Yes, I don’t. The result page is broken (the previous pages work fine).
Moses
Karma: 210
I feel you could come to the same conclusions/prescriptions with a much simpler underlying framework:
In order to utilize human effort, someone must come up with some valuable activity to pipe that effort into. A manager/employer, roughly speaking.
Some people manage/employ themselves; they find something to pipe their efforts into on their own. Maybe they start a project, a charity, a startup, organize a local group or an event, what have you.
Some people are even willing to manage/employ other people: they come up with so many ideas of what to do that it can keep multiple people busy.
Other people require external management/employment; they look for pre-defined jobs to slot themselves into.
[Rest of comment edited for clarity:]
The practical suggestions seem to fall into two categories:
“Be more self-managing, stop looking for a job and come up with your own idea what you can do”—e.g., organize events, do research on your own.
“Delegate”—e.g. distill the 80k know-how and delegate coaching. But the people at 80k don’t have the time to actively orchestrate this. Again, there will need to be people who actively step up and make this happen.
So I think you could take out all the hierarchy stuff, radically simplifying the idea, and still make roughly the same suggestions:
Stop looking for other people to manage you. If you show up looking for a job, requiring management from other people who are already busy managing themselves or others, you’re adding to their burden, not easing it. The high-profile EA orgs are not bottlenecked on “structure” or “network”; they’re bottlenecked because there’s a hundred people requiring management for every one person willing to manage others. Create your own research agenda, start your own EA org, organize your own event, find out on your own how some aspect of the EA community could be improved, propose a solution, implement it.
achieved their prominence
Aha! This made it click for me. I was confused by this whole issue where people can’t get jobs at prestigious EA orgs. Something felt backwards about it.
Let’s say you want to solve some problem in the world and you conclude that the most effective way for you to push on the problem is to take the open research position at organization X.
But you find out that there’s someone even better for that position than you who will take it. Splendid! Now your hands are free to take the only slightly less effective position at organization Y! It’s as if you got a clone for free—now we’re surely getting closer to the solution of the problem than you originally expected!
But again, you find out someone better suited will be taking the position instead of you. Marvelous! So many people are working on the problem; as someone who just wants the problem solved (right?), you couldn’t wish for anything better! Off to the next task on the to-do list—hopefully someone is already taking care of that one as well!
…But, weirdly enough, as people get rejected from position after position, they get more and more frustrated and sullen. How so?
I think it makes more sense to me if, instead of “how can I maximize the amount of progress made on the most important problem”, I model people as asking “how can I achieve prominence in the EA community?” Then, of course, if it’s someone else achieving prominence instead of you, you’re going to get frustrated instead of delighted.
Does this make sense to anyone else or have I read too much Robin Hanson?
Yes, makes sense.
EA should try to make people feel relevant if and only if they’re doing good.
I would even say something like “iff they’re making an honest attempt at doing good”, because the kids are suffering from enough crippling anxiety as it is :)
It’s been said that EA is vetting constrained, but in some deep sense it’s more like that EA (and the world) is constrained on the amount of people that don’t need to be told what to do.
Great, I feel less crazy when other people have the same thoughts as me. From my comment a week ago:
The high-profile EA orgs are not bottlenecked on “structure” or “network”; they’re bottlenecked because there’s a hundred people requiring management for every one person willing to manage others.
I have several thoughts on this, but I only have time for one right now:
I’m not a psychiatrist, but I would suggest that the thoughts we have when we’re mentally healthy are the valid ones, and the thoughts we have when we’re depressed are the twisted, irrational ones.
I know that when you’re depressed, it seems that you’re seeing things more clearly, but I think that a psychiatrist would tell you that’s not the case.
So if your healthy self feels okay about not performing up to your depressed-self’s standards, I would strongly suggest to defer to the healthy self (by postponing all decisions until you’re healthy again).
I agree with Brendon that the Hotel should charge the tenants, and the tenants should seek their own funding.
If I was contemplating donating to the Hotel, the decision would hinge almost entirely on who is at the hotel and what they are working on. Moreover, I expect I would almost certainly want to tie my donation to a specific tenant/group of tenants, because I wouldn’t a priori expect all of them to be good donation targets.
At this point, why would I not just fund the specific person directly? Better yet, why would I not donate to the EA Funds/CEA and let professional grant-makers sift through the tenants’ personal applications?
When I look at the current guest list, it’s just very short, general introductory paragraphs. Surely you wouldn’t expect a grant-maker to make a funding decision based on these.
The Hotel itself is a cool idea which makes sense: create a transient EA hub somewhere where land is cheap. I love it. I am in fact one of those people who were excited about the project when it was first announced.
But in the current model, you cannot separate funding the Hotel from funding the specific people who stay there, and potential donors just don’t have enough information about those people to confidently fund them.
Is there any resource (eg blogpost) for people curious about what “facilitating conversations” involves?
Yes, that helps, thanks. “Mediating” might be a word which would convey the idea better.
Nice summary of the benefits, thanks.
To new practitioners, I would strongly suggest to follow much more detailed instruction that given here; for example, I follow the meditation guide The Mind Illuminated, which I can wholeheartedly recommend. It will make your meditation more productive and more enjoyable.
Re: productivity—from personal experience, meditation also seems to help with overthinking. I think that Rationalists in particular have the nasty habit of endless intellectualizing about how to beat akrasia and get myself to do X; it seems that as you meditate, the addiction to this mental movement fades and then it’s not appealing anymore, so you go do X instead.
I think it’s more than a matter of the quantity of thinking; I think there’s a qualitative difference in whether the underlying motive for even starting the train of thought is “I intend to do X, so I have to plan the steps that constitute X”, or whether it’s “X scares the fuck out of me and I have to avoid doing X in a way that the System 2 can rationalize to itself, so it’s either (1) go stare in the fridge, (2) masturbate, (3) deep-clean the bathroom, or (4) start a google doc brainstorming all the concerns I should take into account when prioritizing the various sub-tasks of X. Hmm, 4 sounds like something System 2 would eat up, the absolute dumbass.”
I’ll take your invitation to treat this as an open thread (I’m not going to EAG).
before you’re ready to tackle anything real ambitious… what should you do?
Why not tackle less ambitious goals?
I think a big problem for EA is not having a clear sense of what mid-level EAs are supposed to do.
Funny—I think a big problem for EA is mid-level EAs looking over their shoulders for someone else to tell them what they’re supposed to do
Ah.
An important facet of the Middle of the Middle is that people don’t yet have the agency or context needed to figure out what’s actually worth doing, and a lot of the obvious choices are wrong.
This seems to me like two different problems:
Some people lack, as you say, agency. This is what I was talking about—they’re looking for someone to manage them.
Other people are happy to do things on their own, but they don’t have the necessary skills and experience, so they will end up doing something that’s useless in the best case and actively harmful in the worst case. This is a problem which I missed before but now acknowledge.
Normally I would encourage practicing doing (or, ideally, you know, doing) rather than practicing thinking, but when doing carries the risk of harm, thinking starts to seem like a sensible option. Fair enough.
Hmm, it’s not so much the classic rationalist trait of overthinking that I’m concerned about. It’s more like…
First, when you do X, the brain has a pesky tendency to learn exactly X. If you set out to practice thinking, the brain improves at the activity of “practicing thinking”. If you set out to achieve something that will require serious thinking, you improve at serious thinking in the process. Trying to try and all that. So yes, practicing thinking, but you can’t let your brain know that that’s what you’re trying to achieve.
Second, “thinking for real” sure is work, but the next question is, is this work worth doing? When you start with some tangible end goal and make plans by working your way backwards to where you are now, that informs you what thinking works needs to be done, decreasing the chance that you’ll waste time on producing research which looks nice and impressive and all that, but in the end doesn’t help anyone improve the world.
I guess if you come up with technology that allows people to plug into the world-saving-machine at the level of “doing research-assistant-kind-of-work for other people who know what they’re doing” and gradually work their way up to “being one of the people who know what they’re doing”, that would make this work.
You wouldn’t be “practicing thinking”; you could easily convince your brain that you’re actually trying to achieve something in the real world, because you could clearly follow some chain of sub-sub-agendas to sub-agendas to agendas and see that what you’re working on is for real.
And, by the same token, you’d be working on something that (someone believes) needs to be done. And maybe sometimes you’d realize that, no, actually, this whole line of reasoning can be cut out or de-prioritized, here’s why, etc.—and that’s how you’d gradually grow to be one of the people who know what they’re doing.
So, yeah, proceed on that, I guess.
Just as a data point, I didn’t read OP as an attack at all.
I also don’t think that if you have overall negative feedback, you should necessarily have to come up with some good things to say as well, just to balance things out and “be nice”. OP said what they wanted to say and it reads to me like valuable feedback, including the subtle undertone of frustration.
As a data point on the object level, I think that magic sorting makes sense on a website with intense traffic (HN, reddit), not on a site with a few posts a day.
Both here and on LW, I have
/allPostsbookmarked, “Sorted by Daily”; that helps. I haven’t used the front page in ages.
Oh, I would’ve sworn that was already the case (with the understanding that, as you say, there is less volunteering involved, because with the “inner” movement being smaller, more selective, and with tighter/more personal relationships, there is much less friction in the movement of money, either in the form of employment contracts or grants).
Just a heads up regarding the HEXACO personality test website that was mentioned: it seems to be broken right now, so instead of results, you get a bunch of lines like this:
Notice: Undefined offset: 3 in /home/hexaco/domains/hexaco.org/public_html/classes/Statistics.php on line 35I didn’t find any other HEXACO test online; did anyone else? (Or has the official website worked for anyone else?)