Impacts being distributed heavy-tailed has a very psychologically harsh effect given the lack of feedback loops in longtermist fields and I wonder what interpersonal norms one could cultivate amongst friends and the community writ-large (loosely held/purely musing etc.):
Distinguishing pessimism about ideas from pessimism about people.
Ex-ante vs. ex-post critiques.
Celebrating when post-mortems have led to more successful projects.
Mergers/takeover mechanisms of competition between peoples/projects.
I think EAs in the FTX era were leaning hard on hard capital (e.g. mentioning no lean season close down) ignoring the social and psychological parts of taking risk and how we can be a community that recognises heavy-tailed distributions without making it worse for those who are not in the heavy-tail.
Impacts being distributed heavy-tailed has a very psychologically harsh effect given the lack of feedback loops in longtermist fields and I wonder what interpersonal norms one could cultivate amongst friends and the community writ-large (loosely held/purely musing etc.):
Distinguishing pessimism about ideas from pessimism about people.
Ex-ante vs. ex-post critiques.
Celebrating when post-mortems have led to more successful projects.
Mergers/takeover mechanisms of competition between peoples/projects.
I think EAs in the FTX era were leaning hard on hard capital (e.g. mentioning no lean season close down) ignoring the social and psychological parts of taking risk and how we can be a community that recognises heavy-tailed distributions without making it worse for those who are not in the heavy-tail.