sarahconstantin's Shortform

sarahconstantin

links 8/31/26: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/08-31-2026

- https://yearningslav.substack.com/p/why-doing-operations-work-feels-bad EA orgs have a tendency to undervalue "ops" work, treating a variety of specialized tasks as though they should all be done by a usually female "office mom" whom they don't really respect. The "ops girlies" have noticed and are not happy about this.
  - My recommendation for the "ops girlies" is to speak up.
    - Look into norms in other industries, which EA orgs may be unfamiliar with, and be the expert telling people what Best Practice is, which may mean better pay, more staff, or more sensible ways of doing things.
    - be more opinionated, generally. in nerdy, male-dominated subcultures, the assumption is that if you have interesting ideas you will share them, out loud or in writing. when they're thinking of "talented people" to recruit for research or leadership, the first people who come to mind are people who have strong, visible Takes. if you're quiet, you will be assumed to have nothing to say.
      - the OP is worried that people think she's dumb (and worried that they may be right.) but the people whose judgment she fears do not have the ability to see into her brain. they have no idea whether she's smart or dumb. she just does not stand out to them, because she doesn't share opinions.
- https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised Ajeya Cotra on the HuggingFace attack.
- https://berkeleygenomics.org/articles/Chromosome_identification_methods.html Tsvi Benson-Tilsen on how to physically identify and manipulate a particular chromosome
- https://www.macroscience.org/p/pierre-azoulay-on-open-science-as economics of science that actually comes to some interesting empirical conclusions
  - scientists do accept lower pay in exchange for working at places that allow them to publish -- i.e. they have a "taste for open science"
  - getting an HHMI prize results in more post-prize high-impact publication compared to peers -- the prize "works" to incentivize more high-risk and ambitious science
  - openly distributed experimental methods (like mouse strains) result in more science that uses those methods.
- https://danluu.com/bug-blind/ Dan Luu on "bug blindness"

Showing 3 of 4 replies (Click to show all)

Dan Luu on "bug blindness"

From the title and pop-up preview of the first few sentences, I was 50-50 on whether this was about Entomophobia or seeing metaphorical programming bugs/inefficiencies everywhere. It's the latter. Interesting case of heterosemy and a lack of context.

8Ben Pace2mo

Backdrop: The EAs have often had head-in-the-clouds kind of philosophers with little idea of how to do management and tried to build an org around them / their mission, and so they've decided that ops is a separable skill. Also the philosopher makes their lives kinda terrible by being awful at management.

2Adam Scholl2mo

I think historically MIRI and CFAR also experimented a bunch with having this orientation/failure mode. Lightcone in particular does seem to me to have it less, and I think this seems probably better overall, though not without cost; the philosophers in question were doing useful work in the clouds, by my lights.