My rough guess is “we survived; most of the differences I could imagine someone fearing didn’t come to pass”. My correction on that rough guess is: “Okay, but insofar as Duncan was the main holder of certain values, skills, and virtues, it seems pretty plausible that there are gaps now today that he would be able to see and that we haven’t seen”.
To be a bit more specific: some of the poles I noticed Duncan doing a lot to hold down while he was here were:
Institutional accountability and legibility;
Clear communication with staff; somebody caring about whether promises made were kept; somebody caring whether policies were fair and predictable, and whether the institution was creating a predictable context where staff, workshop participants, and others wouldn’t suddenly experience having the rug pulled out from under them;
Having the workshop classes start and end on time; (I’m a bit hesitant to name something this “small-seeming” here, but it is a concrete policy that supported the value above, and it is easier to track)
Revising the handbook into a polished state;
Having the workshop classes make sense to people, have clear diagrams and a clear point, etc.; having polish and visible narrative and clear expectations in the workshop;
AFAICT, these things are doing… alright in the absence of Duncan (due partly to the gradual accumulation of institutional knowledge), though I can see his departure in the organization. AFAICT also, Duncan gave me a good chunk of model of this stuff sometime after his Facebook post, actually—and worked pretty hard on a lot of this before his departure too. But I would not fully trust my own judgment on this one, because the outside view is that people (in this case, me) often fail to see what they cannot see.
When I get more concrete:
Institutional accountability and legibility is I think better than it was;
Clean communication with staff, keeping promises, creating clear expectations, etc. -- better on some axes and worse on others—my non-confident guess is better overall (via some loss plus lots of work);
Classes starting and ending on time—at mainlines: slightly less precise class-timing but not obviously worse thereby; at AIRCS, notable decreases, with some cost;
Handboook revisions—have done very little since he left;
Polish and narrative cohesion in the workshop classes—it’s less emphasized but not obviously worse thereby IMO, due partly to the infusion of the counterbalancing “original seeing” content from Brienne that was perhaps easier to pull off via toning polish down slightly. Cohesion and polish still seem acceptable, and far far better than before Duncan arrived.
Also: I don’t know how to phrase this tactfully in a large public conversation. But I appreciate Duncan’s efforts on behalf of CFAR; and also he left pretty burnt out; and also I want to respect what I view as his own attempt to disclaim responsibility for CFAR going forward (via that Facebook post) so that he won’t have to track whether he may have left misleading impressions of CFAR’s virtues in people. I don’t want our answers here to mess that up. If you come to CFAR and turn out not to like it, it is indeed not Duncan’s fault (even though it is still justly some credit to Duncan if you do, since we are still standing on the shoulders of his and many others’ past work).
On reading Anna’s above answer (which seems true to me, and also satisfies a lot of the curiosity I was experiencing, in a good way), I noted a feeling of something like “reading this, the median LWer will conclude that my contribution was primarily just ops-y and logistical, and the main thing that was at threat when I left was that the machine surrounding the intellectual work would get rusty.”
It seems worth noting that my model of CFAR (subject to disagreement from actual CFAR) is viewing that stuff as a domain of study, in and of itself—how groups cooperate and function, what makes up things like legibility and integrity, what sorts of worldview clashes are behind e.g. people who think it’s valuable to be on time and people who think punctuality is no big deal, etc.
But this is not necessarily something super salient in the median LWer’s model of CFAR, and so I imagine the median LWer thinking that Anna’s comment means my contributions weren’t intellectual or philosophical or relevant to ongoing rationality development, even though I think Anna-and-CFAR did indeed view me as contributing there, too (and thus the above is also saying something like “it turned out Duncan’s disappearance didn’t scuttle those threads of investigation”).
I agree very much with what Duncan says here. I forgot I need to point that kind of thing out explicitly. But a good bit of my soul-effort over the last year has gone into trying to inhabit the philosophical understanding of the world that can see as possibilities (and accomplish!) such things as integrity, legibility, accountability, and creating structures that work across time and across multiple people. IMO, Duncan had a lot to teach me and CFAR here; he is one of the core models I go to when I try to understand this, and my best guess is that it is in significant part his ability to understand and articulate this philosophical pole (as well as to do it himself) that enabled CFAR to move from the early-stage pile of un-transferrable “spaghetti code” that we were when he arrived, to an institution with organizational structure capable of e.g. hosting instructor trainings and taking in and making use of new staff.
Reading this I’m curious about what the actual CFAR position on punctuality was before and now. Was it something like the Landmark package under your tenure?
My rough guess is “we survived; most of the differences I could imagine someone fearing didn’t come to pass”. My correction on that rough guess is: “Okay, but insofar as Duncan was the main holder of certain values, skills, and virtues, it seems pretty plausible that there are gaps now today that he would be able to see and that we haven’t seen”.
To be a bit more specific: some of the poles I noticed Duncan doing a lot to hold down while he was here were:
Institutional accountability and legibility;
Clear communication with staff; somebody caring about whether promises made were kept; somebody caring whether policies were fair and predictable, and whether the institution was creating a predictable context where staff, workshop participants, and others wouldn’t suddenly experience having the rug pulled out from under them;
Having the workshop classes start and end on time; (I’m a bit hesitant to name something this “small-seeming” here, but it is a concrete policy that supported the value above, and it is easier to track)
Revising the handbook into a polished state;
Having the workshop classes make sense to people, have clear diagrams and a clear point, etc.; having polish and visible narrative and clear expectations in the workshop;
AFAICT, these things are doing… alright in the absence of Duncan (due partly to the gradual accumulation of institutional knowledge), though I can see his departure in the organization. AFAICT also, Duncan gave me a good chunk of model of this stuff sometime after his Facebook post, actually—and worked pretty hard on a lot of this before his departure too. But I would not fully trust my own judgment on this one, because the outside view is that people (in this case, me) often fail to see what they cannot see.
When I get more concrete:
Institutional accountability and legibility is I think better than it was;
Clean communication with staff, keeping promises, creating clear expectations, etc. -- better on some axes and worse on others—my non-confident guess is better overall (via some loss plus lots of work);
Classes starting and ending on time—at mainlines: slightly less precise class-timing but not obviously worse thereby; at AIRCS, notable decreases, with some cost;
Handboook revisions—have done very little since he left;
Polish and narrative cohesion in the workshop classes—it’s less emphasized but not obviously worse thereby IMO, due partly to the infusion of the counterbalancing “original seeing” content from Brienne that was perhaps easier to pull off via toning polish down slightly. Cohesion and polish still seem acceptable, and far far better than before Duncan arrived.
Also: I don’t know how to phrase this tactfully in a large public conversation. But I appreciate Duncan’s efforts on behalf of CFAR; and also he left pretty burnt out; and also I want to respect what I view as his own attempt to disclaim responsibility for CFAR going forward (via that Facebook post) so that he won’t have to track whether he may have left misleading impressions of CFAR’s virtues in people. I don’t want our answers here to mess that up. If you come to CFAR and turn out not to like it, it is indeed not Duncan’s fault (even though it is still justly some credit to Duncan if you do, since we are still standing on the shoulders of his and many others’ past work).
On reading Anna’s above answer (which seems true to me, and also satisfies a lot of the curiosity I was experiencing, in a good way), I noted a feeling of something like “reading this, the median LWer will conclude that my contribution was primarily just ops-y and logistical, and the main thing that was at threat when I left was that the machine surrounding the intellectual work would get rusty.”
It seems worth noting that my model of CFAR (subject to disagreement from actual CFAR) is viewing that stuff as a domain of study, in and of itself—how groups cooperate and function, what makes up things like legibility and integrity, what sorts of worldview clashes are behind e.g. people who think it’s valuable to be on time and people who think punctuality is no big deal, etc.
But this is not necessarily something super salient in the median LWer’s model of CFAR, and so I imagine the median LWer thinking that Anna’s comment means my contributions weren’t intellectual or philosophical or relevant to ongoing rationality development, even though I think Anna-and-CFAR did indeed view me as contributing there, too (and thus the above is also saying something like “it turned out Duncan’s disappearance didn’t scuttle those threads of investigation”).
I agree very much with what Duncan says here. I forgot I need to point that kind of thing out explicitly. But a good bit of my soul-effort over the last year has gone into trying to inhabit the philosophical understanding of the world that can see as possibilities (and accomplish!) such things as integrity, legibility, accountability, and creating structures that work across time and across multiple people. IMO, Duncan had a lot to teach me and CFAR here; he is one of the core models I go to when I try to understand this, and my best guess is that it is in significant part his ability to understand and articulate this philosophical pole (as well as to do it himself) that enabled CFAR to move from the early-stage pile of un-transferrable “spaghetti code” that we were when he arrived, to an institution with organizational structure capable of e.g. hosting instructor trainings and taking in and making use of new staff.
Reading this I’m curious about what the actual CFAR position on punctuality was before and now. Was it something like the Landmark package under your tenure?