EA Forum developer
jp
Karma: 702
This is extreme JP bait.
Exactly the sort of mild optimization that I will become obsessed with.
In favor of steelmanning
I think you and the previous commenter would both do well to read the short, hyperlinked definition. (Sorry.)
We use Asana for this. (It’s broadly great, and I don’t understand how Jira isn’t getting its lunch completely eaten. And I’m not just saying that because of my funder.)
I agree with a lot of this, though I think the mental attitude here is still extremely useful. For example, you may be dealing with something outside of your usual ticket system, or a ball may be smaller than something that would justify an Asana ticket.
I have a classic rationality comment on the EA Forum that’s reasonably popular. I thought I’d crosspost here. The context is “What are work practices that you’ve adopted that you now think are underrated?”
***
CEA (my employer) has long had the concept of “who owns this ball.”[1] I’m gonna have a hard time in this answer conveying exactly how much this has become a whole encompassing working philosophy for me.
Level 1: The alarm bells about dropped balls
If you are having a conversation and someone’s like “we should do X”… Someone should really be the person owning the ball for doing (or not doing!) X.
If there’s a “ball” (a task of some sort) that’s sitting around and not moving forward, and anyone has any uncertainty about who’s responsible for it, they should flag that.
Example: “Ok, who owns the ball of reaching out to GWWC?”
Level 2: Passing balls
Be extremely clear in your communication when you’re handing off a ball to someone else, or taking on a ball. This prevents balls from getting dropped in the first place. We use dedicated emoji-jargon for this at CEA:
🏈 for handing off a ball
🤾 for catching a ball
Example: “I’m not sure what happened there, looks like a bug. 🏈 to you to fix?”
Level 3: Systems that prevent dropped balls
We have a round robin system in our code reviews, to make sure that each code review is assigned to a single reviewer, who knows that it’s their job to review that code. The reviewer then assigns the task back to the original developer to address comments and/or merge the code. The code review can literally never be in an ambiguous state. (Ideally anyway. Human be humans, and it happens.)
Both our developers and our moderators has the concept of an “on-call” rotation, both developed by me. Quoting from the moderator on-call doc:
You should be aiming to ensure an efficiently running ship. It’s your job this week to make sure that everything’s running smoothly. That does not mean doing everything yourself. But this week, the buck of dropped balls does stop with you.
***
I think I’ve done a fair job of communicating the type of thing I mean, but it really goes quite deep and broad for me. As I predicted, moreso than this suggests.
- ^
I wrote this answer, and then realized I needed to give a shout out to @amywilley and the (CEA) events team, who really embody the spirit of this philosophy. Amy at one point bought like 40 styrofoam balls and had CEA write tasks they were worried might be getting dropped on them, and then we went around finding an owner for the balls, or deciding to drop them by choice.
We’ve been thinking about this for the EA Forum. I endorse Raemon’s thoughts here, I think, but I know I can’t pass the ITT of a more transparent side here.
This comment feels like wishful thinking to me. Like, I think our communities are broadly some of the more truth-seeking communities out there. And yet, they have flaws common to human communities, such as both 1 and 2. And yet, I want to engage with these communities, and to cooperate with them. That cooperation is made much harder if actors blithely ignore these dynamics by:
Publishing criticism that could wait
Pretend that they can continue working on that strategy doc they were working on, while there’s an important discussion centered on their organization’s moral character happening in public
I have a long experience of watching conversations about orgs evolve. I advise my colleagues to urgently reply. I don’t think this is an attempt to manipulate anyone.
I basically probably endorse this for you, but would also suggest whether you could do more automatic red-shifting and dimming of your lights in the evening.
Is that common?
My model was that this is the thing going on for many night owls. I believe I had studies at one point that would back this up, but could not immediately find them.
if you benefit from a visual indication of wake time blacking out the external light and replacing it with light under your control seems much better, if you can get it bright enough?
I’m not in principle opposed. The approach you mention has super conceptual benefits under the model you and I share. In practice, I find my friends often have lights that go from zero to very bright very fast. I expect this to be more equivalent to an alarm clock than a subtle nudge to your sleep cycle mechanism to start moving towards wake-up-land.
Against Complete Blackout Curtains For Sleep
Huh. Wild.
When I had the chance to drive an electric car recently, I turned off “one pedal driving”. I bet you could in a Tesla. Note for next time!
This sounds like some dark magic to me.
This post was a great dive into two topics:
How an object-level research field has gone, and what are the challenges it faces.
Forming a model about how technologically optimistic projects go.
I think this post was good on it’s first edition, but became great after the author displayed admirable ability to update their mind and willingness to update their post in light of new information.
Overall I must reluctantly only give this post a +1 vote for inclusion, as I think the books are better served by more general rationality content, but I’m terms of what I would like to see more of on this site, +9. Maybe I’ll compromise and give +4.
This is great. Encouragement to turn it into a top level post if you want it.
Spot the problem with this statement:
The Galleri test did not detect DNA methylation patterns that are associated with cancer in your blood sample. In a clinical validation study, fewer than1% of individuals with this result were projected to have cancer.
It seems like a large amount of work of this post is being done by:
So people seem skeptical that we can cover large areas with these lamps.
Maybe the experts are thinking of large-scale deployments in schools, hospitals, airports, conference centers? I feel like numbers seem important.
It would help your signal-boosting if you hit space after pasting that url, in which case the editor would auto-link it.
(JP, you say, you’re a dev on this codebase, why not make it so it auto-links it on paste — yeah, well, ckeditor is a pain to work with and that wasn’t the default behavior.)
I think the problem with zoom meetings is not the meeting itself, but instead the bounds of the meeting. It’s easier to have better coordination if you can freely wander in and out of a casual conversation. It’s hard to get super-in-sync over, say, 60 minutes a day of facetime. To put another way, zoom does fine for “full meeting” mode, but much worse for casual, semi-meeting mode. VR does nothing to solve the second category, so I’m skeptical.
My mom and her siblings report learning their phone number this way. It’s effective enough that I know that the house phone of my grandparents half a century ago ends in seven.