This is an essay that I wrote to a colleague at Palisade, articulating why I feel unsatisfied with goals and projects that others on the team (on average) feel more enthusiastic about. It describes one aspect of how I, personally, am doing strategic analysis and choosing which projects to invest in.

Related: Compounding Resource X

Bricks for a wall

Say you need 70 million bricks to build a wall. You also need architects and builders, and 50,000 tonnes of mortar (all which you also don’t have right now), but you'll eventually need 70 million bricks,). You can maybe get away with using only 50 million bricks, if you rely on clever architectural tricks, but less than that is not going to cut it.

You ran a labor-intensive 6 month project to make 100,000 bricks.

Now, one of three things could happen:

Someone (including you), is using the bricks that you made to build kilns, which can make many more bricks. You are contributing to a self-reinforcing industrial process that is producing an order of magnitude more bricks each year. [You’re upstream of an exponential]
Someone starts a rapidly-growing brick-making school, which will churn out another 1000 brick maker [...]

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Outline:

(00:34) Bricks for a wall

(03:32) Little shifts in worldview for changing society

(05:31) The actual situation

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
August 31st, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hivfo4qM8zW4oDAFk/bricks-and-exponentials-a-note-on-how-i-evaluate-projects

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Bricks and exponentials: A note on how I evaluate projects” by Eli Tyre

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Bricks and exponentials: A note on how I evaluate projects” by Eli Tyre