You say “The intended message of this post is not ‘Don’t reach out to busy people!‘, but ‘Do reach out, and have these things in mind to make it more likely to get a response/if you don’t get one,’” but then your first example is:
“Let’s assume world-leading AGI alignment researcher Paul Christiano has put extensive research into finding the optimal soap dispenser… I still shouldn’t ask him which soap dispenser to buy… And, I hope that Christiano thinks the same and would never talk to me again if I were to make such a request.”
Even putting aside that these points are at odds with each other, EA really—and I cannot emphasize this enough—needs to cut the hero worship that posts like this reinforce. Successful people would not be where they are if people around them hadn’t put thousands of hours into parenting, supporting, and mentoring them. It would be dumb to waste literally anyone’s afternoons on “a soap dispenser shopping tour,” but also, ~no one successful would ever agree to do this, and ~no one would ever ask. It’s not a real example. The more realistic example is probably something like: a computer science PhD student at a top university is on the fence about reaching out to ask for a 30-minute Zoom because they don’t want to waste Christiano’s time.
My sense is that people strongly err on the side of not reaching out to people they should reach out to because they’re intimidated, or think they’re too unimportant, or are worried about wasting others’ time. This is actually quite bad, because there are probably a dozen smart, hardworking people who are under-mentored for each person who is over-mentored. Most of these people are not going to realize their full potential, and that threatens the survival of humanity.
As you ultimately note, people who are busy and important are typically quite good at managing their own time. (I once co-authored with another graduate student a formal, three-paragraph email proposing a research project to a famous professor and got the iconic response: “Zthanks but I don’t have time. There are others who could do it.” Our email probably took 1.5 hours to write and edit; he probably took 15 seconds to respond.) Busy people can make their own decisions about how to allocate their time.
No hero worship at all intended, sorry if it came off like that. I agree with you that way too much of that happens in EA. Rockwell’s “On living without idols” is with quite some distance my favorite piece on the EA Forum, and one of my favorite texts on all of the internet.
I’m one of the ~1% of EAs who have a natural tendency to ask for favors too leniently rather than too cautiously, so I would have appreciated knowing these things earlier. The core target audience of this post is people like me.
However, I do think the things I write here might be useful for people outside this group as well: In my understanding, a significant number of people outside my specific subset of neurodivergence tend to just pick up the meme of “better not waste central peoples’ time and attention!” without ever putting much explicit thought into why things are generally done that way. So, I wanted to make explicit the practicalities behind that intuition, to demystify it and make reaching out to busy people more actionable.
I may have failed in that, I’m still in the process of learning to cater my writing to all the different sub-audiences within EA at once. Thanks for pointing out that the intended humor in my exaggerated Christiano-example wasn’t apparent.
I.e., someone from ask culture might need to be warned not to bother people so much. Someone from guess culture might need to be told that it is ok to reach out to people once in a while.
Thanks! Yep, that is totally in line with the fact that the Karma score of the post here is much more mixed than on LessWrong, which definitely is an Askier sphere than EA.
You say “The intended message of this post is not ‘Don’t reach out to busy people!‘, but ‘Do reach out, and have these things in mind to make it more likely to get a response/if you don’t get one,’” but then your first example is:
Even putting aside that these points are at odds with each other, EA really—and I cannot emphasize this enough—needs to cut the hero worship that posts like this reinforce. Successful people would not be where they are if people around them hadn’t put thousands of hours into parenting, supporting, and mentoring them. It would be dumb to waste literally anyone’s afternoons on “a soap dispenser shopping tour,” but also, ~no one successful would ever agree to do this, and ~no one would ever ask. It’s not a real example. The more realistic example is probably something like: a computer science PhD student at a top university is on the fence about reaching out to ask for a 30-minute Zoom because they don’t want to waste Christiano’s time.
My sense is that people strongly err on the side of not reaching out to people they should reach out to because they’re intimidated, or think they’re too unimportant, or are worried about wasting others’ time. This is actually quite bad, because there are probably a dozen smart, hardworking people who are under-mentored for each person who is over-mentored. Most of these people are not going to realize their full potential, and that threatens the survival of humanity.
As you ultimately note, people who are busy and important are typically quite good at managing their own time. (I once co-authored with another graduate student a formal, three-paragraph email proposing a research project to a famous professor and got the iconic response: “Zthanks but I don’t have time. There are others who could do it.” Our email probably took 1.5 hours to write and edit; he probably took 15 seconds to respond.) Busy people can make their own decisions about how to allocate their time.
No hero worship at all intended, sorry if it came off like that. I agree with you that way too much of that happens in EA. Rockwell’s “On living without idols” is with quite some distance my favorite piece on the EA Forum, and one of my favorite texts on all of the internet.
I’m one of the ~1% of EAs who have a natural tendency to ask for favors too leniently rather than too cautiously, so I would have appreciated knowing these things earlier. The core target audience of this post is people like me.
However, I do think the things I write here might be useful for people outside this group as well: In my understanding, a significant number of people outside my specific subset of neurodivergence tend to just pick up the meme of “better not waste central peoples’ time and attention!” without ever putting much explicit thought into why things are generally done that way. So, I wanted to make explicit the practicalities behind that intuition, to demystify it and make reaching out to busy people more actionable.
I may have failed in that, I’m still in the process of learning to cater my writing to all the different sub-audiences within EA at once. Thanks for pointing out that the intended humor in my exaggerated Christiano-example wasn’t apparent.
Just a note: this post could have opposite advice for people from guess culture rather than ask culture. See https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-between-FU-and-Welcome#830421
I.e., someone from ask culture might need to be warned not to bother people so much. Someone from guess culture might need to be told that it is ok to reach out to people once in a while.
Thanks! Yep, that is totally in line with the fact that the Karma score of the post here is much more mixed than on LessWrong, which definitely is an Askier sphere than EA.