People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power

People are using institutions as platforms

Context affects the types of ideas people have and the work they do to pursue those ideas

Different institutions have created monopolies on various enterprises

Being Elite should be painful

Academic administrators and professors are playing very different games

Week of 26 July 2020

The Roman Empire was built on an aristocracy of service

# §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]]



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§Academia Constraints

The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting

§Institutions and Games

Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers

Academic research is often just the concept half of creating a heuretic

All institutions are coupled to at least one game

Motivation is not context-free

Human capital theory of stagnation

Research requires intrinsic motivation

Bottling Lightning

Universities have multiple conflicting missions

Researchers distend the meaning of discovery because of academic incentives

# Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge
People keep track of their ‘score’ in citations, published papers, grant money, awards.

### Related
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[Academia 



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Innovation orgs need to be aligned with their money factory

Defining clear timescales and scopes for collaborations is a tool to minimize politics

DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years

Alignment requires existential threats

Playing the same game is the only way people can align for extremely long time scales

Kumar Types of Games Tweet

Principles for Innovation Orgs

It is feasible to consciously cultivate a scene of frontier openers

Minimum Necessary Alignment

Directly acknowledging alignment and misalignment can be powerful

Decision quality is timescale dependent

It is hard to engage with long pieces outside your community

# Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales
### Related
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]

### Reference
- [[Gwendolyn Regina Politics Discussion]]



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Fair games have legible rules

Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game

Individual actions reflect on Institutions

Organizations are groups of people organized to pursue a shared goal

# All institutions are coupled to at least one game
[[Institutions shape how individuals interact]] through a set of spoken or unspoken rules. Those rules create a game. ([[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]].) 

The bigger more missions an institution has, the more games it will also have. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]].

Additionally, [[Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions]] - without them there is no boundary between who is part of the institution and who is not (and thus, who should be expected to know and adhere to the rules of the game.) Often there is a separate gatekeeping game to start playing the institutional game. [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]]. 

### Some Examples
- [[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]]



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# Attempting to make a game more fair by adding rules has many unintended downsides
[[Fair games have legible rules]] so intuitively people often try to make games more fair by adding rules. 

At first these rules are often simple like “take a standardized test.” But because [[Fair games can be gamed]], the outcome of the rule isn’t what the creators intended, for example test-based admission filtering for rich kids who can pay for test prep instead of equalizing the playing field. 

A common response to the unintended consequences of adding rules is to add more rules. So college admissions becomes not “how well can you do on grades and the SAT?” but “How well can you simultaneously play sports, do community service, play an instrument, get grades, and do on the SAT?” Building a new building becomes a maze work of regulation, etc. 

Additional layers of rules add a lot of complexity. This complexity makes it harder and more expensive to try to follow all the rules. It can still be gamed but moves you ever further into the 

For example, the way regulations work is that they are layered. 

### Related
- [[Institutional scar tissue]]



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Ideas are not drawn from a stationary distribution

Plural agency goes against both great man theory and great forces theory

# Context affects the types of ideas people have and the work they do to pursue those ideas 
Context plays a large role not just in what people think is important, but for the sorts of ideas people have in the first place. Context is a frustratingly nebulous term that I won’t even attempt to circumscribe. When thinking about ideas, there are two key aspects of context that are worth focusing on: the culture someone swims in and the resources that they believe to be at their disposal.

I want to make a sideways argument about research ideas by talking about startups. It’s a world where success demands similar levels of intrinsic motivation to research but has some clear natural experiments around the effect of context on ideas. [[Paul Graham]] and [[Y Combinator]] are an example of the power of culture and resources to affect the ideas people have and how they pursue those ideas. YC, more than anything else, made starting a startup feel possible for many people around the world. Before YC, there wasn’t some fixed number of people with startup ideas who needed permission and resources to act on them. Instead, there were many people for whom the idea of they themselves starting a company had not once gone through their minds, but once the process of startup idea was legible, they found a community, and saw the availability of early resources for pursuing that path, they *then* had startup ideas. The institution of [[Y Combinator]] and Silicon Valley more generally made previously unthinkable ideas thinkable. 

I’m not making a [[John Locke]]-Ian argument that people are just Tabula Rasas imprinted by the society. People had startup ideas long before [[Y Combinator]], [[Sequoia Capital]] or even the idea of venture capital. But I do suspect that people had many *fewer* startup ideas before those institutions existed. Furthermore, those earlier ideas were not necessarily the best startup ideas or the ones that people were the most intrinsically motivated to pursue. The context shift did more than just encourage slightly worse or less intrinsically motivated people to pursue slightly worse ideas; there’s no way to prove it, but I suspect that without the context of 2010’s Silicon Valley, top founders with amazing ideas would have just gone down different paths. Context does more than just lower some threshold on an underlying distribution — it *changes* that distribution. 

The ability to change that distribution is why raising others’ ambitions is high return! [[cowenHighreturnActivityRaising2018]]. Raising someone’s ambitions is often not a matter of simply encouraging someone to pursue an idea of theirs that they wouldn’t otherwise pursue. Instead, it’s making seeding the meta-idea that they *could* be pursuing an idea that they haven’t yet had via a path that they could not previously conceive. Context provides some nebulous combination of what you *should* do and what you *could* do. 

In a world where people invent things in their basement and then bring them into the world by patenting and selling rights, people are going to have a lot of ideas about inventions and you’ll see a lot of filed patents. In a world where people create collective action by forming small social clubs, you’re going to see people with a lot of ideas for social clubs. In a world where people start startups, you’re going to see a lot of ideas for startups. 

Focusing back on research: in a world where research is funded through grants to PIs to pursue specific projects where the the majority of work is done by grad students that are judged on their scientific contribution and publication record, you’re going to see a lot of ideas that can be done by grad students that are seeking publishable scientific contributions. People will be intrinsically motivated to pursue these ideas! The ideas won’t be corruptions of their “true” motivations, they’ll just be downstream of context: the culture that researchers swim in and the resources that they believe to be at their disposal.

Perhaps it’s useful to draw on the idea of the [[Adjacent Possible]] here. 

Maybe [[Culture is intellectual dark energy]] and that’s the explanation for why ideas behind their time happen
“Culture” is an unsatisfying answer for “why did something happen or not  

#### Driving questions for this note
- What are contexts here?
	- “Culture”
	- Perceived resources

### Anecdotes?
[[Venkatesh Narayanamurti]] in [[narayanamurtiGenesisTechnoscientificRevolutions2021]] asserts that directed research is important. He comes from a context ([[Bell Labs]]) where he had amazing experiences with research managers and saw amazing results in that context.

Another popular opinion (espoused in places like [[stanleyWhyGreatnessCannot2015]]) focuses on the importance of constraint-free exploration. [[Michael Nielsen]] has mentioned that he in fact often doesn’t know what he’s doing until he’s gotten there ::source needed::. He’s had great success with this strategy and seen many others achieve similar success. 

Both these statements are true

Which side is right?  
	
### Related
- [[cowenHighreturnActivityRaising2018]] 
- `To consistently create brilliant poets, you need a society awash in mediocre, even tawdry poetry.` from [[greerCulturesThatBuild2020]]
- [[Motivation is not context-free]]
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]
- [[§Institutions and Games]]
- [[Ideas are not drawn from a stationary distribution]]



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Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things

Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution

# Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?
# Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission
We’ve lost trust and confidence in institutions. We hope that people in institutions act in line with the purpose and mission of those institutions but increasingly that’s no longer the case. It’s almost a tautology to say that the people in those institutions no longer have incentives to act in line with the purpose and mission of those institutions. 

It doesn’t seem like people in institutions have very many incentives to uphold the mission and purpose of the institution. Without their career, power, wealth, etc. being tied to that mission and purpose even good rational people will act out of line with the institution’s mission and purpose.  These people have no [[Skin in the game (SITG)]] in aligning their actions with the institutional purpose. Note how [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]. 

So what if you literally put rules in place that asked whether someone’s actions were in line with the institutional mission and goals? The more extreme version would look like asking whether someone’s actions were the ones that *maximized* the institutions societal goals. The extreme version seems like a good idea because it’s straightforward to that there are actions which are to some degree in line with institutional missions that in aggregate erode the institution. For example a regulator favoring his buddy’s company over one that makes superior products. Without the maximization criteria, favoritism is arguably ok as long as the buddy’s company is not actively going against institutional purpose. It’s much more straightforward to ask “given the possible actions, did this person take the action that contributed maximally the institutional purpose?” 

Institutional SITG would look like  firing and disgracing a journalist because they took an action that didn’t maximize societal sense-making.  

Institutional SITG would require pre-agreeing on the role of an institution. The debate over the role of the institution pops the debate to a higher level leverage point ([[Leverage Points — Places to intervene in a system]]) where you’re arguing about the  goal of a system instead of people in the system. Hopefully this discussion would move us away from the fact that [[People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does]].

This debate would also be useful because it would enable us to precisely call out which institutions had multiple conflicting missions.  For example, [[Universities have multiple conflicting missions]]. It is probably too much to ask that each institution have only orthogonal missions. 

It raises the question what are the purposes and missions of most [[List of Purpose and Missions of Different Institutions]]

### Related
- [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]]
- [[Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave]]



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Fair games can be gamed

Making a game more fair reduces its variance

Government money needs to be fair

Complicated rules are a way of creating a nominally fair game that is not fair by any common use of the word

# Fair games are self-limiting
[[Fair games have legible rules]] and if a game has legible rules, it’s easier to predict whether you have a shot of winning. Marathons have extremely legible rules and I will bet a lot of money that I will never be world class marathoner. As a result I’m not even going to try. In other words, games with predictable success are self-limiting. 

In the name of fairness, people have been pushing for more legibility in the form of transparency, metrics, and explicit criteria. However, for disciplines that haven’t been systematised, like science or starting companies, [[The Map is not the Territory]] and these attempts to create legibility do not (cannot?) capture all the important things. However, the fairness measures will still create the self-limiting effect and people who could potentially crush it at the illegible unfair game don’t even play. For example [[Months of grant writing is one of the things that makes people think twice about academia]].  

In a way, making a game fair actually *raises* the barriers to entry: only those who can afford to optimize the game can get over the high, but uniform, wall. [[Fair games can be gamed]]. 

Of course, the fairness measures are in place to try to get rid of other things that freeze people out of a game - the classic illegible example is “it’s all about who you know.” This is tricky.  While it is not fair, ‘who you know’ is actually a reasonable rule *in a healthy institution.* In that situation, the people in the institution should want to maximize the game’s output, so they should be open to knowing people who might be great at it, even if they aren’t in their social circle. You see this throughout history - the young outsider pounding down the door of the master who recognizes their talent and helps them win. It is *completely unfair* and yet creates some amazing outputs - Alexander Hamilton, Warren Buffet, etc. However, [[Most institutions have become cancerous]] - so the drive towards fairness is not unreasonable but won’t fix the underlying problem.  

Another way to look at the effect of fairness measures is that they homogenize the people playing the game around ‘people who are good at whatever is being measured.’ For marathons, this is fine because you’ll homogenize around people who are really good at running 32.5 miles as fast as they can. That’s literally all a marathon is so in this case, the map *is* the territory. In science, on the other hand, you’re homogenizing around people who are really good at publishing highly cited papers in prestigious journals, pulling in grant money, and getting attention ([[Successful professors are not necessarily the best researchers]].)  Is that all science is? 

### Related
- [[When ‘talent’ isn’t code for ‘specialized training’ it means the role or industry has not been systematized]]



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Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it

Most institutions have become cancerous

You don’t get to choose the rules of an absolute game

Fair games are self-limiting

People are less worried about equality when the pie is growing

Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes

There are many games where following the rules as written puts you at a disadvantage

Quantized Heilmeier Catechism

Attempting to make a game more fair by adding rules has many unintended downsides

16 July 2020

# Fair games can be gamed
[[Fair games have legible rules]] and [[The more legible the rules of the game, the more straightforward it is to optimize for the game]]. Which means that the more fair you make a game, the more straightforward it is to optimize for that game. 

If a game is straightforward to optimize for there’s a more direct relationship between time and resources you put in and your output. This direct input-output relationship means that people who have the time and resources to put into optimizing for the game will have an advantage at the game. The classic example is college admissions. First, they used grades and standardized test scores that can be optimized by hiring tutors and spending time studying, which led to  wealthy kids who could afford to hire a tutor and spend time studying doing better. So the colleges added extracurriculars and ‘experience’ as admissions criteria to make admissions more fair. But it turns out extracurriculars can also be optimized with time and money. 

I would argue that the only way that colleges would be able to achieve a goal of admitting poor and underrepresented students is through discretion - ie. Making the game unfair. 

If there is a specific way to optimize a game, the variance of the people playing that game will go down. [[Making a game more fair reduces its variance]]

### Related
- [[Fair games are self-limiting]]
-  [[When ‘talent’ isn’t code for ‘specialized training’ it means the role or industry has not been systematized]]
- [[Capped metrics vs infinitely optimizable metrics]]

This note might want to be combined with [[The more legible the rules of the game, the more straightforward it is to optimize for the game]]



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Explicit rules are a substitution for learned pattern matching

Lets just get rid of peer review - article

‘Have your cake and eat it too’ life-games have led to a toxic society

Legible novelty is the worst

# Fair games have legible rules
For now I’m going to define a ‘fair game’ as one where two people of equal ability have the same chance of winning. 

What, intuitively, makes a game *unfair?* Imagine a game where where you don’t know the rules when you start playing. Experienced players can take advantage of corner cases that other players didn’t even realize existed.  Illegible rules seem to be at the heart of most unfair games.

Legible rules seem necessary but not sufficient for a game to be fair. However, the other components of fair games seem much less … legible, which encourages people to focus on legible rules when they want to make a game more fair.  

What do legibility increasing actions look like?
- Removing discretion on the part of gatekeepers 
- Standardized testing 
- Clear entry criteria
- Certifications 
- Explicit Regulations
- Clear metrics 
- Turning implicit rules into explicit rules
- Systematization of the game 

Looking at the list, many of those ‘legibility increasing actions’ have to do with inputs, or the game you need to win to play the game in the first place. [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]]. 

Intuitively, making games more fair is a good thing. However,  [[Attempting to make a game more fair by adding rules has many unintended downsides]], [[The more legible the rules of the game, the more straightforward it is to optimize for the game]], and [[Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game]]. 

### Related
- [[Kumar Types of Games Tweet]]
- [[“have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]
- [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]]
- [[Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it]] 

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# Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes
At the end of the day, the theoretical goal of a gatekeeping game is to predict how well you will do at the real game and create the highest quality outcomes for the institution. Obviously the real goal of a gatekeeping game can be many other things from extortion to maintaining an institutional club of people like you. But for now, let’s assume everybody is acting in good faith. 

Gatekeeping games seem to have two important axes: how closely it approximates the game it is gatekeeping for and the legibility of their results. The less legible the results, the more the result of the proxy game depends on a gatekeeper’s discretion and the less fair it is. [[Fair games have legible rules]]. 

The best way to tell how good someone will be at doing something something is by seeing how good they are at doing that thing. So it’s clear that the ideal gatekeeping game is just the game itself. This is the case for things like marathons or chess. Each has extremely legible outputs and you can do it without going through a gatekeeper. 

Games where the gatekeeping is portfolio-based ,like software development and painting, are close to the ideal in that you can play a toy version of the game that is mechanically the same but with a key difference: they have much less legible outputs. The illegible outputs mean that it is still a gatekeepers discretion and pattern matching that determines whether the portfolio makes you ‘good enough’ to play the real game. 

Internships or previous experience can be pretty good simulations of the real game but begin to move away from the real game on the approximation axis. Thier output varies as a measurement. In some cases, the experience’s output is treated the same way as an item in a portfolio. In this situation, internships are basically a portfolio item where you were playing a simulation of the game instead of the game itself. However, sometimes the act of having done the internship is the measurement itself. In this case, it’s much more legible, but often says less about how well you’ll do on the real game if that game isn’t just showing up and checking some boxes (which many games unfortunately are.) 

Exams are usually poor approximations of the real game, but have extremely legible results. 

Structured interviews are slightly less poor though still bad approximations of the real game but have much less legible results. 

Unstructured interviews are both completely unrelated to the real game and have completely illegible results. Being all the way on the undesirable end of both axes would suggest that this is the absolute worst gatekeeping game. However, it might be that for high-variance games with high barriers to entry, it might be the best.
 
Of course [[The internet has broken gatekeeping]]. So you can always choose to make the legible output of whatever game you’re playing into “attention.” This alternate win condition is great for games where the real output is basically attention anyway, like art, but perhaps less good the larger the gap between the original win condition and this new win condition.

### Related
- [[Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game]]
- [[Fair games can be gamed]]
- [[Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions]]



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New institutions need champions

How do you have an institution that avoids asymmetric career risk and going rogue in a world where everybody is a free agent?

# Individual actions reflect on Institutions
At the end of the day [[Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things]]. As humans, we attribute the aggregate actions of the people in an organization to the organization as a whole.  [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]], but individuals also shape everything about an institution through their actions. 

When the aggregate action of individuals go against an institution’s perceived mission ([[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]) people start to lose trust in that institution. If it goes on long enough this eroded trust weakens the institution’s ability to shape how individuals interact, which leads to more individuals going against the institution’s perceived mission, creating a feedback loop that rips the institution apart.

An institution can prevent the self-destructive feedback loop by making an example of the individual.  If you publicly expunge the individual from the institution, it shows people outside the institution that the institution can police itself. However, modern institutions don’t seem to be expunging people who fail in their institutional role [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]], but *are* expunging people who violate extra-institutional rules. These expunging may confuse the rules of the institutional game ([[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]]) and reduce trust both inside the institution and outside.  ([[The more trust an institution has, the less it needs formal process]])

Weirdly I think this harkens to [[Girardian scapegoating]]. 

The reflection of individual actions on institutions is one reason why [[Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution]]. If it’s unclear who’s in the institution, it’s unclear who reflects on it.

### Related
- [[Specialization and comparative advantage are related but not the same thing]]



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Institutions shape how individuals interact

Bureaucracies are human algorithms

Regulatory agencies become more risk conservative over time

# Institutional scar tissue
The rules and processes built up over time as an institution fixes problems

### Related 
- [[Organizational DNA is hard to change or act against]]



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Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution

Having more separate games is good for society

Classical liberalism arose in an environment that no longer exists

Reaper functions dominate other incentives

Optimizing individual components of a system is often at odds with the system itself

The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions

Is it possible to have a collectivist government built on top of inalienable individual rights?

The way people think drastically changes depending on their context

Michael Levine concept of agency and Alex Dancos concept of purpose might both be describing systems with loops

Culturally we expect modern organizations to become a monopoly

If there is a possibility for a monopoly, an institution is either nonexistent or worthless

# Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system
In group selection theories of evolution, two-level hierarchies generate [[Slack - concept]] for the lower level to achieve better equilibria via competition between the higher levels. The classic example is the organism-cell dual level hierarchy, which enables cells to achieve their long run goal of replicating better than if the best strategy was  to become cancerous and grow at the expense of all of the other cells.  The second layer of the hierarchy enables entities to escape [[Thomas Hobbes]]. 

From [[alexanderStudiesSlack2020]] : `Group selection works when the group itself has a shared genetic code (or other analogous ruleset) that can evolve. `

Institutions are this `analogous ruleset` for groups of individuals. In [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]], [[Yuval Levin]] literally makes that claim without the evolutionary framing: [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]. Put differently, institutions set the rules for the game. [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]].

Framed as the second level of a group selection we could also expect institutions themselves to compete and evolve. What are they competing over? In other words, what determines their fitness? Institutions compete over who can achieve their missions the best - [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]. In an ideal world, news organizations would compete to be the best societal sense-making organization, universities would compete to be the best educational-research organizations, etc. These are all Level I institutions. Remember,  [[There are two levels of institution]]. Perhaps we could think of the fitness function itself as Level II institutions - “The Press,” “Academia,” “Business,” “Government” etc. Seen through that lens, there’s actually another two-layer group selection process between Level I and Level II institutions, where the Level II institutions are the rules of the game that Level I institutions play.  

Going even one step farther - is there yet another layer of the hierarchy? Could we think of ‘culture’ or ‘society’ as rules for how different Level II institutions interact? Here’s where the analogy breaks down because culture doesn’t just act on Level II institutions, but on Level I institutions and individuals as well - revealing that it’s actually a complex system that is not a modularized hierarchy. 

In the same way that cells that have become cancerous stop following the rules of the higher hierarchical level for their own benefit, [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]. This note is important because it implies that the suggestion ‘abandon institutions and empower the individual’ is not a viable solution. 

### Related
- [[Coordination Problems]]



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Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

Projects need to build narratives of perceived progress on top of pieces of evidence

Reaper functions beat culture decks

People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does

Profit makes organizations auto-catalyzing

What makes a good organizational mission?

You can think about institutions as systems

# Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions
The mission of an institution is what it shapes individual interactions to achieve. [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]. 

An institution’s explicit mission is what the people in that institution explicitly claim is its mission. 

An institutions implicit mission is what the institution actually shapes individuals to achieve. [[Reaper functions beat culture decks]]. 

The perceived mission is what people *outside* of the institution project onto it as what it’s trying to achieve.  You could think of this as its societal purpose.  

Ideally, all three of these are the same, but they rarely are. Institutions become cancerous when their implicit goal becomes “survival at all costs” [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]

- [[List of Purpose and Missions of Different Institutions]]



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Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions

People who have done a thing should be in charge of a thing

Organizations and people lend each other social capital

National service could unfuck the US

New fields need to be exclusive

dijekstraStrengthsAcademicEnterprise1994

Enabling creative work that is not currently happening will require breaching institutional barriers

The fact that the torah is always in Hebrew is powerful

How can you claim to be making a new field if you are writing for a general audience?

Science should be less open unless you want to dig deep and engage

# Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution
In the same way that organisms need to clearly differentiate between cells that are part of them and not part of them, institutions need to differentiate between individuals who are inside and outside of the institution. [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]].

Therefore institutions need a way of differentiating an in-group and an out-group. Differentiating an in-group and an out-group is just gatekeeping. And since [[Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things]] [[Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions]]. The need to differentiate in-group and out-group also means that all institutions are to some extent, ‘exclusive.’ 

Obviously “it’s complicated” as it is with biology! You gut is full of bacteria, etc.



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Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions

Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk

Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave

The ability to say ‘huh that’s funny’ is important for discovering new phenomena

People do not like conforming to external structures

Incentives are the fundamental forces of peopleland

DARPA is relatively tiny and flat

Grants only go so far

You need to break rules to create new paradigms

Heuretics evolve by moving between institutions

People use a few members of a category to stand for the whole

Assertions

Creating a new institution is saying I think there is a better way of organizing people and directing their work

# Institutions shape how individuals interact
Institutions primarily shape how individuals interact by setting up rules for games. [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]

At the same time [[People do not like conforming to external structures]], so there is always some inherent tension between individual incentives and institutional rules. However the goal of the rules is to get everyone to a better equilibrium by creating a shared set of rules that can themselves compete -  [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]. 

Institutions both shape how individuals interact *within* an institution but also how individuals interact *between institutions.* 

 The ‘within institution’ context includes both interactions within an organization, but also within Level II institutions like ‘The Media.’  [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]. The former is company culture, while the latter is fuzzy things like ‘journalistic ethics’ or ‘honor.’ 

‘Between institution’ interactions are our expectations and perceptions of individuals knowing that they are part of an institution. You have a different expectation of a police officer, journalist, and professor knowing nothing but their profession[^1] and there may be different spoken or unspoken rules around interactions.  Most people respond differently when a police officer asks them to do something than when a non-police officer asks the same thing, or when a journalist asks for an interview.  These expectations from outside the institution are based on the perceived role of the institution. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]. 

A lot of how institutions shape how individuals interact between institutions is tied up with someone acting in their institutional role. When an individual acts ‘in an institutional role’ they basically become an avatar of that institution. They are imbued with that institution’s power and reputation - both good and bad. Any action they take reflects not on them, but on the institution as a whole. 

Drawing a line between someone acting in an institutional role and as an individual is the tricky piece. At the end of the day, an institutional avatar and an individual are the same physical human, so distinguishing between the two is an act of imagination.  It might even be a [[Load Bearing Fiction]]. In the relatively easy cases, uniforms and shifts distinguish people between their institutional and individual roles: an officer in uniform represents the department and a waiter on shift represents the restaurant. The line between institution and individual just becomes murkier from there until you get to someone like the Queen of England who is *always* in her institutional role. But even when ideally the uniform is a bright line, the real line is not so clear: there are implicit institutional expectations on individuals 24/7. 

Part of these constant expectations are conduct based: there are standards you expect individuals in different institutional roles to obey regardless of whether they are embodying the institutional avatar or not. In a way, these are almost purity standards that determine whether the individual is *worthy* of embodying the avatar. But a bookmark in this notion of purity. Politicians having sex scandals is the classic example here. 

Part of these constant expectations are based on the fact that the institutional avatar and the individual are never truly separated. This incomplete separability is why many people think professors should not have relationships with their students. In a more clear cut situation, the student could be using the relationship to get better grades or the student could feel subtlety coerced.  Even if they both are truly attracted to each other, relationships can end, people an act poorly in response to breakups, and the professor still controls a lever of power. Note that the stronger the individual norms on institutional behavior, the less you need institutional rules mediating behavior. In an extreme case, if all professors would never ever ever let anything affect grades besides the quality of the work, then you need less strict rules about relationships between professors and students. As soon as one professor breaks this standard though, the institution tightens rules on all the professors. Shifting from norms to explicit rules like this creates [[Institutional scar tissue]]. 

The incomplete separability of avatar and individual also shapes how people interact because people *know* that the separability is incomplete. People will treat people with power differently even when they are playing golf or posting about something totally unrelated to their job on twitter. 

Which brings us to two big ways that the ways that institutions have shaped how individuals interact have changed. 
1. [[The post-consensus world has fractured norms]]. These fractured norms especially affected the expectations of where the line lies between acting as an institutional avatar and an individual as well as which individual behaviors reflect back onto the institutional role. Purity is almost taboo to talk about, but there is now strong disagreement over what makes someone too impure to be an institutional avatar. 
2. [[The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions]]

### Related 
- Ideas of Innovation and Invention from [[mokyrLeverRichesTechnological1992]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]

[^1]: Of course, it’s important note which expectations are  institutionally imposed vs. just correlated with people in the institutions, like the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. *However* even that is complicated, because institutions tend to encourage or at least shelter these traits. If someone had some absent-minded tendencies and went into, say, hedge funds, they may have suppressed them while as a professor they let them flourish. This institutional trait-encouragement may be nothing more than the reenforcement from keeping a bunch of people with the same trait in the same place and [[You are the average of the five people you spend the most time around]] doing its work. But since [[Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things]], ‘enhancing traits by getting a bunch of people with similar traits together in the same place’ is a reasonable, if mundane, mechanism by which institutions can reasonably shape how individuals interact. 



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Many things cannot be measured well

Opacity is important to DARPA’s outlier success

The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories

Legibility poisoning

Corruption potential and efficiency are anti-correlated

The purpose of the Scientific Paper system is to generate legible artifacts of work, award credit for them, and direct funding towards generating more legible artifacts

21st century riffs on ARPA should be private

Feedback loops matter even if there is no control explicitly being exerted

# Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it
If you want to make sure that someone isn’t up to any shenanigans, you need a way of measuring their outputs. In order to have measurable outputs you need to make the game they’re playing at least somewhat legible. The importance of legibility is the idea behind KPIs, Taylor’s scientific management, and a lot of modern economics. Similarly, if you want to make sure that an institution isn’t corrupt, you want a legible way of seeing how money is spent and people are hired to make sure that they aren’t spending money on fancy dinners and cigars or hiring their unqualified buddy from the golf club’s son over the highly qualified immigrant kid. 

At the end of the day, all of these metrics make an entity (individual, group, or institution) appear legible to outsiders. Of course [[Many things cannot be measured well]] and [[The Map is not the Territory]] so the metrics will vary on the accuracy of the picture they give. However, the the appearance of legibility is enough for outsiders to make judgements on how an entity is performing. Generally this corresponds to making some numbers go up and other numbers go down. 

Once you know how an entity is performing, you can then start to form opinions about what sort of inputs you should give it to try to make the numbers do what you want. More money and awards if the numbers are doing what you want; less money, shame, or sackings if the numbers are not doing what you want. It’s a control system: inputs informed by measured outputs. 

Bureaucracies depend on legible games because in effect [[Bureaucracies are human algorithms]] that need clear inputs. As a result, the bureaucratisation of an institution is usually coupled to making that institution more legible - academia, government, and large companies are clear examples of this. 

[[Scott Alexander]] argues that a lot of the thesis of [[Seeing like a State]] is that creating legibility is a [significant part of how governments exert control over their citizens](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/). 

The desire to measure and control an institution often comes from a good place and can lead to good results - reducing corruption, incentivizing inefficiency, and making them more fair. The benefits of legibility are legion. 

However, making an institution more legible can also have many downsides. [[Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game]], [[Fair games can be gamed]], and external control of an institution makes it more political: [[Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission]].

Over time, people outside of institutions seem to have become more interested in controlling what happens inside of them. There are many possible explanations: 
- Perception that institutions are not delivering on their perceived mission  ([[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]), 
- A trend towards caring about behavior in all situations, 
- A trend towards wanting more fairness, 
- more value placed on measurability, 
- A trend towards wanting more transparency.  

In order to create this control, institutions have been pushed to become ever more fair and legible. My biggest concern is the impact that this trend has had on high variance institutions - specifically research. [[Making a game more fair reduces its variance]]. 

### Related
- [[Streetlight Effect]]
- [[Formal process lets people outside the organization trust in the process instead of the people]]
- [[Opacity is important to DARPA’s outlier success]]
- [[Shared values allow you to break rules without breaking the spirit of the rules]]



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Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?

# List of Purpose and Missions of Different Institutions
- Journalism - Societal Sense Making
- CDC - Controlling disease
- Academia -

What are others? #questions



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What does ‘working’ mean?

You can’t cut off just one tail of a distribution

Einstein would have been stuck in a patent office - failures of paradigm-shifting science

There is a fundamental tension between government accountability and the opacity necessary to do high-variance work

Things that work well on average don’t work in systems that depend on power laws

# Making a game more fair reduces its variance
 [[Fair games can be gamed]]. As a consequence, there is usually a single clear path to win at the game, which means that the sort of people who succeed will tend to be similar.  The fact that [[Fair games are self-limiting]] compounds the similarity of winners because dissimilar people won’t even play. 

It feels a little tautological that if you reduce the variance of the people who are playing the game, it will create lower variance output. For games like marathons or chess, that’s fine - their outputs naturally have capped variance. 

By contrast, capping the variance of games that depend on outlier results - science, startups, hedge funds, art - seems deadly to its output. [[You can’t cut off just one tail of a distribution]]. This may be one reason for why science is stagnating ([[Is Science Slowing Down? - SSC]]) while the startup world feels relatively healthy. The road to academia has been made incredibly legible - and thus, low variance. University admissions, grad school admissions, faculty hiring, and tenure all have clear paths to success. 

While there are some high level similarities, the ingredients to startup success are still incredibly opaque. (And hence the proliferation of gurus, thought leaders and bullshit vendors - [[Full-time thought leaders try to become gatekeepers to knowledge]].) 

In addition to destroying the output of institutions that depend on high-variance outcomes, reducing variance can reduce the average quality of people in the institution by making it clear to high-variance people who don’t fit the mold that they won’t be able to have a good outcome. This feedback loop with the fact that [[Fair games are self-limiting]] pushes high-variance people towards the remaining high variance games - in the early 21st century, this is startups. 

Note how everybody in startups are obsessed with “talent” but nobody in science is. This seem like an odd statement consider how much we attribute scientific success to “genius”[^1] and the fact that [[The things that make “great talent” in high variance industries boils down to the ability to successfully make things happen under a lot of uncertainty]]. But on the ground, it feels like people don’t act as though this is true: I don’t see professors or departments obsessing over finding and recruiting the best grad students or postdocs. There’s no feeling that “getting the best of the best is absolutely critical to our success.” By contrast, the startup world has, if anything overindexed on that with the idea of the 10x engineer etc. This of course, is a generalization from my experience. It might also be an artifact of the different organizational structures: in science the people in the department get less benefits from the success of others and there may be an implicit assumption that nobody is going to do truly great original work as a grad student?

### Related
- [[Power laws in people quality matter more in high-variance activities]]
- [[The ARPA Model is high-variance]]

[^1]: Thanks to [[Michael Nielsen]] for calling this out. 



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The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation

Peer review has failed as an institution

Philanthropists want things to become sustainable

Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission

Institutions need to either be explicitly temporary or have a path to sustainability

Why aren’t people building more institutions?

Getting to new optima is hard

Palladium Podcast

Experience does not mean expertise

# Most institutions have become cancerous
 Let’s look at this assertion through the lens of evolutionary theory and group selection.   [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]].   [^1]

Cells become cancerous when they stop following the rules that all the cells in the organism follow. In this case, the organism is the higher of two levels of a group selection system. One of the [[Observations that lead to the assertion of institutional decay]] is that individuals are prioritizing themselves over their institutional mission. [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]].  

Organizations are weird because they are default alive instead of default dead once they reach a certain size.  [[What if all entities had expiration dates?]]

To further the analogy between cancer, organisms, institutions, and individuals: cancer develops when cells no longer experience senescence. [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]] - which basically is a cancer on the Level II institution. If the Level II institution is functioning well, it forces the organization to either die or continue to support the goals of the level II institution.  So if we’re seeing a proliferation of cancerous Level I institutions, it means that something has gone wrong with the Level II institutions. 

Here I’m going to go off-roading for a bit: hopefully we’ll find our way back.  Level II institutions seem to have experienced a divergence between their  implicit, explicit, and perceived missions. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]].  Why has this happened? There are many explanations that will appeal to different people based on their values and beliefs. 
- Societally, we’ve shifted towards focusing on the importance of the individual over the importance of the institution. This has been helped by the internet removing gatekeepers and giving everybody a voice. Gatekeeping used to be one of the ways that institutions kept individuals in line. 
- Individuals and institutions no longer agree on what the rules one level up the hierarchy *are*. If you dig into it, I suspect that people on different ideological teams actually have different perceived missions of different Level II institutions. This is not inherently a problem in the group-selection model, as long as those different perceptions can compete against some agreed upon fitness function. The problem is that there is no consensus fitness function all the way up. The extreme version of this is the [[Post-consensus world]].
- In business at least, the missions diverged over the idea of “maximizing shareholder value.” Most people perceive businesses to have missions other than just maximizing shareholder value, so if their explicit mission becomes maximizing shareholder value their perceived and explicit missions have diverged. 
- There are fewer resources in the system (less growth) which intensifies competition between Level I institutions and individuals. ie. There’s less [[Slack - concept]]  in the system.  It’s easy to align all your missions when there’s lots of resources to play around with. And since the group selection rules in the Level II institutions were set up in a high-growth world, they were not set up with the teeth to assert themselves when they run up against the incentives of a low-growth world.  ([[Expended list of WTF happened in 1971 and afterwards]]) 

This note was originally titled ‘Most institutions have metasized.’ [[Noah Tye]] noted [That word doesn’t mean what you think it means](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/010/692/19789999.jpg).  It means that a cancer has spread to multiple sites around an organism. However that may actually be true. There isn’t just one Level I institution where the individuals have stopped following institutional rules. It feels like *all* the Level I institutions in many Level II institutions have this problem. One newspaper starts going for clicks instead of sense and other newspapers follow suit. 

### Related
- [[Load Bearing Fiction]]
- [[Fair games can be gamed]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[Fair games have legible rules]]
- [[Institutions need to either be explicitly temporary or have a path to sustainability]]

[^1]: I have very little actual knowledge and training in evolutionary theory so this is mostly just made up hackwork but it feels explanatory and self-consistent enough to be worthwhile mental kindling for different ways to think about real phenomena. 



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Observations that lead to the assertion of institutional decay

# Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role 

[[If you buy that the role of public corporations is to maximize value for their shareholders, they are one of the only institutions that are consistently living up to their purpose and mission]].  

### Tweet
[Ben Reinhardt on Twitter: “On that note - when was the last time anybody resigned for failing at their role in an institution?As opposed to something orthogonal… https://t.co/Pd9RJIDKmG”](https://twitter.com/Ben_Reinhardt/status/1244350864938196993?s=20)

### Related
- [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
- [[Vows]]



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# Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game
Gatekeeping games (the game you need to play to start playing a game) vary in how measurable their outcomes are. [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]]. Since [[Fair games have legible rules]], the more measurable the outcome, the fairer the gatekeeping game. 

However, gatekeeping games also vary in how well they approximate the real game they are gatekeeping for. Playing little league baseball is a pretty good approximation of playing Major League Baseball, but arguably doing fermi questions on a whiteboard isn’t necessarily a good approximation of being a professional programmer. 

Because [[Fair games can be gamed]], it’s possible to optimize for a fair gatekeeping game regardless of how well it approximates the real game. There are so many examples - hiring SAT tutors, doing BS community service, starting a company *so you can get into VC*. Arguably even going to a good college so you can get a high-power job that requires a degree from a top university is an example. Most of these tactics build a skillset disjoint from the one that’s useful in the real game. 

As a consequence, fair gatekeeping games that do a poor job approximating the real game select for people who are good at optimizing the proxy-game, not the real one. This filtering will obviously have an effect on the average person in the institution where people play the real game and thus the institution itself. The effect of optimizing for gatekeeping games may be one of the contributing factors to why [[Most institutions have become cancerous]].

Of course the skills needed in the real game and the proxy game can be the correlated! “Intelligence” is one of these - it does tend to make you both better at the SAT and university (and many jobs.) [[When ‘talent’ isn’t code for ‘specialized training’ it means the role or industry has not been systematized]]. 

### Examples
- Interviews often fall into this trap. Google-style coding interviews for software development that isn’t algorithm heavy or at scale. PM case study interviews where to be fair the right answer needs to be standardized.

### Related
- [[The more legible the rules of the game, the more straightforward it is to optimize for the game]]
- [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]]



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Shadows of the Future

Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales

People want to be loved and be lovely

Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge

IBMs proxy game is publishing patents

How does money work in PARPA?

All funding organizations are research organizations

Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

Why would people want to work with PARPA?

What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?

National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities

Charlie Songhurst conversation 31 Aug 2021

The idea that you need to make a lot of money in software before you can work on sweet sci fi shit is false

# People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power
These games are usually on very long time scales.  [[Playing the same game is the only way people can align for extremely long time scales]].  These long time scales make it so that people and organizations need to create proxy games. [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]

These games are how [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]], so it follows that [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]].

- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]

For anybody who has played [[Magic - The Gathering]], it’s analogous to different win conditions. Some decks are trying to reduce opponents life to zero, but then some decks are trying to deck their opponent. 

### Related
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]
- [[The returns to politics is higher at large organizations - Stake v Rank]]
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]
- [[Internet people are playing a game to maximize engagement]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[What are proxy games that lead to more awesome sci-fi shit?]]
- [[Kumar Types of Games Tweet]]
- [[Who Wants to Play the Status Game? | The Point Magazine]]
- [[“have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]]
- [[§Institutions and Games]]



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Internet people are playing a game to maximize engagement

The returns to politics is higher at large organizations - Stake v Rank

Organizations can get incomes via Contracts, budgets, or products

DARPA’s aversion to people with a web presence may be how they avoid asymmetric career risk

National Labs don’t foster efficient or long term research

Is it possible that we’re actually getting less research because we have more researchers?

# People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games
### Related
- [[IBMs proxy game is publishing patents]]
- [[What are proxy games that lead to more awesome sci-fi shit?]]



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The post-consensus world has fractured respect lines

# Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission
When you think of a politicized institution, you think of people using the institution to further the interests of some outside party rather than doing the thing that aligns with the purpose or mission of the institution. If that outside party is a concrete entity like a person or organization, this is just straight up corruption. But if the outside party is an ideology (or the representative of an ideology) we would call it politicization.

Politicization of an institution is just corruption to an ideology. 

### Related
- [[People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does]]
- [[Politics happens whenever there are three or more people with different goals]]
- [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]
- [[Starting in 2001, DARPA directors began to sync up with presidential administrations]]



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Podcast List

Problematic Podcast

# Problematic 5 — The Media is Dead, Long Live the Media

		- Talking about journalists: `In order to advance their careers they need to get social media followers, in order to get those followers, they need to become a personality, and in order to do that they need to say outrageous things`
		- [[People perceive the need to become a personality in order to have a career]]
	
		- People on social media don’t have context around a personality
			- [[The less shared context you have the higher the coordination costs]]
			- [[Fully open online discussions are low quality because of trust and context]]
		- Individuals leverage their institutions but then don’t want represent them 
			- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]
		- The idea that there’s been a breech between snark in and out of the hallways
		- People need to become a personality in every institution 
			- [[Specialization and comparative advantage are related but not the same thing]]
### Published
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
## Link
	- [Problematic #5 — The Media is Dead, Long Live the Media — Problematic (private feed for bzreinhardt@gmail.com) — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+fkjyMAE6U)

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Peter van Hardenberg conversation 16 Aug 2021

Week of 29 Nov 2020

Inverting the normal relationship between an R+D organization and is money factory may enable new classes of activities

ICT Distillation

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

Four frames model of organizations

ICT Outline

Peter van Hardenberg Conversation 20 Nov 2020

# Reaper functions beat culture decks
[[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]. Or put differently, each institution has both a set of stated goals and principles summed up in either an explicit or implicit ‘culture deck’ and a set of incentive functions dominated by a ‘reaper function’ ([[Reaper functions dominate other incentives]].)  

 Reaper functions are uncomfortable to talk about because they are usually orthogonal to, or blatantly contradict, culture decks. However, the reaper function trumps the culture deck (almost) every time. So if you want to explain why an institution does what it does and possibly predict what it might do (especially under pressure) it’s important to figure out its reaper function. And if you are being serious while creating an institution, it’s important to try to make your reaper function support your stated goals as much as possible and call out the places where there will inevitably be conflict. 

Enumerating all the phenomena that reaper functions explain is beyond the scope of this note.  As an example, [[Asymmetric career risk]] is an important phenomenon generated by reaper functions.  You get fired if you make a weird bet and it doesn’t pay off but *not* if you take a standard action and it fails. 

Reaper functions are why organizational structure matters so much. It’s tempting to say “we’ll just have an amazing mission and culture and the rest will work itself out.” <[[What makes a good organizational mission?]]> However, individual success within an institution will always bleed back into culture and mission ::This section needs work::

DARPA is interesting because the reaper function is *time.* [[DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years]] no matter how successful or unsuccessful they are. Knowing nothing else about the organization that tells you that the incentive is either to try to make as much an impact as you can, or do nothing at all. The prestige function then points out towards which side of that bifurcation people will be pushed. 

::new::
This is perhaps a dual to the Netflix deck point that your culture is who you hire, fire or promote. Reaper functions are *why* you hire fire or promote. 

### Related
- [[Employee-ownership could enable PARPA to align long-term incentives]]
- [[When looking at an organization, always ask “what are the incentives?”]]
- [[Incentives are the fundamental forces of peopleland]]
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]
- [[Alignment requires existential threats]]



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# Reaper functions dominate other incentives
Every institution has a set of actions that will get you promoted, earn or lose you prestige, get you a raise, or increase your power, get fired. Note that these actions aren’t bundled in the straightforward ways that you might expect - for example, prestige actions might possibly get you fired, or power-increasing actions could have nothing to do with promotions and raises could have little to do with prestige. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]. 

The actions that will get you fired are an institution’s reaper function. 

The sum total of these ‘incentive functions’ explains what people in the institution *actually* do.  [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]] through these incentives. These functions apply equally to institutions that are organizations (like The New York Times) and institutions beyond organizations (like Journalism.) [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]].  

One way to approach this framework would be to ask ‘what are all the incentive functions within this organization?’ It’s certainly an intriguing	question. First you would want to know what the different classes of function are - reaper, prestige, money, power, pleasure …? And then you would need to dig into each one for any given institution, keeping in mind the multi-level nature of institutions; what earns you power at one institutional level may lose you power at another. Fishes and ponds. 

Another approach might be to start with a ‘principle component analysis’ where you first ask ‘which functions dominate incentives?’ and pay attention primarily to those. In this approach, the reaper function trumps all the other functions in terms of incentive generation. (If it were a normalized principle component analysis, the reaper function would have something like a 0.75? weight.) 

This latter approach is much more efficient and probably more effective most of the time for analyzing institutional behavior. And the situations where the reaper function does *not* dominate are interesting in and of themselves because it means there are actions with large enough potential upside that it’s worth being kicked out of the institution. 

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# Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution
Is there any difference between a reformer and a heretic besides the fact that one is kicked out of an institution and the other manages to stay with it long enough to change it? Both have divergent policy ideas. 

There also might be something around heretics being actively hunted, while outcasts are just ignored. 

Institutions have different tolerance for divergent opinions and are more or less open to change. Four quadrants
- High Openess to divergent opinion, high openess to change: Reformers thrive
- High Openess to divergent opinion, low openness to change: frustrated potential reformers lead on their own
- Low Openness to divergent opinion, High Openness to change: Lots of meaningless changes, lots of heretics
- Low Openness to divergent opinion, low openness to change: lots of heretics 

### Related 
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]]
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]
- [[Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?]]
- [[Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission]]



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odlyzkoDeclineUnfetteredResearch1995

Absolute games are anchored to reality

Frontiers lead to absolute games instead of relative games

Notes on the decline of unfettered research

Relative games always have a winner

The term moonshot is romantic bullshit

Does entrpreneurship look more like politics or more like physics?

# Relative vs absolute games
Relative games are games where your success is relative to other people playing the game.

Absolute games are games where your success is relative to some absolute metric. Circumnavigating the world, inventing information theory, and running a mile are all absolute games. 

Relative games can often have messed up feedback loops, and lead to [[Bullshit Ideas]]. However,  relative games that are in direct competition against another human can actually lead to tight feedback loops and beneficially expose you to situations where you can’t make excuses. 

### Related
- [[You don’t get to choose the rules of an absolute game]]
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]



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The internet has warped our engagement levels

# The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions
The internet makes it incredibly easy to interact directly with any individual in the world. This ability is pretty great! I can interact on Twitter with people I deeply respect from around the world. People can let down their hair and show their true selves instead of always holding up their institutional avatar masks. Anybody can start a blog or podcast or publish a book or teach a class without going through institutional gatekeepers. I think the great things about people being able to directly interact with fans, followers, customers, and peers instantly and all the time have been well established so I won’t go into it much here.  

From [[Problematic 5 — The Media is Dead, Long Live the Media]] about journalists: `In order to advance their careers they need to get social media followers, in order to get those followers, they need to become a personality, and in order to do that they need to say outrageous things`  in other words [[People perceive the need to become a personality in order to have a career]] and in order to become a personality  [[People are using institutions as platforms]].

The internet disintermediation of institutions has enabled individuals to take the place of institutions. Instead of going to the New York Times for news, you go to your favorite reporter. Instead of reading Nature, you follow your favorite scientist. Because [[Culturally we expect modern organizations to become a monopoly]], individuals replacing institutions has the consequence of ramping the competition between *individuals* to red-hot levels.  This competition is an effect of the hierarchical system of group selection that used to provide slack to balance out the competition. [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]. 

### Related 
- [[“Have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]]
- [[Fully open online discussions are low quality because of trust and context]]
-



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19 Jul 2020

# There are two levels of institution 
According to Oxford English Dictionary, an institution can be:
1. a society or organization founded for a religious, educational, social, or similar purpose.
	- The US government 
	- A department of the US government
	- A specific university 
	- A specific newspaper
	- A specific VC firm
	- A specific company
	- A specific nonprofits
2. an established law, practice, or custom.
	- The institution of marriage 
	- Governments as a whole
	- Academia
	- Journalism
	- Venture Capital 
	- The startup ecosystem (“Silicon Valley”) 
	- Charity
	- Finance (“Wall Street”)

Type I institutions are specific organizations, or subset of an organization. An organization is not necessarily an institution. It’s fuzzy to say, but an organization needs some amount of gravitas and longevity. Type I institutions can become paragons of Type II institutions: for example the NYT standing in for journalism, or Sequioa standing in for venture capital. You can start an organization that becomes a Type I institution.

Type II institutions are emergent behaviors - you can’t start one directly. The closest you can come is to create a type I institution that inspires imitators and becomes a paragon for the new type II institution.  Type II institutions are by their nature fuzzy

Every type I institution seems to have a dual Type II institution, but does every type II institution have type I institutions? At first glance, it looks like the answer should be yes . But looking at marriage, what are the corresponding Type I institutions? Would it be churches, or married couples themselves? I think you could convince me that each married couple was a Type I institution whose dual was the Type II institution of marriage. 

There are clearly many Type I institutions that comprise a Type II institution, but is every Type I institution a member of only one Type II institution? Normatively, we want the answer to be no, for each newspaper to purely belong to Journalism, for each university to purely belong to Academia. But in reality the answer is no - each organization is part of multiple Type II institutions: newspapers and universities are also businesses, startups can be both part of Silicon Valley and whatever institution they’re ‘disrupting’ - Journalism, Finance, Insurance, you name it. I suspect that these divided institutional loyalties may be part of the cause for increased institutional mistrust. 

Both types of institution are fractal. [[Every time you zoom in on a fractal, it presents the same pattern on a different scale]]  There’s governments, and within governments there are Federal governments, city governments, etc. Similarly, there is the US government, and different parts of the US government. 

When we talk about institutions we carelessly jump back and forth between the two levels - “Synecdoching.”



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Institution-builders need to build relationships directly with funders

# Venkatesh Rao thread on institution building
- New institutions require a status inversion
- If your institutional visions require esoteric new processes that require a new kind of bureaucrat and training to staff, you’re doing it wrong. 

Phase 1: strategically cut out parts of the old

Phase 2: keep weeding out fast-growth colonizing processes, keeping the cleared space open

Phase 3: watch for deep new growth and protect it as it displaces the weeds

- Author:[[Venkatesh Rao]]
### Related
- [[Venkatesh Rao twitter thread on independent research]]
## Link
[Venkatesh Rao on Twitter: “Institution building is really a young person’s game, but older people have most of the metis needed to avoid the thousand failure modes around any precocious vision. So for an IB project to work, oldies kinda have to voluntarily play second fiddle to much younger people.”](https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1227290309467365376)



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Benʼs working notes

§Institutions and Games

What are Institutions

Institutions working well or badly

Games

Different Games in the World

Questions

References

Links to this note