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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25441 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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So your thesis is 'there's a phase-change after a certain point where organizations become more political/institutional above Dunbar's law but despite all the bad things we know about big institutions it's necessary and fine?'

Or were you opposing that, saying that you deny that recruitment is the best thing people can do, that the human, non-optimized element is good, that organizations need soul to start off with? I don't understand, is it that the strategies like tricking Coca Cola are hyperdunbar and therefore good? Bad? It seems like a really complicated thesis!

I'm guessing we all struggled through university lecturers telling us to give Topic Sentences and Introductions and it was always cringeworthy to read someone's essay that said 'in this essay I will argue that...' But I think it's important to provide some kind of guidance, especially in long essays. I'm hopelessly lost. Are other people lost or am I having a skill issue?

Apologies, this post was a little more stream of consciousness than I'd intended. My thesis is more that :

  • Every organization, even an organization of one person, must select relative priorities of growth against other targets. For businesses, marketing and investment versus product development; for artists, growing your audience against growing your skills; for streamers focusing on following the algorithm versus following your interests. For FIRST, that's a part of that's the division between creating and expanding teams versus developing skills for those teams, but the pattern exists much more broadly.

  • Organizations that make that decision don't do so (only) because they've forgotten their original goal, or because they've been taken over by people who don't care about that goal, but because scale does genuinely have (distributed) benefit.

  • But that strategy has costs. Effective Altruists often focused on the degenerate cases, where outreach becomes almost all of what the organization does, or where outreach has hit decreasing returns while the organization is unwilling to admit that. But there are more honest problems, such as where this emphasis on outreach disconnects your metrics from your measures, or where successful growth can Baumol you as relative productivity varies with scale for individual parts of the organization.

  • More critically, it is fundamentally risky approach at the level of individual people, while obfuscating the outcome of that gamble. If a consistent and always-applicable recruitment paradigm existed, you would already have joined, as would every adult in the county/country/planet; if you could keep in mind the outcome of your recruitment efforts, it wouldn't exceed your Dunbar number. Not everyone approached can be a recruit, not all recruits persist (or are even desirable), so on: even successful orgs notorious for their outreach can spend hundreds of manhours to get four or five mid-duration recruits. Organizations can eventually make this work out by playing the odds across a large enough number of people, but individual actors within the organization can not. Hyperdunbar non-outreach/recruitment efforts can similarly be risky and hide their outcomes: it's very easy to give a talk before a thousand people, and very hard to know what portion of the audience was listening the next day.

  • Because of their public-facing nature, difficulty of measurement, influence of the internet and media coverage (and, cynically, hyperdunbar organization efforts to dazzle or baffle their membership), these approaches are what are most visible when looking into most fields from outside, such that they seem like the only viable option.

  • But that framework is flawed; hyperdunbar efforts can and often do run face-first into a ditch.

  • Even some efforts toted as wildly successful can fade off at shockingly low numbers. That's not to call them a failure for doing so, even if it's not always or often what the stated goals were. However, it shows a space where the tradeoffs necessary to try to scale to vast numbers weren't necessary.

  • And a lot of good can be done outside of hyperdunbar efforts.

It's not just you, I've struggled to read several recent gattsuru posts but thought I was just retarded

Oof. I guess I'll need to work on making my summary of the recent hyprland cancellation a bit more readable.

Thanks for saying so. I've been trying to highlight more esoteric stuff, but it necessarily involves dropping a pile of context at the start of a post, and it's hard to tell the right balancing point between succinct-but-incomplete and complete-but-infodumpy.

Unfortunately I have this issue with a lot of his comments. Much of the comment seems to consist of asides and I simply cannot keep track of what the main point is supposed to be.

Usually the respondents to his posts pull out a sentence or two and run with it, so I get the feeling I'm not alone in not seeing the main thrust.

Usually the respondents to his posts pull out a sentence or two and run with it

I don't think this is a bad thing. I think this is a good way of interacting with long posts (so people are able to respond to mega essays without feeling obligated to respond with a mega essay of their own) and it can lead to a lot of productive and interesting discussion. Like, on Kulak's recent post not many of the replies directly addressed Kulak's actual thesis, they just used it as a discussion prompt for sharing whatever thoughts they had on India. I think threads like that are healthy for the forum.

That being said, this particular post did a poor job of explaining to me why I should be interested in FIRST or hyperdunbarism (although admittedly this topic is far outside of my normal wheelhouse to begin with).

About halfway through, I completely lost track of what the comment was advocating or even saying.

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