LW - On Not Pulling The Ladder Up Behind You by Screwtape

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On Not Pulling The Ladder Up Behind You, published by Screwtape on April 27, 2024 on LessWrong. Epistemic Status: Musing and speculation, but I think there's a real thing here. I. When I was a kid, a friend of mine had a tree fort. If you've never seen such a fort, imagine a series of wooden boards secured to a tree, creating a platform about fifteen feet off the ground where you can sit or stand and walk around the tree. This one had a rope ladder we used to get up and down, a length of knotted rope that was tied to the tree at the top and dangled over the edge so that it reached the ground. Once you were up in the fort, you could pull the ladder up behind you. It was much, much harder to get into the fort without the ladder. Not only would you need to climb the tree itself instead of the ladder with its handholds, but you would then reach the underside of the fort and essentially have to do a pullup and haul your entire body up and over the edge instead of being able to pull yourself up a foot at a time on the rope. Only then could you let the rope back down. The rope got pulled up a lot, mostly in games or childhood arguments with each other or our siblings. Sometimes it got pulled up out of boredom, fiddling with it or playing with the rope. Sometimes it got pulled up when we were trying to be helpful; it was easier for a younger kid to hold tight to the rope while two older kids pulled the rope up to haul the young kid into the tree fort. "Pulling the ladder up behind you" is a metaphor for when you intentionally or unintentionally remove the easier way by which you reached some height. II. Quoth Ray, Weird fact: a lot of people I know (myself included) gained a bunch of agency from running meetups. When I arrived in the NYC community, I noticed an opportunity for some kind of winter holiday. I held the first Solstice. The only stakes were 20 people possibly having a bad time. The next year, I planned a larger event that people traveled from nearby cities to attend, which required me to learn some logistics as well as to improve at ritual design. The third year I was able to run a major event with a couple hundred attendees. At each point I felt challenged but not overwhelmed. I made mistakes, but not ones that ruined anything longterm or important. I'm a something of a serial inheritor[1] of meetups. Last year I ran the Rationalist Megameetup in New York City, which had over a hundred people attending and took place at a conference hotel. It's the most complicated event I've run so far, but it didn't start that way. The first iteration of the megameetup was, as far as I know, inviting people to hang out at a big apartment and letting some of them crash on couches or air mattresses there. That's pretty straightforward and something I can imagine a first-time organizer pulling off without too much stress. The first time I ran the megameetup, it involved renting an apartment and taking payments and buying a lot of food, but I was basically doing the exact same thing the person before me did and I got to ask a previous organizer a lot of questions. This means that I got to slowly level up, getting more used to the existing tools and more comfortable in what I was doing as I made things bigger. There was a ladder there to let me climb up. If tomorrow I decided to stop having anything to do with the Rationalist Megameetup, I'd be leaving whoever picked up the torch after me with a harder climb. That problem is only going to get worse as the Rationalist Megameetup grows. Projects have a tendency to grow more complicated the longer they go and the more successful they get. Meetups get bigger as more people join, codebases get larger as more features get added, companies wind up with a larger product line, fiction series add more characters and plotlines. That makes tak...