I feel you could come to the same conclusions/prescriptions with a much simpler underlying framework:
In order to utilize human effort, someone must come up with some valuable activity to pipe that effort into. A manager/employer, roughly speaking.
Some people manage/employ themselves; they find something to pipe their efforts into on their own. Maybe they start a project, a charity, a startup, organize a local group or an event, what have you.
Some people are even willing to manage/employ other people: they come up with so many ideas of what to do that it can keep multiple people busy.
Other people require external management/employment; they look for pre-defined jobs to slot themselves into.
[Rest of comment edited for clarity:]
The practical suggestions seem to fall into two categories:
“Be more self-managing, stop looking for a job and come up with your own idea what you can do”—e.g., organize events, do research on your own.
“Delegate”—e.g. distill the 80k know-how and delegate coaching. But the people at 80k don’t have the time to actively orchestrate this. Again, there will need to be people who actively step up and make this happen.
So I think you could take out all the hierarchy stuff, radically simplifying the idea, and still make roughly the same suggestions:
Stop looking for other people to manage you. If you show up looking for a job, requiring management from other people who are already busy managing themselves or others, you’re adding to their burden, not easing it. The high-profile EA orgs are not bottlenecked on “structure” or “network”; they’re bottlenecked because there’s a hundred people requiring management for every one person willing to manage others. Create your own research agenda, start your own EA org, organize your own event, find out on your own how some aspect of the EA community could be improved, propose a solution, implement it.
Most people don’t have the skills required to manage themselves, start their own org, organize their own event, etc; a large fraction of people need someone else to assign them tasks to even keep their own household running. Helping people get better at management skills (at least for managing themselves, though ability to manage others as well would be ideal) could potentially be very high-value. There don’t seem to be many good resources on how to do this currently.
In my view without all the hierarchy stuff, it is harder to see what to create, start, manage, delegate. I would be significantly more worried about the meme of “just go&do things&manage others” spreading than about the meme “figure out how to grow the structure”.
I feel you could come to the same conclusions/prescriptions with a much simpler underlying framework:
In order to utilize human effort, someone must come up with some valuable activity to pipe that effort into. A manager/employer, roughly speaking.
Some people manage/employ themselves; they find something to pipe their efforts into on their own. Maybe they start a project, a charity, a startup, organize a local group or an event, what have you.
Some people are even willing to manage/employ other people: they come up with so many ideas of what to do that it can keep multiple people busy.
Other people require external management/employment; they look for pre-defined jobs to slot themselves into.
[Rest of comment edited for clarity:]
The practical suggestions seem to fall into two categories:
“Be more self-managing, stop looking for a job and come up with your own idea what you can do”—e.g., organize events, do research on your own.
“Delegate”—e.g. distill the 80k know-how and delegate coaching. But the people at 80k don’t have the time to actively orchestrate this. Again, there will need to be people who actively step up and make this happen.
So I think you could take out all the hierarchy stuff, radically simplifying the idea, and still make roughly the same suggestions:
Stop looking for other people to manage you. If you show up looking for a job, requiring management from other people who are already busy managing themselves or others, you’re adding to their burden, not easing it. The high-profile EA orgs are not bottlenecked on “structure” or “network”; they’re bottlenecked because there’s a hundred people requiring management for every one person willing to manage others. Create your own research agenda, start your own EA org, organize your own event, find out on your own how some aspect of the EA community could be improved, propose a solution, implement it.
Most people don’t have the skills required to manage themselves, start their own org, organize their own event, etc; a large fraction of people need someone else to assign them tasks to even keep their own household running. Helping people get better at management skills (at least for managing themselves, though ability to manage others as well would be ideal) could potentially be very high-value. There don’t seem to be many good resources on how to do this currently.
For people who want to do more of this and not have to worry about runway, there is the EA Hotel.
(although note that we are close to running out of runway ourselves, so the “not have to worry about runway” bit isn’t guaranteed right now)
In my view without all the hierarchy stuff, it is harder to see what to create, start, manage, delegate. I would be significantly more worried about the meme of “just go&do things&manage others” spreading than about the meme “figure out how to grow the structure”.