Thank you for this post—I had been waiting for warning signs, I think I will not do that anymore.
Note the post is possibly laced with a bit too many lesswrong/overcoming bias concepts to work for some people without the relevant background (e.g. “looking good to other people” as a large motivation in people’s reasoning), but I’m not sure that’s avoidable.
But at least significantly increased my short-timeline probabilities, from very low to plausible. And helped my System 1 feel a bit more urgency on this topic...
nonn
Karma: 6
I think a major blocker to this kind of thing is that people feel like ‘it’s not a real career’ and worry what would happen if they tried to leave, or just didn’t see success in their fieldbuilding startup.
IMO this is very incorrect above a certain threshold of ability, especially for people already working in EA or AIS technical/policy/generalist roles. But it would be very helpful if your team could offer some stronger guarantees to these people!
Here’s one basic idea (common and probably far from optimal): ‘failed-fieldbuilding-attempt insurance’ - For people you think should do this, you agree to give a 5 year stipend of 2-5k/month if they try & fail & can’t find another decent job. Likely you wouldn’t even have to pay this out much, because most people that you’re excited to see try fieldbuilding are IMO incorrect about not being able to transition back. So in practice, you’d give them the stipend for a few months before they found a new job. And many of them would actually succeed & you’d pay nothing!