I recently spent ~2 hours reflecting on RPās longtermism departmentās wins, mistakes, and lessons learned from our first year[1] and possible visions for 2022. Iāll lightly adapt the ālessons learned for Michael specificallyā part of that into a comment here, since it seems relevant to what youāre trying to get at here; I guess a more effective person in my role would match my current strengths but also already be nailing all the following things. (I guess hopefully within a year Iāll ~match that description myself.)
(Bear in mind that this wasnāt originally written for public consumption, skips over my āwinsā, etc.)
āFocus more
Concrete implications:
Probably leave FHI (or effectively scale down to 0-0.1 FTE) and turn down EA Infrastructure Fund guest manager extension (if offered it)
Say no to side things more often
Start fewer posts, or abandon more posts faster so I can get other ones done
Do 80ā20 versions of stuff more often
Work on getting more efficient at e.g. reviewing docs
Reasons:
To more consistently finish things and to higher standards (rather than having a higher number of unfinished or lower quality things)
And to mitigate possible stress on my part, [personal thing], and to leave more room for things like exercise
And to be more robust against personal life stuff or whatever
(I mean something like: My current slow-ish progress on my main tasks is even with working parts of each weekend, so if e.g. I had to suddenly fly back to Australia because a family member was seriously ill, Iād end up dropping various balls Iāve somewhat committed to not dropping.)
Maybe trust my initial excitement less regarding what projects/āposts to pour time into and what ideas to promote, and relatedly put more effort into learning from the views and thinking of more senior people with good judgement and domain expertise
E.g., focus decently hard on making the AI gov stuff go well, since that involves doing stuff Luke thinks is useful and learning from Luke
Maybe pay more attention to scale and relatedly to whether an important decision-maker is likely to actually act on this
Some people really do have a good chance of acting in very big ways on some stuff I could do
But by default I might not factor that into my decisions enough, instead just being helpful to whoever is in front of me or pursuing whatever ideas seem good to me and maybe would get karma
Implement standard productivity advice more, or at least try it out
Iāll break this down more in the habits part of my template for meetings with Peter
[Iām also now trying productivity coaching]
Spend less time planning projects in detail, and be more aware things will change in unexpected ways
Be more realistic when making plans, predictions, and timelines
(No, really)
Including assuming management will take more time than expected, at least given how I currently do it
Spend more time, and get better at, forming and expressing hot takes
Spend less time/āwords comprehensively listing ideas/āconsiderations/āwhatever
More often organise posts/ādocs conceptually or at least by importance rather than alphabetically or not at all
Be more strict with myself regarding exercise and bedtime
Indeed optimise a fair bit for research management careers rather than pure research careers
This was already my guess when I joined, but Iāve become more confident about itā
[1] I mean the first year of the current version of RPās longtermism department; Luisa Rodriguez previously did (very cool!) longtermism work at RP, but then there was a gap between her leaving (as a staff member; sheās now on the board) and the current staff joining.
Thank you for being vulnerable enough to share this!
It sounds like youāre focusing a lot on working on the right things (and by extension, fewer things)? And then becoming more efficient at the underlying skills (ex: explaining, writing, etc.) involved?
Yeah, though Iām also aiming to work on fewer things as āa goal in itselfā, not just as a byproduct of slicing off the things that are less important or less my comparative advantage. This is because more focus seems useful on order to become really excellent at a set of things, ensure I more regularly actually finish things, and reduce the inefficiencies caused by frequent task/ācontext-switching.
I recently spent ~2 hours reflecting on RPās longtermism departmentās wins, mistakes, and lessons learned from our first year[1] and possible visions for 2022. Iāll lightly adapt the ālessons learned for Michael specificallyā part of that into a comment here, since it seems relevant to what youāre trying to get at here; I guess a more effective person in my role would match my current strengths but also already be nailing all the following things. (I guess hopefully within a year Iāll ~match that description myself.)
(Bear in mind that this wasnāt originally written for public consumption, skips over my āwinsā, etc.)
āFocus more
Concrete implications:
Probably leave FHI (or effectively scale down to 0-0.1 FTE) and turn down EA Infrastructure Fund guest manager extension (if offered it)
Say no to side things more often
Start fewer posts, or abandon more posts faster so I can get other ones done
Do 80ā20 versions of stuff more often
Work on getting more efficient at e.g. reviewing docs
Reasons:
To more consistently finish things and to higher standards (rather than having a higher number of unfinished or lower quality things)
And to mitigate possible stress on my part, [personal thing], and to leave more room for things like exercise
And to be more robust against personal life stuff or whatever
(I mean something like: My current slow-ish progress on my main tasks is even with working parts of each weekend, so if e.g. I had to suddenly fly back to Australia because a family member was seriously ill, Iād end up dropping various balls Iāve somewhat committed to not dropping.)
Maybe trust my initial excitement less regarding what projects/āposts to pour time into and what ideas to promote, and relatedly put more effort into learning from the views and thinking of more senior people with good judgement and domain expertise
E.g., focus decently hard on making the AI gov stuff go well, since that involves doing stuff Luke thinks is useful and learning from Luke
E.g., it was good that I didnāt bother to finish and post my research question database proposal
Maybe pay more attention to scale and relatedly to whether an important decision-maker is likely to actually act on this
Some people really do have a good chance of acting in very big ways on some stuff I could do
But by default I might not factor that into my decisions enough, instead just being helpful to whoever is in front of me or pursuing whatever ideas seem good to me and maybe would get karma
Implement standard productivity advice more, or at least try it out
Iāll break this down more in the habits part of my template for meetings with Peter
[Iām also now trying productivity coaching]
Spend less time planning projects in detail, and be more aware things will change in unexpected ways
Be more realistic when making plans, predictions, and timelines
(No, really)
Including assuming management will take more time than expected, at least given how I currently do it
Spend more time, and get better at, forming and expressing hot takes
Spend less time/āwords comprehensively listing ideas/āconsiderations/āwhatever
More often organise posts/ādocs conceptually or at least by importance rather than alphabetically or not at all
Be more strict with myself regarding exercise and bedtime
Indeed optimise a fair bit for research management careers rather than pure research careers
This was already my guess when I joined, but Iāve become more confident about itā
[1] I mean the first year of the current version of RPās longtermism department; Luisa Rodriguez previously did (very cool!) longtermism work at RP, but then there was a gap between her leaving (as a staff member; sheās now on the board) and the current staff joining.
Thank you for being vulnerable enough to share this!
It sounds like youāre focusing a lot on working on the right things (and by extension, fewer things)? And then becoming more efficient at the underlying skills (ex: explaining, writing, etc.) involved?
Yeah, though Iām also aiming to work on fewer things as āa goal in itselfā, not just as a byproduct of slicing off the things that are less important or less my comparative advantage. This is because more focus seems useful on order to become really excellent at a set of things, ensure I more regularly actually finish things, and reduce the inefficiencies caused by frequent task/ācontext-switching.