The biggest concern/red flag for me is one aspect of the authoritarian nature of the project. I would be perfectly fine with fully outsourcing decisions (giving higher intellectual status) but not with being a subordinate in full generality. What I’m trying to point at is the difference between “What should I do? He said to do “x” and I trust his expertise so this is my best option and I’m going to make myself do it if unpleasant” and someone forcing me to do the thing.
Which of the two would be my intuitive reaction depends mostly on your character/attitude and this is something that is completely missing from the discussion so far. Hopefully that is because people know you so they are sure it wouldn’t be a problem but your comments here only show competence and don’t exclude arrogance or enjoying power too much and beginning to boss people around. I found concerning the comparisons to military bootcamps and talking about tyrants as this somewhat paints the image of “someone shouting at people to do stuff” which I expect to have severe negative effects and build up resentment quickly. In other words it seems to me that constraining your image strictly to the one who decides what is to be done as opposed to someone who also enforces the execution would reduce the risk of failure of the experiment. Enforcing by regulating incentives should be fine as it won’t speak to System 1 and provoke the low-level “Who are you to tell me what to do” reaction.
Maybe this is an obvious point that having a nice and respectful leader is better than powerful tyrant but I’m not sure how far I can generalize from my own preferences so decided to share anyway. Apologies if this doesn’t make sense or wastes your time, I’m new to posting here.
Used the poll. I’ve been reading mostly old posts for the last year but never registered as I feel I can’t contribute much to the discussions. I check the discussion forum regularly but read/click only what seems interesting or is highly upvoted.