The quote is from Christopher Alexander's book A Pattern Language. It's an introduction + 200 or so "patterns" (design principles from different levels of architecture, from cities to chairs), where the reader can consult patterns that feels relevant to them. He recommends A Timeless Way of Building for more of the theory, and A Pattern Language for a more applied representation.
re 1) I have thought of it as imagining a child whose arms has chosen to grow faster by becoming an adult arm before the rest of the child body. The decoherence in the child is rep...
I appreciate a lot what this post is driving at.
Adding on to what you're saying, even instrumentally speaking, a human working so hard they are edging (or past) burnout, is not nearly as effective in being able to assess their own landscape (i.e. see less visible mistakes). Especially because the stakes of the problems we are trying to solve can be so extraordinarily high, doing good sustainably becomes so critical as a basic practice. Helping each other do better can be a thing we learn to do better too.
A culture that emphasizes being a workhorse can be l...
I also quite appreciate the organization/management posts, as someone else commented above.
I'll also add that cultivating and retaining institutional knowledge with a regular team is already quite a task in itself, and sustaining sufficient ontological and practical coherence with contractors can lead to a lot of inheritance type issues. This kind of overhead cost can often be overlooked or trivialized, in my experience.
However, I can imagine a scenario where there could be the deliberate training of certain contractors to fulfill a particular ecosystem's ...
I really appreciate the sentiment from this. I help run SPARC (https://sparc-camp.org/) and while the camp itself is meant to be a selective program, we want to support more broadly addressed initiatives too (if nothing else they end up benefiting us anyway because it encourages future good and aligned applications).
SPARC can probably help on the level of ops support from alumni who may be interested and a degree of funding that can at least make something like 2. happen.
I felt like this is a deeply human approach to sharing “critique”, something that I wish to see so much more of, both in EA and everywhere else.
Your expression, for me, paints a possibility of “altruism” that is capable of escaping the seeming paradox that doing good for a world (which includes me) somehow must trade off against my wellbeing. When we model to the rest of the world that “Effective” “Altruism” looks like brilliant (and especially young) people burn themselves out in despair, we are also creating a second order effect where we broadcast the i... (read more)