>It’s fine to have professional facilitators who are helping the community-building work without detailed takes on object-level priorities, but they shouldn’t be the ones making the calls about what kind of community-building work needs to happen
I think this could be worth calling out more directly and emphatically. I think a large fraction (idk, between 25 and 70%) of people who do community-building work aren’t trying to make calls about what kinds of community-building work needs to happen.
Noticing that the (25%, 70%) figure is sufficiently different from what I would have said that we must be understanding some of the terms differently.
My clause there is intended to include cases like: software engineers (but not the people choosing what features to implement); caterers; lawyers … basically if a professional could do a great job as a service without being value aligned, then I don’t think it’s making calls about what kind of community building needs to happen.
I don’t mean to include the people choosing features to implement on the forum (after someone else has decided that we should invest in there forum), people choosing what marketing campaigns to run (after someone else has decided that we should run marketing campaigns), people deciding how to run an intro fellowship week to week (after someone else told them to), etc. I do think in this category maybe I’d be happy dipping under 20%, but wouldn’t be very happy dipping under 10%. (If it’s low figures like this it’s less likely that they’ll be literally trying to do direct work with that time vs just trying to keep up with its priorities.)
I guess I think there’s a continuum of how much people are making those calls. There are often a bunch of micro-level decisions that people are making which are ideally informed by models of what it’s aiming for. If someone is specializing in vegan catering for EA events then I think it’s great if they don’t have models of what it’s all in service of, because it’s pretty easy for the relevant information to be passed to them anyway. But I think most (maybe >90%) roles that people centrally think of as community building have significant elements of making these choices.
I guess I’m now thinking my claim should be more like “the fraction should vary with how high-level the choices you’re making are” and provide some examples of reasonable points along that spectrum?
>It’s fine to have professional facilitators who are helping the community-building work without detailed takes on object-level priorities, but they shouldn’t be the ones making the calls about what kind of community-building work needs to happen
I think this could be worth calling out more directly and emphatically. I think a large fraction (idk, between 25 and 70%) of people who do community-building work aren’t trying to make calls about what kinds of community-building work needs to happen.
Noticing that the (25%, 70%) figure is sufficiently different from what I would have said that we must be understanding some of the terms differently.
My clause there is intended to include cases like: software engineers (but not the people choosing what features to implement); caterers; lawyers … basically if a professional could do a great job as a service without being value aligned, then I don’t think it’s making calls about what kind of community building needs to happen.
I don’t mean to include the people choosing features to implement on the forum (after someone else has decided that we should invest in there forum), people choosing what marketing campaigns to run (after someone else has decided that we should run marketing campaigns), people deciding how to run an intro fellowship week to week (after someone else told them to), etc. I do think in this category maybe I’d be happy dipping under 20%, but wouldn’t be very happy dipping under 10%. (If it’s low figures like this it’s less likely that they’ll be literally trying to do direct work with that time vs just trying to keep up with its priorities.)
Do you think we have a substantive disagreement?
I guess I think there’s a continuum of how much people are making those calls. There are often a bunch of micro-level decisions that people are making which are ideally informed by models of what it’s aiming for. If someone is specializing in vegan catering for EA events then I think it’s great if they don’t have models of what it’s all in service of, because it’s pretty easy for the relevant information to be passed to them anyway. But I think most (maybe >90%) roles that people centrally think of as community building have significant elements of making these choices.
I guess I’m now thinking my claim should be more like “the fraction should vary with how high-level the choices you’re making are” and provide some examples of reasonable points along that spectrum?