(Why “Top 3” instead of “literally the top priority?” Well, I do think a successful AGI lab also needs have top-quality researchers, and other forms of operational excellence beyond the ones this post focuses on. You only get one top priority, )
I think the situation is more dire than this post suggests, mostly because “You only get one top priority.” If your top priority is anything other than this kind of organizational adequacy, it will take precedence too often; if your top priority is organizational adequacy, you probably can’t get off the ground.
The best distillation of my understanding regarding why “second priority” is basically the same as “not a priority at all” is this twitter thread by Dan Luu.
The fear was that if they said that they needed to ship fast and improve reliability, reliability would be used as an excuse to not ship quickly and needing to ship quickly would be used as an excuse for poor reliability and they’d achieve none of their goals.
Oh thanks, I was looking for that twitter thread and forgot who the author was.
I was struggling in the OP to figure out how to integrate this advice. I agree with the Dan Luu thread. I do… nonetheless see orgs successfully doing multiple things. I think my current belief is that you only get one top priority to communicate to your employees, but that a small leadership team can afford to have multiple priorities (but, they should think of anything as not in their top-5 as basically sort of abandoned, and anything not in their top-3 as ‘very at risk of getting abandoned’)
I also don’t necessarily think “priority” is quite the right word for what needs happening here. I’ll think on this a bit more and maybe rewrite the post.
I think the situation is more dire than this post suggests, mostly because “You only get one top priority.” If your top priority is anything other than this kind of organizational adequacy, it will take precedence too often; if your top priority is organizational adequacy, you probably can’t get off the ground.
The best distillation of my understanding regarding why “second priority” is basically the same as “not a priority at all” is this twitter thread by Dan Luu.
Oh thanks, I was looking for that twitter thread and forgot who the author was.
I was struggling in the OP to figure out how to integrate this advice. I agree with the Dan Luu thread. I do… nonetheless see orgs successfully doing multiple things. I think my current belief is that you only get one top priority to communicate to your employees, but that a small leadership team can afford to have multiple priorities (but, they should think of anything as not in their top-5 as basically sort of abandoned, and anything not in their top-3 as ‘very at risk of getting abandoned’)
I also don’t necessarily think “priority” is quite the right word for what needs happening here. I’ll think on this a bit more and maybe rewrite the post.