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.
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.