Severin

• SeverinMay 11, 2023, 12:22 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Katarina Hahn’s comment on: Psy­cholog­i­cal safety as the yard­stick of good EA move­ment building

  Love it! That bit slipped my mind and seems like a super relevant addition. Thanks a lot.

• SeverinMay 11, 2023, 11:01 AM

  8 points

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  on: Sev­erin’s Shortform

  My personal gold standard of good organizing is the Advice Process. Description by Burning Nest:

  “The general principle is that anyone should be able to make any decision regarding Burning Nest.

  Before a decision is made, you must ask advice from those who will be impacted by that decision, and those who are experts on that subject.

  Assuming that you follow this process, and honestly try to listen to the advice of others, that advice is yours to evaluate and the decision yours to make.”^[1]

  One of the problems the Advice Process tackles is what anarchist visionary madman Robert Anton Wilson calls the SNAFU-principle [“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”]:

  “Communication only occurs between equals–real communication, that is–because when you are dealing with people above you in a hierarchy, you learn not to tell them anything they don’t want to hear. If you tell them anything they don’t want to hear, the response is, “One more word Bumstead and I’ll fire you!” Or in the military, “One more word and you’re court-martialed.” It’s throughout the whole system.

  So the higher up in the hierarchy you go, the more lies are being told to flatter those above them. So those at the top have no idea what is going on at all. Those at the bottom have to adjust to the rules made by those at the top who don’t know what’s going on. Those at the top can write rules about this, that and the other, while those at the bottom have got to adjust reality to fit the rules as much as they can.”

  “So I call this the burden of omniscience: those on the top are supposed to be doing the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and all the sensing, apprehending and conceptualizing for the whole society and those at the bottom have to adjust to what those at the top think based on all the misinformation flowing up in a hierarchy where any speaking of the truth can get you punished.”^[2]

  And the Advice Process does more than just prevent SNAFU: It also prevents the eternal deadlock of consensus-based decisionmaking I’ve suffered through in nonhierarchical collectives of the political left, the eternal bad compromises of basic democracy, and incredible amounts of time wasted on having to be in the room while decisions are made that you don’t actually care about all that much.

  1947, Churchill said:

  “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…” ^[3]

  Luckily, it is not 1947 anymore. Now, we have the Advice Process. It is very good, so you might want to use it.

  1. ^

     https://​​www.loomio.com/​​burning-nest-advice-process/​​

  2. ^

     Cited after http://​​www.idleworm.com/​​ideas/​​snafu.shtml , because most of my books are currently buried in cardboard boxes.

  3. ^

     https://​​richardlangworth.com/​​worst-form-of-government

• SeverinMay 10, 2023, 3:46 PM

  6 points

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  in reply to: Geoffrey Miller’s comment on: Psy­cholog­i­cal safety as the yard­stick of good EA move­ment building

  Yep, all of those are valid points. Thanks!

• SeverinMay 10, 2023, 3:45 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Jelle Donders’s comment on: Psy­cholog­i­cal safety as the yard­stick of good EA move­ment building

  Yep, expectation-setting like that is super valuable.
  
  I’ve also written a short facilitation handbook a couple months ago. It’s useful for meetups, workshops, and basically any other kind of work with groups. Optimizing for psychological safety is implicit in a bunch of things there.

• SeverinMay 10, 2023, 3:36 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: Psy­cholog­i­cal safety as the yard­stick of good EA move­ment building

  Thanks! Yep, the “socials is all people want.” is a bit of a hyperbole. In addition to the TEAMWORK talks, we also have the Fake Meat—Real Talk reading/​discussion group dinners, and will have a talk at the next monthly social, too.

  The one-day career workshops sound great, added to the to-do list.

• SeverinMay 10, 2023, 3:32 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: Psy­cholog­i­cal safety as the yard­stick of good EA move­ment building

  Thanks! Yep, retreats like that are high-ish on the to-do list.

Psy­cholog­i­cal safety as the yard­stick of good EA move­ment building

• SeverinMay 8, 2023, 5:12 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Sinclair Chen’s comment on: Ad­vice for in­ter­act­ing with busy people

  Helps in some situations, yea.
  
  At the same time, in EA, having access to spare cash and potential for impact are not necessarily highly correlated. So, if this becomes the only solution, it might make a bunch of extremely high EV conversations just not happen.

• SeverinMay 7, 2023, 11:22 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Stuart Buck’s comment on: Ad­vice for in­ter­act­ing with busy people

  Thanks! Yep, that is totally in line with the fact that the Karma score of the post here is much more mixed than on LessWrong, which definitely is an Askier sphere than EA.

• SeverinMay 5, 2023, 3:16 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: AI Rights Activist’s comment on: Ad­vice for in­ter­act­ing with busy people

  Strong upvote!
  
  I’m constantly putting some effort into automatizing information flows.
  
  E.g., I asked an EA Berlin community member to write a how-to on finding housing in Berlin, because I get that question at least once a month.
  
  If you have more ideas for how to automatize such things, I’d be excited to read about them.

• SeverinMay 5, 2023, 3:10 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: lilly’s comment on: Ad­vice for in­ter­act­ing with busy people

  No hero worship at all intended, sorry if it came off like that. I agree with you that way too much of that happens in EA. Rockwell’s “On living without idols” is with quite some distance my favorite piece on the EA Forum, and one of my favorite texts on all of the internet.
  
  I’m one of the ~1% of EAs who have a natural tendency to ask for favors too leniently rather than too cautiously, so I would have appreciated knowing these things earlier. The core target audience of this post is people like me.
  
  However, I do think the things I write here might be useful for people outside this group as well: In my understanding, a significant number of people outside my specific subset of neurodivergence tend to just pick up the meme of “better not waste central peoples’ time and attention!” without ever putting much explicit thought into why things are generally done that way. So, I wanted to make explicit the practicalities behind that intuition, to demystify it and make reaching out to busy people more actionable.
  
  I may have failed in that, I’m still in the process of learning to cater my writing to all the different sub-audiences within EA at once. Thanks for pointing out that the intended humor in my exaggerated Christiano-example wasn’t apparent.

Fake Meat—Real Talk 3: The Ca­pa­bil­ity Ap­proach to Hu­man Welfare

• SeverinMay 5, 2023, 8:58 AM

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: markov_user’s comment on: Ad­vice for in­ter­act­ing with busy people

  Thanks! Yep, I’m definitely an outlier in EA regarding how much I don’t care about authority.

  I added section 7 a couple hours after publication to account for feedback on the lesswrong side of this post. Now also added a disclaimer at the start:

  “Note: The intended message of this post is not “Don’t reach out to busy people!”, but “Do reach out, and have these things in mind to make it more likely to get a response/​if you don’t get one.” ”

Ad­vice for in­ter­act­ing with busy people

• SeverinMay 3, 2023, 3:10 PM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 1

  on: Sugges­tion: A work­able ro­man­tic non-es­ca­la­tion policy for EA com­mu­nity builders

  Since writing this, I’ve done a bunch more debating and thinking about how to handle romantic attraction in communities I’m actively involved in responsibly. So, here’s the rule I want to commit to from now on:

  In any community I’m involved in, I won’t be the one driving romantic escalation (or hinting at it) with anyone lower in the institutional hierarchy than me. This applies within 1 month after low-intensity interactions like a 90min workshop and 3 months after high-intensity interactions like a retreat where I was in a lead facilitator role.

  Some specifications:

  1. Both formal and informal hierarchies count. For example, attendees of workshops I facilitate pro bono or during unconferences still count as “lower in the hierarchy”.

  2. Responding to advances people lower in hierarchies make towards me is fine. (Unless other reasons make that seem unethical.)

  3. Escalation can only happen if and only if the other person signals at least an obvious 6 on the Decide10 scale. I.e., a lack of proactiveness counts as a “no”.

  4. Galaxy brain slytherining a la “I’ll just make friends for now and set things up so that they are more likely to propose to me later on.” or “You knoooow, I committed to a certain rule because I’m SUCH an ethical person, so if you were to have interest in me, you’d have to be the one to make the first step *wink wink*” is prohibited.

  5. I might adjust this rule over time as evidence accumulates, but only *after* consulting with people I trust in these matters.

  6. I think a version of this might help us handle EA’s gender imbalance better: It might be good if if heterosexual men in general would just accept/​decline advances from women, and not proactively flirt themselves.

Tack­ling mul­ti­ple cause ar­eas by reimag­in­ing our food sys­tem (Talk+Meetup @Team­work with Chris Popa)

• SeverinApr 30, 2023, 3:18 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: ElliotJDavies’s comment on: EA might sys­tem­at­i­cally gen­er­ate a scarcity mind­set that pro­duces low-in­tegrity actors

  I agree with that statement, and I didn’t intend to make either of those claims.

• SeverinApr 26, 2023, 7:59 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Matt Goodman’s comment on: EA might sys­tem­at­i­cally gen­er­ate a scarcity mind­set that pro­duces low-in­tegrity actors

  I think a more steelmanned version of my initial claim would be that there’s a particular type of struggling that corresponds to low-integrity behavior, and that some aspects of current EA culture make it more likely for people to struggle in that particular way. Even (and maybe especially) if they are generally caring and well-meaning and honestly dedicated to the cause.
  
  I think “scarcity mindset” is an okay handle.
  
  A postrationalist friend also pointed out that what I’m talking about corresponds to Buddhism’s realm of hungry ghosts. In modern psychological reinterpretations of Buddhist mythology, that describes a mode of existence people can get stuck in when they develop the wrong kind of rumination. Basically, always being very aware of lack and what’s missing and being desperate to fill that up.
  
  I’m not sure yet how useful either of these handles will turn out—but yet again, this whole post is an intellectual work in progress and I only reposted it here because people on Facebook found it surprisingly insightful.

• SeverinApr 26, 2023, 4:21 PM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Matt Goodman’s comment on: EA might sys­tem­at­i­cally gen­er­ate a scarcity mind­set that pro­duces low-in­tegrity actors

  Yup, I definitely overgeneralized here and may be completely off. I think there’s something where I’m pointing at, and this helps me clarify my thinking. So thanks.
  
  Generally: I by no means want to demonize anyone for struggling. To a significant extent, I buy into a social model of mental health, and mostly see one person’s struggling as a symptom of their whole surrounding (social and other) being diseased.
  
  My intention behind this post was to point out some ways in which I think EA is suboptimally organized. The rough claim I was aiming for is this: “It’s easier to be a saint in paradise, so let’s make EA a bit more paradisic by fixing some of our norms.”

• SeverinApr 26, 2023, 10:32 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: EA might sys­tem­at­i­cally gen­er­ate a scarcity mind­set that pro­duces low-in­tegrity actors

  Yep, I agree with that point—being untrustworthy and underresourced are definitely not the same thing.