My 2 cents is a shift in mindset. It’s related to 3.
In my experience, the elephant in the brain is that most of us, most of the time, are still optimizing for approval 90% and value 10%. If you manage to snap out of that, you’ll suddenly see that there is a lot of unacknowledged value out there.
Not because anyone’s intentionally ignoring things, but because the people and organisations that have the position to acknowledge value are busy, and imperfect. They haven’t thought of everything. They don’t have everything in control. They’re not your superiors. The only difference between them and you is that they realized that there’s no fire alarm for adulthood. You won’t wake up one day and realise that you are now wise and able to handle everything.
The terrifying truth is that there are not enough adults in the room. You are, in some broad sense, the most responsible individual here. No one can tell you what to do. So now you have to take ownership of these problems and personally see to it that they are solved. It’s terrifying, but it’s necessary.
In some sense, we’re not going to make it without your help.
It’s been said that EA is vetting constrained, but in some deep sense it’s more like that EA (and the world) is constrained on the amount of people that don’t need to be told what to do.
So build up that skill of making decisions that you would feel comfortable about even if a large amount of people scrutinized you for it. Then start acting as if a large amount of superintelligent and reasonable people are scrutinizing you with the expectation that you will personally take care of everything. If you can handle that pressure, it’s the best prompt I’ve found to get myself to start generating plenty of work to do. Much more than I can do on my own.
It’s been said that EA is vetting constrained, but in some deep sense it’s more like that EA (and the world) is constrained on the amount of people that don’t need to be told what to do.
Great, I feel less crazy when other people have the same thoughts as me. From my comment a week ago:
The high-profile EA orgs are not bottlenecked on “structure” or “network”; they’re bottlenecked because there’s a hundred people requiring management for every one person willing to manage others.
I strongly feel this is incorrect. Coordination is incredibly expensive, is already a major pain point and source of duplication and wasted effort, and having lots of self-directed go-getters will make that worse.
Yes. This makes me think of investor Keith Rabois’ notion of “barrels” vs “ammunition”:
If you think about people, there are two categories of high-quality people: there is the ammunition, and then there are the barrels. You can add all the ammunition you want, but if you have only five barrels in your company, you can literally do only five things simultaneously. If you add one more barrel, you can now do six things simultaneously. If you add another one, you can do seven, and so on. Finding those barrels that you can shoot through — someone who can take an idea from conception to live and it’s almost perfect — are incredibly difficult to find. This kind of person can pull people with them. They can charge up the hill. They can motivate their team, and they can edit themselves autonomously. Whenever you find a barrel, you should hire them instantly, regardless of whether you have money for them or whether you have a role for them. Just close them.
I am unsure about the net value of encouraging people to simply need less management and wait for less approval.
Some (most?) people do need guidance until they are able to run projects independently and successfully, ignoring the need doesn’t make it go away.
The unilateralist’s curse is scary. A lot of decisions about EA network growth and strategy that the core organizations have come to are rather counter-intuitive to most of us until we got the chance to talk it through with someone who has spent significant amounts of time thinking about them.
Even with value-aligned actors, coordination might become close to impossible if we accelerate the amount of nodes without accelerating the development of culture. I currently prefer preserving the option of coordination being possible over “many individuals try different things because coordination seemed too difficult a problem to overcome”.
My 2 cents is a shift in mindset. It’s related to 3.
In my experience, the elephant in the brain is that most of us, most of the time, are still optimizing for approval 90% and value 10%. If you manage to snap out of that, you’ll suddenly see that there is a lot of unacknowledged value out there.
Not because anyone’s intentionally ignoring things, but because the people and organisations that have the position to acknowledge value are busy, and imperfect. They haven’t thought of everything. They don’t have everything in control. They’re not your superiors. The only difference between them and you is that they realized that there’s no fire alarm for adulthood. You won’t wake up one day and realise that you are now wise and able to handle everything.
The terrifying truth is that there are not enough adults in the room. You are, in some broad sense, the most responsible individual here. No one can tell you what to do. So now you have to take ownership of these problems and personally see to it that they are solved. It’s terrifying, but it’s necessary.
In some sense, we’re not going to make it without your help.
It’s been said that EA is vetting constrained, but in some deep sense it’s more like that EA (and the world) is constrained on the amount of people that don’t need to be told what to do.
So build up that skill of making decisions that you would feel comfortable about even if a large amount of people scrutinized you for it. Then start acting as if a large amount of superintelligent and reasonable people are scrutinizing you with the expectation that you will personally take care of everything. If you can handle that pressure, it’s the best prompt I’ve found to get myself to start generating plenty of work to do. Much more than I can do on my own.
Great, I feel less crazy when other people have the same thoughts as me. From my comment a week ago:
I strongly feel this is incorrect. Coordination is incredibly expensive, is already a major pain point and source of duplication and wasted effort, and having lots of self-directed go-getters will make that worse.
Yes. This makes me think of investor Keith Rabois’ notion of “barrels” vs “ammunition”:
The attitude you’re describing reminds me of the attitude that Keith Rabois refers to as a “barrel.”
I’d love to hear why this got downvoted. Am I missing something?
Didn’t downvote but my two cents:
I am unsure about the net value of encouraging people to simply need less management and wait for less approval.
Some (most?) people do need guidance until they are able to run projects independently and successfully, ignoring the need doesn’t make it go away.
The unilateralist’s curse is scary. A lot of decisions about EA network growth and strategy that the core organizations have come to are rather counter-intuitive to most of us until we got the chance to talk it through with someone who has spent significant amounts of time thinking about them.
Even with value-aligned actors, coordination might become close to impossible if we accelerate the amount of nodes without accelerating the development of culture. I currently prefer preserving the option of coordination being possible over “many individuals try different things because coordination seemed too difficult a problem to overcome”.