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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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

§Institutions and Games

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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gertnerIdeaFactoryBell2012

Reaper functions beat culture decks

Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory

Healthy corporate R+D requires a trifecta of conditions

Expensive research needs to address an existential threat eventually at an organizational level to maintain support

Bell Labs was only profitable in conjunction with AT+T

Regulation drove many of Bell Labs’ actions

Bell Labs was not a business

How do you have skin in the game around ideas?

Having your life on the line forces you to contend with objective reality

Bell labs existed before continuous improvement was expected

Government research is corporate R&D for United States Inc

The niche corporate labs once occupied still needs to be filled

ICT Distillation

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

Ed Bice Conversation 4 Jun 2021

ICT Outline

Peter van Hardenberg Conversation 20 Nov 2020

Stan Kugell and Randy Castleman conversation 11 Dec 2020

# Alignment requires existential threats
People often use “Alignment” as a [[Suitcase Handle Word]]. When you look at alignment, especially in the organizational context, it boils down to “is keeping this relationship going holding off some existential threat?” 

Through the lens of [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]] the only way for two entities playing different games to have the same goal is if one or both of the games would come to a crashing halt if the goal was not met. ie. The goal addresses an existential threat.

Of course, “existential threat” is an extreme term that means different things for different entities. In this context one could think of it as something that could end something you really do not want to end. For companies it could be an important revenue stream, or the business itself. For a person it could be your life or just the trajectory of your career. Clearly, what is existential is relative and there’s a continuum of importance in the threats. 

While it’s abstract, I find this concept useful because it allows you to roughly analyze ‘how aligned’ two entities are and have blunt conversations about it.  

### Related
- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]
- [[Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory]]
- [[Innovation orgs need a money factory]]
- [[Minimum Necessary Alignment]]
- [[The fewer people there are the easier it is to align on goals and the longer those goals can remain aligned]]
- [[Playing the same game is the only way people can align for extremely long time scales]]



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

Opacity is important to DARPA’s outlier success

§ARPA model

Why do people become DARPA Program managers?

The definition of the ARPA model has changed over time

PARPA needs a constitution with checks and balances

The transient nature of most people at DARPA enables ideas to be revisited

Employee-ownership could enable PARPA to align long-term incentives

NSF Program officers can have multi-decade tenures

Many DARPA Programs are multigenerational

PARPA needs to be obsessed with PMs

NSF and DARPA as Models for Research Funding - An Institutional Analysis

# DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years
Program manager turnover means that there is also turnover in ideas. [[The transient nature of most people at DARPA enables ideas to be revisited]]. 

Explicitly temporary tours of duty may also be an answer to [[Why do people become DARPA Program managers?]] If you have many options in life, it’s more palatable to go into a position that is explicitly designed around the expectation that you can have maximum impact in a few years and then go do something else.  

The transient nature of program managers also makes them more immune to most of the effects of [[People giving out grants try to derisk them as much as possible]] because there’s only one clear objective - make the program work. They are still subject to giving the grant to people they trust but my hunch is that the trust and exposure are more solvable problem than wanting to be able to show that their money was ‘well spent’.

Abstractly, the *explicitly* temporary nature of program managers allows DARPA to maintain alignment with program managers because [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]].  Unlike many organizations there’s no implicit tension between the knowledge that most people will leave eventually and the uncertainty about when. 

 [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]. Maybe there’s something about the transient nature that doesn’t allow them to play long-term games or figure out how to game them. There’s something to the fact that the program managers are not just transient, but they are transiently *changing games.* An academic who becomes a program manager isn’t going to worry about publishing papers. A military officer who becomes a program manager isn’t going to worry about impressing their direct superiors. Playing a completely different game enables them to focus on the job at hand.

The transient nature of program managers was only codified in the 90’s because program managers were sticking around for much longer than five years. This codification suggests that the transient nature of program managers is more than just a historical artifact.  

Speculatively, there’s something about a culture that knows people have an explicitly short tenure that might actually maintain quality. You see this in lab groups, (possibly military units?), and fraternities that maintain the same culture for decades. [[Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave]]. 

[[ARPA-E]] and [[IARPA]] program managers also have explicitly temporary positions.

::New:: Program manager tenures are often shorter than the length of successful programs. New program managers often take over a program from a departing program manager in addition to creating their own program. The most famous of these lineages may be [[JCR Licklider]] -> [[Ivan Sutherland]] -> [[Robert Taylor]]. Common multigenerational programs ([[The Management of Innovation]]) may also help enforce quality and culture transmission. People want to make sure that their baby, the program they poured blood sweat and tears into for the past five years, is left in good hands. The continued success of the program you started depends on both the quality of the person you help hire to continue it and embedding them in the culture that 

### Related
- [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]
- [[Five years is the greatest amount of time you can plan with accuracy]]
- [[Reaper functions beat culture decks]]



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Long term plans often involve decisions that look stupid over shorter time horizons

# Decision quality is timescale dependent
When you’re evaluating the quality of a decision you can’t decouple it from the timescale you expect it to play out on.

This is the underlying reason why for most decisions in a startup it’s important to just ‘move fast’ because most of the decisions will actually be irrelevant on a relatively short timescale. On the flipside, [[Warren Buffet]] explicitly doesn’t move fast because [[Berkshire Hathaway]] makes only long term investments and he thinks about the whole org lasting beyond himself. 

### Related 
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]
- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]



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Stripe press could provide low touch support to a community of frontier openers

Philanthropies can easily become misaligned with their money factories

How does money work in PARPA?

narayanamurtiGenesisTechnoscientificRevolutions2021

ARPA became DARPA in 1972 because of the increased scrutiny on military spending both in the government and outside of it

“The System” of AT&T

Philanthropies are forced to show consistent short term progress

The incentives inherent to corporate R&D mean that researchers motivated by money leave and those who are motivated by glory are not the best in the world

AI research is an exception to the decline of corporate R+D

Tensions are the core theme of the PARPA writeup

Organizations can get incomes via Contracts, budgets, or products

There are many tight feedback loops built into the ARPA model

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

All the work at Bell Labs needed to tie back to the system

Breakthrough fundamental science

Bell Labs and AT&T had timescale alignment

DARPA’s primary purpose is to develop military technology

Does the money factory need to necessarily be one organization?

The shift of Pioneer to be a remote accelerator is a case study for the incentives around monetization

Who is paying the bills?

# Innovation orgs need to be aligned with their money factory
Aligned incentives are the only thing that will enable the innovation org to not have crushing oversight and be able to work on long-term projects. [[Playing the same game is the only way people can align for extremely long time scales]] so if the innovation org is going to survive long term, it needs to be playing the same game as the money factory. It can get away with diverging for some time, but it’s always finite.  [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]. The alignment also needs to be clear to the people who control the money and be on a timescale that’s acceptable to them. So while fundamental research might be in the long-term interest of the United States Government, the timescale that matters to most politicians is their term in office. 

 [[Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory]].

The more fund-strapped the money factory is, the tighter the alignment needs to be. When AT&T, Microsoft, or Google are flush with Monopoly money they’re happy to let people dick around on whatever. When stocks dip, the first programs to be cut are the ones that have the least plausible ties to the core product. [[Expensive research needs to address an existential threat eventually at an organizational level to maintain support]]. Similarly [[ARPA became DARPA in 1972 because of the increased scrutiny on military spending both in the government and outside of it]].

### Related
- [[Principles for Innovation Orgs]]
- [[Philanthropies can easily become misaligned with their money factories]]
- [ ] Need to integrate [[Reaper functions dominate other incentives]] 

## References




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Fair games have legible rules

The more legible the rules of the game, the more straightforward it is to optimize for the game

# Kumar Types of Games Tweet
- Cooperative or non cooperative
- Symmetric and Asymmetric
- Zero-sum and non-zero sum
- Simultaneous and sequential
- Perfect information and Imperfect information
- Combinatorial games
- Finite and infinite games
- Discrete and continuous games
- Many player and population games
- Metagames
[Kumar 🇺🇸 on Twitter: “A pro tip to grow any company. Figure out what type of Game you’re playing in any system. There’s classifications.… “](https://twitter.com/datarade/status/1257156407503306753/photo/1)

### Related
- [[What are proxy games that lead to more awesome sci-fi shit?]]
- [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]



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# Minimum Necessary Alignment
the set of beliefs you need to agree on with someone to put everything else aside and move forward on a common goal.

### Related
- [[Playing the same game is the only way people can align for extremely long time scales]]
- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]
- [[Goal aligning happens on specific scopes and timescales]]

## Reference
- Originally from [[Balaji Srinivasan]]
[Balaji S. Srinivasan on Twitter: “Minimum necessary alignment: the set of beliefs you need to agree on with someone to put everything else aside and move forward on a common goal.”](https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1082097138396348417?s=12)



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Institutions shape how individuals interact

Shadows of the Future

Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

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

All funding organizations are research organizations

Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

Why would people want to work with PARPA?

Research requires intrinsic motivation

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

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

Universities have multiple conflicting missions

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

# 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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# Playing the same game is the only way people can align for extremely long time scales
This goes for romantic relationships, business relationships, etc.

Everything else is like a side quest
[[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]]



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§PARPA

Can you use transparency to earn enough trust to be opaque?

What should be in the Packet

Would it be correct to use the term lab for innovation organization

# Principles for Innovation Orgs
As with any set of principles, these are flexible. However, the more you bend them, the more poorly an innovation org will work. 
- Opacity is important
	-  [[Opacity is important to DARPA’s outlier success]]
	- The more people who can influence a plan before it happens, the more likely it is to be derailed. 
		- Note that there should be an explicit distinction between purely advisory roles, direct power roles, and delayed power roles
	- Opacity is important because [[Making a game more fair reduces its variance]].
- [[Demos are like afterburners]]
	- Demos are essentially promises: we will create the thing this demo evokes in your imagination
	- The purpose of a demo is to rally excitement and resources that can get you to reality
	- Demos are *not* a sign of progress in and of themselves - often they can actually take work away from progress on the actual thing because in addition to the TRL ~3 system, you need to build a lot of instrumentation to make it useable that will be thrown away and replaced in the final output
	- In an ideal situation you wouldn’t need demos - the money factory would trust the innovation org enough to give them the resources they need without the demo and understand technical reports enough to understand the progress that has been made
	- Ideally demos would follow the “apple model” where the demo is just showing off the thing that is already in production
	- [[We should strive to unbundle Elon Musks Brain]]
- The ability to change direction quickly is tantamount
	- Anything that makes it harder to change direction should be eliminated. Among other things this includes unchangeable roadmaps and metrics, overhead and restrictions on spending money and hiring, and generally needing to ask permission before taking action. 
	-  [[Make living documents]] can enable quick direction changes while keeping stakeholders in the loop. 
- More money fungibility is better
	- Research is never linear.  Like [[The Idea Maze]], you might think beforehand that you need to zag when you actually need to zig. In the context of innovation orgs, budgets with restricted line items - so much for personnel, so much for equipment, etc. - can severely hamper an organizations ability to execute on 
	- [[It is relatively easy for DARPA PMs to re-deploy funding]]
- Long-term thinking is structural
	- You can say all you want about long term thinking but if you need to constantly go and raise the next quarter’s worth of money, you will be thinking about what you can do in order to raise that money
- It’s all about people 
	- There are two ways that people make or break an innovation org. 
	- First, like other high-variance activities all the results are driven by the tails of the distribution. This power law means that the best person for the job is going to be *massively* more impactful than the second best person and could make the difference between success and failure. As a consequence, innovation orgs with restrictions on who they can work with - whether because of salary caps, credential requirements, or personality tests - are likely shooting themselves in the foot.
	- Second, the importance of people mean that incentives on those people are critical. If individual incentives aren’t aligned with the organization as a whole, chances of achieving your desired outcome decrease significantly. 
- [[Manage the Transfer not the Technology]]
	- Shamelessly stolen from the excellent book [[bahcallLoonshotsHowNurture2019]] 
	- In the same way that the world will not beat a path to your door if you build a better mousetrap, if an innovation organization does some amazing work, that work will not automatically impact the world. It requires work from people outside the organization to diffuse it, whether through commercialization, continued public development or other mechanisms. It takes planning and work to make sure this will happen, and too often people focus too much on the organization itself and less on how the organization will hand off the work it has done. Often this involves collaboration *before* the work is done.
	- The other part of this principle is that once you have the right people and incentives in place, further external management and intervention generally hurts the innovation org. 
- Explicitly call out misalignments between the money factory and the innovation org
	- At the end of the day, the goal of the innovation org is to create things that have never existed before and the goal of its money factory is something else (otherwise it would be an innovation organization itself.) It is uncomfortable, but if you can explicitly call out the misalignments between these two goals, you can come up with a strategy to mitigate the effect of this  misalignment.  There are several ways to mitigate the misalignment. You can constrain what the innovation org works on - this works when the money factory itself has an extremely broad mandate, like DARPA and the DoD or Bell Labs and AT&T. [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]] so another approach is to explicitly define the expectations and timescales that each party expects *before* starting. 
- Research is not linear
	- You can’t expect regular progress reports from an innovation organization. Einstein published four of is five most impactful papers in a single year, and the fifth paper ten years later. 
- Trust matters
	- Innovation orgs are by their very nature trying to do things that have never been done before. You can’t do something that has never been done before by acting in entirely normal ways (otherwise it would have been done!) So in order for an innovation org to work, stakeholders both outside and inside need to be comfortable with actions that are hard to justify or predict a priori. That is, innovation orgs will not work without a level of trust.  



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Relative vs absolute games

All institutions are coupled to at least one game

# carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012
Listened to the audio book 

### Published
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
## Link


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Benʼs working notes

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

Related

Reference

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