I agree with this take, but I think that this is primarily an agency and “permission to just do things” issue, rather than people not being good at prioritisation. It requires some amount of being willing to be wrong publicly and fail in embarrassing ways to actual go and explore under-explored things, and in general, I think that current EA institutions (including people on the EA forum) don’t celebrate people actually getting a bunch of stuff done and testing a bunch of hypothesis (otoh, shutting down your project is celebrated which is good imo—though ~only if you write a forum post about it).
I guess overall, I don’t think that people are as bottlenecked on how much prioritisation they are doing, but are pretty bottlenecked on “just doing things” and not staring into the void enough to realise that they should move on from their current project or pivot (even when people on the forum will get annoyed with them). In part, these considerations converge because it turns out that many projects are fairly bottlenecked by the quality of execution rather than by the ideas themselves, and actually trying out a project and iterating on it seems to reliably improve projects.
In general, my modal advice for EAs has shifted from “try to think hard about what is impactful” towards “consider just doing stuff now” or “suppose you have 10x more agency, what would you do? Maybe do that thing instead?”.
I agree with this take, but I think that this is primarily an agency and “permission to just do things” issue, rather than people not being good at prioritisation. It requires some amount of being willing to be wrong publicly and fail in embarrassing ways to actual go and explore under-explored things, and in general, I think that current EA institutions (including people on the EA forum) don’t celebrate people actually getting a bunch of stuff done and testing a bunch of hypothesis (otoh, shutting down your project is celebrated which is good imo—though ~only if you write a forum post about it).
I guess overall, I don’t think that people are as bottlenecked on how much prioritisation they are doing, but are pretty bottlenecked on “just doing things” and not staring into the void enough to realise that they should move on from their current project or pivot (even when people on the forum will get annoyed with them). In part, these considerations converge because it turns out that many projects are fairly bottlenecked by the quality of execution rather than by the ideas themselves, and actually trying out a project and iterating on it seems to reliably improve projects.
In general, my modal advice for EAs has shifted from “try to think hard about what is impactful” towards “consider just doing stuff now” or “suppose you have 10x more agency, what would you do? Maybe do that thing instead?”.