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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: Being a young person in EA: my journey into the EA community, published by ScientificS on May 27, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
I came across a program for curious young people called Leaf through an online course tailored about how to save and help lives, then attended a residential where I further explored these ideas. Going from being told there is a right or wrong way in my school system, I explored EA through the lens of learning techniques which I may or may not use to try to get closer to my goals- of helping others and saving lives.
Through the adjacent opportunities such as books, talks, the 80k podcast, the network of people and the further online events, I have continued exploring the cause areas and have now changed my career progression plans.
IMPORTANT: this article was written based on my personal views, and with the motivation of documenting my personal journey but without any aim in terms of future involvement. Of course, please comment or contact me if you want to know more, or for clarification, or to ask about anything, but I am a young student, with disabilities, so may not respond very quickly, and may not be able to do something really intensive such as a report or breakdown of a topic...
This article was not proofread, and nothing was ran past any entities mentioned. Everything is my own opinion and I only have positive experiences overall, so honestly, I don't think there is anything negative to say so far, but it is truthful and I am sorry if you disagree and please let me know.
I talk a lot about Leaf, this is a non profit started that helps young people between 16-19 do more good by helping them see how and with what techniques they can do good in the world even at a young age, and the fact that they help with career guidance, university and degree choices, and teaching about techniques was very positive and useful for me, but no one from Leaf approves or pre saw this article (or even knew I was writing it before) and I would be happy to be contacted for views,
opinions or anything else but I am not paid or affiliated to them, just grateful genuinely for their help.
How it started: a chance encounter with Leaf
I had never heard of EA until around February 2023. I had been searching for summer university opportunities and came across Leaf, and at first believed it was simply an Oxford summer school to do with learning and applied on the original form, for the online cohort.
Doing the extended application, I came across questions such as 'Watch this video on what the future might be like, what do you agree with, now what would you disagree with, now how would you critique your disagreements' and I was shocked; we were asked to critique our own critiques and extend our arguments (with a very tight word limit that definitely caused a lot of editing and annoyance at first).
As I went further, questions like 'What is the weirdest opinion you hold' or 'What is the worst injustice in the world, how would you solve it with 1 million pounds' definitely intrigued me... what normal summer program asks us about this?
I explored further and fell more in love, here I was, a 16 year old, used to being taught the 'Right Opinion TM' without ever being asked what I thought or why I might change my mind. I had never been asked what I would do to solve injustices, or to even consider the fact that I myself can do so.
I was invited to a discord server (a very steep learning curve for someone who never had social media before) where at first it was me and 2-3 people and I cautiously tested the water with an introduction mentioning that I enjoy discussing the education system.
What followed was me and the 2 peers amassing over 180 messages within a week, from topics such as quantum computing, navigation, meritocracy, genetic basis of intelligence,

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: Computational Mechanics Hackathon (June 1 & 2), published by Adam Shai on May 27, 2024 on LessWrong.
Join our
Computational Mechanics Hackathon, organized with the support of APART, PIBBSS and Simplex.
This is an opportunity to learn more about Computational Mechanics, its applications to AI interpretability & safety, and to get your hands dirty by working on a concrete project together with a team and supported by Adam & Paul. Also, there will be cash prizes for the best projects!
Read more and sign up for the event
here.
We're excited about Computational Mechanics as a framework because it provides a rigorous notion of structure that can be applied to both data and model internals. In
,
Transformers Represent Belief State Geometry in their Residual Stream
, we validated that Computational Mechanics can help us understand fundamentally what computational structures transformers implement when trained on next-token prediction - a belief updating process over the hidden structure of the data generating process. We then found the fractal geometry underlying this process in the residual stream of transformers.
This opens up a large number of potential projects in interpretability. There's a lot of work to do!
Key things to know:
Dates: Weekend of June 1st & 2nd, starting with an opening talk on Friday May 31st
Format: Hybrid - join either online or in person in Berkeley! If you are interested in joining in person please contact Adam.
Program:
Keynote Opening by @Adam Shai and @Paul Riechers - Friday 10:30 AM PDT
Online Office Hours with Adam and Paul on Discord - Saturday and Sunday 10:30 PDT
Ending session - Sunday at 17:30 PDT
Project presentations - Wednesday at 10:30 PDT
Projects:
After that, you will form teams of 1-5 people and submit a project on the entry submission page. By the end of the hackathon, you will submit: 1) The PDF report, 2) a maximum 10-minute video overview, 3) title, summary, and descriptions. You will present your work on the following Wednesday.
Sign up: You can sign up on this
website. After signing up, you will receive a link to the discord where we will be coordinating over the course of the weekend. Feel free to introduce yourself on the discord and begin brainstorming ideas and interests.
Resources:
You're welcome to engage with this selection of
resources before the hackathon starts.
Check out our (living)
Open Problems in Comp Mech document, and in particular the section with Shovel Ready Problems.
If you are starting a project or just want to express interest in it, fill out a row in
this spreadsheet
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: Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow, published by Elizabeth on May 27, 2024 on LessWrong.
Introduction
First they came for the epistemology/we don't know what happened after that.
I'm fairly antagonistic towards the author of that tweet, but it still resonates deep in my soul. Anything I want to do, anything I want to change, rests on having contact with reality. If I don't have enough, I might as well be pushing buttons at random.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of forces pushing against having enough contact with reality. It's a lot of work even when reality cooperates, many situations are adversarial, and even when they're not entropy itself will constantly chip away at your knowledge base.
This is why I think constantly seeking contact with reality is the meta principle without which all (consequentialist) principles are meaningless. If you aren't actively pursuing truthseeking, you won't have enough contact with reality to make having goals a reasonable concept, much less achieving them. To me this feels intuitive, like saying air is necessary to live. But I've talked to many people who disagree, or who agree in the abstract but prioritize differently in the breach.
This was supposed to be a grand post explaining that belief. In practice it's mostly a bunch of pointers to facets of truthseeking and ideas for how to do better. My hope is that people can work backwards from these to the underlying principle, or flesh out their own relationship with truthseeking.
Target audience
I think these are good principles for almost any situation, but this essay is aimed at people within Effective Altruism. Most of the examples are from within EA and assume a certain amount of context. I definitely don't give enough information to bring someone unfamiliar up to speed. I also assume at least a little consequentialism.
A note on examples and actions
I'm going to give lots of examples in this post. I think they make it easier to understand my point and to act on what agreement you have. It avoids the failure mode Scott Alexander discusses
here, of getting everyone to agree with you by putting nothing at stake.
The downside of this is that it puts things at stake. I give at least 20 examples here, usually in less than a paragraph, using only publicly available information. That's enough to guarantee that every person who reads this will find at least one example where I'm being really unfair or missing crucial information. I welcome corrections and arguments on anything I say here, but when evaluating the piece as a whole I ask that you consider the constraints I was working under.
Examples involving public writing are overrepresented. I wanted my examples to be as accessible as possible, and it's hard to beat public writing for that. It even allows skimming. My hope is that readers will work backwards from the public examples to the core principle, which they can apply wherever is most important to them.
The same goes for the suggestions I give on how to pursue truthseeking. I don't know your situation and don't want to pretend I do. The suggestions are also biased towards writing, because I do that a lot.
I sent a draft of this post to every person or org with a negative mention, and most positive mentions.
Facets of truthseeking
No gods, no monsters, no epistemic daddies
When I joined EA I felt filled with clarity and purpose, at a level I hadn't felt since I got rejected from grad school. A year later I learned about a promising-looking organization outside EA, and I felt angry. My beautiful clarity was broken and I had to go back to thinking. Not just regular thinking either (which I'd never stopped doing), but meta thinking about how to navigate multiple sources of information on the same topic.
For bonus points, the organization in question was
J-PAL.

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: Review: Conor Moreton's "Civilization & Cooperation", published by [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien on May 26, 2024 on LessWrong.
Author's note: in honor of the upcoming LessOnline event, I'm sharing this one here on LessWrong rather than solely on my substack. If you like it, you should subscribe to my substack, which you can do for free (paid subscribers see stuff a week early). I welcome discussion down below but am not currently committing to any particular level of participation myself.
Dang it, I knew I should have gone with my first instinct, and photocopied the whole book first. But then again, given that it vanished as soon as I got to the end of it, maybe my second instinct was right, and trying to do that would've been seen as cheating by whatever magical librarians left it for me in the first place.
It was just sitting there, on my desk, when I woke up six weeks ago. At first I thought it was an incredibly in-depth prank, or maybe like a fun puzzle that Logan had made for me as an early birthday present. But when I touched it, it glowed, and it unfolded in a way that I'm pretty sure we don't currently have the tech for.
Took me a while to decode the text, which mostly looked like:
…but eventually I got the hang of it, thanks to the runes turning out to be English, somehow, just a weird phonetic transcription of it.
Hilariously mundanely, it turned out to be a textbook (!), for what seemed like the equivalent of seventh graders (!!), for what seemed like the equivalent of social studies (!!!), written by an educator whose name (if I managed the translation correctly) is something like "Conor Moreton"…
…in a place called (if I managed the translation correctly) something like "Agor."
At first, I thought it was a civics textbook for the government and culture of Agor in particular, but nope - the more I read, the more it seemed like a "how stuff works" for societies in general, with a lot of claims that seemed to apply pretty straightforwardly to what I understand about cultures here on Earth.
(I'll be honest. By the time I got to the end of it, I was stoked about the idea of living in a country where everybody was taught this stuff in seventh grade.)
I took notes, but not very rigorous ones. I wasn't counting on the book just disappearing as soon as I finished reading the last page
(I know, I know, not very savvy of me, I should have seen that coming. 20/20 hindsight.)
so what follows is a somewhat patchwork review, with a lot of detail in random places and very little detail in others. Sorry. It's as complete as I can make it. If anybody else happens to get their hands on a copy, please let me know, or at least be sure to take better notes yourself.
I. Civilization as self-restraint
The first chapter of Moreton's book asks readers to consider the question Where does civilization come from? Why do we have it?
After all, at some point, civilization didn't exist. Then gradually, over time, it came into being, and gradually, over time, it became more and more complex.
(Moreton goes out of his way to make clear that he's not just talking about, like, static agrarian society, but civilizations of all kinds, including nomadic and foraging ones.)
At every step of the way, he argues, each new extra layer of civilization had to be better than what came before. Cultures aren't quite the same as organisms, but they're still subject to evolutionary pressure. Behaviors that don't pay off, in some important sense, eventually die out, outcompeted by other, better-calibrated behaviors.
The book points out that what civilization even is is a question that's up for debate, with many people using many different definitions. Moreton proposes a single, unifying principle:
Civilization is the voluntary relinquishment of technically available options. It's a binding of the self,

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: Notifications Received in 30 Minutes of Class, published by tanagrabeast on May 26, 2024 on LessWrong.
Introduction
If you are choosing to read this post, you've probably seen the image below depicting all the notifications students received on their phones during one class period. You probably saw it as a retweet of
this tweet, or in
one of Zvi's posts. Did you find this data plausible, or did you roll to disbelieve? Did you know that the image dates back to at least 2019? Does that fact make you more or less worried about the truth on the ground as of 2024?
Last month, I performed an enhanced replication of this experiment in my high school classes. This was partly because we had a use for it, partly to model scientific thinking, and partly because I was just really curious. Before you scroll past the image, I want to give you a chance to mentally register your predictions. Did my average class match the roughly 1,084 notifications I counted on Ms.
Garza's viral image? What does the distribution look like? Is there a notable gender difference? Do honors classes get more or fewer notifications than regular classes? Which apps dominate? Let's find out!
Before you rush to compare apples and oranges, keep in mind that I don't know anything about Ms. Garza's class -- not the grade, the size, or the duration of her experiment. That would have made it hard for me to do a true replication, and since I saw some obvious ways to improve on her protocol, I went my own way with it.
Procedure
We opened class with a discussion about what we were trying to measure and how we were going to measure it for the next 30 minutes. Students were instructed to have their phones on their desks and turned on. For extra amusement, they were invited (but not required) to turn on audible indicators. They were asked to tally each notification received and log it by app.
They were instructed to not engage with any received notifications, and to keep their phone use passive during the experiment, which I monitored.
While they were not to put their names on their tally sheets, they were asked to provide some metadata that included (if comfortable) their gender. (They knew that gender differences in phone use and depression were a topic of public discussion, and were largely happy to provide this.)
To give us a consistent source of undemanding background "instruction" - and to act as our timer - I played the first 30 minutes of Kurzgesagt's groovy
4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour video. Periodically, I also mingled with students in search of insights, which proved highly productive.
After the 30 minutes, students were charged with summing their own tally marks and writing totals as digits, so as to avoid a common issue where different students bundle and count tally clusters differently.
Results
Below are the two charts from our experiment that I think best capture the data of interest. The first is more straightforward, but I think the second is a little more meaningful.
Ah! So right away we can see a textbook long-tailed distribution. The top 20% of recipients accounted for 75% of all received notifications, and the bottom 20% for basically zero. We can also see that girls are more likely to be in that top tier, but they aren't exactly crushing the boys.
But do students actually notice and get distracted by all of these notifications? This is partly subjective, obviously, but we probably aren't as worried about students who would normally have their phones turned off or tucked away in their backpacks on the floor. So one of my metadata questions asked them about this.
The good rapport I enjoy with my students makes me pretty confident that I got honest answers - as does the fact that the data doesn't change all that much when I adjust for this in the chart below.
The most interesting difference in 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: Level up your spreadsheeting, published by angelinahli on May 25, 2024 on LessWrong.
Epistemic status: Passion project / domain I'm pretty opinionated about, just for fun.
In this post, I walk through some principles I think good spreadsheets abide by, and then in the companion piece, I walk through a whole bunch of tricks I've found valuable.
Who am I?
I've spent a big chunk of my (short) professional career so far getting good at Excel and Google Sheets.[1] As such, I've accumulated a bunch of opinions on this topic.
Who should read this?
This is not a guide to learning how to start using spreadsheets at all. I think you will get more out of this post if you use spreadsheets at least somewhat frequently, e.g.
Have made 20+ spreadsheets
Know how to use basic formulas like sum, if, countif, round
Know some fancier formulas like left/mid/right, concatenate, hyperlink
Have used some things like filters, conditional formatting, data validation
Principles of good spreadsheets
Broadly speaking, I think good spreadsheets follow some core principles (non-exhaustive list).
I think the below is a combination of good data visualization (or just communication) advice, systems design, and programming design (spreadsheets combine the code and the output).
It should be easy for you to extract insights from your data
1. A core goal you might have with spreadsheets is quickly calculating something based on your data. A bunch of tools below are aimed at improving functionality, allowing you to more quickly grab the data you want.
Your spreadsheet should be beautiful and easy to read
1. Sometimes, spreadsheets look like the following example.
2. I claim that this is not beautiful or easy for your users to follow what is going on. I think there are cheap techniques you can use to improve the readability of your data.
There should be one source of truth for your data
1. One common pitfall when designing spreadsheet-based trackers is hard copy and pasting data from one sheet to another, such that when your source data changes, the sheets you use for analyses no longer reflect "fresh" data. This is a big way in which your spreadsheet systems can break down.
2. A bunch of tools below are designed to improve data portability - i.e. remove the need for copy and pasting.
Your spreadsheet should be easy to audit
1. One major downside of spreadsheets as compared to most coding languages, is that it's often easy for relatively simple spreadsheets to contain silent bugs in them.[2]
2. Some features of spreadsheets that contribute to this problem:
1. Spreadsheets hide the code and show you only the output by default.
1. When you use formulas, once you hit enter, the user doesn't by default get to read what's going on. So if the output looks plausible, you might not notice your formula has a bug in it.
2. It's harder to break up your work into chunks.
1. When you're coding, most people will break up a complicated formula into several lines of code, using intermediate variables and comments to make things more readable. E.g.:
2.
3. By default, some Sheets formulas get really unwieldy, and you need to work a bit harder to recover readability.
3. Spreadsheets contain more individual calculations.
1. When you're coding and you want to perform the same calculation on 100 rows of data, you'd probably use a single line of code to iterate over your data (e.g. a for loop).
2. In Google Sheets, you're more likely to drag your formula down across all of your rows. But this means that if you accidentally change the formula for one cell and not the others, or if your data has now changed and it turns out you need to drag your formulas down more, things can break in annoying ways.
3. Because of this, I consider auditability one of the key qualities of a well designed spreadsheet. Some of the tools below will rec