Writing as a comment because it didn’t feel very central to the post. I want to share some thoughts on my motivation to write this post and how it evolved. Initially, I was going to write a slightly different post which emphasised the following points:
We’re relatively overreporting successes and underreporting mistakes, failures, or lessons learned. (pretty strong claim)
It’s difficult to quantify what is “enough” of the “right type” of discourse. This feels inherently fuzzy. It’s not just about the quantity of posts—I think the “right” level of discourse would make me feel like I’m getting exposed to lots of peoples’ internal models or hypotheses on how they expected things to go, and how they went wrong, and compare their models to mine to try and figure out if I could avoid making the mistakes they are making.
Other community members could find it valuable to read about those experiences (medium strength claim)
It would help them develop better models and thus make better decisions
It could help them feel less alone
It’s worth the cost for actors to invest more time into such reflection (somewhat confident claim)
I was motivated to write this for three reasons:
Despite having strong values of transparency in EA, there still feel like strong disincentives to write about our failures. The whole set-up of EA is kind of like “other people made mistakes, and we’re going to do better”. That sets a pretty high bar for trying new things, or sharing “dumb mistakes” (or “dumb questions”). Of course, if the bar is set too low, you might have much less impact than you could otherwise. But if it’s too high it could disincentivize people from trying things.
The recent influx of FTX funding, as well as the uptick in interest around EA entrepreneurship and people starting more, and more ambitious, projects means that we are likely to see more failed early-stage EA projects. I wasn’t sure how we’d deal with this
I felt there isn’t enough transparency around failure in meta, despite the amount of uncertainty. It may be that we just don’t make that many mistakes—that seems very unlikely. When I reflect on my own time in community building, I’ve changed my mind many times (and continue to do so), most major meta organisations have as well.
While writing this post the feedback I got made me realise that rather than just advocating for “more of X” it would be more valuable to help people by providing heuristics for making decisions on how and when to engage in failure discourse.
Thanks for sharing your motivations! Personally, I would have liked to read your original post, even if it was more one-sided, and got the other side elsewhere. Being helped with heuristics for making decisions is not really what I was looking for in this post—it feels paternalistic and contrived in me, and I’d enjoy you advocating earnestly for more of something you think is good.
Writing as a comment because it didn’t feel very central to the post. I want to share some thoughts on my motivation to write this post and how it evolved. Initially, I was going to write a slightly different post which emphasised the following points:
We’re relatively overreporting successes and underreporting mistakes, failures, or lessons learned. (pretty strong claim)
It’s difficult to quantify what is “enough” of the “right type” of discourse. This feels inherently fuzzy. It’s not just about the quantity of posts—I think the “right” level of discourse would make me feel like I’m getting exposed to lots of peoples’ internal models or hypotheses on how they expected things to go, and how they went wrong, and compare their models to mine to try and figure out if I could avoid making the mistakes they are making.
Other community members could find it valuable to read about those experiences (medium strength claim)
It would help them develop better models and thus make better decisions
It could help them feel less alone
It’s worth the cost for actors to invest more time into such reflection (somewhat confident claim)
I was motivated to write this for three reasons:
Despite having strong values of transparency in EA, there still feel like strong disincentives to write about our failures. The whole set-up of EA is kind of like “other people made mistakes, and we’re going to do better”. That sets a pretty high bar for trying new things, or sharing “dumb mistakes” (or “dumb questions”). Of course, if the bar is set too low, you might have much less impact than you could otherwise. But if it’s too high it could disincentivize people from trying things.
The recent influx of FTX funding, as well as the uptick in interest around EA entrepreneurship and people starting more, and more ambitious, projects means that we are likely to see more failed early-stage EA projects. I wasn’t sure how we’d deal with this
I felt there isn’t enough transparency around failure in meta, despite the amount of uncertainty. It may be that we just don’t make that many mistakes—that seems very unlikely. When I reflect on my own time in community building, I’ve changed my mind many times (and continue to do so), most major meta organisations have as well.
While writing this post the feedback I got made me realise that rather than just advocating for “more of X” it would be more valuable to help people by providing heuristics for making decisions on how and when to engage in failure discourse.
Thanks for sharing your motivations! Personally, I would have liked to read your original post, even if it was more one-sided, and got the other side elsewhere. Being helped with heuristics for making decisions is not really what I was looking for in this post—it feels paternalistic and contrived in me, and I’d enjoy you advocating earnestly for more of something you think is good.