I should have played the game more. I thought BOTECs for alignment work were dumb — how would estimating differential x-risk reduction basis points mean anything? I figured smart funders would just get the obvious argument around reducing elicitation overhang. They didn’t, and ego stopped me from making up the numbers anyway. Probably should have.
I think it would be a shame if you took away this lesson. A perfectly good reason to not make up numbers, that has nothing to do with ego, is: “Made-up numbers are arbitrary! There’s no reason to think these numbers are calibrated with enough precision to be action-guiding, or at least, as action-guiding as people often take them to be.”
This is/was largely about fundraising, which seems pretty dependent on this, especially in EA/startup spaces. One potential funder specifically passed because of this. I’m sympathetic to this direction, because as a funder (resource allocator) you need some way of evaluating cost/benefit/risk/expected-payoff, and the exercise itself can be pretty useful for better calibration (even if still not precise enough to be action-guiding).
I guess a better framing for this lesson would be “I should have compromised to get the resources I needed to execute my vision, because otherwise the chance my vision succeeds is significantly worse”. Not all compromises are worth it of course, but this one probably was!
I think it would be a shame if you took away this lesson. A perfectly good reason to not make up numbers, that has nothing to do with ego, is: “Made-up numbers are arbitrary! There’s no reason to think these numbers are calibrated with enough precision to be action-guiding, or at least, as action-guiding as people often take them to be.”
This is/was largely about fundraising, which seems pretty dependent on this, especially in EA/startup spaces. One potential funder specifically passed because of this. I’m sympathetic to this direction, because as a funder (resource allocator) you need some way of evaluating cost/benefit/risk/expected-payoff, and the exercise itself can be pretty useful for better calibration (even if still not precise enough to be action-guiding).
I guess a better framing for this lesson would be “I should have compromised to get the resources I needed to execute my vision, because otherwise the chance my vision succeeds is significantly worse”. Not all compromises are worth it of course, but this one probably was!