I just came across this. Same article, different voting behaviour.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/6aXfG57FvbcrKf9Qd/make-the-drought-evaporate – 8 karma from 10 votes (no critical comments) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wttyWyKqkPyncuoCm/make-the-drought-evaporate – 32 karma from 24 votes

Nitpick: Localizing a largish number of texts looks more like a manufacturing or product development process to me. A classic ‘project manager’, as you mention in Roles, would have to keep this in mind and manage things differently (thinking about queues, batch size, work-in-process constraints, cycle time, throughput etc.).

Thank you, moderators! I didn't notice any trolls or spam, which I guess is evidence of your good work. :-)

Thanks for your concern about my karma! ;-) The difference between my comment and the reply is indeed surprising. I wouldn't have noticed it if you hadn't pointed it out. Here are other, more or less plausible, explanations:

• Most likely: My comment was a quick, abstract throwaway. I even avoided the word ‘suicide’ because I didn't feel good about bringing it up explicitly. NeoMohist's reply is more concrete, emotional and caring. I guess people resonate with that more and want to say with their upvote: ‘Yes, me worried too. Please keep an eye on him.’
• It was a quick, throwaway comment bringing up suicide. It carries bad vibes and doesn't add much. (I guess on Facebook it's harder/harsher to ‘downvote’ and people just decide not to react in that case, leaving you with the positive reactions.)
• NeoMohist has a cool username.
• EA Forum behaviour is deteriorating. (I was sometimes puzzled how things developed with my article on hiring and the comments on it. Of course, I'm biased for my article and comments.)
• Without the clarification (although I added it before all the karma accrued to the reply), one could misunderstand my comment as: ‘I'm only slightly worried because losing Sam wouldn't be a big loss, given what was happened.’ (I feel bad for even spelling out this possible misinterpretation.)
• People read continuously until the end of the comment chain and vote only there, instead of going back and looking what else might deserve an upvote.

Some corrections of the Sequoia info:

• I've never been a grad student.
• I'm neither Japanese nor a Japanese citizen.
• I ‘volunteered’ in the sense that people at Alameda reached out to me, I said ok and then got paid by the hour for my help.
• ‘(obscure, rural)’ is an exaggeration. ‘provincial’ would be a more apt adjective for the location. The main bank we used was SMBC, the second-largest bank in Japan.
• ‘for a fee’ sounds as if it was some sort of bribe to get them to do what we wanted. But we only paid the usual transaction fees and margin that any bank would charge.

But mostly, if https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xafpj3on76uRDoBja/the-ftx-future-fund-team-has-resigned-1?commentId=hpP8EjEt9zTmWKFRy is accurate, I'm bummed that the money I helped earn was squandered right away.

I have 2 weeks to raise $8b

that's basically all that matters for the rest of my life

Two weeks to live? I'm slightly worried. But only slightly.

[To clarify: I wrote ‘slightly’ because it appears that Sam writes a lot of things that aren't very reliable and well thought-out. So I didn't want to put too much stock in a particular phrasing.]

Thanks for explaining! I'm happy to read that you're discussing this with other people, too.

Please forgive the insensitivity of the following question. I've been wondering about this for a while and now I'm (ab)using your post about your troubles and ambitions as a place to ask it: What is your thinking on charging money for the tech support part of your work?

The EA ecosystem appears to consist of organizations supporting each other for free, while being funded by a third party. How about third-parties funding only those organizations that do direct work and can't have paying customers, and having the rest be semi-commercial, organized by market forces? (I know that this wouldn't work for your more ambitious projects. But for the day-to-day tech support it should be possible, at least in a market economist's dream world.)

Thanks for including my post here. Your summary is shockingly good! It captures the essence of my article very well.

For the record I'll note that not all the ‘bad’ things the hiring consultants had planned actually happened. Because the manager at the org that was hiring did some reading and then took over the process.

Thanks for taking the time to write up balanced feedback! I was surprised.

I'm starting to understand the message from your and other comments that the tone of the article is distracting from the content and even causing people to misunderstand it. When I write another article, I will take more time to work on the tone.

I knew that the introduction is written in a choppy way, but I didn't expect that it would be hard to read. Thanks for telling me that. Good point also that I should introduce key terms more explicitly. You pointing this out made me see it as another source of confusion.

One clarification about ‘promoting Manager Tools’: The reason is that I'm using arguments from authority a lot. From the authority of Manager Tools. In order for those arguments to be convincing, I need to establish that Manager Tools is reliable. That's why I write how their guidance leads to success etc. Now, arguments from authority tend to be weak (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority). If I had the time, I would write out all the arguments properly, gather data etc. But I don't have the time, unfortunately. Also, it's not crucial for my main point, particularly my original main point. My original main point is that Hirely does bad work (they're hopefully doing better now – that's why I half-assedly repurposed the article) and one can be convinced of that without being convinced by each and every sub-point.

The hyperlink thing is to comply with my own demand from an old LessWrong post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ytStDZ7BaC23GvGPb/please-give-your-links-speaking-names It wasn't that much extra work because I wrote a little Clojure script to transform one Markdown file into another.

As to the summary up-front: Recently I try to structure articles in a way that the title and the table of contents can be read as the summary. In this article this got lost a bit because of the repurposing.