Being a first employee is pretty different from being in a middle-stage organization. In particular, the opportunity to shape what will come has an appeal that can I think rightly bring in folks who you can’t always get later. (Folks present base rates for various reference classes below; I don’t know if anyone has one for “founding” vs “later” in small organizations?)
Relatedly, my initial guess back in ~2013 (a year in) was that many CFAR staff members would “level up” while they were here and then leave, partly because of that level-up (on my model, they’d acquire agency and then ask if being here as one more staff member was or wasn’t their maximum-goal-hitting thing). I was excited about what we were teaching and hoped it could be of long-term impact to those who worked here a year or two and left, as well as to longer-term people.
I and we intentionally hired for diversity of outlook. We asked ourselves: “does this person bring some component of sanity, culture, or psychological understanding—but especially sanity—that is not otherwise represented here yet?” And this… did make early CFAR fertile, and also made it an unusually difficult place to work, I think. (If you consider the four founding members of me, Julia Galef, Val, and Critch, I think you’ll see what I mean.)
I don’t think I was very easy to work with. I don’t think I knew how to make CFAR a very easy place to work either. I was trying to go with inside views even where I couldn’t articulate them and… really didn’t know how to create a good interface between that and a group of people. Pete and Duncan helped us do otherwise more recently I think, and Tim and Adam and Elizabeth and Jack and Dan building on it more since, with the result that CFAR is much more of a place now (less of a continuous “each person having an existential crisis all the time” than it was for some in the early days; more of a plod of mundane work in a positive sense). (The next challenge here, which we hope to accomplish this year, is to create a place that still has place-ness, and also has more visibility into strategy.)
My current view is that being at workshops for too much of a year is actually really hard on a person, and maybe not-good. It mucks up a person’s codebase without enough chance for ordinary check-sums to sort things back to normal again afterward. Relatedly, my guess is also that while stints at CFAR do level a person up in certain ways (~roughly as I anticipated back in 2013), they unfortunately also risk harming a person in certain ways that are related to “it’s not good to live in workshops or workshop-like contexts for too many weeks/months in a row, even though a 4-day workshop is often helpful” (which I did not anticipate in 2013). (Basically: you want a bunch of normal day-to-day work on which to check whether your new changes actually work well, and to settle back into your deeper or more long-term self. The 2-3 week “MIRI Summer Fellows Program” (MSFP) has had… some great impacts in terms of research staff coming out of the program, but also most of our least stable people additionally came out of that. I believe that this year we’ll be experimentally replacing it with repeated shorter workshops; we’ll also be trying a different rest days pattern for staff, and sabbatical months, as well as seeking stability/robustness/continuity in more cultural and less formal ways.)
My guesses, in no particular order:
Being a first employee is pretty different from being in a middle-stage organization. In particular, the opportunity to shape what will come has an appeal that can I think rightly bring in folks who you can’t always get later. (Folks present base rates for various reference classes below; I don’t know if anyone has one for “founding” vs “later” in small organizations?)
Relatedly, my initial guess back in ~2013 (a year in) was that many CFAR staff members would “level up” while they were here and then leave, partly because of that level-up (on my model, they’d acquire agency and then ask if being here as one more staff member was or wasn’t their maximum-goal-hitting thing). I was excited about what we were teaching and hoped it could be of long-term impact to those who worked here a year or two and left, as well as to longer-term people.
I and we intentionally hired for diversity of outlook. We asked ourselves: “does this person bring some component of sanity, culture, or psychological understanding—but especially sanity—that is not otherwise represented here yet?” And this… did make early CFAR fertile, and also made it an unusually difficult place to work, I think. (If you consider the four founding members of me, Julia Galef, Val, and Critch, I think you’ll see what I mean.)
I don’t think I was very easy to work with. I don’t think I knew how to make CFAR a very easy place to work either. I was trying to go with inside views even where I couldn’t articulate them and… really didn’t know how to create a good interface between that and a group of people. Pete and Duncan helped us do otherwise more recently I think, and Tim and Adam and Elizabeth and Jack and Dan building on it more since, with the result that CFAR is much more of a place now (less of a continuous “each person having an existential crisis all the time” than it was for some in the early days; more of a plod of mundane work in a positive sense). (The next challenge here, which we hope to accomplish this year, is to create a place that still has place-ness, and also has more visibility into strategy.)
My current view is that being at workshops for too much of a year is actually really hard on a person, and maybe not-good. It mucks up a person’s codebase without enough chance for ordinary check-sums to sort things back to normal again afterward. Relatedly, my guess is also that while stints at CFAR do level a person up in certain ways (~roughly as I anticipated back in 2013), they unfortunately also risk harming a person in certain ways that are related to “it’s not good to live in workshops or workshop-like contexts for too many weeks/months in a row, even though a 4-day workshop is often helpful” (which I did not anticipate in 2013). (Basically: you want a bunch of normal day-to-day work on which to check whether your new changes actually work well, and to settle back into your deeper or more long-term self. The 2-3 week “MIRI Summer Fellows Program” (MSFP) has had… some great impacts in terms of research staff coming out of the program, but also most of our least stable people additionally came out of that. I believe that this year we’ll be experimentally replacing it with repeated shorter workshops; we’ll also be trying a different rest days pattern for staff, and sabbatical months, as well as seeking stability/robustness/continuity in more cultural and less formal ways.)
In curious about that. It seems like a new point for me. What concrete negative effects have you seen there?