Clearly as a purely factual matter, there is a community-building track, albeit one that doesn’t currently have a ton of roles—the title is an overstatement.
My point is that it’s not separate. People doing community building can (and should) talk a bunch to people focused on direct work. And we should see some of people moving backwards and forwards between community building and more direct work.
I think if we take a snapshot in 2022 it looks a bit more like there’s a community-building track. So arguably my title is aspirational. But I think the presence or absence of a “track” (that people make career decisions based on) is a fact spanning years/decades, and my best guess is that (for the kind of reasons articulated here) we’ll see more integration of these areas, and the title will be revealed as true with time.
Overall: playing a bit fast and loose, blurring aspirations with current reporting. But I think it’s more misleading to say “there is a separate community-building track” than to say there isn’t. (The more epistemically virtuous thing to say would be that it’s unclear if there is, and I hope there isn’t.)
BTW I agree that the title is flawed, but don’t have something I feel comparably good about overall. But if you have a suggestion I like I’ll change it.
(Maybe I should just change “track” in the title to “camp”? Feels borderline to me.)
I guess you want to say that most community building needs to be comprehensively informed by knowledge of direct work, not that each person who works in (what can reasonably be called) community building needs to have that knowledge.
Maybe something like “Most community building should be shot through by direct work”—or something more distantly related to that.
Though maybe you feel that still presents direct work and community-building as more separate than ideal. I might not fully buy the one camp model.
I do think that still makes them sound more separate than ideal—while I think many people should be specializing towards community building or direct work, I think that specialized to community building should typically involve a good amount of time paying close attention to direct work, and I think that specialized to direct work should in many cases involve a good amount of time looking to lever knowledge to inform community building.
To gesture at (part of) this intuition I think that some of the best content we have for community building includes The Precipice, HPMoR, and Cold Takes. In all cases these were written by people who went deep on object-level. I don’t think this is a coincidence, and while I don’t think all community-building content needs that level of expertise to produce well, I think that if we were trying to just use material written by specialized community builders (as one might imagine would be more efficient, since presumably they’ll know best how to reach the relevant audiences, etc.) we’d be in much worse shape.
Yeah, I get that. I guess it’s not exactly inconsistent with the shot through formulation, but probably it’s a matter of taste how to frame it so that the emphasis gets right.
Clearly as a purely factual matter, there is a community-building track, albeit one that doesn’t currently have a ton of roles—the title is an overstatement.
My point is that it’s not separate. People doing community building can (and should) talk a bunch to people focused on direct work. And we should see some of people moving backwards and forwards between community building and more direct work.
I think if we take a snapshot in 2022 it looks a bit more like there’s a community-building track. So arguably my title is aspirational. But I think the presence or absence of a “track” (that people make career decisions based on) is a fact spanning years/decades, and my best guess is that (for the kind of reasons articulated here) we’ll see more integration of these areas, and the title will be revealed as true with time.
Overall: playing a bit fast and loose, blurring aspirations with current reporting. But I think it’s more misleading to say “there is a separate community-building track” than to say there isn’t. (The more epistemically virtuous thing to say would be that it’s unclear if there is, and I hope there isn’t.)
BTW I agree that the title is flawed, but don’t have something I feel comparably good about overall. But if you have a suggestion I like I’ll change it.
(Maybe I should just change “track” in the title to “camp”? Feels borderline to me.)
Could change “there is no” to “against the” or “let’s not have a”?
Thanks, changed to “let’s not have a …”
I guess you want to say that most community building needs to be comprehensively informed by knowledge of direct work, not that each person who works in (what can reasonably be called) community building needs to have that knowledge.
Maybe something like “Most community building should be shot through by direct work”—or something more distantly related to that.
Though maybe you feel that still presents direct work and community-building as more separate than ideal. I might not fully buy the one camp model.
I do think that still makes them sound more separate than ideal—while I think many people should be specializing towards community building or direct work, I think that specialized to community building should typically involve a good amount of time paying close attention to direct work, and I think that specialized to direct work should in many cases involve a good amount of time looking to lever knowledge to inform community building.
To gesture at (part of) this intuition I think that some of the best content we have for community building includes The Precipice, HPMoR, and Cold Takes. In all cases these were written by people who went deep on object-level. I don’t think this is a coincidence, and while I don’t think all community-building content needs that level of expertise to produce well, I think that if we were trying to just use material written by specialized community builders (as one might imagine would be more efficient, since presumably they’ll know best how to reach the relevant audiences, etc.) we’d be in much worse shape.
Yeah, I get that. I guess it’s not exactly inconsistent with the shot through formulation, but probably it’s a matter of taste how to frame it so that the emphasis gets right.
After reflecting further and talking to people I changed “track” in the title to “camp”; I think this more accurately conveys the point I’m making.