Severin

Karma: 1,130

Severin 23 Aug 2023 5:22 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jeroen Willems’s comment on: Should I train to become a mediator for the EA ecosystem?
I don’t understand how this is relevant to what I’m writing, as I don’t intend to do mediation only for people who know AR or circling. But the number of upvotes indicates that others do understand, so I’d like to understand it, too. Jeroen, would you mind elaborating?

Severin 14 Aug 2023 21:21 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Should I train to become a mediator for the EA ecosystem?
That’s an excellent question!
For organization-internal mediations, I guess that’s not a problem, because everyone within the org has an interest in the process going well?
One version for grievances between orgs/community members I could think of: Having an EA fund or E2Ger pay all my gigs so I can offer them pro bono and have no financial incentives to botch the outcome.
Plus, I’ll definitely want to build a non-EA source of income so that I’m not entirely financially dependent on EA.
Where do you see gaps in these ideas?

Severin 14 Aug 2023 21:17 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: CEvans’s comment on: Should I train to become a mediator for the EA ecosystem?
Perhaps another consideration against is that it seems potentially bad to me for any one person to be the primary mediator for the EA community. There are some worlds where this position is subtly very influential. I dont think I would want a single person/worldview to have that, in order to avoid systematic mistakes/biases.
Well, good that my values are totally in line with the correct trajectory for EA then!

No, but seriously: I have no idea how to fix this. The best response I can give is: I’d suspect that having one mediator is probably still better than having zero mediators. Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Plus, it’s an essential part of the role to just be a catalyst for the conflict parties rather than try and steer the outcome towards any particular direction. (Of course, that is an ideal that is not perfectly aligned with how humans actually work.)
Perhaps you coordinating a group/arrangement with external people could be a great idea.
So far, every single time I’ve done ops work without guidance and under precarious financial circumstances has made me miserable and lead to outcomes I was less than satisfied with. I’m definitely not the right person to do this.
Plus, I have some evidence this will probably not work within any reasonable amount of effort: One person with an insider perspective of many EA orgs’ conflicts said that so far, the limiting factor for hiring an external mediator was having one available who is sufficiently trusted. I.e., being known and trusted in the community is crucial for actually doing this. It’s hard enough to build a reputation for myself, even if I’m around at conferences and in the forums a lot. Building a reputation on behalf of external mediators I work with seems like a near impossible task.

Severin 14 Aug 2023 21:08 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Should I train to become a mediator for the EA ecosystem?
Huh, sounds plausible. At the same time, it has me wonder whether EA should imitate the corporate world less here. Wouldn’t “Would it be high EV to have an EA insider with competence in this?” be a more relevant question than “Is this something that’s already common and generally useful in the non-EA world?”

I guess the heuristic you point at is for avoiding vultures?

Severin 14 Aug 2023 21:05 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: MathiasKB’s comment on: Should I train to become a mediator for the EA ecosystem?
What would be cheap tests to determine if this would be valuable?
Good prompt, thanks!

Mediation is a high risk/high reward activity, and I’d only want to work with EA orgs when I’m already sure that I can consistently deliver very high quality. So I started advertising mediation to private people on pay-what-you-want-basis now to build the necessary skill and confidence. If this works out, I’ll progress to NGOs in a couple weeks.
The AuthRev and Relating Languages links look like nonsense to me.
I wince every time when I look at their homepages, way too optimized for selling stuff to a mainstream audience rather than providing value to rationalish people.
But, if you think Authentic Relating and Circling are legit (which a bunch of EAs in at least Germany and the Bay do), it makes sense to take AuthRev pretty seriously. Their facilitator trainings and their 350-page authentic relating games manual make them one of the core pillars of the community. Plus, some early-days CFAR folks were involved in co-founding the company.
That impression is very valuable evidence though. Afaict, AR is way more popular among EAs younger than the grantmaker generation.

Severin 9 Jun 2023 21:42 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jackson Wagner’s comment on: Virtue ethics is utilitarianism for humans
Agreed!

Severin 9 Jun 2023 15:08 UTC
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in reply to: quinn’s comment on: Virtue ethics is utilitarianism for humans
Agree with everything.

Your friend sounds delightful! I think actually, what I’m trying to point towards here is closer to “lifestyle anarchism” than classic virtue ethics. Coincidentally, I found myself defaulting back to explaining my values in anarchist terms when I announced my career transition from active EA community builder to baby influencer in my first blog post.

I guess it’s no coincidence that Rocky’s “on living without idols” is my all-time favorite on the EA forum.

Severin 9 Jun 2023 14:38 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: emre kaplan’s comment on: Virtue ethics is utilitarianism for humans
Thanks! I’m still grappling with putting the intuitions behind this post into words, so this is valuable feedback.

Personally, my heuristic in the example you describe is rolling with what I feel like. Considerations that go into that are:

1. Will it kill me? (I’m allergic to red meat)
2. Would I be actively disgusted eating it? (The case for most if not all non-vegetarian stuff.)
3. Do I lack the spoons to have a debate about this, given which amount of pushback/disappointment I expect from the host?

...and when all of them get a “no”:
4. Do I feel like my nutrient profile is sufficiently covered atm? Will this, or asking for a vegan alternative make me feel more alert and healthy? (I all-too-often default to lacto-vegetarianism in stressful times. Low-effort vegan foods tend to give me deficiencies (probably protein) that give me massive cheese cravings. From utilitarianism I learned to prioritize not feeling crap over always causing minimum harm.)

While studying philosophy in Uni, I also hated virtue ethics for years due to its intrinsic fuzziness.

Things that changed since then and turned it into a very attractive default:
1. Picking up a meditation habit that made my gut feeling more salient and coherent, and my verbal reasoning less loud/coercive.
2. Learning Focusing to a reasonable level of fluency. The mental motion of checking with my system 1 what the best course forward would be is pretty much the same as pausing to tune in to my felt sense and gauging where it draws me.

Severin 9 Jun 2023 13:52 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Virtue ethics is utilitarianism for humans
awesome, looks good!

Severin 15 May 2023 13:26 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Ben_West’s comment on: Psychological safety as the yardstick of good EA movement building
Oh dear. Well, there goes that bit of evidence out the window.

Severin 11 May 2023 18:56 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: mhendric’s comment on: Psychological safety as the yardstick of good EA movement building
Strongly agree!

Actually, the seeds for a bunch of my current knowledge about and approach to community building were sown during various unconferences over the years.

The 2020 Unconference was my first in-person encounter with EA. After my first contact point with EA was reading a bunch of 80k articles which didn’t quite seem to have me as part of their target audience, I was very positively surprised by how warm and caring and non-elitist the community was.

I learned to get these things out of EAG(x)s as well. But, had the fancy professional events been my first contact with the community, I might well not be around anymore.

The unconference-format in EA evolved into several directions since its inception. For example, the AI Safety Europe retreat this year was an unconference with a framing that optimized for a clear personal/professional separation. In my impression, it worked wonderfully in that. Not only in regards to combining the flat hierarchies of the format with a professional vibe, but also in regards to connections made. Meanwhile, the German unconferences evolved away from a professional focus, into funconferences into a no longer EA-affiliated summercamp that’s completely organized by volunteers and participant-funded.

I started drafting a follow-up to this post with practical suggestions today. Doing more unconferences is on the list.

Severin 11 May 2023 13:37 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Amber Dawn’s comment on: Severin’s Shortform
Yep—it reflects how many things in EA already work implicitly. That’s one of the things I love about EA. And, I think it would be good if we use this as an explicit model more often, too.

If you want to dive a little bit deeper into these kinds of management practices, you may want to have a look into the Reinventing Organizations-wiki: https://reinventingorganizationswiki.com/en/theory/decision-making/

If you want to dive very, very deep, Frederik Laloux’s “Reinventing Organizations” might be a worthwhile read. I’m halfway through, and it helped me build a whole bunch of intuitions for how to do community building better.

Severin 11 May 2023 12:22 UTC
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.

Severin 11 May 2023 11:01 UTC
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

Severin 10 May 2023 15:46 UTC
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!

Severin 10 May 2023 15:45 UTC
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.

Severin 10 May 2023 15:36 UTC
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.

Severin 10 May 2023 15:32 UTC
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.

Severin 8 May 2023 17:12 UTC
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.

Severin 7 May 2023 23:22 UTC
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.