Moses
Comments32
I think the first step, if you believe you're less competent than your colleagues believe you to be, is to find out who's wrong—you, them, or both? And are you wrong about your assessment of yourself, or about what your colleagues think of you, or both? Think about what questions you could ask or what metrics you could measure to answer these questions.
If it's your colleagues who's wrong, is it worth correcting them? They understand the risks, they know that recruitment is hit and miss. Is it your responsibility to protect them? You can live in fear of the moment when you'll be found out, or you can cherish the days when you are allowed to do the job, and accept your fate with equanimity. You're not getting your head cut off; you can choose how you feel about this.
Oh, I would've sworn that was already the case (with the understanding that, as you say, there is less volunteering involved, because with the "inner" movement being smaller, more selective, and with tighter/more personal relationships, there is much less friction in the movement of money, either in the form of employment contracts or grants).
So, to simplify your problem: I help someone, but somewhere else there is someone else who I wasn't able to help. Wat do?
You're in this precise situation regardless of quantum physics; I guarantee you won't be able to save everyone in your personal future light cone either. So I think that should simplify your question a bunch.
Why would this change your metaethical position? The reason you'd want to help someone else shouldn't change if I make you aware of some additional people somewhere which you're not capable of helping.
Just as a data point, I didn't read OP as an attack at all.
I also don't think that if you have overall negative feedback, you should necessarily have to come up with some good things to say as well, just to balance things out and "be nice". OP said what they wanted to say and it reads to me like valuable feedback, including the subtle undertone of frustration.
As a data point on the object level, I think that magic sorting makes sense on a website with intense traffic (HN, reddit), not on a site with a few posts a day.
Oh, I thought you refer to some kind of legal costs. You mean costs of vetting. Right. As has been noted: EA is vetting constrained, EA is network constrained.
But this is the case with employees as well, isn't it? It's just about vetting people in general.
One thing I notice, looking at the 80k job board, is that not that many EA(-adjacent) orgs are interested in remote workers.
A good example of a ToC diagram is this old Leverage Research plan.