I guess that a week doing ELK would help on this—probably not a big boost, but the type of thing that adds up over a few years.
I expect that for this purpose you’d get more out of spending half a week doing ELK and half a week talking to people about models of whether/why ELK helps anything, what makes for good progress on ELK, what makes for someone who’s likely to do decently well at ELK.
(Or a week on each, but wanting to comment about allocation of a certain amount of time rather than increasing the total.)
Cool, yeah that split makes sense to me. I had originally assumed that “talking to people about models of whether ELK helps anything” would fall into a “community building track,” but upon rereading your post more closely I don’t think that was the intended interpretation.[1]
FWIW the “only one track” model doesn’t perfectly map to my intuition here. E.g. the founders of doordash spent time using their own app as delivery drivers, and that experience was probably quite useful for them, but I still think it’s fair to describe them as being on the “create a delivery app” track rather than the “be a delivery driver” track.
I read you as making an analogous suggestion for EA community builders, and I would describe that as being “super customer focused” or something, rather than having only one “track”.
You say “obsessing over the details of what’s needed in direct work,” and talking to experts definitely seems like an activity that falls in that category.
[Speaking for myself not Oliver …]
I guess that a week doing ELK would help on this—probably not a big boost, but the type of thing that adds up over a few years.
I expect that for this purpose you’d get more out of spending half a week doing ELK and half a week talking to people about models of whether/why ELK helps anything, what makes for good progress on ELK, what makes for someone who’s likely to do decently well at ELK.
(Or a week on each, but wanting to comment about allocation of a certain amount of time rather than increasing the total.)
Cool, yeah that split makes sense to me. I had originally assumed that “talking to people about models of whether ELK helps anything” would fall into a “community building track,” but upon rereading your post more closely I don’t think that was the intended interpretation.[1]
FWIW the “only one track” model doesn’t perfectly map to my intuition here. E.g. the founders of doordash spent time using their own app as delivery drivers, and that experience was probably quite useful for them, but I still think it’s fair to describe them as being on the “create a delivery app” track rather than the “be a delivery driver” track.
I read you as making an analogous suggestion for EA community builders, and I would describe that as being “super customer focused” or something, rather than having only one “track”.
You say “obsessing over the details of what’s needed in direct work,” and talking to experts definitely seems like an activity that falls in that category.