I think you are doing the right thing here, and if anything I would say you could go further in the direction you are already going.
I observe that less vetting means fewer decisions and less costs for the Hotel. Further, if demand for slots is low enough that no vetting is required, this effectively makes the project zero-risk to the Hotel. A good member of the community is still helpful to all the other members of the community, even if their project goes nowhere.
Following on that point, I support coming down hard on the side of optimizing for people over projects. I can think of several reasons, but the simplest is that this was the explicit position for Xerox PARC, which birthed personal computing and is therefore a candidate for the highest-impact project of all time. A lot of relevant detail is in Alan Kay’s The Power of the Context, and a fuller history in The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop.
Further, a person’s impact is probably spread over many projects so investing in them is usually a gain, whereas a failed project is a sunk cost. Lastly, the people optimization method will help with another way in which EA is constrained: unambiguous signals about how and where to apply the absurd surplus of talent available. I expect this last to work both ways, so people who have spent time at the Hotel will also have a better sense of where they can contribute next.
I observe that less vetting means fewer decisions and less costs for the Hotel. Further, if demand for slots is low enough that no vetting is required, this effectively makes the project zero-risk to the Hotel.
This seems to assume the marginal cost to the hotel of taking on a guest is negligible. That does seem plausible to me, but it’s worth highlighting explicitly.
This is close to what I was assuming, but you are right I should have been explicit.
My actual assumption is that the marginal difference in cost between taking on one or another guest is negligible. Based on this I make the claim that projects which are not evaluated by the Hotel are zero risk (to the Hotel).
I expect we should always prefer the case where we did not evaluate the project at all to the case where we evaluated it and were wrong. I don’t see any reason to expect that the cost of evaluating experimental projects will have a high enough success rate to be a net benefit, even before we consider the impact of taking time and money away from the focus on supporting people.
I think you are doing the right thing here, and if anything I would say you could go further in the direction you are already going.
I observe that less vetting means fewer decisions and less costs for the Hotel. Further, if demand for slots is low enough that no vetting is required, this effectively makes the project zero-risk to the Hotel. A good member of the community is still helpful to all the other members of the community, even if their project goes nowhere.
Following on that point, I support coming down hard on the side of optimizing for people over projects. I can think of several reasons, but the simplest is that this was the explicit position for Xerox PARC, which birthed personal computing and is therefore a candidate for the highest-impact project of all time. A lot of relevant detail is in Alan Kay’s The Power of the Context, and a fuller history in The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop.
Further, a person’s impact is probably spread over many projects so investing in them is usually a gain, whereas a failed project is a sunk cost. Lastly, the people optimization method will help with another way in which EA is constrained: unambiguous signals about how and where to apply the absurd surplus of talent available. I expect this last to work both ways, so people who have spent time at the Hotel will also have a better sense of where they can contribute next.
This seems to assume the marginal cost to the hotel of taking on a guest is negligible. That does seem plausible to me, but it’s worth highlighting explicitly.
This is close to what I was assuming, but you are right I should have been explicit.
My actual assumption is that the marginal difference in cost between taking on one or another guest is negligible. Based on this I make the claim that projects which are not evaluated by the Hotel are zero risk (to the Hotel).
I expect we should always prefer the case where we did not evaluate the project at all to the case where we evaluated it and were wrong. I don’t see any reason to expect that the cost of evaluating experimental projects will have a high enough success rate to be a net benefit, even before we consider the impact of taking time and money away from the focus on supporting people.