You have a great point that I agree with: if a person is incompetent at a particular task, they should not be doing that particular task (or should learn first rather than making a mess). IMO, Gleb should not write his own promotional materials himself and should not be the decision maker regarding methods of promotion (or he should invest the time to learn to do it well first). However, in my view, what Gleb does at Intentional Insights is not merely promotion. That is just the most visible thing that Gleb does. What Gleb actually does at InIn includes a lot of uncommon and valuable abilities like:
Gleb has a really intense level of dedication to the cause of spreading rationality. Gleb is brave enough to stick his neck out and take a risk while most people are terrified just to speak in front of an audience (Though I believe someone else aught to write his speeches. Delegating speech writing is common anyway.). He is also taking large risks financially in order to make InIn happen, and not everyone can do that. Gleb cares a lot about helping the world and being kind to others and is very dedicated to that. He is educated and knowledgeable as a professor and as a rationalist, though I realize this doesn’t show very well in the articles written by some of his writers. In his own articles, the quality is much higher. So, I believe his main quality problem is not that he doesn’t understand quality but that his awkward promotion behaviors are repelling the good writers and/or attracting poor ones so that he is left trying to make the best of it. I’ve actually seen this repelling effect happening first hand. I believe that if he proved that Intentional Insights can do promotion well, good writers would want the benefit of being promoted by InIn.
Most importantly, Gleb actually wants the truth while some “rationalists” are motivated by other things (ego, status, loving to argue, wanting to hang out with smart people, etc.), so cannot actually practice rationality, nor do such people have any hope of ever spreading rationality. Spreading rationality is ridiculously hard and it’s not something that most dedicated and reality-minded rationalists would do well right way. Someone like Gleb at least has a chance because his motives are in the right place. That is both mission critical for the cause of spreading rationality, and it’s not common enough.
I think Gleb could pretty easily upgrade his leadership style to play to his strengths, and then learn enough about things like promotion to delegate what he is weak at effectively. All the successful leaders I’ve gotten to know are ignorant about a variety of things their organizations do, but delegate those things well. This works surprisingly well. I’ve seen delegation compensate for some truly hideous areas of incompetence, so I regard delegation as a very powerful strategy. I believe Gleb can learn to use delegation as a sort of reasonable accommodation for the issues that result from social status instinct differences.
Why hasn’t Gleb seemed to update on this yet? He is an updater—I’ve seen it. Maybe you didn’t know this, but Gleb has already begun delegating some of the promotional decisions.
I think what he needs to make delegation successful is a better understanding of promotion. Part of the problem may be that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, so some of the people that Gleb has attracted and chosen to delegate the promotional decisions to aren’t much better at promotion than Gleb is.
The size of the inferential distance in this area is very large and it wasn’t obvious to anyone how to explain across the distance before. I believe that what I wrote in the comment we’re responding to is an insightful enough foundation of an explanation that Gleb, myself, and others can build upon it to help Gleb become informed enough to succeed at delegating promotional tasks to skilled people.
It’s not our responsibility to educate him, of course, but I think there are enough people who are willing enough to do that, even though it takes time. I think Gleb is willing enough to spend the time learning. I think that this approach of crossing the inferential distance is worth testing to see whether it succeeds.
Additionally, I’m happy to document my own attempts at explaining to Gleb, and explaining Gleb to others, by placing these explanations here on the forum. Because I am documenting all of this, others in the EA movement with social status instinct differences will have an opportunity to find information which will assist them with self-improvement. Therefore, my efforts, so long as I document them here, are much more valuable than just helping Gleb.
Even if I test my belief that we can cross the distance with Gleb, and my attempt fails, that test result is still valuable information!
You have a great point that I agree with: if a person is incompetent at a particular task, they should not be doing that particular task (or should learn first rather than making a mess). IMO, Gleb should not write his own promotional materials himself and should not be the decision maker regarding methods of promotion (or he should invest the time to learn to do it well first). However, in my view, what Gleb does at Intentional Insights is not merely promotion. That is just the most visible thing that Gleb does. What Gleb actually does at InIn includes a lot of uncommon and valuable abilities like:
Gleb has a really intense level of dedication to the cause of spreading rationality. Gleb is brave enough to stick his neck out and take a risk while most people are terrified just to speak in front of an audience (Though I believe someone else aught to write his speeches. Delegating speech writing is common anyway.). He is also taking large risks financially in order to make InIn happen, and not everyone can do that. Gleb cares a lot about helping the world and being kind to others and is very dedicated to that. He is educated and knowledgeable as a professor and as a rationalist, though I realize this doesn’t show very well in the articles written by some of his writers. In his own articles, the quality is much higher. So, I believe his main quality problem is not that he doesn’t understand quality but that his awkward promotion behaviors are repelling the good writers and/or attracting poor ones so that he is left trying to make the best of it. I’ve actually seen this repelling effect happening first hand. I believe that if he proved that Intentional Insights can do promotion well, good writers would want the benefit of being promoted by InIn.
Most importantly, Gleb actually wants the truth while some “rationalists” are motivated by other things (ego, status, loving to argue, wanting to hang out with smart people, etc.), so cannot actually practice rationality, nor do such people have any hope of ever spreading rationality. Spreading rationality is ridiculously hard and it’s not something that most dedicated and reality-minded rationalists would do well right way. Someone like Gleb at least has a chance because his motives are in the right place. That is both mission critical for the cause of spreading rationality, and it’s not common enough.
I think Gleb could pretty easily upgrade his leadership style to play to his strengths, and then learn enough about things like promotion to delegate what he is weak at effectively. All the successful leaders I’ve gotten to know are ignorant about a variety of things their organizations do, but delegate those things well. This works surprisingly well. I’ve seen delegation compensate for some truly hideous areas of incompetence, so I regard delegation as a very powerful strategy. I believe Gleb can learn to use delegation as a sort of reasonable accommodation for the issues that result from social status instinct differences.
Why hasn’t Gleb seemed to update on this yet? He is an updater—I’ve seen it. Maybe you didn’t know this, but Gleb has already begun delegating some of the promotional decisions.
I think what he needs to make delegation successful is a better understanding of promotion. Part of the problem may be that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, so some of the people that Gleb has attracted and chosen to delegate the promotional decisions to aren’t much better at promotion than Gleb is.
The size of the inferential distance in this area is very large and it wasn’t obvious to anyone how to explain across the distance before. I believe that what I wrote in the comment we’re responding to is an insightful enough foundation of an explanation that Gleb, myself, and others can build upon it to help Gleb become informed enough to succeed at delegating promotional tasks to skilled people.
It’s not our responsibility to educate him, of course, but I think there are enough people who are willing enough to do that, even though it takes time. I think Gleb is willing enough to spend the time learning. I think that this approach of crossing the inferential distance is worth testing to see whether it succeeds.
Additionally, I’m happy to document my own attempts at explaining to Gleb, and explaining Gleb to others, by placing these explanations here on the forum. Because I am documenting all of this, others in the EA movement with social status instinct differences will have an opportunity to find information which will assist them with self-improvement. Therefore, my efforts, so long as I document them here, are much more valuable than just helping Gleb.
Even if I test my belief that we can cross the distance with Gleb, and my attempt fails, that test result is still valuable information!