I feel as though building a good culture is really quite important, and like this sort of specific proposal & discussion is how, bit by bit, one does that. It seems to me that the default for large groups of would-be collaborators is to waste almost all the available resource due basically to “insufficiently ethical/principled social fabric”.
(My thoughts here are perhaps redundant with Owen’s reply to your comment, but it seems important enough that I wanted to add a separate voice and take.)
Re: how much this matters (or how much is wasted without this), I like the examples in Eliezer’s article on lost purposes or in Scott Alexander’s review of house of god.
The larger EA gets, the easier it is for standard failure modes by effort becomes untethered from real progress, or some homegrown analog, to eat almost all our impact as well. And so the more necessary it is that we really seriously try to figure out what principles can keep our collective epistemology truth-tracking.
I feel as though building a good culture is really quite important, and like this sort of specific proposal & discussion is how, bit by bit, one does that. It seems to me that the default for large groups of would-be collaborators is to waste almost all the available resource due basically to “insufficiently ethical/principled social fabric”.
(My thoughts here are perhaps redundant with Owen’s reply to your comment, but it seems important enough that I wanted to add a separate voice and take.)
Re: how much this matters (or how much is wasted without this), I like the examples in Eliezer’s article on lost purposes or in Scott Alexander’s review of house of god.
The larger EA gets, the easier it is for standard failure modes by effort becomes untethered from real progress, or some homegrown analog, to eat almost all our impact as well. And so the more necessary it is that we really seriously try to figure out what principles can keep our collective epistemology truth-tracking.