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.
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.