I thought this post was really insightful, but I'm not sure how to think about the opportunity cost of these scarce high-context operators being bound up in organizations with high talent density — I imagine that in most cases, they wouldn't be as effective in another place without the synergistic effects of the talent density itself. If we were to spread the high opportunity talent out across organisations, I think those individuals would face a lot more friction in getting things done. I'm curious how that factors in.
The perception of strangeness can also be a psychological defense against moral confrontation. If you can dismiss an idea for being outlandish, you don't have to deal with the question of whether it's actually true. There's a natural, almost knee-jerk trap of hearing a moral claim, jumping to its implications, and judging it based on feelings about those implications as opposed to engaging the argument. I know I've fallen into it.
As someone coming in from the periphery and recently deepening my involvement, I'm really impressed by this movement's history of not shying away from that kind of moral confrontation. Of course, it's also possible for ideas to just be outlandish, and we'll probably look back and find some of those too.
Proper urban planning is an extremely high leverage, under-appreciated intervention. Just for one example, the impact of car-oriented infrastructure on the poor:
Recent estimates put the median individual monthly income in Jakarta at ~$115 USD. It's impossible to support a car on this income, and making places difficult, unsafe, or impossible to reach on foot, by bike, or via public transit creates a huge barrier for low income people to do basic things.
In richer countries like the US, where cars are the only reasonable transportation option in many areas, this amounts to a several thousand dollar per year imposed cost on everyone who can afford them (even barely) and creates a massive cliff for access to jobs, healthy food, etc for everyone who can't.
That's not to mention the economic cost of all city infrastructure being spread out, the environmental cost, the social cost of disconnecting neighborhoods, and on and on
I thought this post was really insightful, but I'm not sure how to think about the opportunity cost of these scarce high-context operators being bound up in organizations with high talent density — I imagine that in most cases, they wouldn't be as effective in another place without the synergistic effects of the talent density itself. If we were to spread the high opportunity talent out across organisations, I think those individuals would face a lot more friction in getting things done. I'm curious how that factors in.
The perception of strangeness can also be a psychological defense against moral confrontation. If you can dismiss an idea for being outlandish, you don't have to deal with the question of whether it's actually true. There's a natural, almost knee-jerk trap of hearing a moral claim, jumping to its implications, and judging it based on feelings about those implications as opposed to engaging the argument. I know I've fallen into it.
As someone coming in from the periphery and recently deepening my involvement, I'm really impressed by this movement's history of not shying away from that kind of moral confrontation. Of course, it's also possible for ideas to just be outlandish, and we'll probably look back and find some of those too.
But yeah, keep EA weird :)
Great article, thanks for sharing this.
Proper urban planning is an extremely high leverage, under-appreciated intervention. Just for one example, the impact of car-oriented infrastructure on the poor:
Recent estimates put the median individual monthly income in Jakarta at ~$115 USD. It's impossible to support a car on this income, and making places difficult, unsafe, or impossible to reach on foot, by bike, or via public transit creates a huge barrier for low income people to do basic things.
In richer countries like the US, where cars are the only reasonable transportation option in many areas, this amounts to a several thousand dollar per year imposed cost on everyone who can afford them (even barely) and creates a massive cliff for access to jobs, healthy food, etc for everyone who can't.
That's not to mention the economic cost of all city infrastructure being spread out, the environmental cost, the social cost of disconnecting neighborhoods, and on and on