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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: Update on GPI's activities and plans for 2022, published by Global Priorities Institute on January 28, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This post gives a summary of the Global Priorities Institute’s activities from late 2020 to late 2021 and our priorities and plans for 2022. Introduction and summary GPI is a young research institute, formally established in early 2018. By the end of 2018, we had hired our first postdocs, and settled on an initial research focus of “longtermism”: roughly, the idea that the most cost-effective opportunities to do good are matters of influencing the course of the very far future, on timescales of thousands or even millions of years, rather than focussing on how things go (say) within our own lifetimes. We have continuously grown our team since then, with now 15 full-time researchers on our staff. The academic year 2020-21 has been an exciting year for GPI. One highlight has been welcoming and integrating our first two full-time postdoctoral researchers in economics, enabling us to begin building up the economics arm of GPI in earnest. As part of a strategy of investigating possible diversifications of our research agenda within philosophy, we also added a specialist in political philosophy to our philosophy team, and conducted some exciting preliminary exploration of mission-aligned research directions related to “politics and institutions”. And despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were able to develop increasingly close collaborations with various external researchers on topics central to GPI’s mission and continued to build a broad base of earlier-stage contacts via an active program of online workshops. Over the coming year, in addition to building on existing lines of progress, our key priorities include building a network of researchers across a wider range of academic disciplines (including psychology, law and history) who share an interest in GPI’s central research themes, and developing a major project on long-run forecasting. Major activities Research Research output This year, GPI researchers have collectively produced a total of seven new working papers on topics central to GPI’s mission, placed seven such papers newly under review at top academic journals, and had two such papers accepted for publication. Details on our new working papers are in the Appendix, and all GPI working papers can be found on our website. Research exploration Since GPI takes very seriously the imperative to produce research that is optimised to further its distinctive mission, we spend a significant proportion of our research time on exploration that is aimed at mapping out and uncovering ideas for projects that meet this description, alongside the “exploitation” work that turns existing ideas into finished research products. A major area of exploration this past year was “Institutions”. We ran a year-long pilot project to assess whether GPI should expand its research foci in directions related to politics and institutions. We identified several more specific research topics that the pilot group members were excited about. These include (1) increasing returns and thresholds in the context of pursuing social/political change, and to what extent these phenomena undermine “neglectedness” as a heuristic for expected impact; (2) whether impartial altruists should favour more or less centralisation, consolidation and uniformity of institutions; and (3) how to represent the interests of future generations (and other non-voters) within democratic political institutions. Further investigation of these three topics is underway: Jacob Barrett and Loren Fryxell are co-authoring a paper on (1), and plan to convene additional working groups to undertake deeper dives into (2) and (3). We also ran additional exploratory working groups on “the v...