No; that isn’t the trouble; I could imagine us getting the money together for such a thing, since one doesn’t need anything like a consensus to fund a position. The trouble is more that at this point the members of the bay area {formerly known as “rationalist”} “community” are divided into multiple political factions, or perhaps more-chaos-than-factions, which do not trust one another’s judgment (even about pretty basic things, like “yes this person’s actions are outside of reasonable behavioral norms). It is very hard to imagine an individual or a small committee that people would trust in the right way. Perhaps even more so after that individual or committee tried ruling against someone who really wanted to stay, and and that person attempted to create “fear, doubt, and uncertainty” or whatever about the institution that attempted to ostracize them.
I think something in this space is really important, and I’d be interested in investing significantly in any attempt that had a decent shot at helping. Though I don’t yet have a strong enough read myself on what the goal ought to be.
For whatever it’s worth, my sense is that it’s actually reasonably doable to build an institution/process that does well here, and gets trust from a large fraction of the community, though it is by no means an easy task. I do think it would likely require more than one full-time person, and at least one person of pretty exceptional skill in designing processes and institutions (as well as general competence).
I think Anna roughly agrees (hence her first comment), she was just answering the question of “why hasn’t this already been done?”
I do think adversarial pressure (i.e. if you rule against a person they will try to sow distrust against you and it’s very stressful and time consuming) is a reason that “reasonably doable” isn’t really a fair description. It’s doable, but quite hard, and a big commitment that I think is qualitatively different from other hard jobs.
No; that isn’t the trouble; I could imagine us getting the money together for such a thing, since one doesn’t need anything like a consensus to fund a position. The trouble is more that at this point the members of the bay area {formerly known as “rationalist”} “community” are divided into multiple political factions, or perhaps more-chaos-than-factions, which do not trust one another’s judgment (even about pretty basic things, like “yes this person’s actions are outside of reasonable behavioral norms). It is very hard to imagine an individual or a small committee that people would trust in the right way. Perhaps even more so after that individual or committee tried ruling against someone who really wanted to stay, and and that person attempted to create “fear, doubt, and uncertainty” or whatever about the institution that attempted to ostracize them.
I think something in this space is really important, and I’d be interested in investing significantly in any attempt that had a decent shot at helping. Though I don’t yet have a strong enough read myself on what the goal ought to be.
For whatever it’s worth, my sense is that it’s actually reasonably doable to build an institution/process that does well here, and gets trust from a large fraction of the community, though it is by no means an easy task. I do think it would likely require more than one full-time person, and at least one person of pretty exceptional skill in designing processes and institutions (as well as general competence).
I think Anna roughly agrees (hence her first comment), she was just answering the question of “why hasn’t this already been done?”
I do think adversarial pressure (i.e. if you rule against a person they will try to sow distrust against you and it’s very stressful and time consuming) is a reason that “reasonably doable” isn’t really a fair description. It’s doable, but quite hard, and a big commitment that I think is qualitatively different from other hard jobs.