Armchair expertise is good

By Nathan Young @ 2022-09-02T10:13 (0)

This post part of an attempt to draft in public. See my reasoning here. This is a personal post so if you see it, it should be because you chose to. I invite you to become a joint editor or suggest comments/text blocks below. 

Equipping

When I was a Christian, we used to talk about 'equipping'. This was the notion that it was the church's job to teach and prepare members of the community.

'Equipping' was many things but it included:

• Teaching about the Bible and how to live
• Encouraging people to pray
• Providing people with models to be functional at work, as parents and in marriage
• And so on

My church saw itself as a coordination hub for its community. If there was a problem, the church though that it was it's responsibility to fix. Sometimes in EA I think we have too little of this mindset. It's great to give people agency, but there are some similar problems that community members face. And they could be 'equipped better'

• Providing everyone with easy access to the resources we think make people most productive
• Providing everyone with easy access to the resources we think make people happiest
• Creating a space where community members see their value in correcting experts
• Allowing people a way to create track records of predictions, projects and funding decisions that will allow them to control more resources later
• Creating processes for people to find friends, collaborators and mentors

Solutions

• Summaries
• Yearly EA quiz which pays