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: Nuclear security seems like an interesting funding gap, published by Benjamin Todd on May 14, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Here's the funding gap that gets me the most emotionally worked up: In 2020, the largest philanthropic funder of nuclear security, the MacArthur Foundation, withdrew from the field, reducing total annual funding from $50m to $30m. That means people who've spent decades building experience in the field will no longer be able to find jobs. And $30m a year of philanthropic funding for nuclear security philanthropy is tiny on conventional terms. (In fact, the budget of Oppenheimer was $100m, so a single movie cost more than 3x annual funding to non-profit policy efforts to reduce nuclear war.) And even other neglected EA causes, like factory farming, catastrophic biorisks and AI safety, these days receive hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic funding, so at least on this dimension, nuclear security is even more neglected. I agree that a full accounting of neglectedness should consider all resources going towards the cause (not just philanthropic ones), and that 'preventing nuclear war' more broadly receives significant attention from defence departments. However, even considering those resources, it still seems similarly neglected as biorisk. And the amount of philanthropic funding still matters because certain important types of work in the space can only be funded by philanthropists (e.g. lobbying or other policy efforts you don't want to originate within a certain national government). All this is happening exactly as nuclear risk seems to be increasing. There are credible reports that Russia considered the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine in autumn 2022. China is on track to triple its arsenal. North Korea has at least 30 nuclear weapons. More broadly, we appear to be entering an era of more great power conflict and potentially rapid destabilising technological change, including through advanced AI and biotechnology. The Future Fund was going to fill this gap with ~$10m per year. Longview Philanthropy hired an experienced grantmaker in the field, Carl Robichaud, as well as Matthew Gentzel. The team was all ready to get started. But the collapse of FTX meant that didn't materialise. Moreover, Open Philanthropy decided to raise their funding bar, and focus on AI safety and biosecurity, so it hasn't stepped in to fill it either. Longview's program was left with only around $500k to allocate on Nuclear Weapons Policy in 2023, and has under $1m on hand now. Giving Carl and Matthew more like $3 million (or more) a year seems like an interesting niche that a group of smaller donors could specialise in. This would allow them to pick the low hanging fruit among opportunities abandoned by MacArthur - as well as look for new opportunities, including those that might have been neglected by the field to date. I agree it's unclear how tractable policy efforts are here, and I haven't looked into specific grants, but it still seems better to me to have a flourishing field of nuclear policy than not. I'd suggest talking to Carl about the specific grants they see at the margin (carl@longview.org). I'm also not sure, given my worldview, that this is even more effective than funding AI safety or biosecurity, so I don't think Open Philanthropy is obviously making a mistake by not funding it. But I do hope someone in the world can fill this gap. I'd expect it to be most attractive to someone who's more sceptical about AI safety, but agrees the world underrates catastrophic risks (or reduce the chance of all major cities blowing up for common sense reasons). It could also be interesting as something that's getting less philanthropic attention than AI safety, and as something a smaller donor could specialise in and play an important role in. If...

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: Fighting animal suffering: beyond the number of animals killed, published by Keyvan Mostafavi on May 14, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Animal advocates are driven by a common belief: animals should not suffer. Quantifying suffering involves considering the duration and intensity of animals' pain. This nuanced approach reveals that focusing solely on the number of animals killed can obscure the true extent of their suffering. Welfare improvements and reducing the number of farmed animals both contribute to decreasing total suffering, each addressing different aspects of the problem. By delving deeper into the complexities of animal suffering, we can better advocate for meaningful change. Summary Animal activists have various motivations to help animals, but the majority of them agree that animals should not suffer. Suffering is difficult to measure and define, but it is important to try to do so, as it allows us to prioritize which animals need the most help. One approach is to define different intensities of suffering (excruciating, disabling, hurtful, and annoying), and then to look at the number of hours that animals spend in each one of these different states. Ultimately, the two critical components of suffering are its duration and intensity. The number of animals killed alone is not a sufficiently precise proxy for the time they spend in farms or their average suffering, making it inadequate for prioritizing between different species. Improving welfare conditions and reducing the number of animals farmed both play significant roles in decreasing the total amount of suffering, although they impact different aspects of the suffering equation (intensity vs. duration). For animals like broiler chickens and egg-laying hens, reforms such as adopting European Chicken Commitment standards and cage-free systems significantly reduce suffering. The challenge of understanding the scope of animal suffering The injustice of animal farming is inconceivable. By the time you're done reading this post, more than 1 million broiler chickens will have been slaughtered. At the exact moment these lines are written, around 100 billion fishes live in horrendous conditions in farms around the globe. The overwhelming scale of the problem is the main driver for most activists - we're in constant triage and we want to help animals as much as possible with our limited resources. However, the scale of this problem can also deceive us if we are not careful enough. One well-known challenge in this context is scope insensitivity - the human brain struggles to grasp the magnitude of problems relative to their size. Despite this, it seems that modern animal advocates demonstrate a relatively strong ability to distinguish differences in vast numbers. They tend to prioritize farmed animals over companion animals, or farmed chickens over many other species of farmed animals. However, advocates must consider another potential pitfall when assessing scope - fixating solely on the number of animals killed while ignoring other crucial considerations, such as suffering. To illustrate the moral significance of this distinction, we will use an imaginary example of two animals. Please note that it will include some description of animal suffering and death (as we will do in other parts of the article). Let's imagine two dogs - Alan and Nala. Both of them were just diagnosed with an identical terminal and aggressive cancer. Their lives from that point on will be filled with unmanageable, excruciating pain. After careful consideration and observation, Alan was euthanized by the vet after one month. Unfortunately, Nala was living with an impoverished family that had no resources to afford veterinary care, and thus the procedure was delayed by 11 months. In this example, both dogs were euthanized within ...

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: Presenting nine new charities - a record for the AIM (CE) Incubation Program, published by CE on May 14, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. We are thrilled to introduce nine new charities launched through our February-March 2024 Incubation Program. This is an AIM record with an average of five charities launched per round in the previous years. We are also proud to announce that thanks to very generous donors from the Seed Network Funding Circle, these new organizations have secured over $1 million in funding! This is a significant milestone for AIM as an organization. We are very grateful for the support of our funders, mentors, and, most of all, the talented applicants who decided to pursue entrepreneurial careers in the nonprofit sector. We are committed to ongoing support for these new initiatives through mentorship, operational assistance, free co-working space in London, and access to an ever-expanding entrepreneurial network of funders, advisors, interns, and fellow charity founders. This article provides a brief introduction to our new organizations. You will find more information in the sections below if you want to support some charities with further funding or are interested in volunteer opportunities. If you want to launch a high-impact charity, please visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter. We are excited to unveil the February-March 2024 Incubation Program cohort: 1. Centre for Aquaculture Progress focuses on farmed fish welfare. 2. Notify Health improves life-saving vaccine coverage for children through effective and scalable vaccination reminders. 3. Learning Alliance tackles the foundational learning crisis by bringing evidence-based teaching practices into classrooms 4. Novah works towards the reduction of intimate partner violence. 5. Access to Medicines Initiative addresses contraception stock-outs. 6. FarmKind aims to close the funding gap for some of the most impactful animal welfare charities. 7. Ark Philanthropy helps high-net-worth individuals create philanthropic strategies to address global challenges. 8. Taimaka specializes in acute malnutrition treatment. 9. A charity focused on animal welfare (to be announced later this year). An introduction to each charity: Centre for Aquaculture Progress Co-founders: Naomi Murn, Martin Wicke, August Hochman (0.5FTE) Website: www.centreforaquacultureprogress.org Email address: info@centreforaquacultureprogress.org CE incubation grant: $30,000 Description of the intervention: The Centre for Aquaculture Progress is a new organization focused on improving the aquaculture industry to benefit consumers, farmers, and fish. It is the first organization dedicated to improving fish welfare in Greece. The organization's first campaign will involve advocating for the increased uptake of pre-slaughter electrical stunning for Greek sea bream and sea bass. Background of the intervention: Greece is the largest fish producer in the EU, according to the number of individuals alive at any time. Despite Greece being a significant player in EU aquaculture, no animal welfare organization is currently dedicated to improving the welfare of farmed fish in Greece. Animal welfare organizations in the Mediterranean have identified Greece as a gap which must urgently be filled. Hundreds of millions of farmed sea bream and sea bass are subjected to extreme suffering in Greece yearly. In the slaughter process, they are unloaded live into an ice slurry and endure a slow and painful death by gradual freezing and suffocation. While inhumane slaughter is just one of many welfare problems sea bream and sea bass face, it has the most well-researched, tractable and agreed upon solution: pre-slaughter electrical stunning. Near-term plans: The first step for the Centre for Aquaculture Progress is to conduct a gap analysis invo...

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: D&D.Sci Long War: Defender of Data-mocracy Evaluation & Ruleset, published by aphyer on May 14, 2024 on LessWrong. This is a follow-up to last week's D&D.Sci scenario: if you intend to play that, and haven't done so yet, you should do so now before spoiling yourself. There is a web interactive here you can use to test your answer, and generation code available here if you're interested, or you can read on for the ruleset and scores. RULESET Each alien has a different amount of HP: Alien HP Threat* Swarming Scarab 1 1 Chitinous Crawler 3 2 Voracious Venompede 5 3 Arachnoid Abomination 9 4 Towering Tyrant 15 5 *Threat has no effect on combat directly - it's a measure of how threatening Earth considers each alien to be, which scales how many soldiers they send. (The war has been getting worse - early on, Earth sent on average ~1 soldier/4 Threat of aliens, but today it's more like 1 soldier/6 Threat. The wave you're facing has 41 Threat, Earth would send on average ~7 soldiers to it. Earth doesn't exercise much selection with weapons, but sends soldiers in pairs such that each pair has two different weapons - this is a slight bias towards diversity.) Each weapon has a damage it deals per shot, and a rate of fire that determines how many shots it can get off before the wielder is perforated by venomous spines/dissolved into a puddle of goo/voraciously devoured by a ravenous toothed maw: Weapon Damage Min Shots Max Shots Macross Minigun 1 5 8 Fusion Flamethrower 1 3 12 Pulse Phaser 2 4 6 Rail Rifle 3 3 5 Laser Lance 5 2 5 Gluon Grenades 7 2 3 Thermo-Torpedos 13 1 3 Antimatter Artillery 20 1 2 Each soldier will be able to fire a number of shots chosen randomly between Min Shots and Max Shots - for example, a soldier with a Laser Lance will have time to fire 1d4+1 shots, each doing 5 damage. During a battle, humans roll for how many shots each weapon gets, and then attempt to allocate damage from their shots to bring down all aliens. If they succeed, the humans win - if not, the humans lose. While doing this optimally is theoretically very difficult, your soldiers are well-trained and the battles are not all that large, so your soldiers will reliably find a solution if one exists. For example, if you are fighting two Towering Tyrants and two Swarming Scarabs using two soldiers: If you bring one soldier with Antimatter Artillery and one with a Macross Minigun, the Minigun soldier will reliably kill the Scarabs and have 3-6 shots left over (not enough to kill a Tyrant). The Artillery soldier will get either 1 or 2 shots: half the time they will roll a 2, kill both Tyrants and you will win, while the other half they will roll a 1, a Tyrant will survive and you will lose. You can do a little better by bringing one soldier with Antimatter Artillery and one with a Laser Lance. The Laser Lance rolls 2-5 shots - it will always kill both Scarabs, and 1/4 of the time it will roll 5 shots and also be able to kill a Tyrant (at which point you'll win even if the Antimatter Artillery rolls a 1), giving you a 5/8 winrate overall. You can do better still by bringing one soldier with Thermo-Torpedos and one with a Pulse Phaser. The Phaser soldier gets at least 4 shots, with which they kill both Scarabs and do 2 damage to each Tyrant (dropping the Tyrants both to 13 HP). And the Torpedo soldier gets 1-3 shots, with a 2/3 chance of being able to kill both Tyrants now that they've been softened up. I believe this is the best winrate you can get in this example. STRATEGY The most important element of strategy was sending the right kind of weapons for each alien: high-health aliens like Tyrants are extremely inefficient to kill with light weapons like Miniguns, while small, numerous aliens like Scarabs are extremely inefficient to kill with heavy weapons like artillery. There were a few subtler ...

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: Against Student Debt Cancellation From All Sides of the Political Compass, published by Maxwell Tabarrok on May 14, 2024 on LessWrong. A stance against student debt cancellation doesn't rely on the assumptions of any single ideology. Strong cases against student debt cancellation can be made based on the fundamental values of any section of the political compass. In no particular order, here are some arguments against student debt cancellation from the perspectives of many disparate ideologies. Equity and Fairness Student debt cancellation is a massive subsidy to an already prosperous and privileged population. American college graduates have nearly double the income of high school graduates. African Americans are far underrepresented among degree holders compared to their overall population share. Within the group of college graduates debt cancellation increases equity, but you can't get around the fact that 72% of African Americans have no student debt because they never went to college. The tax base for debt cancellation will mostly come from rich white college graduates, but most of the money will go to … rich white college graduates. Taxing the rich to give to the slightly-less-rich doesn't have the same Robin Hood ring but might still slightly improve equity and fairness relative to the status quo, except for the fact that it will trade off with far more important programs. Student debt cancellation will cost several hundred billion dollars at least, perhaps up to a trillion dollars or around 4% of GDP. That's more than defense spending, R&D spending, more than Medicaid and Medicare, and almost as much as social security spending. A trillion-dollar transfer from the top 10% to the top 20% doesn't move the needle much on equity but it does move the needle a lot on budgetary and political constraints. We should be spending these resources on those truly in need, not the people who already have the immense privilege on an American college degree. Effective Altruism The effective altruist critique of student debt cancellations is similar to the one based on equity and fairness, but with much more focus on global interventions as an alternative way to spend the money. Grading student debt cancellation on impact, tractability, and neglectedness, it scores very poorly. Mostly because of tiny impact compared to the most effective charitable interventions. Giving tens of thousands of dollars to people who already have high incomes, live in the most prosperous country on earth, and face little risk of death from poverty or disease is so wasteful that it borders on criminal on some views of moral obligations. It is letting tens of millions of children drown (or die from malaria) because you don't want to get your suit wet saving them. Saving a life costs $5,000, cancelling student debt costs $500 billion, you do the math. Student Debt Crisis If what you really care about is stemming the ill-effects of large and growing student debt, debt cancellation is a terrible policy. If you want people to consume less of something, the last thing you should do is subsidize people who consume that thing. But that's exactly what debt cancellation does: It is a massive subsidy on student debt. Going forward, the legal precedent and political one-upmanship will make future cancellations more likely, so students will be willing to take more debt, study less remunerative majors, and universities will raise their prices in response. Helping those who are already saddled with student debt by pushing future generations further into it is not the right way out of this problem. Fiscal Conservativism Student debt cancellation is expensive. Several hundred billion dollars has already been spent and several hundred billion more are proposed. This will mostly be financed through debt, especially si...

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: Building intuition with spaced repetition systems, published by Jacob G-W on May 14, 2024 on LessWrong. Do you ever go to a lecture, follow it thinking it makes total sense, then look back at your notes later and realize it makes no sense? This used to happen to me, but I've learned how to use spaced repetition to fully avoid this if I want. I'm going to try to convey this method in this post. Much of my understanding of how to create flashcards comes from "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics" by Michael Nielsen and "How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding" by Andy Matuschak, but I think my method falls in between both, in terms of abstraction. Finally, I want to credit Quantum Country for being an amazing example of flashcards created to develop intuition in users. My method is more abstract than Michael Nielsen's approach, since it does not only apply to mathematics, but to any subject. Yet it is less abstract than Andy Matuschak's approach because I specifically use it for 'academic subjects' that require deep intuition of (causal or other) relationships between concepts. Many of Matuschak's principles in his essay apply here (I want to make sure to give him credit), but I'm looking at it through the 'how can we develop deep intuition in an academic subject in the fastest possible time?' lens. Minimize Inferential Distance on Flashcards A method that I like to repeat to myself while making flashcards that I haven't seen in other places is that each flashcard should only have one inferential step on it. I'm using 'inferential step' here to mean a step such as remembering a fact, making a logical deduction, visualizing something, or anything that requires thinking. It's necessary that a flashcard only have a single inferential step on it. Anki trains the mind to do these steps. If you learn all the inferential steps, you will be able to fully re-create any mathematical deduction, historical story, or scientific argument. Knowing (and continually remembering) the full story with spaced repetition builds intuition. I'm going to illustrate this point by sharing some flashcards that I made while trying to understand how Transformers (GPT-2) worked. I made these flashcards while implementing a transformer based on Neel Nanda's tutorials and these two blog posts. Understanding Attention The first step in my method is to learn or read enough so that you have part of the whole loaded into your head. For me, this looked like picking the attention step of a transformer and then reading about it in the two blog posts and watching the section of the video on it. It's really important to learn about something from multiple perspectives. Even when I'm making flashcards from a lecture, I have my web browser open and I'm looking up things that I thought were confusing while making flashcards. My next step is to understand that intuition is fake! Really good resources make you feel like you understand something, but to actually understand something, you need to engage with it. This engagement can take many forms. For technical topics, it usually looks like solving problems or coding, and this is good! I did this for transformers! But I also wanted to not forget it long term, so I used spaced repetition to cement my intuition. Enough talk, here are some flashcards about attention in a transformer. For each flashcard, I'll explain why I made it. Feel free to scroll through. Examples I start with a distillation of the key points of the article. I wanted to make sure that I knew what the attention operation was actually doing, as the blog posts emphasized this. When building intuition, I find it helpful to know "the shape" or constraints about something so that I can build a more accurate mental model. In this case, th...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Monthly Roundup #18: May 2024, published by Zvi on May 14, 2024 on LessWrong. As I note in the third section, I will be attending LessOnline at month's end at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If that is your kind of event, then consider going, and buy your ticket today before prices go up. This month's edition was an opportunity to finish off some things that got left out of previous editions or where events have left many of the issues behind, including the question of TikTok. Oh No All of this has happened before. And all of this shall happen again. Alex Tabarrok: I regret to inform you that the CDC is at it again. Marc Johnson: We developed an assay for testing for H5N1 from wastewater over a year ago. (I wasn't expecting it in milk, but I figured it was going to poke up somewhere.) However, I was just on a call with the CDC and they are advising us NOT to use it. I need a drink. They say it will only add to the confusion because we won't know where it is coming from. I'm part of a team. I don't get to make those decisions myself. Ben Hardisty: The usual institute, or did they have a good reason? Marc Johnson: They say it would only add to the confusion since we don't know precisely where it is coming from. But then they said 2 minutes later that they aren't sure this isn't just regular influenza appearing late. We can answer that, so why don't we??? I don't get it. Alex: Are your team members considering bucking the CDC advice or has the decision been made to acquiesce? I understand them not wanting panic but man if that's not self serving advice I don't know what is. Marc Johnson: The CDC will come around. ZzippyCorgi11: Marc, can private entities ask you to test wastewater around their locations? Is the CDC effectively shutting down any and all testing of wastewater for H5N1? Marc Johnson: No, if people want to send me wastewater I can test them with other funding. I just can't test the samples I get from state surveillance. JH: This is ridiculous. Do it anyway! Marc Johnson: It's not my call. I got burned once for finding Polio somewhere I wasn't supposed to find it. It fizzled, fortunately. Ross Rheingans-Yoo: It's a societal mistake that we're not always monitoring for outbreaks of the dozen greatest threats, given how cheap wastewater testing can get. Active intervention by the CDC to stop new testing for a new strain of influenza circulating in mammals on farms is unconscionable. I strongly agree with Ross here. Of all the lessons to not have learned from Covid, this seems like the dumbest one to not have learned. How hard is 'tests help you identify what is going on even when they are imperfect, so use them'? I am not so worried, yet, that something too terrible is that likely to happen. But we are doing our best to change that. We have a pattern of failing to prepare for such easily foreseeable disasters. Another potential example I saw today would be the high-voltage transformers, where we do not make them, we not have backups available and if we lost the ones we have our grid plausibly collapses. The worry in the thread is primarily storms but also what about sabotage? Oh No: Betting on Elections I am proud to live in an information environment where 100% of the people, no matter their other differences, understand that 'ban all prediction markets on elections' is a deeply evil and counterproductive act of epistemic sabotage. And yet that is exactly what the CFTC is planning to do, with about a 60% chance they will manage to make this stick. Maxim Lott: This afternoon, the government bureaucrats at the CFTC announced that they plan to ban all election betting (aka "prediction markets on elections", aka "event contracts") in the United States. They will also ban trading on events in general - for example, on who will win an Oscar. The decision was 3-2, with the ...

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: Environmentalism in the United States Is Unusually Partisan, published by Jeffrey Heninger on May 13, 2024 on LessWrong. This is the first in a sequence of four posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan? Introduction In the United States, environmentalism is extremely partisan. It might feel like this was inevitable. Caring about the environment, and supporting government action to protect the environment, might seem like they are inherently left-leaning. Partisanship has increased for many issues, so it might not be surprising that environmentalism became partisan too. Looking at the public opinion polls more closely makes it more surprising. Environmentalism in the United States is unusually partisan, compared to other issues, compared to other countries, and compared to the United States itself at other times. The partisanship of environmentalism was not inevitable. Compared to Other Issues Environmentalism is one of the, if not the, most partisan issues in the US. The most recent data demonstrating this comes from a Gallup poll from 2023.[1] Of the 24 issues surveyed, "Protecting the Environment Has Priority Over Energy Development" was tied for the largest partisan gap with "Government Should Ensure That Everyone Has Healthcare." Of the top 5 most partisan issues, 3 were related to environmentalism. The amount this gap has widened since 2003 is also above average for these environmental issues. Figure 1: The percentages of Republicans and Democrats who agree with each statement shown, 2003-2023. Reprinted from Gallup (2023). Pew also has some recent relevant data.[2] They ask whether 21 particular policies "should be a top priority for the president and Congress to address this year." The largest partisan gap is for "protecting the environment" (47 p.p.), followed by "dealing with global climate change" (46 p.p.). These are ten percentage points higher than the next most partisan priority. These issues are less specific than the ones Gallup asked about, and so might not reveal as much of the underlying partisanship. For example, most Democrats and most Republicans agree that strengthening the economy is important, but they might disagree about how this should be done. Figure 2: The percentages of Republicans and Democrats who believe that each issue should be a top priority. Reprinted from Pew (2023). Guber's analysis of Gallup polls from 1990, 2000, & 2010 also shows that environmentalism is unusually partisan.[3] Concern about "the quality of the environment" has a similar partisan gap as concern about "illegal immigration," and larger than concern about any other political issue. If we hone in on concern about "global warming" within overall environmental concern, the partisan gap doubles, making it a clear outlier. Figure 3: Difference between the mean response on a four point scale for party identifiers on concern for various national problems in 2010. "I'm going to read you a list of problems facing the country. For each one, please tell me if you personally worry about this problem a great deal, a fair amount, only a little, or not at all." Reprinted from Guber (2013). The partisanship of environmentalism cannot be explained entirely by the processes that made other issues partisan. It is more partisan than those other issues. At least this extra partisan gap wants an explanation. Compared to Other Countries The United States is more partisan than any other country on environmentalism, by a wide margin. The best data comes from a Pew survey of "17 advanced economies" in 2021.[4] It found that 7 of them had no significant partisan gap, and that the US had a partisan gap that was almost twice as large as any other country. Figure 4: Percentages of people with different ideologies who would be willing to make a lot of or som...

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: In DC, a new wave of AI lobbyists gains the upper hand, published by Chris Leong on May 13, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. "The new influence web is pushing the argument that AI is less an existential danger than a crucial business opportunity, and arguing that strict safety rules would hand America's AI edge to China. It has already caused key lawmakers to back off some of their more worried rhetoric about the technology. ... The effort, a loosely coordinated campaign led by tech giants IBM and Meta, includes wealthy new players in the AI lobbying space such as top chipmaker Nvidia, as well as smaller AI startups, the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and libertarian billionaire Charles Koch. ... Last year, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) declared himself "freaked out" by cutting-edge AI systems, also known as frontier models, and called for regulation to ward off several scary scenarios. Today, Lieu co-chairs the House AI Task Force and says he's unconvinced by claims that Congress must crack down on advanced AI. "If you just say, 'We're scared of frontier models' - okay, maybe we should be scared," Lieu told POLITICO. "But I would need something beyond that to do legislation. I would need to know what is the threat or the harm that we're trying to stop." ... After months of conversations with IBM and its allies, Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.), chair of the House AI Task Force, says more lawmakers are now openly questioning whether advanced AI models are really that dangerous. In an April interview, Obernolte called it "the wrong path" for Washington to require licenses for frontier AI. And he said skepticism of that approach seems to be spreading. "I think the people I serve with are much more realistic now about the fact that AI - I mean, it has very consequential negative impacts, potentially, but those do not include an army of evil robots rising up to take over the world," said Obernolte." 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: Impact Accelerator Program for EA Professionals, published by High Impact Professionals on May 13, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. High Impact Professionals is excited to announce that applications are now open for the Summer 2024 round of our Impact Accelerator Program (IAP). The IAP is a 6-week program designed to equip experienced EA-aligned professionals (not currently working at an EA organization) with the knowledge and tools necessary to make a meaningful impact and empower them to start taking actionable steps right away. To date, the program has been a success, with several alumni having already changed careers to new impactful roles and nearly all participants planning to do the same in the next ~6 months. IAP alumni are also volunteering an average of ~100 hours at EA-aligned orgs/projects and donating on average more than 7% of their annual salary to effective charities. We are currently running the Spring 2024 round, which features a larger number of participants and cohorts. We're pleased to open up this new Summer 2024 program round, which will start the week of July 15. More information is available below and here. Please apply here by May 23. Program Objectives The IAP is set up to help participants: identify paths to impact, take concrete, impactful actions, and join a network of like-minded, experienced, and supportive EA professionals. At the end of the program, a participant should have a good answer to the question "How can I have the most impact with my career, and what are my next steps?", and they should have taken the first steps in that direction. Program Overview Important Dates Deadline to apply: May 23 Apply here Program duration: 6 weeks (week of July 15 - week of August 19, 2024) Format Weekly individual work (2-3 hours). A mix of: Learning: Reading resources on how to think about and prioritize different options for impact Doing: Taking impactful actions, such as developing your own personalized impact plan and taking concrete steps to begin implementing it Virtual group sessions (1.5 hours of discussions and coaching) Includes mastermind sessions where each member of the cohort has the opportunity to present their plans, obstacles, and uncertainties and get in-depth, tailored feedback 1-on-1 sessions with IAP facilitators Extracurricular sessions: The possibility of extra sessions on topics defined by the needs of the cohort (e.g., financial considerations, networking) Post-program support sessions: Access additional group sessions in the months following the program to maintain momentum and continue implementing your plan Topics covered Values and mission - determine your motivations / guiding principles, strengths, and weaknesses to set a clear starting point for your journey Paths to impact for professionals - explore the landscape of career possibilities, address your key uncertainties, and identify your best career and impact options Develop an action plan - put all you've discovered into a roadmap with actionable steps to guide you to your impact goals Implement your plan - Begin taking active steps to turn your plan into an impactful reality Led by: Select members of the High Impact Professionals team/community Why Should You Apply? Overcome Barriers: We'll guide you in exploring your personal obstacles to impact and assist you in taking real-world, impactful actions. Understand Impact: Delve into the complex nature of creating positive change and discover the diverse opportunities available to professionals. Develop and Implement a Solid Impact Plan: Acquire tools to assess and plan for impact, and integrate them into your own circumstances to create a personal roadmap for maximizing your positive influence. Then, begin taking concrete steps to put your plan into action. Connect with Like-Minded People: Embark on this j...