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: Compounding Resource X, published by Raemon on January 11, 2023 on LessWrong.

A concept I got from Anna Salamon, and maybe also from my coworker Jacob Lagerros, although I haven't run this by either of them and they may not endorse my phrasing. I think I probably run with it in a different direction than Anna would endorse.

Epistemic effort: thought about it for a few hours. Basic concept makes sense to me. If it doesn't make sense to you, let me and maybe we can talk-cruxes.

Say you have a problem you don't know how to solve, and seems computationally intractable to strategize about. There are a few ways to go about solving it anyway. But one idea is to follow a heuristic where you look for Resource X, where X has two properties:

X compounds over time

If you have a lot of X, you win.

Say you're playing the game "Chess", or you're playing the game "The Stock Market."

In the stock market, money compounds fairly straightforwardly. You invest money, it results in you getting more money. If you're ultimate goal is either to have a lot of money, or spend a lot of money on a thing, then you win. Hurray. In Chess, you can't calculate all the moves in advance, but, you can try to gain control of the center of the board. “Control over the center” tends to help you gain more control over the center, and if you have enough of it, you win.

Why does it matter that it "compound?". In this scenario you've decided you're trying to win by applying a lot of resource X. If you're starting out without much X, you need some kind of story for how you're going to get enough. If you need 1,000,000 metaphorical units of X within 10 years, and you only have 10 (or, zero).... well, maybe you can linearly gain X at a rate of 100,000 per year. Maybe you could find a strategy that doesn't get any X at all and then suddenly gets all 1,000,000 at the last second. But in practice, if you're starting with a little bit of something, getting a lot of it tends to involve some compounding mechanism.

If you're creating a startup, users can help you get more users. They spread awareness via worth of mouth which grows over time, and in some cases by creating network effects that make other users find your product more valuable. They also, of course, can get you more money, which you can invest in more employees, infrastructure or advertising.

My coworker Jacob used to ask a similar question, re: strategizing at Lightcone Infrastructure. We're trying to provide a lot of value to the world. We currently seem to be providing... some. We're a nonprofit, not a business. But we are trying to deliver a billion dollars worth of value to the world. If we're not currently doing that, we need to have a concrete story for how our current strategy gets us there, or we need to switch strategies.

If our current strategy isn't generating millions of dollars worth of value per month, either we should be able to explain clearly where "the compounding piece" of our strategy is, or our strategy probably isn't very good.

Note: in the chess example, "control over the center" is a particularly non-obvious resource. If you're staring at a chess board, there's lots of actions you could hypothetically take, and a lot of abstractions you could possibly make up to help you reason about them. "Control over the center of the board" is an abstraction that requires accumulated experience to discover, and requires some minimum threshold of experience to even understand. (Note: I myself do not really understand how to "control the center", but I repeated this story to a few chess players and they nodded along as if it made sense).

So, bear in mind that Resource X might be something subtle.

Resource X for "Solve AGI"

Say the problem you're trying to solve is "AGI is gonna kill everyone in 10-40 years", and you're in a preparadigmatic field t...