I don’t really know what we’re going to find, and I’m very uncertain about what actions we’ll want to take at the end of this. We’re open to the possibility that things are really bad and that improving the experiences of women and gender minorities should be a major priority for our team. But we’re also open to finding out that things aren’t – on the whole – all that bad, or aren’t all that tractable, and there are no significant changes we want to prioritise.

I appreciated this. I really want EA to understand its problems and deal with them, but that's not going to happen if everyone is starting with an agenda. I value someone going in with a truth seeking goal to understand the situation. 

Emily was great to work with to get it all done and out :) 

I just finished revamping the Mental Health Navigator's community-recommended provider database, and I'm really hopeful that this will help a bunch of EAs find therapists. (It will be promoted later this fall) https://www.eamentalhealthnavigator.com/recommended-providers 

Fixed! Thanks for catching that. 

Good question! The Al Smith example is from The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro.  The examples with Sam and Rohin were from personal conversations/interviews. I think I also drew in a bit from Rohin's FAQ https://rohinshah.com/faq-career-advice-for-ai-alignment-researchers/. The Scott Young example I pieced together from his blog post and book. I tried to link to some of the relevant blog posts  above. 

A few quick meta comments: It feels like this level of polish is sufficient for getting some people to read the post to begin with. The alternative would be to put a lot of time into creating an engaging, compelling post building your idea, but I don’t actually have a good sense of how much better that would be than simple, conversational tone and brevity you used. The epistemic status note at the top was helpful. 

On the other hand, I suspect that almost none of your readers will actually do anything based on this. You probably want to put more effort into making the suggested action easy and compelling if you want to get people to do something.

On net, I vote for more quick posts like this. 

What’s a skill you have spent deliberate effort in developing that has paid off a lot? Or alternatively, what is a skill you wish you had spent deliberate effort developing much earlier than you did? 

I hear the vague umbrella term “good judgement” or even more simply “thinking well” thrown around a lot in the EA community. Do you have thoughts on how to cultivate good judgement? Did you do anything - deliberately or otherwise - to develop better judgement?