3 min read
let's say you're organizing a conference on urban animals. You created a pool of questions: who is the target audience, when should the conference take place, and so on. So the process is you had a pool of questions, and let's say you have prioritized one of them, the target audience. Now you go back to step one and create a pool of answers to the question "who is the target audience": architects, local politicians, wild animal activists, environmentalists, comedians, welfare biology academics, crazy cat people, and so on. You decide to prioritize activists, academics and three local politicians. Now for execution: how should you invite them? It goes back to a pool of options: Post on social media, a newspaper ad, a private message etc. When you're writing the private message, that is the execution, but actually this also goes back to the process of creating a pool of questions and prioritizing them: what opening would get him excited?
Like AI, you can think about every next word as a pool of options you create and prioritize from.
Obviously many of these processes are subconscious and automatic, and many Q&As are being prioritized and answered without you even being aware of it. It is good, and I think it is also good to be more aware of what we are not aware of, so we can tweak it a bit.
So where is the execution part? I think the best way to define execution is where you have no pool of questions or answers in awareness, you just focus on what you already decided to do, without any creation or prioritization. You've decided you are going to call the vice mayor of your small town to personally ask him to give the keynote at the conference. If in the middle of the call you think "what should I say now, it is going really bad and he doesn't understand how this could help him look better in the eyes of animal lovers", you're out of execution, because you're now creating a pool of answers to a raised question and prioritizing them.
So I define execution by absence: It is only following orders, no thinking. "The robot" state: unaware, uncreative, unopen to change. A skilled performer adjusts constantly without any question reaching awareness, so if it is automatic, you're not stepping out of execution. Intervention in your own process is what makes you step out. An emotional intrusion like fear, ego or fatigue can get you out of the robot state. Turning awareness onto ones own execution can make skilled people choke, so awareness is not always to the advantage. The target is not to maximize it, but to calibrate it, fine tune it, which is in itself a trained skill.
You can be an executor in certain aspects but remain creative in others. For example, be in a robot state while reading a speech, but creative in reading the audience's response, though not changing anything you say.
Questions for you: When are you in an executor robot state of mind? When do you need more of it, when do you need less of it?
When are you too much of a creator? When are you too much of a Prioritizer? You can analyze yourself in light of those three pillars and questions.
2 min read
Idea generation:
I am good at generating pools of questions or answers. I have a broad superficial knowledge on many issues and go a bit deeper in some domains. I am a generalist, and I am OK, sometimes even good, at many things: I can write, lecture, fundraise, manage, go undercover, investigate a new issue, hire the right people, and more. Not exceptionally good on any of those, but between OK and good.
Yet, in hindsight I understand I wasn't broad minded enough in my first ~13 years of activism. I didn't read books on social change, I hardly knew anything about AI, and I was only familiar with Effective Altruism's philosophy in a shallow way.
Prioritization mistakes, mostly in predictions:
- Too optimistic prediction, sometime related to falling in love with my own ideas, not getting enough feedback for those ideas, and not working with prioritization methods (like Weighted Factor Model). Introspection, specifically meditation, helped my prioritization. One specific prediction mistake is I didn't expect the downfall of the Israeli animal rights movement, which started around ~2017 and escalated. I didn't prepare for that
- I have very basic statistical understanding. I know correlation is not causation, I understand just a bit about Bayesian reasoning, but practically not much more than that
- I Didn't do enough checks before prioritizing a project. The Camera On Animal was hardly used by other activists, and the whole broader Spytech vision we had didn't pan out like we wanted to. It wasn't suitable for our budget, the community needs, and the willingness of investigators to put effort into new tools. I had a mistaken inclination towards what looked shiny, exciting and new, something that sets a precedent, over simple and practical. Our best Spytech project this far came from the most common request investigators had and it was very mundane; just a regular camera that combines different features that were not there in the same product
- When the people you depend on, like journalists, don't want the main course, the essence of the story, then the "confetti" - such as a creative angle, a very high quality footage, or an interesting framing - can only help so much. If they don't want to tell the story of farmed animals, the decorations on a direct story about farmed animals have its limits. Sentient's first undercover investigation used a 360 undercover camera, insane HD footage from inside duck slaughter cones, showing animals alive after the slaughter. The success of this story depended more on the general willingness to tell the story of a slaughterhouse in the first place, than on the unique materials we brought. Getting creative within a narrative is enchantment, not a game changer.
