One angle on how this could go poorly is something I call ‘failure cascades’ (a la information cascade). I’m excited that this has been incorporated as a concept in the EA Ops channel, and I think it would be valuable for EA consultants to keep it in mind.
Roughly, a failure cascade could be: > An EA consultancy conducts a search for a really good immigration law firm that they can use when helping EA orgs with immigration. They find a good law firm and proceed to help a dozen EA orgs with visas. Unfortunately it turns out this law firm misunderstood an important component of the H1B renewal process, and suddenly three years later a bunch of EAs across the ecosystem get kicked out of the USA. So a single judgment failure ‘cascades’ across the organizations, causing a relatively catastrophic situation for the community compared to a world where infrastructure/judgment was less centralized.
One angle on how this could go poorly is something I call ‘failure cascades’ (a la information cascade). I’m excited that this has been incorporated as a concept in the EA Ops channel, and I think it would be valuable for EA consultants to keep it in mind.
Roughly, a failure cascade could be:
> An EA consultancy conducts a search for a really good immigration law firm that they can use when helping EA orgs with immigration. They find a good law firm and proceed to help a dozen EA orgs with visas. Unfortunately it turns out this law firm misunderstood an important component of the H1B renewal process, and suddenly three years later a bunch of EAs across the ecosystem get kicked out of the USA. So a single judgment failure ‘cascades’ across the organizations, causing a relatively catastrophic situation for the community compared to a world where infrastructure/judgment was less centralized.