EA - Scalable longtermist projects: Speedrun series – Introduction by Buhl

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: Scalable longtermist projects: Speedrun series – Introduction, published by Buhl on February 7, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is the introductory post in a sequence showcasing a series of mini-research projects (“speedruns”) into scalable longtermist projects, conducted by Rethink Priorities’ General Longtermism Team in the fall of 2022. Each speedrun involved an initial scoping and evaluation of an idea for a scalable longtermist project, to try to identify if the project could be a top candidate for our team to try to bring about.This post explains how and why you might want to use the speedruns. The appendix contains additional information about how and why we produced the speedruns.Who is this sequence for?We imagine the speedruns might be interesting to:Potential longtermist entrepreneurs who might want to use the speedruns as a source of information and inspiration when deciding what projects to work on.Potential funders of entrepreneurial longtermist projects (for the same reason).Researchers who might be interested in looking further into any of the project ideas.(Aspiring) junior researchers interested in empirical global priorities research who might want to use the speedruns as an example of what such research can look like.Stakeholders and the public interested in Rethink Priorities’ General Longtermism team who might want to use the speedruns as an insight into how we work, such as potential funders and job applicants.Things to keep in mind when using the speedrunsThe speedruns are very preliminary and should not be considered the final word on whether a project is promising or not. They were written by junior generalists, and we spent only ~15h on each, prioritizing speed (surprise surprise) over depth and rigor. So they likely contain mistakes, miss important information, and include poor takes. We would have conducted a more in-depth investigation before launching any of these projects (and recommend that others do the same).The project ideas covered in the speedruns are very exploratory and tentative. They are not plans for what RP will work on, but just ideas for what RP could consider working on.The three speedruns in this series should not be considered as “the three most promising projects in our view”. “Project promisingness” was not a criterion in deciding which speedruns to publish (more on how we chose which speedruns to publish in the Appendix). That said, all topics we conducted speedruns on scored relatively highly on an internal weighted factor model.Opinions on whether a given project is worth pursuing will differ for people in a different position to our team. The speedruns were conducted with the specific aim of helping our team figure out which projects to spend further resources on. So they take into account factors that are specific to our team and strategy, such as our relative fit to work on the project in question.We have not updated the conclusions of the speedrun to reflect the recent changes to the funding situation. The speedruns were all conducted before the drastic changes in the EA funding landscape towards the end of 2022, and so they operate with a rough cost-effectiveness bar that is probably outdated.Overview of the sequenceSo far, we are planning for this series to contain 3 of the 13 speedruns we conducted in fall 2022. There’s no particular order we recommend reading them in.The speedruns we’re planning to include in this sequence (so far) are:Developing an affordable super PPECreate AI alignment prizes [coming up later this week]Demonstrate the ability to rapidly scale food production in the case of nuclear winter [coming up later this week]These are the speedruns that (a) did not develop into longer-term research projects which might have other publishable outputs, and (b) were cl...