You once told me that there were ~20 things a person needed to be generally competent. What were they?
I’m not sure I had an exact list, but I’ll try to generate one now and see how many things are on it:
Numeracy
“What surprised you most during your time at CFAR?
Surprise 1: People are profoundly non-numerate.
And, people who are not profoundly non-numerate still fail to connect numbers to life.
This surprised me a lot, because I was told (by somebody who read CFAR handbook) that CFAR isn’t mostly about numeracy, and I’ve never heard about skills involving number crunching from people who went to CFAR workshops. Didn’t they just fail to update on that? If that’s the most important skill, shouldn’t we have a new CFAR who teaches numeracy, reading and writing?
Did EA scale too quickly?
A friend recommended me to read a note from Andy’s working notes, which argues that scaling systems too quickly led to rigid systems. Reading this note vaguely reminded me of EA.
First, it is debatable if EA experienced quick scale up in the last few years. In some ways, it feels to me like it did, and EA founds had a spike of founding in 2022.
But it feels to me like EA community didn’t have things figured out properly. Like SBF crisis could be averted easily by following common business practices or the latest drama with nonlinear. The community norms were off and were hard to change?