EA - Call for Cruxes by Rhyme, a Longtermist History Consultancy by Lara TH

Link to original articleWelcome 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: Call for Cruxes by Rhyme, a Longtermist History Consultancy, published by Lara TH on March 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TLDR; This post announces the trial period of Rhyme, a history consultancy for longtermists. It seems like longtermists can profit from historical insights and the distillation of the current state of historical literature on a particular question, both because of its use as an intuition pump and for information about the historical context of their work. So, if you work on an AI Governance project (research or policy) and are interested in augmenting it with a historical perspective, consider registering your interest and the cruxes of your research here. During this trial period of three to six months, the service is free."History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes." - Mark TwainWhat Problem is Rhyme trying to solve?When we try to answer a complicated question like “how would a Chinese regime change influence the international AI Landscape”, it can be hard to know where to start. We need to come up with a hypothesis, a scenario. But what should we base this hypothesis, this scenario on? How would we know which hypotheses are most plausible? Game theoretical analysis provides one possible inspiration. But we don't just need to know what a rational actor would do, given particular incentives. We also need intuitions for how actors would act irrationally, given specific circumstances.Would we have thought of considering the influence of close familial ties between European leaders when trying to predict the beginning of the first world war? (Clark, 2014)Would we have considered Lyndon B. Johnson's training as a tutor for disadvantaged children as a student when trying to predict his success in convincing congresspeople effectively? (Caro, 1982)Would we have considered the Merino-Wool-Business of a certain diplomat from Geneva when trying to predict whether Switzerland would be annexed by its neighbouring empires in 1815? (E. Pictet, 1892).In summary: A lot of pivotal actions and developments depend on circumstances we wouldn’t expect them to. Not because we’d think them to be implausible, but because we wouldn’t think of considering them. We need inspiration and orientation in this huge space of possible hypotheses to avoid missing out on the ones which are actually true.In an ideal world, AI governance researchers would know about a vast amount of historical literature that is written with enough detail to analyse important decisions, as well as multiple biographies of the same people, so they see where scholars currently disagree. This strategy has two main problems: Firstly, the counterfactual impact these people could have with their time is potentially very big. Secondly, detailed historical literature (which is, often, biographies or primary sources) tends to be written for entertainment, among other things. Biographers have an interest in highlighting maybe irrelevant, but spicy details about romantic relationships, quirky fun jokes told by the person or the etymological origins of the name of a friend. This makes biographies longer than they’d need to be for the goal of analysing the relevant factors in pivotal decisions of a particular person. It takes training to filter through this information to find the actually important stuff.Skills that require training are more efficiently done when a part of an ecosystem specializes in them. Rhyme is an attempt at this specialization.Who could actually use this?The following examples should illustrate who could use this service:Alice is writing a report on the possibilities for the state of California to regulate possible AI uses. They wonder how big the influence of the Governor's advisors was in past regulation attempts of other technologies.Bob wants a brief history of the EU’...