I’m generally sold on the “you need more hierarchical networks” to get real things done (and even more on the more general claim that you need to expand the network in some way, hierarchical or not).
But, interestingly, the bottleneck on fixing the lack of scalable hierarchical network structures is… still the lack of hierarchical network structure. Identifying the problem doesn’t make it go away.
I think most orgs seem to be doing at least a reasonable job of focusing on building out their infrastructure, it’s just that they’re at the early stages of doing so and it’s a necessarily slow process. Scaling too quickly kills organizations. Hierarchy works best when you know exactly what to do, and runs the risk of being too inflexible.
(If you run an org, and aren’t already thinking about how to build better infrastructure that expands the surface area of the network, I do think you should spend a fair bit of time thinking about that)
FYI, the LessWrong team’s take on this underlying problem is “find ways to make intellectual progress in a decentralized fashion, even if it’s less efficient than it’d be in a tight knit organization.”
The new Questions feature and the upcoming improvements to it are meant to provide a way for the community to keep track of it’s collective research agenda and allow people to identify important unsolved problems, and solve them.
A particular risk here, is that coordination is one of the most costly things to fail at.
I’m happy to encourage new EAs to tackle a random research project, or to attempt the sort of charity entrepreneurship that, well, Charity Entrepreneurship seems to encourage.
I’m much more cautious about encouraging people to try to build infrastructure for the EA community, if it only actually works if it not only is high quality but also everyone gets on board with it at the same time. In particular, it seems like people are too prone to focus on the second part.
Every time you try to coordinate on a piece of changing infrastructure, and the project flops, it makes people less enthusiastic to try the next piece of coordination infrastructure (and I think there’s a variation on this for hierarchical leadership)
But I’m fairly excited about things like AI Safety camp, i.e. building new hubs of infrastructure that other existing infrastructure doesn’t rely on until it’s been vetted.
(It’s still important to make sure something like AI Safety camp is done well, because if it’s done poorly at scale it can result in a confusing morass of training tools of questionable quality. This is not a warning not to try it, just to be careful when you do)
Interesting, this definitely seems possible. Are there any examples of EA projects that failed, resulting in less enthusiasm for EA projects generally?
I agree some orgs are possibly close to the margin on how fast you can grow, but my view is we are way below that on the movement level.
One reason for that belief is just looking around on the amount of effort which is going in that direction. If you compare how much work and attention is spent on thinking about the structure, in comparison to the amount of work spent collectively on for example “selecting people for jobs”, my impression is there is a difference of an order. So while you may be right that more effort would not help, in my view we are “not actually trying” (with some positive exceptions).
Another reason is looking on cheap actions people or orgs can take (as with the coaching knowhow transfer) which are not taken.
I’m generally sold on the “you need more hierarchical networks” to get real things done (and even more on the more general claim that you need to expand the network in some way, hierarchical or not).
But, interestingly, the bottleneck on fixing the lack of scalable hierarchical network structures is… still the lack of hierarchical network structure. Identifying the problem doesn’t make it go away.
I think most orgs seem to be doing at least a reasonable job of focusing on building out their infrastructure, it’s just that they’re at the early stages of doing so and it’s a necessarily slow process. Scaling too quickly kills organizations. Hierarchy works best when you know exactly what to do, and runs the risk of being too inflexible.
(If you run an org, and aren’t already thinking about how to build better infrastructure that expands the surface area of the network, I do think you should spend a fair bit of time thinking about that)
FYI, the LessWrong team’s take on this underlying problem is “find ways to make intellectual progress in a decentralized fashion, even if it’s less efficient than it’d be in a tight knit organization.”
The new Questions feature and the upcoming improvements to it are meant to provide a way for the community to keep track of it’s collective research agenda and allow people to identify important unsolved problems, and solve them.
A particular risk here, is that coordination is one of the most costly things to fail at.
I’m happy to encourage new EAs to tackle a random research project, or to attempt the sort of charity entrepreneurship that, well, Charity Entrepreneurship seems to encourage.
I’m much more cautious about encouraging people to try to build infrastructure for the EA community, if it only actually works if it not only is high quality but also everyone gets on board with it at the same time. In particular, it seems like people are too prone to focus on the second part.
Every time you try to coordinate on a piece of changing infrastructure, and the project flops, it makes people less enthusiastic to try the next piece of coordination infrastructure (and I think there’s a variation on this for hierarchical leadership)
But I’m fairly excited about things like AI Safety camp, i.e. building new hubs of infrastructure that other existing infrastructure doesn’t rely on until it’s been vetted.
(It’s still important to make sure something like AI Safety camp is done well, because if it’s done poorly at scale it can result in a confusing morass of training tools of questionable quality. This is not a warning not to try it, just to be careful when you do)
Interesting, this definitely seems possible. Are there any examples of EA projects that failed, resulting in less enthusiasm for EA projects generally?
I agree some orgs are possibly close to the margin on how fast you can grow, but my view is we are way below that on the movement level.
One reason for that belief is just looking around on the amount of effort which is going in that direction. If you compare how much work and attention is spent on thinking about the structure, in comparison to the amount of work spent collectively on for example “selecting people for jobs”, my impression is there is a difference of an order. So while you may be right that more effort would not help, in my view we are “not actually trying” (with some positive exceptions).
Another reason is looking on cheap actions people or orgs can take (as with the coaching knowhow transfer) which are not taken.