I did write something that builds on it, yeah. It was about defining various proxies to optimize for (e.g., money, societal influence, connections to other EA organizations, followers of the organization’s newsletter (with near-term EA as their main interest), value-aligned people with computer science expertise, etc.) and how well they do in futures where we decide different interventions are most important. I didn’t want to make it public because it felt unpolished, and I was worried that some of the proxies could give outsiders the impression of instrumentalizing people.
Someone even helped me with excel to produce a heat map of the results weighted by probability we assign to various interventions mattering the most, and at the time this helped me clarify objections I had to EAF’s 2015/2016 strategic direction (we interacted little with other EA orgs and tried to build up capacity with animal advocacy, but always promote cause neutrality with the intent of maybe pivoting to other causes later). It didn’t lead to many important changes right away, but we made major changes in 2017 that strongly reflected the takeaways I had sketched in those documents.
I did write something that builds on it, yeah. It was about defining various proxies to optimize for (e.g., money, societal influence, connections to other EA organizations, followers of the organization’s newsletter (with near-term EA as their main interest), value-aligned people with computer science expertise, etc.) and how well they do in futures where we decide different interventions are most important. I didn’t want to make it public because it felt unpolished, and I was worried that some of the proxies could give outsiders the impression of instrumentalizing people.
Someone even helped me with excel to produce a heat map of the results weighted by probability we assign to various interventions mattering the most, and at the time this helped me clarify objections I had to EAF’s 2015/2016 strategic direction (we interacted little with other EA orgs and tried to build up capacity with animal advocacy, but always promote cause neutrality with the intent of maybe pivoting to other causes later). It didn’t lead to many important changes right away, but we made major changes in 2017 that strongly reflected the takeaways I had sketched in those documents.