# §Institutions and Games ### What are Institutions * [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]] * [[List of Purpose and Missions of Different Institutions]] * [[There are two levels of institution]] * [[Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution]] * [[Individual actions reflect on Institutions]] * [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]] * [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]] * Institutions have [[Institutional scar tissue]] * [[Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution]] * [[Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions]] * [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]] * [[Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it]] * [[Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution]] ### Institutions working well or badly * [[Market failures are actually failures of the existing institutions to allow markets to work]] * [[Most institutions have become cancerous]] * [[Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission]] * [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]] * [[The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions]] * [[“Have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]] * [[Having more separate games is good for society]] * [[Lowering barriers to entry is clutch for healthy institutions]] ### Games * [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]] * [[Fair games can be gamed]] * [[Fair games have legible rules]] * [[Fair games are self-limiting]] * [[Making a game more fair reduces its variance]] * [[Attempting to make a game more fair by adding rules has many unintended downsides]] * [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]] * [[Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game]] * [[Relative vs absolute games]] ==needs work== * [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]] * [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]] * [[Reaper functions beat culture decks]] * [[Reaper functions dominate other incentives]] ### Different Games in the World * [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]] * [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]] ### Questions * [[Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?]] * [[What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?]] * [[What if all entities had expiration dates?]] * [[Why aren’t people building more institutions?]] * [[What are proxy games that lead to more awesome sci-fi shit?]] ### References * [[Venkatesh Rao thread on institution building]] * [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]] * [[Problematic 5 — The Media is Dead, Long Live the Media]] * [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]