I feel very compelled by this! I would love to help figure out how to approach this bottleneck. I have some ideas.
My sense is that there are some useful funnels already in place that one could take advantage of for finding potential people, and there are effective, growth-y training programs one could also take advantage of. There are maybe bottlenecks in money + space in specific training programs + getting the right people to the right training programs.
The first one is something like “entry level leadership”, where you’re just getting people over the hump of “I can be a person who has agency and organizers/leads at all”. I don’t think growth-training-programs quite work here because people may not even think of themselves as potential leaders to train.
(In the case of Any Given Local Village, I think the deal is that the village needs to be organized such that it naturally causes people to incrementally gain leadership skills, organically as a part of being in the village)
The second would be “okay, though, we actually need people with particular competencies here – an understanding of How Humans Work as well as (potentially) some specific skills relating to whatever you’re leading people towards (i.e. parkour, programming, meditation, rationality).”
It has become really salient to me recently that good practice involves lots of prolific output in low-stakes throwaway contexts. Whereas a core piece of EA and rationalist mindsets is steering towards high-stakes things to work on, and treating your outputs as potentially very impactful and not to be thrown away. In my own mind “practice mindset” and “impact mindset” feel very directly in tension.
I have a feeling that something around this mindset difference is part of why world-saving orientation in a community might be correlated with inadequate opportunities for low-stakes leadership practice.
(recognizing that there’s definitely areas within the rationality community / memeset that reinforce fairly similar high-stakes-memes as the EA memeset. But my experience is that overall the rationality community doesn’t put nearly as pervasive pressure to be ‘impactful’ – there’s a lot more room for just exploring interesting ideas because they are neat, or whatnot)
Worth noting here that the Schedule at MAPLE is very conducive for creating these low-stakes contexts. In fact, inside the Schedule, you are always in such a context…
There is a world-saving mission at MAPLE, but at MAPLE, it does not define people’s worth or whether they deserve care / attention or whether they belong in the community. I think the issue with both the EA and rationalist community is that people’s “output” is too easily tied to their sense of worth. I could probably write many words on this phenomenon in the Bay community.
It is hard to convey in mere words what MAPLE has managed to do here. There is a clearer separation between “your current output level” and “your deserving-ness / worthiness as a human.” It was startling to experience this separation occurring on a visceral level within me. Now I’m much more grounded, self-confident, and less likely to take things personally, and this shift feels permanent and also ongoing.
I think growth-training programs actually do work for the former.
E.g. My CFAR workshop wasn’t something I decided to go to because I was thinking about training leadership. But it none-the-less helped unlock some of this “entry level leadership” thing. Much of the same happens with Circling and other workshops that help unblock people.
So far what seems to work here is training programs that do any kind of developmental training / leveling up. Ideally they work on you regardless of what stage you happen to be and just help propel you to the next stage.
Of course, not all the people who go through those programs end up interested in leadership, but this is probably fine, and I suspect trying to pre-screen for ‘leadership potential’ is a waste of effort, and you should just ride selection effects. (Similar to how people who emigrate correlate with having skill, resourcefulness, and gumption.)
I feel very compelled by this! I would love to help figure out how to approach this bottleneck. I have some ideas.
My sense is that there are some useful funnels already in place that one could take advantage of for finding potential people, and there are effective, growth-y training programs one could also take advantage of. There are maybe bottlenecks in money + space in specific training programs + getting the right people to the right training programs.
I think there’s maybe two distinct bottlenecks:
The first one is something like “entry level leadership”, where you’re just getting people over the hump of “I can be a person who has agency and organizers/leads at all”. I don’t think growth-training-programs quite work here because people may not even think of themselves as potential leaders to train.
(In the case of Any Given Local Village, I think the deal is that the village needs to be organized such that it naturally causes people to incrementally gain leadership skills, organically as a part of being in the village)
The second would be “okay, though, we actually need people with particular competencies here – an understanding of How Humans Work as well as (potentially) some specific skills relating to whatever you’re leading people towards (i.e. parkour, programming, meditation, rationality).”
It has become really salient to me recently that good practice involves lots of prolific output in low-stakes throwaway contexts. Whereas a core piece of EA and rationalist mindsets is steering towards high-stakes things to work on, and treating your outputs as potentially very impactful and not to be thrown away. In my own mind “practice mindset” and “impact mindset” feel very directly in tension.
I have a feeling that something around this mindset difference is part of why world-saving orientation in a community might be correlated with inadequate opportunities for low-stakes leadership practice.
This is actually exactly why I think the rationality community / memeset makes more sense as entry level EA than the EA community
(recognizing that there’s definitely areas within the rationality community / memeset that reinforce fairly similar high-stakes-memes as the EA memeset. But my experience is that overall the rationality community doesn’t put nearly as pervasive pressure to be ‘impactful’ – there’s a lot more room for just exploring interesting ideas because they are neat, or whatnot)
Worth noting here that the Schedule at MAPLE is very conducive for creating these low-stakes contexts. In fact, inside the Schedule, you are always in such a context…
There is a world-saving mission at MAPLE, but at MAPLE, it does not define people’s worth or whether they deserve care / attention or whether they belong in the community. I think the issue with both the EA and rationalist community is that people’s “output” is too easily tied to their sense of worth. I could probably write many words on this phenomenon in the Bay community.
It is hard to convey in mere words what MAPLE has managed to do here. There is a clearer separation between “your current output level” and “your deserving-ness / worthiness as a human.” It was startling to experience this separation occurring on a visceral level within me. Now I’m much more grounded, self-confident, and less likely to take things personally, and this shift feels permanent and also ongoing.
I think this is a very important point, and that anyone trying to build community around a mission should pay attention to it.
+1
Good to train in a gym before you fight.
I think growth-training programs actually do work for the former.
E.g. My CFAR workshop wasn’t something I decided to go to because I was thinking about training leadership. But it none-the-less helped unlock some of this “entry level leadership” thing. Much of the same happens with Circling and other workshops that help unblock people.
So far what seems to work here is training programs that do any kind of developmental training / leveling up. Ideally they work on you regardless of what stage you happen to be and just help propel you to the next stage.
Of course, not all the people who go through those programs end up interested in leadership, but this is probably fine, and I suspect trying to pre-screen for ‘leadership potential’ is a waste of effort, and you should just ride selection effects. (Similar to how people who emigrate correlate with having skill, resourcefulness, and gumption.)