I think if we want people to leave EA build skills and experience and come back and share those with the community the community could do a better job at listening to those skills and experience. I wanted to share my story in case useful:
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My experience is of going away, learning a bunch of new things, coming back and saying hey here are some new things but mostly people seem to say that’s nice and keep on doing the old things.
As a concrete example, as one thing among many, I ended up going and talking to people who work in corporate risk management and national risk management and counterterrorism. And I find out that the non-EA expert community worry about putting too much weight on probability estimates over other ways of judging risks and I come back and say things like: hey are we focusing too much of forecasts and using probabilistic risk management tools rather than more up-to-date best practice management tools.
And then what.
I do of course post online and talk to people. But it is hard to tell what this achieves. There are minimal feedback loops and EA organisations don’t have sufficient transparency of their plans for me to tell if my efforts amount to anything. Maybe it was all find all along and no one was making these kinds of mistakes, or maybe I said “hey there is a better way here” and everyone changed what they are doing or maybe the non-EA experts are all wrong and EAs know better than there is a good reason to think this.
I don’t know but I don’t see much change.
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Now of course this is super hard!!
Identifying useful input is heard. It is hard to tell apart a “hey I am new to the community and don’t understand important cruxes and think thing x is wrong and am not actually saying anything particularly new” from “hey I left the community for 10 years but have a decent grasp of key cruxes and have a very good reason why the community gets thing x wrong and it is super valuable to listen to me”.
It can even be hard for the person saying these things to know what category they fall in. I don’t know if my experiences should suggest a radical shift in how EAs think or are already well known.
And communication is hard here. People who have left the community for a while wont be fully up-to-date with everything or have deep connections or know how to speak the EA-speak.
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So if we value people leaving and learning then we should as a community make an effort to value them on this return. I like your ideas. I think celebrating such people and improving community support structures needs to happen. I am not sure how best to do this. Maybe a red-team org that works with people returning to the community to asses and spread their expertise. Maybe a prize for people bringing back such experience. I also think much more transparency about organisations theories of change and strategy would help people at least get a sense of how organisations work and what if anything is changing.
I think if we want people to leave EA build skills and experience and come back and share those with the community the community could do a better job at listening to those skills and experience. I wanted to share my story in case useful:
– –
My experience is of going away, learning a bunch of new things, coming back and saying hey here are some new things but mostly people seem to say that’s nice and keep on doing the old things.
As a concrete example, as one thing among many, I ended up going and talking to people who work in corporate risk management and national risk management and counterterrorism. And I find out that the non-EA expert community worry about putting too much weight on probability estimates over other ways of judging risks and I come back and say things like: hey are we focusing too much of forecasts and using probabilistic risk management tools rather than more up-to-date best practice management tools.
And then what.
I do of course post online and talk to people. But it is hard to tell what this achieves. There are minimal feedback loops and EA organisations don’t have sufficient transparency of their plans for me to tell if my efforts amount to anything. Maybe it was all find all along and no one was making these kinds of mistakes, or maybe I said “hey there is a better way here” and everyone changed what they are doing or maybe the non-EA experts are all wrong and EAs know better than there is a good reason to think this.
I don’t know but I don’t see much change.
– –
Now of course this is super hard!!
Identifying useful input is heard. It is hard to tell apart a “hey I am new to the community and don’t understand important cruxes and think thing x is wrong and am not actually saying anything particularly new” from “hey I left the community for 10 years but have a decent grasp of key cruxes and have a very good reason why the community gets thing x wrong and it is super valuable to listen to me”.
It can even be hard for the person saying these things to know what category they fall in. I don’t know if my experiences should suggest a radical shift in how EAs think or are already well known.
And communication is hard here. People who have left the community for a while wont be fully up-to-date with everything or have deep connections or know how to speak the EA-speak.
– –
So if we value people leaving and learning then we should as a community make an effort to value them on this return. I like your ideas. I think celebrating such people and improving community support structures needs to happen. I am not sure how best to do this. Maybe a red-team org that works with people returning to the community to asses and spread their expertise. Maybe a prize for people bringing back such experience. I also think much more transparency about organisations theories of change and strategy would help people at least get a sense of how organisations work and what if anything is changing.