A “Scribe”, someone who is good at eliciting and presenting the ideas of other people who aren’t good at presenting their own ideas. There are a lot of people in the intellectual movement who’re brilliant, but don’t write enough, or don’t have an intuitive sense of what needs to be written (what’s not obvious to others, what others are ready for), or don’t have an impulse to do it unless someone is in front of them and asking them questions. A scribe is someone who knows what needs to be written and can facilitate the writing. A very good job for a Scribe is podcast interviewing. There are currently no brilliant scribes doing podcasting as far as I’m aware (potentially due to limited true competition as a result of… incumbency bias, and as a result of the temptation to not be a scribe, and to instead follow your own interests, and because no one has formalized or named the skillset until we did).
Matchmaking, facilitating networking. The easiest way to start to get to know another person is for someone who knows both of you already to tell the two of you what you need to talk about. I feel like every EA group should be doing a lot of this, but it’s hard, it’s not something I’m naturally skilled at, but if someone who had a deep natural interest in people told me what I needed to learn, I think I would learn it then.
Doubt: There’s a possibility that an online profile system is always better for introductions than anything we can do in person.
Doubt: It’s possible that the most reasonable approach will just be to find works that have been made outside of the community, pay for some minor adjustments and put “effective altruism” in the description to make it findable, in which case this is less important, but it might still be useful to have someone who knows how spaces create moods and shape conversations to tell us which spaces are best. But we can figure that out pretty well ourselves.
Various practical skillsets:
A “Scribe”, someone who is good at eliciting and presenting the ideas of other people who aren’t good at presenting their own ideas. There are a lot of people in the intellectual movement who’re brilliant, but don’t write enough, or don’t have an intuitive sense of what needs to be written (what’s not obvious to others, what others are ready for), or don’t have an impulse to do it unless someone is in front of them and asking them questions. A scribe is someone who knows what needs to be written and can facilitate the writing.
A very good job for a Scribe is podcast interviewing. There are currently no brilliant scribes doing podcasting as far as I’m aware (potentially due to limited true competition as a result of… incumbency bias, and as a result of the temptation to not be a scribe, and to instead follow your own interests, and because no one has formalized or named the skillset until we did).
Matchmaking, facilitating networking. The easiest way to start to get to know another person is for someone who knows both of you already to tell the two of you what you need to talk about. I feel like every EA group should be doing a lot of this, but it’s hard, it’s not something I’m naturally skilled at, but if someone who had a deep natural interest in people told me what I needed to learn, I think I would learn it then.
Doubt: There’s a possibility that an online profile system is always better for introductions than anything we can do in person.
Psychology of aesthetics of interior design, and potentially 3d modelling. We will need someone to build venues for EA in VR at some point over the next decade.
Doubt: It’s possible that the most reasonable approach will just be to find works that have been made outside of the community, pay for some minor adjustments and put “effective altruism” in the description to make it findable, in which case this is less important, but it might still be useful to have someone who knows how spaces create moods and shape conversations to tell us which spaces are best. But we can figure that out pretty well ourselves.