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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: Longtermist EA needs more Phase 2 work, published by Owen Cotton-Barratt on April 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. I think there is an issue with the community-wide allocation of effort. A very large proportion of our effort goes into preparation work, setting the community up for future successes; and very little goes into external-focused actions which would be good even if the community disappeared. I'll talk about why I think this is a problem (even though I love preparation work), and what types of things I hope to see more of. Phase 1 and Phase 2 A general strategy for doing good things: Phase 1: acquire resources and work out what to do Phase 2: spend down the resources to do things Note that Phase 2 is the bit where things actually happen. Phase 1 is a necessary step, but on its own it has no impact: it is just preparation for Phase 2. To understand if something is Phase 2 for the longtermist EA community, we could ask “if the entire community disappeared, would the effects still be good for the world?”. For things which are about acquiring resources — raising money, recruiting people, or gaining influence — the answer is no. For much of the research that the community does, the path to impact is either by using the research to gain more influence, or having the research inform future longtermist EA work — so the answer is again no. However, writing an AI alignment textbook would be useful to the world even absent our communities, so would be Phase 2. (Some activities live in a grey area —for example, increasing scope sensitivity or concern for existential risk across broad parts of society.) It makes sense to frontload our Phase 1 activities, but we do want to also do Phase 2 in parallel for several reasons: Doing enough Phase 2 work helps to ground our Phase 1 work by ensuring that it’s targeted at making the Phase 2 stuff go well Moreover we can benefit from the better feedback loops Phase 2 usually has We can’t pivot (orgs, careers) instantly between different activities A certain amount of Phase 2 helps bring in people who are attracted by demonstrated wins We don’t know when the deadline for crucial work is (and some of the best opportunities may only be available early) so we want a portfolio across time So the picture should look something like this: I’m worried that it does not. We aren’t actually doing much Phase 2 work, and we also aren’t spending that much time thinking about what Phase 2 work to be doing. (Although I think we’re slowly improving on these dimensions.) Problem: We are not doing Phase 2 Work When we look at the current longtermist portfolio, there’s very little Phase 2 work. A large majority of our effort is going into acquiring more resources (e.g. campus outreach, or writing books), or into working out what the-type-of-people-who-listen-to-us should do (e.g. global priorities research). This is what we could call an inaction trap. As a community we’re preparing but not acting. (This is a relative of the meta-trap, but we have a whole bunch of object-level work e.g. on AI.) How does AI alignment work fit in? Almost all AI alignment research is Phase 1 — on reasonable timescales it’s aiming to produce insights about what future alignment researchers should investigate (or to gain influence for the researchers), rather than producing things that would leave the world in a better position even if the community walked away. But if AI alignment is the crucial work we need to be doing, and it's almost all Phase 1, could this undermine the claim that we should increase our focus on Phase 2 work? I think not, for two reasons: Lots of people are not well suited to AI alignment work, but there are lots of things that they could productively be working on, even if AI is the major determinant of the future (see below) Even within AI a...