Writing is just a lot more time-consuming to cover equivalent ground in my experience. I occasionally make the mistake of getting into multi-hour text conversations with people, and almost invariably look back and think we could have covered the same ground in a phone call lasting <25% as long.
I agree with this, especially if youāre trying to make a decision or solve a problem together. Itās very difficult and time-consuming to negotiate solutions via text.
Yeah, agreed that your conclusion applies to the majority of interactions from a 1-off perspective.
But I observe a decent amount of cases where it would be good to have literal documentation of statements, take-aways etc. because otherwise, youāll have to have many more phone calls.
Iām especially thinking of co-working and other mutually agreed upon mid- to long-term coordination scenarios. In order to do collective world-modelling better, i.e. to find cruxes, prioritize, research, introspect, etc., it seems good to have more bandwidth AND more memory. But people routinely choose bandwidth over memory, without having considered the trade-off.
I suspect that this is an unconscious choice and often leads to quite suboptimal outcomes for groups, as they become reliant on human superconnectors and those peopleās memoryāas a local community-builder, this is what I am. And I canāt trust my memory, so I outsource most of it in ways that are legible mostly to meāas it would be too costly for me to make it such that itās legible also for others.
It is these superconnectors who have a disproportionate effect on the common knowledge and overall culture of a group. If the culture is being developed purposefully, youād want really good documentation of it to remind, improve and onboard.
Instead, most groups seem to have to rely on leadership and oral communication to coordinate. In part this might be because the pay-off of good documentation and building a culture that uses it is so long-term, that few are currently willing to pay for it?
I am essentially wondering about the causal relationship here: are we (a) not paying for more resource-intensive coordination systems because we consciously arenāt convinced of the value/āpossibility of it or are we (b) not convinced of the value/āpossibility of more resource-intensive coordination systems because we havenāt actually tried all that much yet?
I suspect that weāre in the scenario of ānot actually having tried enoughā because of a) general culture and norms around communication that discourage trying and b) only having had the necessary level of tech adoption to even make this a possibility for <20 years.
Communities of people with mostly technical backgrounds seem to fare massively better on the existence of asynchronous and formal coordination mechanisms than most other groups (e.g. GitLabās remote culture). Is this because these people are a specific kind of person? Is it because theyāve been trying harder/āfor longer? How easily transferrable is their culture? What does it take to make it more popular? Or do we believe this attempt is doomed to fail? If so, why?
And if we agree that this seems valuable to popularize, then why is it so hard to mobilize the necessary resources to make it happen more? Is it just general inertia or is there more?
I am afraid that any single individual is making your observation for any single instance but at the collective level and across time, I would be surprised if the calculus holds.
Having an updates document that people fill in every week might be useful for you to either replace or complement your meetings? Alternatively, an agenda doc per meeting where you can transcribe whatever the other people say helps solve the problem of not being able to remember or document what other people say. I also record a few of the meetings Iām in, especially important ones (with the other person/āsā permission of course), in case I want to revisit them in the future.
Thanks, I have this wherever possible. Strong upvote for the practical usefulness of the comment.
There are cases, though, where the core problem is notthe ability to record but the lack of appreciation of the value of making things explicit and documenting them as such. Then I can one-sidedly record all I want, it wonāt shape my environment in the way I want to.
Thatās why Iām asking about the appreciation aspect in particular. I think there are a lot of gains from attitudes that are common in EA that are just lost in many other circles because people donāt have the same commitment to growth.
This is especially the case when you alone canāt do much but need a whole group to buy into this attitude. Thatās also why Iām less interested in meetings that are clearly only limited to 1-1 exchange. There are settings where you need to asynchronously update multiple people and having explicit communication would be much better, yet people seem to have a clear preference for 1-1 calls etc.
Iām also not talking about situations where you can impose your normsābut rather about situations where you have to figure out carefully how to go meta while avoiding triggering any individualās defensiveness to then level up the group as a whole.
Essentially, I guess, Iām interested in case studies for what pieces are missing in peopleās models that this seems so hard for many groups outside of EA. The answers here have already given some insight into it.
Writing is just a lot more time-consuming to cover equivalent ground in my experience. I occasionally make the mistake of getting into multi-hour text conversations with people, and almost invariably look back and think we could have covered the same ground in a phone call lasting <25% as long.
I agree with this, especially if youāre trying to make a decision or solve a problem together. Itās very difficult and time-consuming to negotiate solutions via text.
Yeah, agreed that your conclusion applies to the majority of interactions from a 1-off perspective.
But I observe a decent amount of cases where it would be good to have literal documentation of statements, take-aways etc. because otherwise, youāll have to have many more phone calls.
Iām especially thinking of co-working and other mutually agreed upon mid- to long-term coordination scenarios. In order to do collective world-modelling better, i.e. to find cruxes, prioritize, research, introspect, etc., it seems good to have more bandwidth AND more memory. But people routinely choose bandwidth over memory, without having considered the trade-off.
I suspect that this is an unconscious choice and often leads to quite suboptimal outcomes for groups, as they become reliant on human superconnectors and those peopleās memoryāas a local community-builder, this is what I am. And I canāt trust my memory, so I outsource most of it in ways that are legible mostly to meāas it would be too costly for me to make it such that itās legible also for others.
It is these superconnectors who have a disproportionate effect on the common knowledge and overall culture of a group. If the culture is being developed purposefully, youād want really good documentation of it to remind, improve and onboard.
Instead, most groups seem to have to rely on leadership and oral communication to coordinate. In part this might be because the pay-off of good documentation and building a culture that uses it is so long-term, that few are currently willing to pay for it?
I am essentially wondering about the causal relationship here: are we (a) not paying for more resource-intensive coordination systems because we consciously arenāt convinced of the value/āpossibility of it or are we (b) not convinced of the value/āpossibility of more resource-intensive coordination systems because we havenāt actually tried all that much yet?
I suspect that weāre in the scenario of ānot actually having tried enoughā because of a) general culture and norms around communication that discourage trying and b) only having had the necessary level of tech adoption to even make this a possibility for <20 years.
Communities of people with mostly technical backgrounds seem to fare massively better on the existence of asynchronous and formal coordination mechanisms than most other groups (e.g. GitLabās remote culture). Is this because these people are a specific kind of person? Is it because theyāve been trying harder/āfor longer? How easily transferrable is their culture? What does it take to make it more popular? Or do we believe this attempt is doomed to fail? If so, why?
And if we agree that this seems valuable to popularize, then why is it so hard to mobilize the necessary resources to make it happen more? Is it just general inertia or is there more?
I am afraid that any single individual is making your observation for any single instance but at the collective level and across time, I would be surprised if the calculus holds.
Having an updates document that people fill in every week might be useful for you to either replace or complement your meetings? Alternatively, an agenda doc per meeting where you can transcribe whatever the other people say helps solve the problem of not being able to remember or document what other people say. I also record a few of the meetings Iām in, especially important ones (with the other person/āsā permission of course), in case I want to revisit them in the future.
Thanks, I have this wherever possible. Strong upvote for the practical usefulness of the comment.
There are cases, though, where the core problem is not the ability to record but the lack of appreciation of the value of making things explicit and documenting them as such. Then I can one-sidedly record all I want, it wonāt shape my environment in the way I want to.
Thatās why Iām asking about the appreciation aspect in particular. I think there are a lot of gains from attitudes that are common in EA that are just lost in many other circles because people donāt have the same commitment to growth.
This is especially the case when you alone canāt do much but need a whole group to buy into this attitude. Thatās also why Iām less interested in meetings that are clearly only limited to 1-1 exchange. There are settings where you need to asynchronously update multiple people and having explicit communication would be much better, yet people seem to have a clear preference for 1-1 calls etc.
Iām also not talking about situations where you can impose your normsābut rather about situations where you have to figure out carefully how to go meta while avoiding triggering any individualās defensiveness to then level up the group as a whole.
Essentially, I guess, Iām interested in case studies for what pieces are missing in peopleās models that this seems so hard for many groups outside of EA. The answers here have already given some insight into it.