# How do you have skin in the game around ideas? # How do you have skin in the game around ideas Enabling more awesome sci-fi shit is a bigger job than I can do by myself so I do want to explicitly put memes in people’s heads and get you thinking. There is directly-applicable work I can do as an individual with my current level of creditability but it is limited. Even working on the hypothesis that [[You can create a program design discipline that enables better research and development]] I run into people who (justifiably) don’t engage too much because it’s not clear what I can offer if they do engage. [[Alignment requires existential threats]]. One of the reason people are eager to engage with DARPA program managers is that there’s an imaginable chance of it leading to a funding opportunity. ([[A large part of a DARPA program manager’s job is focused network building]].) This isn’t to say that people only want money - they just rationally need to be able to see how engaging will further their goals. Social capital is fairly interchangeable with normal capital in generating engagement. So even showing direct results requires capital of some sort. Since I am relatively constrained on both fronts, somehow I need to bootstrap to credibility (to get resources) or resources (to get creditability). One of the few ways to bootstrap social and normal capital directly (as opposed to going off and doing a parallel career that builds social and normal capital) is to become a ‘thought leader.’ The things you can produce with neither social or normal capital are compelling ideas and narratives. It’s also tempting because to do what I think I need to do, the monetary capital needs to be fairly unconstrained. The less social capital you have when acquiring money, the more constraints it comes with. However, even if it’s done for good reasons, trying to bootstrap capital through research and ideas can be a trap. One reason is that attention from ideas is relatively cheap. I love attention and it would be tempting to just continue to put out research and ideas, telling myself that eventually I can leverage it into action and the ideas enable other people to act. Arguably, if you can convince many people to take action instead of doing it yourself, that is the most scalable thing! However, when everybody starts thinking this way it leads to an intellectual circle-jerk. [[You get good at what you do]], so spending time pushing ideas will make me better at pushing ideas as opposed to taking action on them. I think the world has a glut of people who are good at the former and a dearth of people who are good at the latter. The tricky bit, as noted before is that taking that action requires capital (or at least the *perceived potential* of capital) that I don’t have. Although I certainly would like to be the one to act on these ideas, it’s more important that they are acted on at all. Even then, it’s important for these ideas about what should be done in the world to have a feedback loop with reality. So not trying to implement them myself would be intellectually lazy as well as dishonest. At the same time, I think that influencing the way people think and getting attention from the right people is essential to giving the idea a chance. The timescales that I’m talking about (probably won’t show even preliminary results for 2-3 years and then it will be arguable because there won’t be a metric like money to point to) are such that I cannot purely let results speak for themselves. Additionally, getting to these results will require creditability beyond what I have now. So I will inevitably need to walk a fine line between spewing ideas to build creditability and encourage other people to act while having acting myself. In addition to the standard talk but no walk thought leader pattern, another pattern I want to avoid is the more subtle one where someone puts out actionable ideas and doesn’t update them based on feedback from the world. There is an archetype of the thought-leader-CEO who leaves organizational failures in their wake, insulated by the popularity of their ideas. Of course, I’m not saying my ideas are that good but it is certainly tempting to try to get to that state instead of exposing them to risky reality. In effect the question becomes “how do I have skin in the game around these ideas?” The most obvious and straightforward way is to explicitly say, I’m coupling these ideas to actions I am taking and will make it blatantly obvious where they are wrong so that you can shame and ignore me if it doesn’t work out. The tension is that I *do* believe that these ideas are important and useful and I worry that there are so many contingent factors that implementation failure does not necessarily imply an indictment of them. It’s intoxicating to have people apply your ideas beyond their scope. I simultaneously believe three things that can lead to contradictory actions 1. That it’s important for people to internalize and play with the ideas that I’m pushing beyond any actions I can take directly 2. That I need to put these ideas into action in order to refine them and demonstrate that they can be done 3. That somehow I need to have skin in the game but that tying my life success/failure to the experimental implementation of #2 is not a good test. At the same time, publicly having skin in the game is a way to have people take you seriously. Some random ideas about how to have skin in the game * Create some metrics around success and not let salary go above some level without hitting success metric Conversation with Andy: Skin in the game comes from the time that you spend on the work. This is similar to the heuristic that Braben used in [[brabenScientificFreedomElixir2008]]. Of course, those scientists could also pivot once given the grant, which explains why a large part of the selection process was spent delving into whether they were the sort of person who would do that. The slightly dissatisfying part of the “time is how you have skin in the game” is that (especially for ideas) you can get a lot of fame and glory from intermediate products even if their culmination collapses. And in a way this is good - if someone has abstract ideas they do need to be evaluated separately from specific implementation. In my head I keep my accountable by striving for the respect of people I respect. Perhaps one level higher skin in the game looks like publicly naming the people whose opinion of me other people should pay attention to? The other issue with ‘time spent’ as skin in the game is that you could become incentivized to ‘backwash’ the time you spent [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/How+do+you+have+skin+in+the+game+around+ideas) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/How+do+you+have+skin+in+the+game+around+ideas)