these are all literally from the Nonprofits for Dummies book. [...] The history I’ve heard is that SI [...]
\
failed to read Nonprofits for Dummies,
I remember that, when Anna was managing the fellows program, she was reading books of the “for dummies” genre and trying to apply them… it’s just that, as it happened, the conceptual labels she accidentally happened to give to the skill deficits she was aware of were “what it takes to manage well” (i.e. “basic management”) and “what it takes to be productive”, rather than “what it takes to (help) operate a nonprofit according to best practices”. So those were the subjects of the books she got. (And read, and practiced.) And then, given everything else the program and the organization was trying to do, there wasn’t really any cognitive space left over to effectively notice the possibility that those wouldn’t be the skills that other people afterwards would complain that nobody acquired and obviously should have known to. The rest of her budgeted self-improvement effort mostly went toward overcoming self-defeating emotional/social blind spots and motivated cognition. (And I remember Jasen’s skill learning focus was similar, except with more of the emphasis on emotional self-awareness and less on management.)
failed to ask advisors for advice,
I remember Anna went out of her way to get advice from people who she already knew, who she knew to be better than her at various aspects of personal or professional functioning. And she had long conversations with supporters who she came into contact with for some other reasons; for those who had executive experience, I expect she would have discussed her understanding of SIAI’s current strategies with them and listened to their suggestions. But I don’t know how much she went out of her way to find people she didn’t already have reasonably reliable positive contact with, to get advice from them.
I don’t know much about the reasoning of most people not connected with the fellows program about the skills or knowledge they needed. I think Vassar was mostly relying on skills tested during earlier business experience, and otherwise was mostly preoccupied with the general crisis of figuring out how to quickly-enough get around the various hugely-saliently-discrepant-seeming-to-him psychological barriers that were causing everyone inside and outside the organization to continue unthinkingly shooting themselves in the feet with respect to this outside-evolutionary-context-problem of existential risk mitigation. For the “everyone outside’s psychological barriers” side of that, he was at least successful enough to keep SIAI’s public image on track to trigger people like David Chalmers and Marcus Hutter into meaningful contributions to and participation in a nascent Singularity-studies academic discourse. I don’t have a good idea what else was on his mind as something he needed to put effort into figuring out how to do, in what proportions occupying what kinds of subjective effort budgets, except that in total it was enough to put him on the threshold of burnout. Non-profit best practices apparently wasn’t one of those things though.
But the proper approach to retrospective judgement is generally a confusing question.
the kind of thing that makes me want to say [. . .]
The general pattern, at least post-2008, may have been one where the people who could have been aware of problems felt too metacognitively exhausted and distracted by other problems to think about learning what to do about them, and hoped that someone else with more comparative advantage would catch them, or that the consequences wouldn’t be bigger than those of the other fires they were trying to put out.
strategic plan [...] SI failed to make these kinds of plans in the first place,
There were also several attempts at building parts of a strategy document or strategic plan, which together took probably 400-1800 hours. In each case, the people involved ended up determining, from how long it was taking, that, despite reasonable-seeming initial expectations, it wasn’t on track to possibly become a finished presentable product soon enough to justify the effort. The practical effect of these efforts was instead mostly just a hard-to-communicate cultural shared understanding of the strategic situation and options—how different immediate projects, forms of investment, or conditions in the world might feed into each other on different timescales.
expenses tracking, funds monitoring [...] some funds monitoring was insisted upon after the large theft
There was an accountant (who herself already cost like $33k/yr as the CFO, despite being split three ways with two other nonprofits) who would have been the one informally expected to have been monitoring for that sort of thing, and to have told someone about it if she saw something, out of the like three paid administrative slots at the time… well, yeah, that didn’t happen.
I agree with a paraphrase of John Maxwell’s characterization: “I’d rather hear Eliezer say ‘thanks for funding us until we stumbled across some employees who are good at defeating their akrasia and [had one of the names of the things they were aware they were supposed to] care about [happen to be “]organizational best practices[“]’, because this seems like a better depiction of what actually happened.” Note that this was most of the purpose of the Fellows program in the first place—to create an environment where people could be introduced to the necessary arguments/ideas/culture and to help sort/develop those people into useful roles, including replacing existing management, since everyone knew there were people who would be better at their job than they were and wished such a person could be convinced to do it instead.
Note that this was most of the purpose of the Fellows program in the first place -- [was] to help sort/develop those people into useful roles, including replacing existing management
FWIW, I never knew the purpose of the VF program was to replace existing SI management. And I somewhat doubt that you knew this at the time, either. I think you’re just imagining this retroactively given that that’s what ended up happening. For instance, the internal point system used to score people in the VFs program had no points for correctly identifying organizational improvements and implementing them. It had no points for doing administrative work (besides cleaning up the physical house or giving others car rides). And it had no points for rising to management roles. It was all about getting karma on LW or writing conference papers. When I first offered to help with the organization directly, I was told I was “too competent” and that I should go do something more useful with my talent, like start another business… not “waste my time working directly at SI.”
“I’d rather hear Eliezer say ‘thanks for funding us until we stumbled across some employees who are good at defeating their akrasia and [had one of the names of the things they were aware they were supposed to] care about [happen to be “]organizational best practices[“]’, because this seems like a better depiction of what actually happened.”
\
I remember that, when Anna was managing the fellows program, she was reading books of the “for dummies” genre and trying to apply them… it’s just that, as it happened, the conceptual labels she accidentally happened to give to the skill deficits she was aware of were “what it takes to manage well” (i.e. “basic management”) and “what it takes to be productive”, rather than “what it takes to (help) operate a nonprofit according to best practices”. So those were the subjects of the books she got. (And read, and practiced.) And then, given everything else the program and the organization was trying to do, there wasn’t really any cognitive space left over to effectively notice the possibility that those wouldn’t be the skills that other people afterwards would complain that nobody acquired and obviously should have known to. The rest of her budgeted self-improvement effort mostly went toward overcoming self-defeating emotional/social blind spots and motivated cognition. (And I remember Jasen’s skill learning focus was similar, except with more of the emphasis on emotional self-awareness and less on management.)
I remember Anna went out of her way to get advice from people who she already knew, who she knew to be better than her at various aspects of personal or professional functioning. And she had long conversations with supporters who she came into contact with for some other reasons; for those who had executive experience, I expect she would have discussed her understanding of SIAI’s current strategies with them and listened to their suggestions. But I don’t know how much she went out of her way to find people she didn’t already have reasonably reliable positive contact with, to get advice from them.
I don’t know much about the reasoning of most people not connected with the fellows program about the skills or knowledge they needed. I think Vassar was mostly relying on skills tested during earlier business experience, and otherwise was mostly preoccupied with the general crisis of figuring out how to quickly-enough get around the various hugely-saliently-discrepant-seeming-to-him psychological barriers that were causing everyone inside and outside the organization to continue unthinkingly shooting themselves in the feet with respect to this outside-evolutionary-context-problem of existential risk mitigation. For the “everyone outside’s psychological barriers” side of that, he was at least successful enough to keep SIAI’s public image on track to trigger people like David Chalmers and Marcus Hutter into meaningful contributions to and participation in a nascent Singularity-studies academic discourse. I don’t have a good idea what else was on his mind as something he needed to put effort into figuring out how to do, in what proportions occupying what kinds of subjective effort budgets, except that in total it was enough to put him on the threshold of burnout. Non-profit best practices apparently wasn’t one of those things though.
But the proper approach to retrospective judgement is generally a confusing question.
The general pattern, at least post-2008, may have been one where the people who could have been aware of problems felt too metacognitively exhausted and distracted by other problems to think about learning what to do about them, and hoped that someone else with more comparative advantage would catch them, or that the consequences wouldn’t be bigger than those of the other fires they were trying to put out.
There were also several attempts at building parts of a strategy document or strategic plan, which together took probably 400-1800 hours. In each case, the people involved ended up determining, from how long it was taking, that, despite reasonable-seeming initial expectations, it wasn’t on track to possibly become a finished presentable product soon enough to justify the effort. The practical effect of these efforts was instead mostly just a hard-to-communicate cultural shared understanding of the strategic situation and options—how different immediate projects, forms of investment, or conditions in the world might feed into each other on different timescales.
There was an accountant (who herself already cost like $33k/yr as the CFO, despite being split three ways with two other nonprofits) who would have been the one informally expected to have been monitoring for that sort of thing, and to have told someone about it if she saw something, out of the like three paid administrative slots at the time… well, yeah, that didn’t happen.
I agree with a paraphrase of John Maxwell’s characterization: “I’d rather hear Eliezer say ‘thanks for funding us until we stumbled across some employees who are good at defeating their akrasia and [had one of the names of the things they were aware they were supposed to] care about [happen to be “]organizational best practices[“]’, because this seems like a better depiction of what actually happened.” Note that this was most of the purpose of the Fellows program in the first place—to create an environment where people could be introduced to the necessary arguments/ideas/culture and to help sort/develop those people into useful roles, including replacing existing management, since everyone knew there were people who would be better at their job than they were and wished such a person could be convinced to do it instead.
FWIW, I never knew the purpose of the VF program was to replace existing SI management. And I somewhat doubt that you knew this at the time, either. I think you’re just imagining this retroactively given that that’s what ended up happening. For instance, the internal point system used to score people in the VFs program had no points for correctly identifying organizational improvements and implementing them. It had no points for doing administrative work (besides cleaning up the physical house or giving others car rides). And it had no points for rising to management roles. It was all about getting karma on LW or writing conference papers. When I first offered to help with the organization directly, I was told I was “too competent” and that I should go do something more useful with my talent, like start another business… not “waste my time working directly at SI.”
Seems like a fair paraphrase.