EAs tend to lack experience with more formal or competitive interactions, such as political maneuvering in big organisations. This is particularly important for interacting with prestigious or senior people, who as a rule don’t have much time for naivety, and who we don’t want to form a bad impression of EA.
I can’t immediately see why a lack of experience with political maneuvering would mean that we often waste prestigious peoples’ time. Could you give an example? Is this just when an EA is talking to somoene prestigious and asks a silly question? (e.g. “Why do you need a managing structure when you could just write up your goals and then ask each employee to maximize those goals?” or whatever)
“Don’t have much time for X” is an idiom which roughly means “have a low tolerance for X”. I’m not saying that their time actually gets wasted, just that they get a bad impression. Might edit to clarify.
And yes, it’s partly about silly questions, partly about negative vibes from being too ideological, partly about general lack of understanding about how organisations work. On balance, I’m happy that EAs are enthusiastic about doing good and open to weird ideas; I’m just noting that this can sometimes play out badly for people without experience of “normal” jobs when interacting in more hierarchical contexts.
Great post!
I can’t immediately see why a lack of experience with political maneuvering would mean that we often waste prestigious peoples’ time. Could you give an example? Is this just when an EA is talking to somoene prestigious and asks a silly question? (e.g. “Why do you need a managing structure when you could just write up your goals and then ask each employee to maximize those goals?” or whatever)
“Don’t have much time for X” is an idiom which roughly means “have a low tolerance for X”. I’m not saying that their time actually gets wasted, just that they get a bad impression. Might edit to clarify.
And yes, it’s partly about silly questions, partly about negative vibes from being too ideological, partly about general lack of understanding about how organisations work. On balance, I’m happy that EAs are enthusiastic about doing good and open to weird ideas; I’m just noting that this can sometimes play out badly for people without experience of “normal” jobs when interacting in more hierarchical contexts.
I think this should be an important part of a potential EA training institute, see https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L9dzan7QBQMJj3P27/training-bottlenecks-in-ea
To have impact you need to have personal impact skills as well, besides object-level knowledge.