This was the post I was most personally looking forward to. I think it lays out of a number of gears that are easy to reason about, that seem useful regardless of whether the entire thesis hangs together.
The issue with layers-of-management was my most important update from this sequence, and “what to do about that?” seems like one of the most important questions for groups of people trying to put a dent in the universe.
An open question in my mind is something like “how much better is it to found a new organization rather than open up a new department at an existing institution”, in particular because it’s not obviously better if you end up with an ecosystem that has less legible “management layers” in between organizations. (Zvi notes that investors may-or-may-not count as a management layer and it depends. “What does it depend on?” is my next question)
Something I note: I think this post almost-but-not-quite-stands alone. I think the rest of the sequence was necessary to make the overall points Zvi is meaning to make, but I think there’s a narrower set of points that this post is making that only depend on you roughly having a sense that there’s a special kind of middle-management-hell that can exist.
I think you could summarize that in a few paragraphs and then have a pretty good standalone post, with pointers to the rest of the sequence for people that want to delve into the broader argument.
This was the post I was most personally looking forward to. I think it lays out of a number of gears that are easy to reason about, that seem useful regardless of whether the entire thesis hangs together.
The issue with layers-of-management was my most important update from this sequence, and “what to do about that?” seems like one of the most important questions for groups of people trying to put a dent in the universe.
An open question in my mind is something like “how much better is it to found a new organization rather than open up a new department at an existing institution”, in particular because it’s not obviously better if you end up with an ecosystem that has less legible “management layers” in between organizations. (Zvi notes that investors may-or-may-not count as a management layer and it depends. “What does it depend on?” is my next question)
Something I note: I think this post almost-but-not-quite-stands alone. I think the rest of the sequence was necessary to make the overall points Zvi is meaning to make, but I think there’s a narrower set of points that this post is making that only depend on you roughly having a sense that there’s a special kind of middle-management-hell that can exist.
I think you could summarize that in a few paragraphs and then have a pretty good standalone post, with pointers to the rest of the sequence for people that want to delve into the broader argument.