oriented communication channels. 2. Conferences are an efficient way how to screen general ML research without spending a lot of time on X Almost all papers are presented in the form of posters. In case of a big conference, this usually means many thousands of posters presented in huge poster sessions. My routine for engaging with this firehose of papers: 1. For each session, read all the titles. Usually, this prunes it by a factor of ten (i.e. from 600 papers to 60). 2. Read the abstracts. Prune it to things which I haven't noticed before and seem relevant. For me, this is usually by a factor of ~3-5. 3. Visit the posters. Posters with paper authors present are actually a highly efficient way how to digest research: Sometimes, you suspect there is some assumption or choice hidden somewhere making the result approximately irrelevant - just asking can often resolve this in a matter of tens of seconds. Posters themselves don't undergo peer review which makes the communication more honest, with less hedging. Usually authors of a paper know significantly more about the problem than what's in the paper, and you can learn more about negative results, obstacles, or directions people are excited about. Clear disadvantage of conferences is the time lag; by the time they are presented, some of the main results are old and well known, but in my view a lot of the value is the long tail of results which are sometimes very useful, but not attention grabbing. 3. ML research community as a control group My vague impression is that in conceptual research, mainstream ML research lags behind LW/AI safety community by something between 1 to 5 years, rediscovering topics discussed here. Some examples: ICML poster & oral presentation The Platonic Representation Hypothesis is an independent version of Natural abstractions discussed here for about 4 years. A Roadmap to Pluralistic Alignment deals with Self-unalignment problem and Coherent extrapolated volition Plenty of research on safety protocols like debate, IDA,... Prior work published in the LW/AI safety community is almost never cited or acknowledged - in some cases because it is more convenient to claim the topic is completely novel, but I suspect in many cases researchers are genuinely not aware of the existing work, which makes their contribution a useful control: if someone starts thinking about these topics, unaware of the thousands hours spent on them by dozens of people, what will they arrive at? 4. What 'experts' think ML research community is the intellectual home of many people expressing public opinions about AI risk. In my view, b...

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 Cancer Resolution?, published by PeterMcCluskey on July 24, 2024 on LessWrong. Book review: The Cancer Resolution?: Cancer reinterpreted through another lens, by Mark Lintern. In the grand tradition of outsiders overturning scientific paradigms, this book proposes a bold new theory: cancer isn't a cellular malfunction, but a fungal invasion. Lintern spends too many pages railing against the medical establishment, which feels more like ax-grinding than science. I mostly agreed with his conclusions here, but mostly for somewhat different reasons than the ones he provides. If you can push through this preamble, you'll find a treasure trove of scientific intrigue. Lintern's central claim is that fungal infections, not genetic mutations, are the primary cause of cancer. He dubs this the "Cell Suppression theory," painting a picture of fungi as cellular puppet masters, manipulating our cells for their own nefarious ends. This part sounds much more like classical science, backed by hundreds of quotes from peer-reviewed literature. Those quotes provide extensive evidence that Lintern's theory predicts dozens of cancer features better than do the established theories. Older Theories 1. The DNA Theory (aka Somatic Mutation Theory): The reigning heavyweight, this theory posits that cancer results from an accumulation of genetic mutations in critical genes that control cell growth, division, and death. 2. Another old theory that still has advocates is the Metabolic Theory. This theory suggests that cancer is primarily a metabolic disease, characterized by impaired cellular energy production (the Warburg effect). It proposes that damage to mitochondria is a key factor in cancer development. I wrote a mixed review of a book about it. Lintern points out evidence that mitochondria are turned off by signals, not damaged. He also notes that tumors with malfunctioning mitochondria are relatively benign. Evidence Discrediting the DNA Theory The standard version of the DNA Theory predicts that all cancer cells will have mutations that affect replication, apoptosis, etc. Around 2008 to 2013, substantial genetic data became available for cancer cells. Lintern wants us to believe that this evidence fully discredits the DNA Theory. The actual evidence seems more complex than Lintern indicates. The strongest evidence is that they found cancers that seem to have no mutations. Almost as important is that the mutations that are found seem more randomly distributed than would be expected if they caused consistent types of malfunctions. Lintern's theory seems to explain all of the Hallmarks of Cancer, as well as a few dozen other features that seem to occur in all cancers. He argues that the DNA Theory does a poor job of explaining the hallmarks. DNA Theorists likely reject that characterization. They appear to have thought their theory explained the hallmarks back before the genetic data became available (mostly just positing mutations for each hallmark?). My guess is that they are busy adding epicycles to their theory, but the situation is complex enough that I'm having trouble evaluating it. He also points out that the DNA Theory struggles with Peto's Paradox (why don't larger animals get more cancer?), while his theory neatly sidesteps this issue. Additionally, mouse embryos formed from cancer cells showed no signs of cancer. Evidence of Fungi A key game-changer is the growing evidence of fungi in tumors. Until 2017, tumors were thought to be microbe-free. Now? We're finding fungi in all types of cancer, with tumor-specific fungal profiles. There's even talk of using fungal DNA signatures to distinguish cancer patients from healthy individuals. It's not a slam dunk for Lintern's theory, but it shifts the odds significantly. Medical Establishment Inertia It looks like people in the medical ...

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: Confusing the metric for the meaning: Perhaps correlated attributes are "natural", published by NickyP on July 24, 2024 on LessWrong. Epistemic status: possibly trivial, but I hadn't heard it before. TL;DR: What I thought of as a "flaw" in PCA - its inability to isolate pure metrics - might actually be a feature that aligns with our cognitive processes. We often think in terms of composite concepts (e.g., "Age + correlated attributes") rather than pure metrics, and this composite thinking might be more natural and efficient Introduction I recently found myself describing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and pondering its potential drawbacks. However, upon further reflection, I'm reconsidering whether what I initially viewed as a limitation might actually be a feature. This led me to think about how our minds - and, potentially, language models - might naturally encode information using correlated attributes. An important aspect of this idea is the potential conflation between the metric we use to measure something and the actual concept we're thinking about. For instance, when we think about a child's growth, we might not be consciously separating the concept of "age" from its various correlated attributes like height, cognitive development, or physical capabilities. Instead, we might be thinking in terms of a single, composite dimension that encompasses all these related aspects. After looking at active inference a while ago, it seems like in general, a lot of human heuristics and biases seem like they are there to encode real-world relationships that exist in the world in a more efficient way, which are then strained in out-of-distribution experimental settings to seem "irrational". I think the easiest way to explain is with a couple of examples: 1 - Age and Associated Attributes in Children Suppose we plotted two attributes: Age (in years) vs Height (in cm) in children. These are highly correlated, so if we perform Principal Component Analysis, we will find there are two main components. These will not correspond to orthogonal Age and Height components, since they are quite correlated. Instead, we will find an "Age + Height" direction, and a "Height relative to what is standard for that age" direction. While once can think of this as a "failure" of PCA to find the "true things we are measuring", I think this is perhaps not the correct way to think about it. For example, if I told you to imagine a 10-year-old, you would probably imagine them to be of height ~140 5cm. And if I told you they were 2.0m tall or 0.5m tall, you would be very surprised. On the other hand, one often hears phrases like "about the height of a 10-year-old". That is, when we think about a child's development, we don't typically separate each attribute into distinct vectors like "age," "height," "voice pitch," and so on. Instead, we might encode a single "age + correlated attributes" vector, with some adjustments for individual variations. This approach is likely more efficient than encoding each attribute separately. It captures the strong correlations that exist in typical development, while allowing for deviations when necessary. When one talks about age, one can define it as: "number of years of existence" (independent of anything else) but when people talk about "age" in everyday life, the definition is more akin to: "years of existence, and all the attributes correlated to that". 2 - Price and Quality of Goods Our tendency to associate price with quality and desirability might not be a bias, but an efficient encoding of real-world patterns. A single "value" dimension that combines price, quality, and desirability could capture the most relevant information for everyday decision-making, with additional dimensions only needed for finer distinctions. That is, "cheap" can be conceptualised ...

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: Evidence of Poor Cross-Cultural Interactions in the EA community, published by Yi-Yang on July 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary In this project, I investigated non-Western EAs' perception of CCIs they had with Westerners, specifically: 1. How often non-Westerners experienced CCI issues; 2. What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced; 3. How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings. To do that, I collected an array of evidence from seven sources (e.g., anecdotes from interviews and a focus group, and some statistics from three surveys not done by me). And based on the evidence on CCIs I have collected so far, I believe that poor CCIs are likely to be a common but minor problem for most non-westerners in the EA community. At the organisational or community level, I would not flag CCI issues as something to be heavily prioritised (moderate confidence), but I would recommend EA-aligned organisations and organisers to start or maintain interventions that are sensible or if the trade-offs are acceptable, like some of the ones listed here by AmAristizabal. At the individual level, I recommend: 1. Checking out some of the vignettes shared by non-Western EAs here and here 2. Read more examples of SAEs here 3. Read some of my low-confidence takes on what non-Western and Western folks could do to improve CCIs Background I noticed that I was feeling annoyed in some of my cross-cultural interactions (CCIs) in the EA community, but I couldn't tell for sure whether these interactions had exclusionary elements in them. These are more subtle, and are not the overt racist behaviours that I'm more familiar with. Hence, I started this investigation out of a desire to sanity check myself ("Am I misinterpreting things? Or has anyone else experienced the same thing?"). I would also be happy if this project is useful to others too, perhaps by making non-Western folks feel less perplexed or less alone. In this project, I investigated non-Western EAs' perception of CCIs they had with Westerners, specifically: 1. How often non-Westerners experienced CCI issues; 2. What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced; 3. How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings. This investigation was done pretty informally and in a non-strategic way (e.g. I wasn't really explicitly thinking about this in a Bayesian probability way), but it does consist of an array of evidence from seven sources that I think, when combined, are pretty informative. Evidence compiled Evidence that might indicate less negative CCIs 1. EA Survey 2022 According to the Rethink Priorities team who lead the EA Survey 2022 project, survey respondents who identified as more non-Western scored slightly better than survey respondents who identified as more Western in terms of: Satisfaction (mean): 7.55 (N=219) versus 7.17 (N=2251) out of 10.00 points Retention (mean): 5.51 (N=144) versus 5.42 (N=1736) out of 7.00 points Mental health (mean): 3.49 (N=143) versus 3.27 (N=1528) out of 5.00 points The above three metrics aren't exactly what I'm looking for, that is belongingness. It might be the case that non-Westerners do experience CCI issues but still get a lot of value from EA or belongingness in their local EA groups. Evidence that might indicate more negative CCIs 1. My personal experience Firstly, I've noticed Western folks "hijacking" (most likely unconsciously or unintentionally) norms in spaces where non-Western folks traditionally belong, are the majority, or a mix of both. I've noticed at least one such behaviour in an EA setting before. Here are a few non-EA-related examples (to preserve anonymity): A discussion group in Malaysia I was a part of has a norm about raising one's hands and letting the moderator pick the next speaker to make speaking time more ...

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: We need an independent investigation into how EA leadership has handled SBF and FTX, published by AnonymousEAForumAccount on July 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary Rebecca Kagan believes "EA needs an investigation, done externally and shared publicly, on mistakes made in the EA community's relationship with FTX." She is far from the only person who has called for an independent investigation, but Kagan's experience and knowledge as a former board member of Effective Ventures makes her perspective particularly relevant. Explaining her decision to resign from EV's board, Kagan wrote: "I want to make it clear that I resigned last year due to significant disagreements with the board of EV and EA leadership, particularly concerning their actions leading up to and after the FTX crisis… I believe there were extensive and significant mistakes made which have not been addressed. (In particular, some EA leaders had warning signs about SBF that they ignored, and instead promoted him as a good person, tied the EA community to FTX, and then were uninterested in reforms or investigations after the fraud was revealed). In this post, I describe a large and growing body of evidence that is consistent with Kagan's concerns about (some parts of) EA leadership.[1] To summarize my review of the public record: Communications from EA leaders have not been forthcoming about important factual matters including SBF's tenure on CEA's board, his brief tenure as a CEA employee, and his status as one of 80k and CEA's largest donors before he even founded Alameda. There are worrisome discrepancies between comments (or lack thereof) from EA leaders and credible media reports about important issues. These include whether leaders knew about allegations of unethical behavior by SBF in the wake of the Alameda dispute, whether they were aware of allegations of inappropriate sexual relationships, and whether a Slack group of EA leaders ignored warnings just four months prior to FTX's collapse that SBF was under criminal investigation. EA leaders have made public claims about post-FTX reforms that could easily be construed as misleading, most notably framing Effective Ventures' board changes as "institutional reform" when Kagan resigned precisely because she thought such reform was lacking. I don't claim to have a complete understanding of these issues, and I've included lists of the outstanding questions I think are most important in the hopes that other community members can shed light on them. It's quite possible that answering these questions would reveal additional instances of troubling behavior[2] (though I believe it is incredibly unlikely that anyone in EA leadership was aware of, or should have anticipated, FTX's massive fraud). It's also quite possible that answering these questions would uncover mitigating factors I'm not aware of that would justify how EA leaders have behaved. But with the current state of public knowledge, the community as a whole has a poor understanding of what happened. Relevant information is incomplete and/or highly dispersed. No single person or entity has a grasp of the full picture. That makes it impossible to know which behaviors were reasonable, and which were mistakes that the community should be learning from. An independent investigation would solve this problem. It could answer open questions, collect wide-ranging perspectives, and share critical lessons with the entire community. And an independent post-mortem could do so in a credible and responsible way. In Rob Bensinger's words, "An investigation can discover useful facts and share them privately, and its public write-up can accurately convey the broad strokes of what happened, and a large number of the details, while taking basic steps to protect the innocent." Kagan's allegations, together...

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: Monthly Roundup #20: July 2024, published by Zvi on July 24, 2024 on LessWrong. It is monthly roundup time. I invite readers who want to hang out and get lunch in NYC later this week to come on Thursday at Bhatti Indian Grill (27th and Lexington) at noon. I plan to cover the UBI study in its own post soon. I cover Nate Silver's evisceration of the 538 presidential election model, because we cover probabilistic modeling and prediction markets here, but excluding any AI discussions I will continue to do my best to stay out of the actual politics. Bad News Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin files comment suggesting SpaceX Starship launches be capped due to 'impact on local environment.' This is a rather shameful thing for them to be doing, and not for the first time. Alexey Guzey reverses course, realizes at 26 that he was a naive idiot at 20 and finds everything he wrote cringe and everything he did incompetent and Obama was too young. Except, no? None of that? Young Alexey did indeed, as he notes, successfully fund a bunch of science and inspire good thoughts and he stands by most of his work. Alas, now he is insufficiently confident to keep doing it and is in his words 'terrified of old people.' I think Alexey's success came exactly because he saw people acting stupid and crazy and systems not working and did not then think 'oh these old people must have their reasons,' he instead said that's stupid and crazy. Or he didn't even notice that things were so stupid and crazy and tried to just… do stuff. When I look back on the things I did when I was young and foolish and did not know any better, yeah, some huge mistakes, but also tons that would never have worked if I had known better. Also, frankly, Alexey is failing to understand (as he is still only 26) how much cognitive and physical decline hits you, and how early. Your experience and wisdom and increased efficiency is fighting your decreasing clock speed and endurance and physical strength and an increasing set of problems. I could not, back then, have done what I am doing now. But I also could not, now, do what I did then, even if I lacked my current responsibilities. For example, by the end of the first day of a Magic tournament I am now completely wiped. Google short urls are going to stop working. Patrick McKenzie suggests prediction markets on whether various Google services will survive. I'd do it if I was less lazy. Silver Bullet This is moot in some ways now that Biden has dropped out, but being wrong on the internet is always relevant when it impacts our epistemics and future models. Nate Silver, who now writes Silver Bulletin and runs what used to be the old actually good 538 model, eviscerates the new 538 election model. The 'new 538' model had Biden projected to do better in Wisconsin and Ohio than either the fundamentals or his polls, which makes zero sense. It places very little weight on polls, which makes no sense. It has moved towards Biden recently, which makes even less sense. Texas is their third most likely tipping point state, it happens 9.8% of the time, wait what? At best, Kelsey Piper's description here is accurate. Kelsey Piper: Nate Silver is slightly too polite to say it but my takeaway from his thoughtful post is that the 538 model is not usefully distinguishable from a rock with "incumbents win reelection more often than not" painted on it. Gil: worse, I think Elliott's modelling approach is probably something like max_(dem_chance) [incumbency advantage, polls, various other approaches]. Elliott's model in 2020 was more bullish on Biden's chances than Nate and in that case Trump was the incumbent and down in the polls. Nate Silver (on Twitter): Sure, the Titanic might seem like it's capsizing, but what you don't understand is that the White Star Line has an extremely good track re...

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 most crucial part of next year's federal budget, published by Dane Valerie on July 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This Vox article by Dylan Matthews provides an excellent overview of why funding Gavi, the international vaccine alliance, is one of the most impactful things the US government does. Gavi has a proven track record of cost-effectively saving millions of lives by providing access to essential vaccines in the world's poorest countries. Gavi is currently seeking $9billion in funding for its 2026-2030 budget, which includes over $1 billion for the newly approved malaria vaccines. Despite some concerns about "donor fatigue," there appears to be strong bipartisan support in Congress for meeting or even exceeding the Biden administration's $1.58 billion pledge to Gavi. However, the article argues that even this level of funding may not be sufficient to fully take advantage of the new malaria vaccines' potential. With more support, Gavi could theoretically vaccinate up to 29 million children per year against malaria. 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: Non-Western EAs' perception of cross cultural interactions they had with Western EAs, published by Yi-Yang on July 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary I investigated non-Western EAs' perception of cross cultural interactions (CCIs) they had with Westerners, specifically: 1. Whether or not non-Westerners experienced CCI issues, and how often; 2. How their CCIs compare between EA and non-EA settings; 3. What kinds of subtle acts of exclusion (SAEs) they had experienced. I interviewed 21 non-Western EAs (selected from an EA conference's Swapcard and a few from my own personal network) and discovered: An overwhelming number of interviewees (19 out of 21) thought their cross-cultural interactions in EA settings were almost all neutral or positive. However, among the same 19 interviewees who found their CCIs to be mostly neutral or positive, they've also reported the following: 43% (9 out of 19) reported at least one general negative CCI 48% (10 out of 19) reported at least one SAE caused by Western EAs 19% (4 out of 19) reported at least one SAE caused by other non-Western EAs (or themselves) 81% (17 out of 19) reported: At least one general negative CCI, or At least one SAE caused by Western EAs, or At least one SAE caused by other non-Western EAs (or themselves), or A mix or all of the above. When asked to compared CCIs between EA settings and non-EA settings, 7 out of 14 thought CCIs in EA settings are about the same when compared to non-EA settings. 5 out of 14 thought CCIs in EA settings are better for them. 2 out of 14 thought CCIs in EA Settings are worse for them. Here are the most reported experiences: General negative CCIs Non-Western EAs found the act of connecting with Western EAs challenging. (4x) Non-Western EAs felt suspicious about the lack of representation. (3x) Non-Western EAs found the English language barrier challenging to overcome. (3x) SAEs caused by Western EAs Western EAs treating non-Western EAs in a way that's demeaning. (4x) Western EAs were coming across as paternalistic towards non-Western EAs. (2x) SAEs caused by non-Western EAs Non-Western EAs changing their accent or communication style to be more Western. (2x) For a better understanding of Western and non-Western CCIs, I highly recommend reading the highlighted negative vignettes and highlighted positive vignettes. Methodology I thought a more hands-on qualitative approach, like doing interviews, would be a better choice compared to a survey, because it offered me: 1. More flexibility to pivot the type of questions I ask or the things I want to say; 2. More information about a person's emotional state; 3. A way to potentially express empathy to those who might need it. I've also received feedback that interviewing people seems like the next best option too. Hence, I decided to interview people online who would identify themselves as EA or EA adjacent, and are predominantly non-Western. In these interviews, I asked: 1. How much cross cultural interactions in EA have you had? 2. How are the cross cultural interactions in EA settings that you've experienced? 3. Have you encountered any kinds of subtle acts of exclusion from others in EA settings? 4. Have you encountered acts of exclusion that are done by oppressed groups or minorities onto themselves in EA settings? 5. How do your cross-cultural experiences compare between EA and non-EA settings? 6. Are there other experiences you'd like to share? Or questions you'd like me to ask but I didn't? I did two things with the qualitative data I got from the interviews: 1. I collected their experiences, paraphrased them, and compiled them under the appendix below. For those I found to be resonant in some hard-to-describe way, I included them in the "highlighted negative/positive vignettes" sections. 2. I did some basic qualitative re...

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 Mieux Donner: A new effective giving initiative in France, published by Jennifer Stretton on July 24, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR Announcing the launch of Mieux Donner - a fundraising organisation focused on informing and inspiring individuals in France and French speaking Switzerland to donate effectively, directing their contributions towards charities with the greatest impact. Who are we? Mieux Donner was co-founded by Jennifer Stretton and Romain Barbe. We completed AIM's effective giving charity incubator program in July 2024. Key objectives for year one Charity registration and launch our effective giving platform (Done) Our ambitious goal: Securing €1,000,000 in donations from at least 300 donors Our minimal goal: Raise more in counterfactual donations than we raised in seed funding We have been given funding of $95,000 to get the project started. We would like to raise at least this in counterfactual donations in year one Ideally, we would like to achieve a giving multiplier of at least two by raising $180,000 in year one Launch a pilot project of the 10% Pledge and aim for 20 pledgers Confirm our most effective audiences and outreach tactics to enable cost-effective scale-up in Y2-3 Why launch a new effective giving initiative? Effective charities have significant room to absorb more funding. Effective charities are reliant on the donations of a few large donors. Effective Giving Initiatives, such as Giving What We Can and Effektiv Spenden, have raised over $500 million collectively and established a proven strategy for engaging donors. Leveraging their best practices and insights, Mieux Donner hopes to achieve high rates of growth. Why France? French people have the lowest English proficiency in Northern Europe. This limits their access to EA and effective giving ideas. Compared to other major European countries, France raises more money from private donors. By reaching out to a broad audience, these donors will be exposed to effective giving for the first time. France has the third-highest number of millionaires in the world. We have first mover advantage for SEO optimisation Why French speaking Switzerland? There is huge donation potential to be unlocked in Switzerland. In year one, Effektiv Spenden raised just €350K in Germany compared to €1.2M in Switzerland. In 2021 48% of Effektiv Spenden's donations came from Switzerland. Effektiv Spenden are partnering with us to target French speakers in Switzerland ( 22% of Swiss population). They have provided us with their donation platform to enable tax deductible donations to all of our recommended charities for Swiss Tax Residents. Geneva has the second highest concentration of millionaires in the world and one of our founders, Jennifer, is based just one hour from Geneva. Isn't there already an Effective Giving Initiative in France? There is one other effective giving initiative in France called Don Efficace and we are working collaboratively with them. The reason that AIM decided to research and launch another effective giving initiative in France is because: Don Efficace aims to increase the tax-deductible portfolio of effective charities and is a research focused organisation. Their strategy to increase donations to effective charities is to find effective charities within France that qualify for tax deduction*. They plan to help effective EU/EEA charities obtain fiscal agreements so that they can also become tax deductible in France. Mieux Donner is an outreach focused organisation. Our strategy to increase donations to effective charities is to market the most effective charities, regardless of their tax deductibility status in France. As Don Efficace's research finds more effective charities within France, we expect that we will recommend them if they are on par with the eff...