I’m thinking more along the line of mentors for the mentors, and I think one solution would be a platform on which to crowd source ideas for individuals’ ten-year strategic plan. In a perfect world, one would be able to donate one’s talents (in addition to one’s money) to the EA cause, which could then be strategically deployed by an all-seeing EA director. Maybe MIRI could work on that.
MIRI is focussing on mathematical AI safety research at the moment, so they wouldn’t currently want to act as a director of EA resources in general!!
I think for people who really have substantial personal non-monetary resources to give away, there are people who are prepared to step into a temporary advice-giving role, which might not even be so materially different from what you’re describing. even with my limited non-monetary resources, I’ve got quite helpful advice from people like Carl Shulman, Nick Beckstead and Paul Christiano, who I think are somewhat of a collective miscellaneous-problem-EA-question-answerer!!
Mentoring the mentors: the problem with giving advice to senior people is that if you know less about their domain than they do, then your advice might well make them worse off. So in such cases, it’s often preferable to bring you together with similar people, so that you can bounce ideas off one another. Or maybe I’m still missing some considerations, but these reservations seem worth taking into account.
I’m thinking more along the line of mentors for the mentors, and I think one solution would be a platform on which to crowd source ideas for individuals’ ten-year strategic plan. In a perfect world, one would be able to donate one’s talents (in addition to one’s money) to the EA cause, which could then be strategically deployed by an all-seeing EA director. Maybe MIRI could work on that.
MIRI is focussing on mathematical AI safety research at the moment, so they wouldn’t currently want to act as a director of EA resources in general!!
I think for people who really have substantial personal non-monetary resources to give away, there are people who are prepared to step into a temporary advice-giving role, which might not even be so materially different from what you’re describing. even with my limited non-monetary resources, I’ve got quite helpful advice from people like Carl Shulman, Nick Beckstead and Paul Christiano, who I think are somewhat of a collective miscellaneous-problem-EA-question-answerer!!
Mentoring the mentors: the problem with giving advice to senior people is that if you know less about their domain than they do, then your advice might well make them worse off. So in such cases, it’s often preferable to bring you together with similar people, so that you can bounce ideas off one another. Or maybe I’m still missing some considerations, but these reservations seem worth taking into account.
Thanks, Ryan. That’s all very helpful.
(And the MIRI reference was a superintelligent AI joke.)
Haha ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!