There’s something extra which is closely connected with this: The time and motivation of central nodes is extremely valuable. Burning the resources of people who are in positions of power and aligned with your values is much more costly than burning other people’s resources[1], and saving or giving them extra resources is proportionately more valuable.
People who have not been a central node generally underestimate how many good things those people would be able to unblock or achieve with a relatively small amount of their time/energy/social favors that simply don’t get done because they’re making hard trade-offs. Finding ways to buy central nodes more time by finding things they’d love to do but don’t have the bandwidth to do themselves or even manage other people in any detail and stepping up to do a good job of it is one of the best ways to contribute for many people.
For example, I noticed that the LW tag portal entry on AI was missing many of the recently created tags about a year ago, and after making a bunch of other contributions to less sensitive tag-wiki pages I brought this up with the LW team and they gave me access to keep it updated. I’ve been doing that, and taking a small load off the team while maintaining something which should obviously be maintained.
Energy is more often the limiting factor than time, so if a central node gets a motivation boost from mentoring you this can be great. Don’t avoid talking to central nodes and trust them to manage their own time, just don’t pressure them to talk to you if they seem like they don’t want to continue the conversation. It’s almost certainly not personal, they just have 10 other high value things they could be doing.
There’s something extra which is closely connected with this: The time and motivation of central nodes is extremely valuable. Burning the resources of people who are in positions of power and aligned with your values is much more costly than burning other people’s resources[1], and saving or giving them extra resources is proportionately more valuable.
People who have not been a central node generally underestimate how many good things those people would be able to unblock or achieve with a relatively small amount of their time/energy/social favors that simply don’t get done because they’re making hard trade-offs. Finding ways to buy central nodes more time by finding things they’d love to do but don’t have the bandwidth to do themselves or even manage other people in any detail and stepping up to do a good job of it is one of the best ways to contribute for many people.
For example, I noticed that the LW tag portal entry on AI was missing many of the recently created tags about a year ago, and after making a bunch of other contributions to less sensitive tag-wiki pages I brought this up with the LW team and they gave me access to keep it updated. I’ve been doing that, and taking a small load off the team while maintaining something which should obviously be maintained.
Energy is more often the limiting factor than time, so if a central node gets a motivation boost from mentoring you this can be great. Don’t avoid talking to central nodes and trust them to manage their own time, just don’t pressure them to talk to you if they seem like they don’t want to continue the conversation. It’s almost certainly not personal, they just have 10 other high value things they could be doing.