Franziska Fischer
Posts 7
Comments8
Phrasings like
"if $58,000 of all inclusive world travel plus $1000 a month stipend is a $70,000 salary"
for what is evidently a fully paid, luxurious work & travel experience to top EA hubs including costs covered for a partner, tanks the quality of the comment.
You make it sound like they were offering a McKinsey-like 80 hour gloabl travel slavery. Nonlinear's offering seems to resemble more a global travel experience for "young silicon-valley EAs" while hustling on a project they find valuable and networking with top EA managers. Regardless of where the exact truth lies, this unreflected strawman characterisation makes it hard to read your comment as well thought through.
On direct response to the takeaway, I think there's space and need for both, rigid organisations governed by all sorts of boards and unions as well as dynamic social experiment-like orgs trying out new stuff. They probably have different target groups and it seems perfectly desireable to have a world where we got both options.
Yes indeed that's what I am suggesting: if a strong bottleneck is mentoring for an org, one approach of "more broadly distributing ressources" might be that programmes increase their student-staff ratio (meaning a bit more self-guided work for each participant but more participants in total)
Prominent and very competitive programmes I was thinking of are SERI MATS and MLAB from redwood, but I think that extreme applicants-participant ratios are true for pretty much all paid and even many non-paid EA fellowships, e.g. PIBBSS or . Thanks for the hint that it may be helpful to mention some of them.
@'they have more ressources than us': Why does that matter? If the question is "How can we achieve the most possible impact with the limited ressources we got?". Then given the extreme competitiveness of these programmes and the early-career-stage most applicants are in, a plausible hypothesis is that scaling up the quantity of these training programmes at the expense of quality is a way to increase total output. And so far it seems to me that this is potentially neglected
Thanks for the elaborate answer. I'd be curious to hear a bit more of your thoughts regarding the meta-comment in your last paragraph + hints what to change about the information environment you suspect here, if you have time
note: feel free to be as unrigorous as you want with the response, you don't need to justify beliefs, just flesh them out a bit, I don't intend to contest them but want to use them to improve my understanding of that situation
I think your example with fetuses being the variation between single cells and adults is very adequate here. So my claim would probably be something along the lines of "the fact that 8-month old fetuses exist (which usually may not be killed anymore) is a strong reason why in most countries 4-months-old fetuses have a lot of legal & societal protection. If there was nothing in between the 4 months fetus and the born baby, I don't think many countries would ban abortion of 4-months old fetuses, rather it is there because of the transition. Thus the existence of a smooth transition between non-human animals and sapiens would increase support for "lower" animals.
I agree that there is already a continuum with e.g. disabled sapiens as you name it. However I don't think that "commonsense" is aware of that. I think commonsense sees mentally disabled people as something "that could have been any of us" (or could even still happen to many of us, as some mental disabilities are not from birth). However intermediate species can not be considered disabled exceptions/"misfortunes" or something like that
I guess an important question to begin with should be what chain of actions to you expect from your report. Do you want to report them to the police? The university? Do you want to show pictures as evidence or bring them to an occasion where the asserted crime happens? What then? They write a report, nothing happens except scoreched earth?
Without diving into the details of peoples motivations for doing cocaine and their actual needs, doing cocaine is a problem common enough in most western countries that reporting a single individual consumer will likely have negligible consequences at large and potentially harmful consequences for yourself. Reporting individual cocaine consuming students doesn't seem like a realistic strategy to combat drug cartels but comes with personal risks that don't seem worth it, even if you believe in some positive consequences from said report (like this guy not using cocaine anymore?), which I'd be sceptical of in the first place.