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Dang, I missed seeing this before the solution was posted. And oh dear, it's high-complexity. Oh well, I'll give it a shot anyway!

Yes, the field is definitely more funding constrained than talent constrained right now

Oh I misread it as "eighty percent of the effort" oops.

people sometimes talk about whether you should go into policy, ai research, ea direct work, etc. but afaict all of those fields work like normal careers where actually you have to spend several years resume-building before painstakingly convincing people you're worth hiring for paid work. so imo these are not actually high-leverage paths to impact and the fields are not in fact short on people.

Consider the reaction my comment from three months [LW(p) · GW(p)] ago got.

There’s a lot here and if my existing writing didn’t answer your questions, I’m not optimistic another comment will help^[1]. Instead, how about we find something to bet on? It’s difficult to identify something both cruxy and measurable, but here are two ideas:

I see a pattern of:
1. CEA takes some action with the best of intentions
2. It takes a few years for the toll to come out, but eventually there’s a negative consensus on it.
3. A representative of CEA agrees the negative consensus is deserved, but since it occurred under old leadership, doesn’t think anyone should draw conclusions about new leadership from it.
4. CEA announces new program with the best of intentions.

So I would bet that within 3 years, a CEA representative will repudiate a major project occurring under Zach’s watch.

I would also bet on more posts similar to Bad Omens in Current Community Building or University Groups Need Fixing coming out in a few years, talking about 2024 recruiting. 
 

1. ^{^}

   Although you might like Change my mind: Veganism entails trade-offs, and health is one of the axes [LW · GW] (the predecessor to EA Vegan Advocacy is not Truthseeking) and Truthseeking when your disagreements lie in moral philosophy [LW · GW] and Love, Reverence, and Life [LW · GW] (dialogues with a vegan commenter on the same post)

Arguably, "basic logical principles" are those that are true in natural language. Otherwise nothing stops us from considering absurd logical systems where "true and true" is false, or the like. Likewise, "one plus one is two" seems to be a "basic mathematical principle" in natural language. Any axiomatization which produces "one plus one is three" can be dismissed on grounds of contradicting the meanings of terms like "one" or "plus" in natural language.

The trouble with set theory is that, unlike logic or arithmetic, it often doesn't involve strong intuitions from natural language. Sets are a fairly artificial concept compared to natural language collections (empty sets, for example, can produce arbitrary nestings), especially when it comes to infinite sets.

So, I think Fight 1 is funny, but it is kind of high context, involving reading two somewhat long stories. (Planecrash in particular is past a million words long!) I'd considered "Who would win in a fight, Eliezer Yudkowsky or Scott Alexander? ["Eliezer", "Scott", "Wait, what's this? It's Aella with a steel chair!"]" and "Who is the rightful caliph? ["Eliezer Yudkowsky","Scott Alexander", "Wait, what's this? It's Robin Hanson with a steel chair!"]" but feel a bit weird about including real people. 

I think they're just as funny though, and far more people will understand it, so maybe I should switch. Anyone have convincing thoughts here?

It would be nice to see at least three questions which would demonstrate how person extracts evidence from others' words, how much time and emotions could they spend if they needed to communicate a point precisely, etc.

I'll have to sleep on that, actually. Will return tomorrow, presumably with more concrete ideas)

I don't think there's a lot of value in distinguishing 3000 and 1,000,000 and probably for any aggregate you'll want to show this will just be "later than 2200" or something like that. But yes this way they can't make a statement that this will be 1,000,000 which is some downside.

I'm not a big fan of looking at the neighbors to decide whether this is a missing answer or high estimate (it's OK to not want to answer this one question). So some N/A or -1 should be ok.

(Just to make it clear, I'm not saying this is an important problem)