With respect to power dynamics point one and two, there is another person known to the community who is perhaps more qualified and already running something which is similar in several respects—Geoff Anders of Leverage Research. So I don’t think this is precisely the only group making an attempt to hit this sort of thing, though I still find it novel and interesting.
(disclaimer: I was at the test weekend for this house and am likely to participate)
Yeah, Geoff and Leverage have a lot I would love to look at and emulate, but I haven’t been running under the assumption that I’d just … be allowed to. I’m beginning some conversations that are exciting and promising.
That being said, I do think that the overall goals are somewhat different. Leverage (as far as I can tell) is building a permanent superteam to actually do stuff. I think Dragon Army is building a temporary superteam that will do stuff in the short and medium term, but is more focused on individual leveling up and sending superhero graduates out into the world to do lots and lots of exploring and tackle a wide number of strategies. My model of Leverage is looking for the right thing to exploit on, whereas I’m looking for how to create competent people, and while there’s a lot of overlap those are not the same Polaris.
I similarly think Geoff is highly competent and certainly outstrips me in some ways (and possibly is net more qualified), but I’d posit I outstrip him in a roughly similar number of ways, and that he’s better matched for what Leverage is doing and I’m better matched for what DA is doing (sort of tautologically, since we’re each carving out mountains the way we think makes the most sense). I think the best of all would be if Geoff and I end up in positions of mutual respect and are able to swap models and resources, but I acknowledge he’s a good five years my senior and has no reason to treat me as an equal yet.
EDIT: Also note that Geoff is disqualified by virtue of already being busy, and as for “just join Leverage,” well … they’ve never really expressed interest in me up to this point, so I figured I wouldn’t bother them unless I was no longer employed day-to-day.
I dunno about “key.” Open-ended brainstorm, keeping in mind that my models of Leverage are vague and straw and NO insult is intended if I get things wrong …
Leverage advantages—provides a discriminator that lets you tell more accurately who fits and who doesn’t, sounds better if your goal is to accrue funding, is better if your goal is to return money to an investor, provides your participants with a strong mission that they can write in their hearts rather than a vague one that might be hard to grasp, gives you a narrowing principle that helps you discard certain kinds of growth as irrelevant/boon-doggle with reasonably high confidence
Leverage disadvantages—seems (from my limited outside vantage point) to require people to more closely conform to the shape of the leader/take on a singular mission rather than allowing for different colors in the spectrum, seems to fall prey to the intellectual property and get-there-first problems that encourage isolation from the broader network of allies, (maybe) requires you to somewhat distort what you’re doing to please investors, (maybe) requires you to strike the balance between deciding-too-soon and being-decision-paralyzed because you have to cohere around a smaller number of goals at a time
Dragon Army advantages—adheres (slightly) more closely to what the average rationalist wants and thus opens you up to a (slightly) wider range of participants, causes members to gain leadership and facilitation skills of necessity rather than accidentally/luckily, (somewhat more) forces people to confront the question what do you really want instead of giving them an easy out by handing them a distracting answer, doesn’t require as much funding, biases toward action rather than running the risk of spiraling up into the meta
Dragon Army disadvantages—more vulnerable to strawmanning and skepticism because it is less coherent and clear, much more vulnerable to confusion or failure if I get hit by a bus because the models all live in my head and aren’t yet interactable, runs the risk of losing people who are impatient and feel like they’re lost in triviality, is less viscerally rewarding (jack of all tradesing, that is) than getting gold medals as a master, needs a longer runway/longer start time because it’s more explicitly about culture building and less about objective checkpoints that you can meet on the fly
incomplete
Note that I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH that my models of Leverage are VAGUE AND PROBABLY WRONG and also note that I’m sleep-deprived and I am aware that this may not really answer your question.
Oh, also: AFAIK, Leverage is actually fairly low on precommitment, i.e. if someone were to want everyone to get together in the same room at the same time on a regular basis, they would have to go around and win the argument something like forty times, and at any time someone who’d previously been convinced could just say, “actually, never mind, I changed my mind and I have better things to do again,” and there aren’t any … initially consensual, eventually coercive? … structures in place.
Nothing, in short, to get people across the unpleasant valley except their own epistemics and willpower … no firm, unyielding scaffold that can be built such that others can rely on it. So, Leverage has the advantage of not having the failures of such a system (e.g. people getting trapped and wasting time), and Dragon Army has the advantages of having the benefits of such a system (Actual Reliability that doesn’t require inordinate upfront costs, the ability to develop an ecology of affordances over time upon a Schelling point of togetherness).
With respect to power dynamics point one and two, there is another person known to the community who is perhaps more qualified and already running something which is similar in several respects—Geoff Anders of Leverage Research. So I don’t think this is precisely the only group making an attempt to hit this sort of thing, though I still find it novel and interesting.
(disclaimer: I was at the test weekend for this house and am likely to participate)
Yeah, Geoff and Leverage have a lot I would love to look at and emulate, but I haven’t been running under the assumption that I’d just … be allowed to. I’m beginning some conversations that are exciting and promising.
That being said, I do think that the overall goals are somewhat different. Leverage (as far as I can tell) is building a permanent superteam to actually do stuff. I think Dragon Army is building a temporary superteam that will do stuff in the short and medium term, but is more focused on individual leveling up and sending superhero graduates out into the world to do lots and lots of exploring and tackle a wide number of strategies. My model of Leverage is looking for the right thing to exploit on, whereas I’m looking for how to create competent people, and while there’s a lot of overlap those are not the same Polaris.
I similarly think Geoff is highly competent and certainly outstrips me in some ways (and possibly is net more qualified), but I’d posit I outstrip him in a roughly similar number of ways, and that he’s better matched for what Leverage is doing and I’m better matched for what DA is doing (sort of tautologically, since we’re each carving out mountains the way we think makes the most sense). I think the best of all would be if Geoff and I end up in positions of mutual respect and are able to swap models and resources, but I acknowledge he’s a good five years my senior and has no reason to treat me as an equal yet.
EDIT: Also note that Geoff is disqualified by virtue of already being busy, and as for “just join Leverage,” well … they’ve never really expressed interest in me up to this point, so I figured I wouldn’t bother them unless I was no longer employed day-to-day.
What do you think are the key advantages & disadvantages of your Polaris vs Leverage’s? How does this relate to methods?
I dunno about “key.” Open-ended brainstorm, keeping in mind that my models of Leverage are vague and straw and NO insult is intended if I get things wrong …
Leverage advantages—provides a discriminator that lets you tell more accurately who fits and who doesn’t, sounds better if your goal is to accrue funding, is better if your goal is to return money to an investor, provides your participants with a strong mission that they can write in their hearts rather than a vague one that might be hard to grasp, gives you a narrowing principle that helps you discard certain kinds of growth as irrelevant/boon-doggle with reasonably high confidence
Leverage disadvantages—seems (from my limited outside vantage point) to require people to more closely conform to the shape of the leader/take on a singular mission rather than allowing for different colors in the spectrum, seems to fall prey to the intellectual property and get-there-first problems that encourage isolation from the broader network of allies, (maybe) requires you to somewhat distort what you’re doing to please investors, (maybe) requires you to strike the balance between deciding-too-soon and being-decision-paralyzed because you have to cohere around a smaller number of goals at a time
Dragon Army advantages—adheres (slightly) more closely to what the average rationalist wants and thus opens you up to a (slightly) wider range of participants, causes members to gain leadership and facilitation skills of necessity rather than accidentally/luckily, (somewhat more) forces people to confront the question what do you really want instead of giving them an easy out by handing them a distracting answer, doesn’t require as much funding, biases toward action rather than running the risk of spiraling up into the meta
Dragon Army disadvantages—more vulnerable to strawmanning and skepticism because it is less coherent and clear, much more vulnerable to confusion or failure if I get hit by a bus because the models all live in my head and aren’t yet interactable, runs the risk of losing people who are impatient and feel like they’re lost in triviality, is less viscerally rewarding (jack of all tradesing, that is) than getting gold medals as a master, needs a longer runway/longer start time because it’s more explicitly about culture building and less about objective checkpoints that you can meet on the fly
incomplete
Note that I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH that my models of Leverage are VAGUE AND PROBABLY WRONG and also note that I’m sleep-deprived and I am aware that this may not really answer your question.
Oh, also: AFAIK, Leverage is actually fairly low on precommitment, i.e. if someone were to want everyone to get together in the same room at the same time on a regular basis, they would have to go around and win the argument something like forty times, and at any time someone who’d previously been convinced could just say, “actually, never mind, I changed my mind and I have better things to do again,” and there aren’t any … initially consensual, eventually coercive? … structures in place.
Nothing, in short, to get people across the unpleasant valley except their own epistemics and willpower … no firm, unyielding scaffold that can be built such that others can rely on it. So, Leverage has the advantage of not having the failures of such a system (e.g. people getting trapped and wasting time), and Dragon Army has the advantages of having the benefits of such a system (Actual Reliability that doesn’t require inordinate upfront costs, the ability to develop an ecology of affordances over time upon a Schelling point of togetherness).