This post elides a distinction between reputation as process and reputation as an ~instrumental goal. 

I think reputations are (properly) earned by *how* you do what you do, not *what* you choose to do. As (I think) Claude says: emails not returned and invitations not extended. It matters to have a reputation for being honest, attentive, forthright, transparent, diligent, fair, etc. If your reputation consciously consists more in "doing things that are popular," that is one of several roads to losing yourself. 

People mock EAs for caring about shrimp and insects and viciously attack them for prioritizing future generations. Hiring a much-maligned ex-con because they are the best fit for a role is far lower stakes than those things, but it is still a substantive decision; the kind of thing where if you let "what will others think?" dictate your decision (independent of whether their objections have object-level merit), there's no principled reason you would refuse to abandon some important moral constituency on the same grounds if you thought the ends justified the means. Another important reputation to maintain is "will not be cowed out of their beliefs by mere social pressure."

More importantly, if people knew that you were taking popularity into account for its own sake in deciding what to do, this would and should *hurt* your reputation. Honesty about what you would do on the object level is a virtue.

There should be unpopular EAs and unpopular EA orgs. We should not try to be a monolith managing each other to manage other people's impressions of EA as a whole.

If someone on the Forum team has an automated way of making these each their own event or otherwise advertising them as such, that'd be very helpful!

As a sometimes-helper and sometimes-hater of you videos, I can certify that this one was real good. Gripping from start to finish and did a nice job illustrating the kinds of headwinds people trying to put goodness first will face when trying to intervene in AI.

And just as a piece of art, the way you changed frames from the board drama play-by-play to the flashbacks was masterful.

Very excited to see you two in particular doing this! I'm happy to facilitate a cohort or help with whatever else you need.

I think your suggestion about talented people's ability to triage advice is at least partially true. A problem with it is that a smart response to bad or inapplicable advice is to stop listening to the advice-giver entirely. So you only get a few chances to make contact and you shouldn't spend them on the lower-value content.

Thanks Vasco. Conceptually was very helpful in generating my original list. I think the other lists have value, but are more more observational heuristics that might explain many micro issues, but not really help you make sense of the world and how things work overall. 

Thank you so much Raymond these are great. All Tier 1 and 2 concepts I failed to include. And thank you for catching a typo in the sheet!

Thank you Jen! And we might just take you up on that...

Limiting to US universities is mostly a me and Sarah consideration. We're American and it's good to focus. I thought about European universities early on, but they were physically and culturally too far away for our high-touch approach.

The fundamental thing happening here is that the opportunity cost of an exceptionally talented person taking advice aimed at the average person is vastly higher than the inverse, so people give advice that ensures the exceptionally talented lean into ambition and build these fields, even if many non-exceptional people will try and fail. 

People are not good at self-assessment in both directions and the more you caveat and qualify your advice, the less it gets through, so this is the bet to make.