I have friends who, early in EA or rationality, did things that look a lot like joining nonlinear. 10+ years later they’re still really happy with those decisions. Some of that is selection effects of course, but think some of it is the reasons they joined were very different.
People who joined early SingInst or CEA by and large did it because they’d been personally convinced this group of weirdos was promising. The orgs maybe tried to puff themselves up, but they had almost no social proof. Whereas nowadays saying “this org is EA/rationalist” gives you a built-in audience. You can prestige hack within EA (and I think nonlinear did[1]) and convince people they should join you because you’re ingroup and can grant them prestige in the group.
Orgs that attract via object-level ideas rather than prestige are probably healthier to work at (although still pretty easy to fuck yourself up with), and people attracted by ideas rather than ingroup prestige are probably more emotionally resilient. They’re also more likely to leave if the program isn’t good for them.
Sometimes different people have different reaction to the same organization simply because they want different things. If you want X, you will probably love the organization that pushes you towards X, and hate the organization that pushes you away from X.
If this is clearly communicated at an interview, the X person probably will not join the anti-X organization. So the problem is when they figure it out too late, when changing jobs again would be costly for them.
And of course it is impossible to communicate literally everything, and also sometimes things change. I think that a reasonable rule of thumb would be to communicate the parts where you differ significantly from the industry standard. Which leads to a question what is the industry standard. Is it somewhere documented explicitly? But there seems to be a consensus, if you e.g. go to Workplace Stack Exchange, about what is normal and what is not.
(...getting to the point...)
I think the “original weirdos” communicated their weirdness clearly.
Compared to that, the EA community is quite confusing for me (admittedly, an outsider). On one hand, they handle tons of money, write grant applications, etc. On the other hand, they sometimes pose as an informal group of weird friends just having fun, living together, debating kinky sexual behavior while brainstorming how to save the world.
So I am confused—what the hell is the “industry standard” here? What are the reasonable expectations here?
(To use an example unrelated to the current debate, if an idealistic girl coming right out of university brings her plan to eradicate malaria and asks for grant money, should she expect an impartial scientific evaluation of her plan, or should she expect to be invited to a dinner by a man twice her age who will tell her about polyamory and if she isn’t interested then this may be the last time anyone important talked to her? What is the EA “industry standard”? Clearly we have two wildly different expectations here; which person is being unreasonable in this story?)
Returning to the current debate, it is “industry standard” in EA organizations to get a written contract? To live in the same house as your boss, even if you prefer not to? To be paid in cash, rather than having your expenses covered? To be discouraged from talking to people unrelated to your business? To be threatened to be blacklisted from the industry if you publicly complain about any of the above?
If there is an authoritative source on the “industry standard”, someone please give me a link, so that I can refer to it in future, when a behavior of an EA company is discussed again. Or perhaps we (some EA people) should write it. Because in its absence, any company can tell their employees that whatever they do is the standard behavior (and the prestige hacking makes it sound likely), and the employees have no easy way to verify this.
Threatening employees by lawsuits and blacklisting for discussing their working conditions is very bad also on the meta level, because it prevents us from discussing what is actually happening. It goes completely against the original ethos of the rationalist community.
I have friends who, early in EA or rationality, did things that look a lot like joining nonlinear. 10+ years later they’re still really happy with those decisions. Some of that is selection effects of course, but think some of it is the reasons they joined were very different.
People who joined early SingInst or CEA by and large did it because they’d been personally convinced this group of weirdos was promising. The orgs maybe tried to puff themselves up, but they had almost no social proof. Whereas nowadays saying “this org is EA/rationalist” gives you a built-in audience. You can prestige hack within EA (and I think nonlinear did[1]) and convince people they should join you because you’re ingroup and can grant them prestige in the group.
Orgs that attract via object-level ideas rather than prestige are probably healthier to work at (although still pretty easy to fuck yourself up with), and people attracted by ideas rather than ingroup prestige are probably more emotionally resilient. They’re also more likely to leave if the program isn’t good for them.
E.g. grants programs announced with great fanfare that, in the fine print, had tiny budgets.
Sometimes different people have different reaction to the same organization simply because they want different things. If you want X, you will probably love the organization that pushes you towards X, and hate the organization that pushes you away from X.
If this is clearly communicated at an interview, the X person probably will not join the anti-X organization. So the problem is when they figure it out too late, when changing jobs again would be costly for them.
And of course it is impossible to communicate literally everything, and also sometimes things change. I think that a reasonable rule of thumb would be to communicate the parts where you differ significantly from the industry standard. Which leads to a question what is the industry standard. Is it somewhere documented explicitly? But there seems to be a consensus, if you e.g. go to Workplace Stack Exchange, about what is normal and what is not.
(...getting to the point...)
I think the “original weirdos” communicated their weirdness clearly.
Compared to that, the EA community is quite confusing for me (admittedly, an outsider). On one hand, they handle tons of money, write grant applications, etc. On the other hand, they sometimes pose as an informal group of weird friends just having fun, living together, debating kinky sexual behavior while brainstorming how to save the world.
So I am confused—what the hell is the “industry standard” here? What are the reasonable expectations here?
(To use an example unrelated to the current debate, if an idealistic girl coming right out of university brings her plan to eradicate malaria and asks for grant money, should she expect an impartial scientific evaluation of her plan, or should she expect to be invited to a dinner by a man twice her age who will tell her about polyamory and if she isn’t interested then this may be the last time anyone important talked to her? What is the EA “industry standard”? Clearly we have two wildly different expectations here; which person is being unreasonable in this story?)
Returning to the current debate, it is “industry standard” in EA organizations to get a written contract? To live in the same house as your boss, even if you prefer not to? To be paid in cash, rather than having your expenses covered? To be discouraged from talking to people unrelated to your business? To be threatened to be blacklisted from the industry if you publicly complain about any of the above?
If there is an authoritative source on the “industry standard”, someone please give me a link, so that I can refer to it in future, when a behavior of an EA company is discussed again. Or perhaps we (some EA people) should write it. Because in its absence, any company can tell their employees that whatever they do is the standard behavior (and the prestige hacking makes it sound likely), and the employees have no easy way to verify this.
Threatening employees by lawsuits and blacklisting for discussing their working conditions is very bad also on the meta level, because it prevents us from discussing what is actually happening. It goes completely against the original ethos of the rationalist community.