We had mostly ruled out political advocacy, so there was no one trying to do the “make connections with congresspeople” work that would have caused us to discover that someone had been thinking of this as an important issue for years.
It is the case that I thought there was little point in building political connections on this issue; but the more earlier failure was that for the last two decades there have only ever been a handful of people working seriously on this problem to begin with, which means most balls would be dropped regardless.
That’s totally right, until like 2020 or something the community was small and underresourced, such that things were gonna get dropped.
But I think we also did a somewhat bad job of effectively strategizing about how to approach the problem such that we ended up making worse allocation-of-effort choices than we could have, given the (unfair) benefit of hindsight.
I have a draft post about how I think we should have spent the period before takeoff started, in retrospect.
It is the case that I thought there was little point in building political connections on this issue; but the more earlier failure was that for the last two decades there have only ever been a handful of people working seriously on this problem to begin with, which means most balls would be dropped regardless.
That’s totally right, until like 2020 or something the community was small and underresourced, such that things were gonna get dropped.
But I think we also did a somewhat bad job of effectively strategizing about how to approach the problem such that we ended up making worse allocation-of-effort choices than we could have, given the (unfair) benefit of hindsight.
I have a draft post about how I think we should have spent the period before takeoff started, in retrospect.
I will read it when you publish it!
would a co-writer help?