lincolnq
Posts 5
Comments102
It's a fair critique. I use "legible" in this way, and I don't really want to give it up, and I think it's not too bad jargon-wise because even non-EA people seem to understand it without too much prefixing with definition.
Your alternatives don't quite capture the idea right:
- If I were to set a "clear" or "understandable" goal, I would expect people to be able to make sense of the goal statement but not necessarily see what KPIs went into it.
- "Verifiable" is the opposite: I would expect people to expect that they could check whether or not we made the goal, but not simply read it and get it
- The closest is "clear and verifiable" but it's three words -- and "legible" is still better, because it points at a more system-1-ish implementation of clarity and verifiability.
You said in your "Five years" post that you are planning to do more self-eval and impact assessments, and I strongly encourage this. What are the most realistic bits of evidence you could get from an impact report of Rethink Priorities which would cause you to dramatically update your strategy? (or, another generator: what are you most worried about learning from such assessments?)
I don’t believe this is an unbelievably terrible idea; it makes sense to do this in some circumstances. That said, take resentment buildup seriously! If you feel that you are the sort of person who has even a small chance of feeling resentful about this choice later on, it is probably not worth it. You need to feel unambiguously good about this decision in the short and long term.
Yeah, sorry, I wrote the comment quickly and "resources" was overloaded. My first reference to resources was intended to be money; the second was information like career guides and such.
I think the critical-info-in-private thing is actually super impactful towards centralization, because when the info leaks, the "decentralized people" have a high-salience moment where they realize that what's happening privately isn't what they thought was happening publicly, they feel slightly lied-to or betrayed, lose perceived empowerment and engagement.
The tractability of further centralisation seems low
I'm not sure yet about my overall take on the piece but I do quibble a bit with this; I think that there are lots of simple steps that CEA/Will/various central actors (possibly including me) could do, if we wished, to push towards centralization. Things like:
- Having most of the resources come from one place
- Declaring that a certain type of resource is the "official" resource which we "recommend"
- Running invite-only conferences where we invite all the people that are looked-up-to as leaders in the community, and specifically try to get those leaders on the same page strategically
- Generally demonstrating intensely high levels of cooperativeness with people who are "trusted" along some shared legible axis, and much lower levels of cooperativeness with outsiders
- Stop publishing critical info publicly, relying on whisper networks to get the word out about things
I didn't start off writing this comment to be snarky, but I realized that we are, kind of, doing most of these things. Do we intend to? Should we maybe not do them if we think we want to push away from centralization?
I mostly agree, but would add that it seems totally okay if two orgs sometimes work on the same thing! It's easy to over-index on the simple existence of an item within scope and say "oh that's covered" and move on, without actually asking "is this need really being met in the world?" Competition is good in general, and I wouldn't want to overly discourage it.
Yeah. I just joined the board so I don’t exactly know why, but we are definitely aware of missing this deadline and the charity commission is as well, and I think it is caused by the ongoing investigation.