Assessing and Onboarding candidates is a challenge for all organizations but it may be worse in EA as they may not be large enough to have HR departments and seem to have staff mainly to do the research but not people development and training. A lot of this tends to be maturing the culture so while there are commercial solutions, they have to meet the culture. I don’t look at the problem as developing new software but rather adapting something existing and operates at the right scale to get the job done.
Patrick Liu
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Hi, there may be a use case for people wanting a change of scenario for inspiration on a challenge or may want to hunker down to do some deep work. In such cases, a month long stay may be needed to do some effective work. Has it been considered to do housing swaps?
On having a routine, or don’t—I really like this advice. I feel we would benefit from having a default routine that we’ve set once and then don’t have to repeat the decision for. This could be a morning routine or what to order for lunch. Even though its a default, you can make it intentional the times you choose to override it like when you override a setting on your phone. This allows for exploration and whimsy while the other 80% of your choices are alleviated by having the default.
On working unless you actively decide otherwise—I don’t think this applies as well to general situations. I have found there is a benefit to time constraints on a task so you focus more deeply on it rather than assuming you have 14 hours in the day to do it. It also forces prioritization so you eliminate distractions like emails which can take up your most productive hours and also make you feel “busy”. Also Josh Watzkin talks about being able to turn your peak state on and off so you can control your energy. Ultimately I think it will depend on what type of work the person has to do so I think it warrants each person to consider if they can be more effective by leveraging constraints.
Shower thoughts: AI has advanced its intelligence so fast by running thousands of iterations of training. In a way, it has lived a thousand lifetimes during our human lifespan. If each training run was one life, could that be analogous to one human life? If AGI has a survival instinct, could that be analogous to the drive for the survival of the human race as a species? Does that then change the way to look at control or coexistence mechanisms with AGI?
Oh, so apparently this is called the “Second Species” theory. I’ll need to read more on it.
Thanks, just got on it. Will check it out!
Hi Prof.Wierd,
IMO the “most important” principle will depend on where you are in life at the time. This seems to be a book worth re-reading throughout life and the same passage can mean different things at different points in life. If I recall, Dalio separates his principles into those more for personal life and those more for business/dealing with others. I think the personal principles which you have full control of today, are worth comparing and contemplating first. Something such as “how to hire” may not be as relevant if you are not currently in a position to hire. (Counterpoint, it is worth flipping the principle around and consider how we might be a good hire or employee as an auxiliary exercise).
Personally, I found the diagnosing oneself immediately actionable.
I started reading Arms and Influence at the library. I would it say it further applies the concepts of SoC, specifically to war or nuclear threat scenarios but SoC would be the first principles to analyze conflict. Interestingly, in the forward I read, Schelling mentions he realizes some of the things are out of date but left it in for historical context.
I agree, especially with the point of iterating your “product”. I would take it further and add that in the beginning, the team should be trying to optimize learning. They should to open to changing the product and even throw away that v0.1 website/format. They should keep the learning and rebuild. Also consider that learning includes learning what doesn’t work, so keep the lesson, archive the product and treat it as a “one time we did that experiment”.
Hi, I think you might find something helpful from this system for information organization. It divides up four different purposes a user might be looking for information and so the optimal service model for each can be a bit different. Like you say in the post, some information can be too dense for new people onboarding so I believe the information needs to be presented in different ways.
Regarding figure out your customer, I saw this recent post that makes me rethink my weighing on customer personas and shift more towards “Jobs to be done”. It taught me that personas are better collapsed into JtbD -
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/matthewlerner_i-once-wasted-1m-on-personas-matt-lerner-activity-7037014334195032064-mra-?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Could EA benefit from allowing more space for contemplating a response after a post goes up?
This is a post from Jason Fried who write a lot about modern work practices implemented at his company 37 signals—https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jason-fried_dont-be-a-knee-jerk-at-most-companies-activity-7043983774434414593-Y0jG
He describes not encouraging instant, first impression reactions to idea pitches through flipping the communication process. They put out long form content about the idea before the presentation so there can be more developed responses. For posts in the forum, I feel like posts go for quick comments and that helps it rise to the frontpage and gather more comments. Its good and bad to me and I wonder what an improvement could look like.
(Yes, I knee-jerk wrong about this after seeing the post. )
Interesting, have you had a chance to pilot or trial this with any researchers so far?
The Atlantic article by Jacob Stern points out that there is no great analogy to capture the essence of Artificial Intelligence. But if there was, then AI would probably just be a subcategory of that idea. AI can be thought of as a combination of things but it is really its own category. Perhaps the best way to put it—AI is like a Chimera with the destructiveness of Nuclear weapons, the uncontrollable virality of Social Media, the double-edged sword of Drug discovery, and the transformative power of Electricity. It is like a lot of things but put together, it may have far reaching implications we have not begun to comprehend.
I like this framework—“The Lazy Genius guide to nearly everything, but I’m too lazy to count”. It says to decide once for all the small stuff (like what to wear to the store or what to order for lunch) so you can enjoy the moment.
Right, other ways I’ve heard this described is operations is Business as Usual (BAU) and projects have a start date and end date. I’ve seen this important distinction when it comes to budgeting as BAU will be funded first with a certain % uplift of last year’s spend. Project costs tend to be more of a stab in the dark as it will be something that hasn’t been done in this iteration before (e.g. this location or population segment) and whatever will fit in the remaining budget plays a large selection factor.
Now programs....that’s like having your cake and eating it too.
Hey cool, I tried doing something similar throwing in links to NotionAI, telling it to turn the text into a table, and then prompting a column for a summary. NotionAI is about $10/month and your API calls were around $5. Do you think at some point in scale it might be cheaper to use notion? Then maybe you can get adhoc table filtering for free?
Hi Scott, do you know where we can get the data sets to add it to the EA Data Science repo?
Is there a cap on the number of participants? If I am already able to go to a physical EAG will I be taking a spot away from someone else in the virtual conference?
I’ve also been hearing on the 80K hrs podcast and several posts reflecting that our EA orgs have an issue deploying talent. They mention the difficultly assessing and onboarding candidates effectively. I’ve been considering if a workflow platform can provide a quick win and would be interested in exploring more.