In the absence of proper feedback loops, we will feel like we are succeeding while we are in fact stagnating and/or missing the mark. Wary of using this as a fully general critique, some of the proxies we use for success seem to be only loosely tracking what we actually care about. (See Goodhart’s Law.)
For instance, community growth is used as a proxy for success where it might, in fact, be an indicator of concept and community dilution. Engagement on OMfCT, while ‘engaging the EA community,’ seems to supplant real, critical engagement. (I’m really uncertain of this claim.) With the exception of a few people, often those from the early days of EA, there’s little generation of new content, and more meta-fixation on organizations and community critiques.
Tracking quality and novel content is really hard, but it seems far more likely to move EA into the public sphere, academia, etc. than boosting pretty numbers on a graph. We’re going to miss a lot of levers for influence if we keep resting on our intellectual laurels.
I’d like to see more essay contests and social rewards for writing, rather than the only response to such writing being blunt critiques of the content itself. I’d also like to see the development of more sophisticated metrics to gauge community development, rather than treating more quantifiable, scalable metrics as our only rigorous option.
Anonymous #32(c):