EA - What’s going on with ‘crunch time’? by rosehadshar

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: What’s going on with ‘crunch time’?, published by rosehadshar on January 20, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Also on LW here.Imagine the set of decisions which impact TAI outcomes.Some of the decisions are more important than others: they have a larger impact on TAI outcomes. We care more about a decision the more important it is.Some of the decisions are also easier to influence than others, and we care more about a decision the easier it is to influence.Decisions in the past are un-influenceableProbably some decisions in the future are too, but it may be hard to identify which onesHow easy it is to influence a decision depends on who you arePeople have access to different sets of people and resourcesInfluence can be more or less in/direct (e.g. how many steps removed are you from the US President)The influenceable decisions are distributed over time, but we don’t know the distribution:Decisions might happen earlier or later (timing/timelines)There might be more or fewer decisions in the setDecisions might be more or less concentrated over time (urgency/duration)There might be discontinuities (only one decision matters, at the right of the distribution suddenly there are no more decisions because takeover has happened.)It’s possible that in the future there might be a particularly concentrated period of important decisions, for example like this:People refer to this concentrated period of important decisions as ‘crunch time’. The distribution might or might not end up actually containing a concentrated period of important decisions - or in other words, crunch time may or may not happen.Where the distribution does contain a concentrated period of important decisions (or at least is sufficiently likely to in expectation), crunch time might be a useful concept to have:It’s a flag to switch modes (e.g. aiming for direct effects rather than getting ourselves into a better position in future)It’s a way of compressing lots of information about the world (e.g. these 15 things have happened with various levels of confidence, which makes us think that these 50 things will happen soon with various probabilities)It’s a concept which can help to coordinate lots of people, which in some crunch time scenarios could be very importantBut we don’t know what the underlying distribution of decisions is. Here are just some of the ways the distribution might look:The fact that the underlying distribution is uncertain means that there are several ways in which crunch time might be an unhelpful concept:Different sorts of concentrated periods of important decisions might differ so much that it’s better to think about them separately.A crunch time lasting a day seems pretty different to one lasting 5 yearsA crunch time where one actor makes one decision seems pretty different to one where many thousands of actors make many thousands of decisionsThe eventual distribution may not contain a single concentrated period of important influenceable decisions.Maybe the most important decisions are in the pastMaybe there will be a gradual decline in the importance of influenceable decisions as humanity becomes increasingly disempoweredMaybe the distribution is lumpy, and there will be many discrete concentrated periods of important decisionsDistributions in different domains, or even for different individuals, might diverge sufficiently that there’s no meaningful single period of important decisionsIt seems unlikely that distributions diverge wildly at the individual level, but I think it’s possible that there might be reasonably different distributions for people who work in government versus in AI labs, for example.It might still be useful to have crunch time as a concept for a particularly concentrated period of important decisions, but only apply it in specific...