On community achievements
One of the major blockers to strong mid-range strategy is that, to the extent our community has concrete achievements, nobody knows what they are. I spend a fair amount of time keeping track of friends and allies, who they are, what they’re like, and what they’re doing at the moment. Yet when I tried to start this writeup with a list of example achievements by people we knew, I found that even I didn’t know who had done what. People might post stuff on Facebook or Twitter, but it gets mixed in with ads, political propaganda, hoax news stories, and all kinds of other crap, making it near-impossible to find the important things. I know about a few achievements, like Ed Boyden’s work and how it won the Breakthrough Prize, but that was such a big deal it made the New York Times. That’s way too high of a bar.
So, off-the-cuff proposal: start an online newspaper or magazine or blog or something which catalogs the achievements of individuals and small groups in the community. Ideally, the focus should be on concrete achievements. It’s hard to come up with enough good real examples, so I’ll make up some hypothetical ones.
Bad: Lately, Michael Smith has become interested in theoretical physics.
Reasoning: Wrong forum; nothing wrong with that, but nothing concrete has happened yet.
Good: Michael Smith has written the top-ranked answers for the quantum physics questions <X>, <Y> and <Z> on the AskScience subreddit. These answers got over a thousand upvotes from the AskScience community.
Bad: Jessica Johnson has raised $1 million for the Against Malaria Foundation.
Reasoning: It’s easy for money raised to not really do anything; amounts raised are often outright fake (eg. money “pledged” on the basis of unenforceable promises, often many decades in the future); puts too much emphasis on raw number of dollars.
Good: Jessica Johnson has spent the past year working to expand Against Malaria Foundation’s fundraising pipeline. According to the head of AMF, her work has caused over 200,000 new nets to be distributed in Malawi.
Good: Yesterday, Matthew Williams was awarded the Haber Prize for chemistry for his work on flexible conducting materials. He did his work with the help of… <page-long explanation of what his work was, how he did it, and why it’s important, most of which hasn’t been printed here before>.
Bad: Yesterday, Matthew Williams was awarded an honorary doctorate from Princeton, for his work inventing the VCR in 1972. This award represents the famous inventor’s 13th honorary degree.
Reasoning: It’s very easy and harmful to chase empty status tokens, for work that was (at best) long in the past or (at worst) stolen or nonexistent.
Bad: Amanda Jones said today that she had been hired by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline as a senior research chemist.
Reasoning: Just getting a job (or similar) doesn’t mean you’ll do well at the job, or that the job will accomplish much; senior corporate jobs are very often just empty status tokens (see eg. Paul Graham’s The Submarine ).
Good: Amanda Jones is one of the key scientists on the team behind Progenitorivox, a new anti-diabetes drug just announced by GlaxoSmithKline.
Bad: Joshua Brown has started a new company, which will apply to Y Combinator for their 2016 summer cycle.
Reasoning: Nothing has really happened yet; our community talks a lot about “entrepreneurship” as a general thing, without much encouragement of specific projects, which causes Thiel-style paradoxes.
Good: Joshua Brown announced today that he is starting a new machine learning company, FlowNet. FlowNet’s software, to be released early next year, has 23% better performance on standard computer vision benchmarks compared to existing competitors.
Bad: Sarah Davis, the author of the blog Dance Better, is an excellent writer.
Reasoning: Too vague.
Good: Sarah Davis is the author of the blog Dance Better. Her blog gets over 10,000 readers a day, and has been cited by <outlet>, <outlet>, and <outlet>. The San Francisco Dance Club has grown from 30 people to 200 so far this year, and <name>, <name>, and <name> cited Sarah’s blog as the biggest thing inspiring them to get into dancing.