Thanks for this post. It’s great to see the writeup to be able to learn from the experience, even though it didn’t work out for you guys in this iteration of the idea.
I sense a slight potential tension between the comment that “EA operations generalists, often with community-builder backgrounds, who would be interested in working on EA meta projects” seem like a promising group to work with and the comment that “There are very few people with longtermist & entrepreneurial experience (e.g., 2-3 years experience in both) that we trust to execute ambitious projects in specific areas of longtermism (bio, AI, etc.).” I would imagine that the former group would tend to not have much experience in “specific areas of longtermism”. I’d love any clarity you can shed on this:
Am I just wrong? I.e. do some/many of these people have substantial experience in specific areas?
Is it that you see this group as being promising specifically for various meta projects that don’t require deep expertise in any one area?
Is it that you think that this gap could potentially be bridged as part of a longtermist entrepreneurship incubator’s role, e.g. by getting promising-seeming potential future LEs placed into jobs where they can build some domain specific knowledge before revisiting the idea of LE, or some such?
Hey Jamie—Ben Clifford here, thanks for flagging this.
I think your second bullet captures the idea well. I don’t think being good at EA community building and associated ideas requires deep domain expertise in areas like AI or Bio.
There would be an argument for thinking about bullet 3 as well but it wasn’t what I was thinking.
Thanks for this post. It’s great to see the writeup to be able to learn from the experience, even though it didn’t work out for you guys in this iteration of the idea.
I sense a slight potential tension between the comment that “EA operations generalists, often with community-builder backgrounds, who would be interested in working on EA meta projects” seem like a promising group to work with and the comment that “There are very few people with longtermist & entrepreneurial experience (e.g., 2-3 years experience in both) that we trust to execute ambitious projects in specific areas of longtermism (bio, AI, etc.).” I would imagine that the former group would tend to not have much experience in “specific areas of longtermism”. I’d love any clarity you can shed on this:
Am I just wrong? I.e. do some/many of these people have substantial experience in specific areas?
Is it that you see this group as being promising specifically for various meta projects that don’t require deep expertise in any one area?
Is it that you think that this gap could potentially be bridged as part of a longtermist entrepreneurship incubator’s role, e.g. by getting promising-seeming potential future LEs placed into jobs where they can build some domain specific knowledge before revisiting the idea of LE, or some such?
Something else?
Hey Jamie—Ben Clifford here, thanks for flagging this.
I think your second bullet captures the idea well. I don’t think being good at EA community building and associated ideas requires deep domain expertise in areas like AI or Bio.
There would be an argument for thinking about bullet 3 as well but it wasn’t what I was thinking.