EA orgs have a tendency to undervalue “ops” work, treating a variety of specialized tasks as though they should all be done by a usually female “office mom” whom they don’t really respect.
I don’t know about “the EA orgs”, but the rationalists closest to me are very explicit about the best ops people being some of the most important people around. Most of the Lightcone team are ops generalists. I have long advised would-be org founders that advice #1 is “don’t found an org”, #2 is “don’t grow the org”, and #3 is “if you really need to found an org, then your very first hire should be a super ops person”.
“A Message to Garcia” comes up now and then on LessWrong; it explains the ethos of the super ops person quite nicely. A little snippet from the beginning:
When war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain fastnesses of Cuba—no one knew where. No mail or telegraph message could reach him. The President must secure his cooperation, and quickly.
What to do!
Someone said to the President, “There is a fellow by the name of Rowan [Lt. Andrew S. Rowan, U.S. Army] will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.”
Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How the “fellow by the name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oilskin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on the other side of the Island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia—are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail. The point that I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?”
By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing—”Carry a message to Garcia.”
A simple test for a super ops person: if for some reason they literally needed to get a message to a guerilla leader in the mountains of Cuba, would they just go do that? Not necessarily alone, they might hire people, but would they ensure that the message reached its intended recipient, without org leadership having to pay any further attention to the matter? When I think of my shortlist of “super ops people” the answer is “yes” for every one of them; every one of them would get the message to Garcia.
Backdrop: The EAs have often had head-in-the-clouds kind of philosophers with little idea of how to do management and tried to build an org around them / their mission, and so they’ve decided that ops is a separable skill. Also the philosopher makes their lives kinda terrible by being awful at management.
I think historically MIRI and CFAR also experimented a bunch with having this orientation/failure mode. Lightcone in particular does seem to me to have it less, and I think this seems probably better overall, though not without cost; the philosophers in question were doing useful work in the clouds, by my lights.
I don’t know about “the EA orgs”, but the rationalists closest to me are very explicit about the best ops people being some of the most important people around. Most of the Lightcone team are ops generalists. I have long advised would-be org founders that advice #1 is “don’t found an org”, #2 is “don’t grow the org”, and #3 is “if you really need to found an org, then your very first hire should be a super ops person”.
“A Message to Garcia” comes up now and then on LessWrong; it explains the ethos of the super ops person quite nicely. A little snippet from the beginning:
A simple test for a super ops person: if for some reason they literally needed to get a message to a guerilla leader in the mountains of Cuba, would they just go do that? Not necessarily alone, they might hire people, but would they ensure that the message reached its intended recipient, without org leadership having to pay any further attention to the matter? When I think of my shortlist of “super ops people” the answer is “yes” for every one of them; every one of them would get the message to Garcia.
Backdrop: The EAs have often had head-in-the-clouds kind of philosophers with little idea of how to do management and tried to build an org around them / their mission, and so they’ve decided that ops is a separable skill. Also the philosopher makes their lives kinda terrible by being awful at management.
I think historically MIRI and CFAR also experimented a bunch with having this orientation/failure mode. Lightcone in particular does seem to me to have it less, and I think this seems probably better overall, though not without cost; the philosophers in question were doing useful work in the clouds, by my lights.