EA - The Rethink Priorities Existential Security Team's Strategy for 2023 by Ben Snodin

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: The Rethink Priorities Existential Security Team's Strategy for 2023, published by Ben Snodin on May 8, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.The Rethink Priorities Existential Security Team's Strategy for 2023SummaryThis post contains a moderately rough, high-level description of the Rethink Priorities Existential Security team’s (XST’s) strategy for the period April-October 2023.XST is a team of researchers focused on improving the world according to a longtermist outlook through research and other projects, and is part of Rethink Priorities (RP).Note that until very recently we were called the General Longtermism team (GLT). We have now renamed ourselves the Existential Security team (XST), which is slightly more descriptive and more closely reflects our focus on reducing existential risk.XST’s three focus areas for 2023 will be:Longtermist entrepreneurship (65%): Making highly impactful longtermist projects happen by finding and developing ideas for highly promising longtermist projects, identifying potential founders, and supporting them as they get these projects started. Our main activities will be:Identifying and detailing the most promising ideas for longtermist projects, with a goal of having ~5 detailed project ideas by the end of June, that we can bring to a potential meeting of talented entrepreneurs in July/August, organized by Mike McCormick.A relatively brief founder-first-style founder search (looking for highly promising founders and finding projects that they are an especially good fit for).Exploring founder-in-residence MVPs (hiring potential founders and giving them space to develop their own ideas for promising projects).Supporting founders once they’re identified.Strategic clarity research (25%): Research that helps shed light on high-level strategic questions relevant for the EA community and for people working on reducing existential risk. This year, we plan to focus on high-level EA movement-building strategy questions (such as “What kind of EA movement do we want?” or “What’s the optimal portfolio among priority cause areas we should aim at building?”), and possibly on high-level questions that seem important for assessing whether and how to help launch entrepreneurial projects. Most of our work on this will happen in the second half of the year.Flexible time for high-impact opportunities (10%): Time allocated for i) team members working on projects that they are very keen on and ii) highly impactful and time-sensitive projects that arise due to changes in external circumstances.Concrete outputs we’ll aim for:5 project idea memos by the end of June that are of a standard equal to or better than the 2023 Q1 megaproject speedruns that we posted on the EA Forum in February.1 strategic clarity research output by the end of October.1 new promising project launched by the end of October.11 publicly shared research or project idea outputs by the end of the year.From mid-May onwards, we’re planning to have 4 FTE executing this strategy: me (Ben), Marie, Jam, and Renan. Linch is pursuing a separate research agenda related to longtermist strategic clarity.The high-level timeline is:[completed] March: The team winds down current projects and begins work on executing the team strategy from the start of April.[in progress] April-July: The team focuses on the entrepreneurship program, and works on founder-first activities, founder support, and project research. The project research is focused on generating a new prioritization model and shallow project ranking by the end of April, and 5 project ideas memos by the end of June for a potential meeting of promising entrepreneurs in July/August.August-October: Jam and Ben continue working on the entrepreneurship program, while Marie and Renan switch to strategic clarity research.Start o...