In the spirit of Murphyjitsu, the most obvious failure mode that you didn’t mention is that I expect you to burn out dramatically after a few weeks, from exhaustion or the psychological strain of trying to optimize the experiences of N people. The bootcamp phase is not analogous to anything I’ve heard of you doing sustainably for an extended period of time.
So, do you expect Dragon Army Barracks to work if Eli has to take over for you in Week Four?
Hmm, interesting. My self-model is somewhat incapable of burning out during this, due to an ability to run forever on spite (that’s only somewhat tongue-in-cheek).
It’s a solid point, though. If I condition on burnout, I think that Eli manages or not based on the level of specificity and concreteness that we managed to get in place in the first few weeks. Like, I don’t think Eli is competent (yet) to create the thing, but I do think he’s competent to oversee its maintenance and preservation. So that seems to put a somewhat higher priority on early systemization and scaffold-building than might have otherwise been in my plan.
Good question.
Edit: also, probably the closest analogue to this in my past is being the sole functioning RA on a dorm hall of ~30 high schoolers in a high-stress school environment. That was probably within the same order of magnitude of juggling, once you account for the fact that my increase in skill since then is balanced by the increase in complexity/responsibility. I did a lot to try to manage the experience of those thirty people.
FWIW, my model of Duncan agrees with his model of himself here. I don’t expect him to burn out doing this.
…and even if he does, I expect that the combo of Eli plus the sort of people I imagine being part of Dragon Army would pull it through. Not guaranteed, but with a strong enough chance that I’m basically not worried about a failure mode along the lines of “Flops due to Duncan burnout and subsequent systems failures.”
I would like to say that I share your strong preference for being second in command over first and would like to add a datapoint that I find being first in command to be really stressful in a way that doesn’t hit me or mess with my decision making until after I relinquish the role, at which point it hits hard, and am curious if that happens or has happened to you. (Examples; Being first responder in a medical emergency and keeping everything going right up until the victim had arrived at the E.R. and then throwing up and shaking for the rest of the night, leading a major college class project for a semester that went really well and then essentially shutting down and hiding in my room for a week.)
If I were trying to do what you seem to be trying to do, I would be setting myself up for a major crash once I’d brought the experiment to a close or handed off the baton. Obviously our minds are different in many ways, but I figured it was worth checking to see if you had that issue and found a solution that might be stealable.
In the spirit of Murphyjitsu, the most obvious failure mode that you didn’t mention is that I expect you to burn out dramatically after a few weeks, from exhaustion or the psychological strain of trying to optimize the experiences of N people. The bootcamp phase is not analogous to anything I’ve heard of you doing sustainably for an extended period of time.
So, do you expect Dragon Army Barracks to work if Eli has to take over for you in Week Four?
Hmm, interesting. My self-model is somewhat incapable of burning out during this, due to an ability to run forever on spite (that’s only somewhat tongue-in-cheek).
It’s a solid point, though. If I condition on burnout, I think that Eli manages or not based on the level of specificity and concreteness that we managed to get in place in the first few weeks. Like, I don’t think Eli is competent (yet) to create the thing, but I do think he’s competent to oversee its maintenance and preservation. So that seems to put a somewhat higher priority on early systemization and scaffold-building than might have otherwise been in my plan.
Good question.
Edit: also, probably the closest analogue to this in my past is being the sole functioning RA on a dorm hall of ~30 high schoolers in a high-stress school environment. That was probably within the same order of magnitude of juggling, once you account for the fact that my increase in skill since then is balanced by the increase in complexity/responsibility. I did a lot to try to manage the experience of those thirty people.
FWIW, my model of Duncan agrees with his model of himself here. I don’t expect him to burn out doing this.
…and even if he does, I expect that the combo of Eli plus the sort of people I imagine being part of Dragon Army would pull it through. Not guaranteed, but with a strong enough chance that I’m basically not worried about a failure mode along the lines of “Flops due to Duncan burnout and subsequent systems failures.”
I would like to say that I share your strong preference for being second in command over first and would like to add a datapoint that I find being first in command to be really stressful in a way that doesn’t hit me or mess with my decision making until after I relinquish the role, at which point it hits hard, and am curious if that happens or has happened to you. (Examples; Being first responder in a medical emergency and keeping everything going right up until the victim had arrived at the E.R. and then throwing up and shaking for the rest of the night, leading a major college class project for a semester that went really well and then essentially shutting down and hiding in my room for a week.)
If I were trying to do what you seem to be trying to do, I would be setting myself up for a major crash once I’d brought the experiment to a close or handed off the baton. Obviously our minds are different in many ways, but I figured it was worth checking to see if you had that issue and found a solution that might be stealable.