If the ‘passive impact’ is of the ‘convince someone else to do it’ form, obviously we need some people willing to actually do the active things.
I think we don’t want too much of a culture of
‘Person A who convinces other people to do X get the credit’, and
‘Person B who actually does X gets less credit’
This would make it hard to get people to actually motivate people to be the person B actual do-er of the thing X.
Another possible caveat is that there is some possible deadweight loss in the time spent convincing other person to do X … perhaps after multiple attempts. If A and B are actually equally qualified to do X and have ~ equal EA-impact opportunity costs (~value of time)
… then it may be better for “A to just do X” rather than to have “A spends 10 hours trying to convince B to do X” (or maybe trying B,..., F before finally convincing G to do X)
On that note, anyone want to start EA CB radio and give me a large share of the credit :).
Possible caveat.
If the ‘passive impact’ is of the ‘convince someone else to do it’ form, obviously we need some people willing to actually do the active things.
I think we don’t want too much of a culture of
‘Person A who convinces other people to do X get the credit’, and
‘Person B who actually does X gets less credit’
This would make it hard to get people to actually motivate people to be the person B actual do-er of the thing X.
Another possible caveat is that there is some possible deadweight loss in the time spent convincing other person to do X … perhaps after multiple attempts. If A and B are actually equally qualified to do X and have ~ equal EA-impact opportunity costs (~value of time)
… then it may be better for “A to just do X” rather than to have “A spends 10 hours trying to convince B to do X” (or maybe trying B,..., F before finally convincing G to do X)
On that note, anyone want to start EA CB radio and give me a large share of the credit :).
Definitely! It’s a specific instance of a potential meta-trap (another piece here about the idea).
The big questions are:
1. What ratio of meta to direct work should there be in the community?
2. How do we allocate credit?
Which is much beyond the scope of this post, but very important to discuss!
Yeah I think I was channeling Peter’s post here