I agree with you, being “a highly cool and well networked EA” and “do things which need to be done” are different goals. This post is heavily influenced by my experience as a new community builder and my perception that, in this situation, being “a highly cool and well networked EA” and “do things which need to be done” are pretty similar. If I wasn’t so sociable and network-y, I’d probably still be running my EA reading group with ~6 participants, which is nice but not “doing things which need to be done”. For technical alignment researchers, this is probably less the case, though still much more than I would’ve expected.
This post is heavily influenced by my experience as a new community builder and my perception that, in this situation, being “a highly cool and well networked EA” and “do things which need to be done” are pretty similar
Even though these two goals may lead to similar instrumental actions (e.g. doing important work), I think these two goals grow different motivational structures inside of you. I recently wrote:
It’s not that my actions were wrong, it’s that I did them for the wrong reasons, and that really does matter. Under my model, the cognitive causes (e.g. I want to be like EY) of externally visible actions (study math) are very important, because I think that the responsible cognition gets reinforced into my future action-generators.
For example, since I wanted to be like Eliezer Yudkowsky, I learned math; since I learned math, I got praised on LessWrong; since I got praised, my social-reward circuitry activated; since the social-reward circuitry activated, credit assignment activates and strengthens all of the preceding thoughts which I just listed, therefore making me more of the kind of person who does things because he wants to be like EY.
I can write a similar story for doing things because they are predicted to make me more respected. Therefore, over time, I became more of the kind of person who cares about being respected, and not so much about succeeding at alignment or truly becoming stronger.
Separating out how important networking is for different kinds of roles seems valuable, not only for the people trying to climb the ladder but also for the people already on the ladder. (e.g., maybe some of these folks desperate to find good people to own valuable projects that otherwise wouldn’t get done should be putting more effort into recruiting outside of the Bay.)
I feel like that’s a good argument for why hanging around the cool, smart people can be good for “skilling up”. But a lot of the value of meeting cool, smart people seems to come from developing good models! and surely it’s possible to build good models of e.g community building, AI safety by doing self-directed study, and occasionally reaching out with specific questions as they arise. I think it’s important to split up the value of meeting cool, smart people into A) networking and social signalling, and B) building better models. And maybe we should be focusing on B.
I agree with you, being “a highly cool and well networked EA” and “do things which need to be done” are different goals. This post is heavily influenced by my experience as a new community builder and my perception that, in this situation, being “a highly cool and well networked EA” and “do things which need to be done” are pretty similar. If I wasn’t so sociable and network-y, I’d probably still be running my EA reading group with ~6 participants, which is nice but not “doing things which need to be done”. For technical alignment researchers, this is probably less the case, though still much more than I would’ve expected.
Even though these two goals may lead to similar instrumental actions (e.g. doing important work), I think these two goals grow different motivational structures inside of you. I recently wrote:
Separating out how important networking is for different kinds of roles seems valuable, not only for the people trying to climb the ladder but also for the people already on the ladder. (e.g., maybe some of these folks desperate to find good people to own valuable projects that otherwise wouldn’t get done should be putting more effort into recruiting outside of the Bay.)
I feel like that’s a good argument for why hanging around the cool, smart people can be good for “skilling up”. But a lot of the value of meeting cool, smart people seems to come from developing good models! and surely it’s possible to build good models of e.g community building, AI safety by doing self-directed study, and occasionally reaching out with specific questions as they arise. I think it’s important to split up the value of meeting cool, smart people into A) networking and social signalling, and B) building better models. And maybe we should be focusing on B.