Since Kathy is sadly gone*, is there a potential new coordination point for coordinating our tracking methods? If you think it’s best to coordinate privately, you can find me on Facebook (David Mears)
*https://www.facebook.com/Kathleen-Kathy-Rebecca-Forth-Memorial-Page-184870828823873/
But I can control whether I am priming people to get accustomed to over-interpreting.
That sounds potentially important. Could you give an example of a failure mode?
Because my approach is not merely about how to behave as a listener. It’s about speaking without throwing in unnecessary disclaimers.
Consider how my question “Could you give an example...?” reads if I didn’t precede it with the following signal of collaborativeness: “That sounds potentially important.” At least to me (YMMV), I would be like 15% less likely to feel defensive in the case where I precede it with such a signal, instead of leaping into the question—which I would be likely (on a System 1y day) to read as “Oh yeah? Give me ONE example.” Same applies to the phrase “At least to me (YMMV)”: I’m chucking in a signal that I’m willing to listen to your point of view.
Those are examples of disclaimers. I argue these kinds of signals are helpful for promoting a productive atomsphere; do they fall into the category you’re calling “unnecessary disclaimers”? Or is it only something more overt that you’d find counterproductive?
I take the point that different people have different needs with regards to this concern. I hope we can both steer clear of typical-minding everyone else. I think I might be particularly oversensitive to anything resembling conflict, and you are over on the other side of the bell curve in that respect.
Yes. What I’m asking about is coordinating methodology. I think Kathy had been a point of contact for both things.
I’m not really talking about showing how friendly you are
It looks like we were talking at cross purposes. I was picking up on the admittedly months-old conversation about “signalling collaborativeness” and [anti-]”combaticism”, which is a separate conversation to the one on value signals. (Value signals are probably a means of signalling collaborativeness though.)
you should probably signal however friendly you are actually feeling
I think politeness serves a useful function (within moderation, of course). ‘Forcing’ people to behave more friendly than they feel saves time and energy.
I think EA has a problem with undervaluing social skills such as basic friendliness. If a community such as EA wants to keep people coming back and contributing their insights, the personal benefits of taking part need to outweigh the personal costs.
Would someone be willing to translate these sentences from philosophy/maths into English? Or let me know how I can work it out for myself?
That is: P(cards not shuffled)P(cards in perfect order | cards not shuffled) >> P(cards shuffled)P(cards in perfect order | cards shuffled), even if my prior credence was that P(cards shuffled) > P(cards not shuffled), so I should update towards the cards having not been shuffled.
Similarly, if it seems to me that I’m living in the most influential time ever, this gives me good reason to suspect that the reasoning process that led me to this conclusion is flawed in some way, because P(I’m reasoning poorly)P(seems like I’m living at the hinge of history | I’m reasoning poorly) >> P(I’m reasoning correctly)P(seems like I’m living at the hinge of history | I’m reasoning correctly).
I think this type of writing puts a very high accessibility bar on these sentences. I fall into the class of people who might be expected to understand these formalisms (I work in programming, a supposedly mathsy job).
Where would you like bug reports to go?
I’m yet another person who pivoted from having a linguistics degree to doing software development as a job—a relatively common path. (In between I tried to be a musician.) The transition was relatively easy: I did a 4-month bootcamp (Makers, London) in 2019. I think it’s much easier to go the bootcamp route than the self-teaching route (assuming the bootcamp is good quality), because it’s full-time, focuses on practical skills, and is verifiable by employers. (Also, they had a careers coach, and a money-back-if-you-don’t-get-a-job guarantee, both of which helped.) It was much easier to be accepted onto a bootcamp than I originally assumed (I thought I’d have to spend months to years preparing for it, but that was totally wrong—just had to complete an online course).
The problem of how to create feedback loops is much more difficult for organisations who focus on far-future (or even medium-future) outcomes. It’s still worth trying to create some loops, as far as possible, and to tighten them.
The facebook and meetup events have been moved back by a week, but this event has not been changed. I am presuming that the fb and meetup events are correct?
Talking with Yonatan has been extremely helpful to me. We’ve mainly communicated by Telegram voice notes and messages. He guided me through a jobhunt period, and helped me refine my plans, partly by giving feedback, partly by letting me ramble into a voice note until I had rubber-ducked myself into progress, and partly by introducing new frames for thinking about decisions I was making. It was useful to have someone to talk to who understood my motivations quite well (EA), but was at an objective distance (3000 miles), and who had relevant expertise and good thoughts.
Some things I appreciate about Yonatan:
He asks good questions. Including tough questions.
Yonatan takes care to elicit my thoughts about things before offering thoughts of his own. This is good firstly because the exercise of advising myself turns up some good ideas and Yonatan is not omniscient, and secondly because copy-pasting other people’s viewpoints without knowing how they got there is less useful (less generalizable and less debuggable) than imparting generative mental ‘frameworks’ or ‘tools’.
One ‘frame’ that has stayed with me is the idea that in some situations, even if there is a small chance of someone being willing to grant your request, it might still be worth it to ask, because they might say yes, and if you don’t ask, they definitely won’t say yes.
Another example of a ‘frame’. Yonatan caused me to pay much more attention to how I was feeling about things (strategies, decisions), in a quasi-therapeutic way, because he believes that my feelings carry useful information, which seems true.
We have an informal dialogue more than a didactic or one-sided dynamic.
He is keen to be told how he is doing, and how his thoughts are being received, in order to incorporate the feedback. He is keen to tailor the relationship to my needs and focus on the topics that are most important, even if they are not necessarily about technology.
I felt able to be unusually honest and open about my thoughts/motivations/fears/insecurities/shortcomings.
As a result of our conversations, I feel I approached my jobhunt-related decisions in a 10x more systematic way than I otherwise would have, and I have more mental models to make future decisions with.
In summary, I highly recommend talking to Yonatan, in case he can help you.
Background about me: I am a developer with 2 years experience, now in my second job.
It’s a broad question, but I think feedback that isn’t tied to ‘real world’ events is out of scope. I’m thinking of how for example a startup might make a product, put it in front of users, and then find out some need they hadn’t thought of in advance.
I’ve a truffle-cist, me
I couldn’t find the podcast on CastBox (which I use). I see that it’s the 15th most popular medium for listening to podcasts in the US in 2019-20.
According to the data I was using, it seems Pandora and Audible are the objectively best mediums to target next with the podcast, but I have a vested interest in you allowing me to listen to it on the app I use.
This post feels relevant: Dust off your CVs for the Big EA Hiring Round
You might also consider using Swapcard (the event app used for EA Globals) as a way to find companies with many EAs in them.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘bandwidth’, each time you use it.
I have trouble parsing what people mean when they say this word, and so do others.
You only have control over your own actions: you can’t control whether your interlocutor over-interprets you or not.
Your “right approach”, which is about how to behave as a listener, is compatible with Michael_PJ’s, which is about how to behave as a speaker: I don’t see why we can’t do both.