I dunno about “key.” Open-ended brainstorm, keeping in mind that my models of Leverage are vague and straw and NO insult is intended if I get things wrong …
Leverage advantages—provides a discriminator that lets you tell more accurately who fits and who doesn’t, sounds better if your goal is to accrue funding, is better if your goal is to return money to an investor, provides your participants with a strong mission that they can write in their hearts rather than a vague one that might be hard to grasp, gives you a narrowing principle that helps you discard certain kinds of growth as irrelevant/boon-doggle with reasonably high confidence
Leverage disadvantages—seems (from my limited outside vantage point) to require people to more closely conform to the shape of the leader/take on a singular mission rather than allowing for different colors in the spectrum, seems to fall prey to the intellectual property and get-there-first problems that encourage isolation from the broader network of allies, (maybe) requires you to somewhat distort what you’re doing to please investors, (maybe) requires you to strike the balance between deciding-too-soon and being-decision-paralyzed because you have to cohere around a smaller number of goals at a time
Dragon Army advantages—adheres (slightly) more closely to what the average rationalist wants and thus opens you up to a (slightly) wider range of participants, causes members to gain leadership and facilitation skills of necessity rather than accidentally/luckily, (somewhat more) forces people to confront the question what do you really want instead of giving them an easy out by handing them a distracting answer, doesn’t require as much funding, biases toward action rather than running the risk of spiraling up into the meta
Dragon Army disadvantages—more vulnerable to strawmanning and skepticism because it is less coherent and clear, much more vulnerable to confusion or failure if I get hit by a bus because the models all live in my head and aren’t yet interactable, runs the risk of losing people who are impatient and feel like they’re lost in triviality, is less viscerally rewarding (jack of all tradesing, that is) than getting gold medals as a master, needs a longer runway/longer start time because it’s more explicitly about culture building and less about objective checkpoints that you can meet on the fly
incomplete
Note that I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH that my models of Leverage are VAGUE AND PROBABLY WRONG and also note that I’m sleep-deprived and I am aware that this may not really answer your question.
Oh, also: AFAIK, Leverage is actually fairly low on precommitment, i.e. if someone were to want everyone to get together in the same room at the same time on a regular basis, they would have to go around and win the argument something like forty times, and at any time someone who’d previously been convinced could just say, “actually, never mind, I changed my mind and I have better things to do again,” and there aren’t any … initially consensual, eventually coercive? … structures in place.
Nothing, in short, to get people across the unpleasant valley except their own epistemics and willpower … no firm, unyielding scaffold that can be built such that others can rely on it. So, Leverage has the advantage of not having the failures of such a system (e.g. people getting trapped and wasting time), and Dragon Army has the advantages of having the benefits of such a system (Actual Reliability that doesn’t require inordinate upfront costs, the ability to develop an ecology of affordances over time upon a Schelling point of togetherness).
What do you think are the key advantages & disadvantages of your Polaris vs Leverage’s? How does this relate to methods?
I dunno about “key.” Open-ended brainstorm, keeping in mind that my models of Leverage are vague and straw and NO insult is intended if I get things wrong …
Leverage advantages—provides a discriminator that lets you tell more accurately who fits and who doesn’t, sounds better if your goal is to accrue funding, is better if your goal is to return money to an investor, provides your participants with a strong mission that they can write in their hearts rather than a vague one that might be hard to grasp, gives you a narrowing principle that helps you discard certain kinds of growth as irrelevant/boon-doggle with reasonably high confidence
Leverage disadvantages—seems (from my limited outside vantage point) to require people to more closely conform to the shape of the leader/take on a singular mission rather than allowing for different colors in the spectrum, seems to fall prey to the intellectual property and get-there-first problems that encourage isolation from the broader network of allies, (maybe) requires you to somewhat distort what you’re doing to please investors, (maybe) requires you to strike the balance between deciding-too-soon and being-decision-paralyzed because you have to cohere around a smaller number of goals at a time
Dragon Army advantages—adheres (slightly) more closely to what the average rationalist wants and thus opens you up to a (slightly) wider range of participants, causes members to gain leadership and facilitation skills of necessity rather than accidentally/luckily, (somewhat more) forces people to confront the question what do you really want instead of giving them an easy out by handing them a distracting answer, doesn’t require as much funding, biases toward action rather than running the risk of spiraling up into the meta
Dragon Army disadvantages—more vulnerable to strawmanning and skepticism because it is less coherent and clear, much more vulnerable to confusion or failure if I get hit by a bus because the models all live in my head and aren’t yet interactable, runs the risk of losing people who are impatient and feel like they’re lost in triviality, is less viscerally rewarding (jack of all tradesing, that is) than getting gold medals as a master, needs a longer runway/longer start time because it’s more explicitly about culture building and less about objective checkpoints that you can meet on the fly
incomplete
Note that I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH that my models of Leverage are VAGUE AND PROBABLY WRONG and also note that I’m sleep-deprived and I am aware that this may not really answer your question.
Oh, also: AFAIK, Leverage is actually fairly low on precommitment, i.e. if someone were to want everyone to get together in the same room at the same time on a regular basis, they would have to go around and win the argument something like forty times, and at any time someone who’d previously been convinced could just say, “actually, never mind, I changed my mind and I have better things to do again,” and there aren’t any … initially consensual, eventually coercive? … structures in place.
Nothing, in short, to get people across the unpleasant valley except their own epistemics and willpower … no firm, unyielding scaffold that can be built such that others can rely on it. So, Leverage has the advantage of not having the failures of such a system (e.g. people getting trapped and wasting time), and Dragon Army has the advantages of having the benefits of such a system (Actual Reliability that doesn’t require inordinate upfront costs, the ability to develop an ecology of affordances over time upon a Schelling point of togetherness).