I seem to have missed this question when it was posted.
You have also (to my knowledge) never joined any other rationality-community or effective altruism-related organization in any capacity.
With the background that I have an independent source of income and it’s costly to move my family (we’re not near any major orgs) so I’d have to join in a remote capacity, I wrote down this list of pros and cons of joining an org (name redacted) that tried to recruit me recently:
Pros
More access to internal discussions at X, private Google Docs, discussions at other places (due to affiliation with X), people to discuss/collaborate with.
Get my ideas taken more seriously (by some) due to X affiliation
Possibly make me more productive through social pressure/expectation
As a personal cost, social pressure to be productive feeling unpleasant
Less likely to post/comment on various topics due to worry about damaging X’s reputation (a lot of X people don’t post much, maybe partly for this reason?)
Get my ideas taken less seriously (by some) due to perception of bias (e.g., having a financial interest in people taking AI risk seriously)
Actual bias due to having connection to X.
Also these two cons, which I just thought of now:
Losing the status and other signaling effect of conspicuously donating most of my work time to x-risk reduction (such as making other people take x-risk more seriously). (I guess I could either take a zero salary or a normal salary and then donate it back, but over time people might forget or not realize that I’m doing that.)
Not being able to pivot as quickly to whatever cause/topic/strategy that seems most important/tractable/neglected, as I update on new information, which seems like an important part of my comparative advantage.
What are the reasons you decided to join or sign on as a co-author for Mercatoria/ICTP?
I guess because the upside seems high and most of the above cons do not apply.
More generally, how do you decide which organizations to associate with?
Some sort of informal/intuitive cost-benefit analysis, like the above pros/cons list.
Have you considered joining other organizations, starting your own organization, or recruiting contract workers/volunteers to work on things you consider important?
I think recruiting, managing people and applying for grants are not part of my comparative advantage, so I prefer to write down my ideas and let others work on them if they agree with me that they are important. (I do worry that by “planting a flag” on some idea and then not pursuing it as vigorously as someone else who might have discovered that idea, I may be making things worse than not writing about that idea at all. So far my best guess is to keep doing what I’ve been doing, but I may be open to being convinced that I should do things differently.)
I seem to have missed this question when it was posted.
With the background that I have an independent source of income and it’s costly to move my family (we’re not near any major orgs) so I’d have to join in a remote capacity, I wrote down this list of pros and cons of joining an org (name redacted) that tried to recruit me recently:
Pros
More access to internal discussions at X, private Google Docs, discussions at other places (due to affiliation with X), people to discuss/collaborate with.
Get my ideas taken more seriously (by some) due to X affiliation
Possibly make me more productive through social pressure/expectation
Cons
Feeling of obligation possibly make me less productive
As a personal cost, social pressure to be productive feeling unpleasant
Less likely to post/comment on various topics due to worry about damaging X’s reputation (a lot of X people don’t post much, maybe partly for this reason?)
Get my ideas taken less seriously (by some) due to perception of bias (e.g., having a financial interest in people taking AI risk seriously)
Actual bias due to having connection to X.
Also these two cons, which I just thought of now:
Losing the status and other signaling effect of conspicuously donating most of my work time to x-risk reduction (such as making other people take x-risk more seriously). (I guess I could either take a zero salary or a normal salary and then donate it back, but over time people might forget or not realize that I’m doing that.)
Not being able to pivot as quickly to whatever cause/topic/strategy that seems most important/tractable/neglected, as I update on new information, which seems like an important part of my comparative advantage.
I guess because the upside seems high and most of the above cons do not apply.
Some sort of informal/intuitive cost-benefit analysis, like the above pros/cons list.
I think recruiting, managing people and applying for grants are not part of my comparative advantage, so I prefer to write down my ideas and let others work on them if they agree with me that they are important. (I do worry that by “planting a flag” on some idea and then not pursuing it as vigorously as someone else who might have discovered that idea, I may be making things worse than not writing about that idea at all. So far my best guess is to keep doing what I’ve been doing, but I may be open to being convinced that I should do things differently.)