You criticize Conjecture’s CEO for being… a charismatic leader good at selling himself and leading people? Because he’s not… a senior academic with a track record of published papers? Nonsense. Expecting the CEO to be the primary technical expert seems highly misguided to me.
Yeah this confiused me a little too. My current job (in soil science) has a non academic boss, and a team of us boffins, and he doesn’t need to be an academic, because its not his job, he just has to know where the money comes from, and how to stop the stakeholders from running away screaming when us soil nerds turn up to a meeting and start emitting maths and graphs out of our heads. Likewise the previous place I was at, I was the only non PhD haver on technical staff (being a ‘mere’ postgrad) and again our boss wasn’t academic at all. But he WAS a leader of men and herder of cats, and cat herding is probably a more important skill in that role than actually knowing what those cats are taking about.
And it all works fine. I dont need an academic boss, even if I think an academic boss would be nice. I need a boss who knows how to keep the payroll from derailing, and I suspect the vast majority of science workers feel the same way.
Note that we don’t criticize Connor specifically, but rather the lack of a senior technical expert on the team in general (including Connor). Our primary criticisms of Connor don’t have to do with his leadership skills (which we don’t comment on this at any point in the post).
I’m confused about the disagree votes. Can someone who disagree-voted say which of the following claims they disagreed with: 1. Omega criticized the lack of a senior technical expert on Conjecture’s team.
2. Omega’s primary criticisms of Connor doesn’t have to do with his leadership skills.
3. Omega did not comment on Connorship’s leadership skills at any point in the post.
Nathan Helm-Burger’ used a different notion of “leadership” (like a startup CEO) to criticise the post and Omega responded to it by saying something about “management” leadership, which doesn’t respond to Nathan’s comment really.
Ah I see. Hmm, if I say “Yesterday I said X,” people-who-talk-like-me will interpret contextless disagreement with that claim as “Yesterday I didn’t say X” and not as “X is not true.” Perhaps this is a different communication norm from LW standards, in which case I’ll try to interpret future agree/disagree comments in that light.
I agree from quickly looking at Beren’s LinkedIn page that he seems like a technical expert (I don’t know enough about ML to have a particularly relevant inside-view about ML technical expertise).
BTW, from the comment to the EA forum cross-post, I discovered that Beren reportedly left Conjecture very recently. That’s indeed a negative update on Conjecture for me (maybe not as much as he specifically left but rather that this indicates a high turnover rate), but regardless, this doesn’t apply to the inference made by Omega in this report, along the lines that “Conjecture’s research is iffy because they don’t have senior technical experts and don’t know what are they doing”, because this wasn’t true until very recently and probably still isn’t true (overwhelmingly likely there are other technical experts who are still working at Conjecture), so this doesn’t invalidate or stain the research that has been done and published previously.
Yeah this confiused me a little too. My current job (in soil science) has a non academic boss, and a team of us boffins, and he doesn’t need to be an academic, because its not his job, he just has to know where the money comes from, and how to stop the stakeholders from running away screaming when us soil nerds turn up to a meeting and start emitting maths and graphs out of our heads. Likewise the previous place I was at, I was the only non PhD haver on technical staff (being a ‘mere’ postgrad) and again our boss wasn’t academic at all. But he WAS a leader of men and herder of cats, and cat herding is probably a more important skill in that role than actually knowing what those cats are taking about.
And it all works fine. I dont need an academic boss, even if I think an academic boss would be nice. I need a boss who knows how to keep the payroll from derailing, and I suspect the vast majority of science workers feel the same way.
Note that we don’t criticize Connor specifically, but rather the lack of a senior technical expert on the team in general (including Connor). Our primary criticisms of Connor don’t have to do with his leadership skills (which we don’t comment on this at any point in the post).
I’m confused about the disagree votes. Can someone who disagree-voted say which of the following claims they disagreed with:
1. Omega criticized the lack of a senior technical expert on Conjecture’s team.
2. Omega’s primary criticisms of Connor doesn’t have to do with his leadership skills.
3. Omega did not comment on Connorship’s leadership skills at any point in the post.
Beren Millidge is not a senior technical expert?
Nathan Helm-Burger’ used a different notion of “leadership” (like a startup CEO) to criticise the post and Omega responded to it by saying something about “management” leadership, which doesn’t respond to Nathan’s comment really.
Ah I see. Hmm, if I say “Yesterday I said X,” people-who-talk-like-me will interpret contextless disagreement with that claim as “Yesterday I didn’t say X” and not as “X is not true.” Perhaps this is a different communication norm from LW standards, in which case I’ll try to interpret future agree/disagree comments in that light.
I agree from quickly looking at Beren’s LinkedIn page that he seems like a technical expert (I don’t know enough about ML to have a particularly relevant inside-view about ML technical expertise).
I think the (perhaps annoying) fact is that LW readers aren’t a monolith and different people interpret disagreement votes differently.
BTW, from the comment to the EA forum cross-post, I discovered that Beren reportedly left Conjecture very recently. That’s indeed a negative update on Conjecture for me (maybe not as much as he specifically left but rather that this indicates a high turnover rate), but regardless, this doesn’t apply to the inference made by Omega in this report, along the lines that “Conjecture’s research is iffy because they don’t have senior technical experts and don’t know what are they doing”, because this wasn’t true until very recently and probably still isn’t true (overwhelmingly likely there are other technical experts who are still working at Conjecture), so this doesn’t invalidate or stain the research that has been done and published previously.