Some Dynamics around Project Organization

Background: I worked on a 3 month-2 year project loosely affiliated with the Rationalist community and/​or the EA community. The project may have been a ‘satellite’ project (e.g. it was not as core to the community as LesserWrong). I’d like to share insights without sharing my identity, so the project in question will remain anonymous.

In this post, I aim to draw attention to how internal politics plays a role in organizing projects, in a way that I personally did not anticipate.

The short version: In this particular project, political troubles and fighting turned out to be 50% of the work I faced and 90% of the burn. This was about 5 times more than I expected, and this was in a project that involved 3-10 people.

Longer version: The project I was part of required early volunteers who were committed to spending time on seeing the project through. (Why didn’t we hire people for pay? No great reason). This had the following effects:

(A) We naturally attracted people who aimed to expand their glory in the rationalist community.

(B) Said people, in my observation, do not like taking no for an answer. This leads to power conflict, fights, etc. etc. etc.

(C) I personally find it very hard to say “no”, and am anecdotally high on agreeability. When other people push hard for “yes” on their own ideas, this leads to a strong feeling of being squeezed against a wall.

(D) It is difficult to fire excited volunteers, for a variety of reasons. The one or two times we did so, it led to them feeling salty at me and the organization—a feeling that I believe persists to this day.

This, to put it mildly, led to a huge organizational imbroglio.

Our project actually worked out very well in the end. However, in an ideal world we could have avoided this internal imbroglio on the way there. Note that (B) is a personal assessment, and not the self-reported internal experience of the project’s volunteers.

Actionables I would take in the future:

-- Hire people with money, even outside people. I later did this, and it worked out much better for me than the infighting that stymied the volunteer group. Hiring establishes a known expectation between the contracted employee and the employer.

-- Volunteers with considerable working experience may be more valuable for team cohesion than volunteers without working experience. This is hard for me to elaborate on, so we can treat it as an untested hypothesis.

Anonymity may ruin any conclusions I presented from being generalized, so I apologize in advance about that :). The one second summary of this post would be : in one particular project affiliated with some members of the rationalist community, political considerations dominated the internal calculations.

This should not be taken as a general systemic feature of rationalist projects, in which I have low experience. I do believe it is a systemic feature of longer-term projects of any form, in the world at large. Therefore, I would speculate it applies to many internal rationalist projects. I am happy to be presented with negative evidence.

Note: For my own sake, please try to refrain from guessing at what the project in question is. This would help me produce more content in the future. I only speak for my awesome self. I do not speak for any other human, organization, or collective of individuals. :)