Unfortunately I think that much of our learning in areas like marketing is not generally applicable enough to be useful to more than a dozen or so people in the world right now. We are talking with these people already and generally I find those conversations to be more useful than spending an equivalent amount of time writing up learnings because we can tailor the conversation to specific circumstances.
For example, writing up my policy learnings ( http://effective-altruism.com/ea/7e/good_policy_ideas_that_wont_happen_yet/ ) took me at least 1.5 days, and it is unclear to me whether this was better than having 15 one-hour conversations with interested people. This was a case where I had particularly well-organised thoughts and potentially novel insights, so I find it likely that in cases where I have less-insightful and worse-organised thoughts it would be better for me just to have the conversations instead, which is the route I am currently going down with a lot of this stuff.
I would be interested in your thoughts on this as someone who does take the time to write up substantial amounts of your thinking. How do you compare the trade-off against spending the same amount of time simply having conversations with people? I’m pretty open to the idea that I’m not spending enough time writing up my learnings, but at the moment I’m trying to focus my effort on conversations instead as I think that’s where more value lies.
A lot of these learnings are written up in the various organisations’ annual and six-monthly reviews such as https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/Jacob%20Hilton/giving_what_we_can_six_month_review.pdf and https://80000hours.org/2014/05/summary-of-the-annual-review-may-2014/
Unfortunately I think that much of our learning in areas like marketing is not generally applicable enough to be useful to more than a dozen or so people in the world right now. We are talking with these people already and generally I find those conversations to be more useful than spending an equivalent amount of time writing up learnings because we can tailor the conversation to specific circumstances.
For example, writing up my policy learnings ( http://effective-altruism.com/ea/7e/good_policy_ideas_that_wont_happen_yet/ ) took me at least 1.5 days, and it is unclear to me whether this was better than having 15 one-hour conversations with interested people. This was a case where I had particularly well-organised thoughts and potentially novel insights, so I find it likely that in cases where I have less-insightful and worse-organised thoughts it would be better for me just to have the conversations instead, which is the route I am currently going down with a lot of this stuff.
I would be interested in your thoughts on this as someone who does take the time to write up substantial amounts of your thinking. How do you compare the trade-off against spending the same amount of time simply having conversations with people? I’m pretty open to the idea that I’m not spending enough time writing up my learnings, but at the moment I’m trying to focus my effort on conversations instead as I think that’s where more value lies.