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

§Institutions and Games

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]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Could_you_design_incentives_so_everyone_had_skin-in-the-game_around_institutional_purpose_and_mission)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Could_you_design_incentives_so_everyone_had_skin-in-the-game_around_institutional_purpose_and_mission)




There are a number of experiments that seem like they can only be done in the context of an organization

Purpose behind ICT Writeup

ICT Distillation

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

ICT Outline

# Creating an organizational structure around a project prematurely can have many downsides
In a way, organizations are a [[Load Bearing Fiction]] that we create to personify a project. Perhaps a more accurate word would be ‘entity-ify’ but [[Human brains put all entities in the same bucket]].  While on paper this personification is primarily legal, its more important effect is to give the project a life of its own.  Instead of being “Elon’s rocket project” it becomes “SpaceX.” Now you can say “SpaceX did this! SpaceX did that. I like/dislike SpaceX.” My (unsubstantiated) hunch is that personifying a project takes advantage of the brain’s chunking mechanism and copious machinery devoted to interpersonal interactions.[^1]

Creating an organization around a project crystalizes it in a way. People start trying to pin a ‘consistent personality’ on the organization and holding it accountable for its actions. These expectations put pressure on you to do what people expect, instead of what needs to be done for the project. In people’s minds organizations are default alive regardless of the reality (remember - personification). This perception in turn puts pressure on you to continue a project beyond the point where you would let go naturally.  

As soon as you create an official organization, it becomes tempting to play  games other than the ones that are best for the project. Brand/prestige, fundraising, hiring, marketing, advisors are all games that organizations need to play eventually but may not be helpful for a project. 

Of course, these downsides can actually become helpful at some point in a project’s trajectory. Additionally, organizational structures provide plenty of other upsides like accountability and legitimacy. The upshot isn’t that you shouldn’t create organizations around projects. Instead you should think very seriously about what would be best for the project (instead of your ego) before you do. 

### Related
- [[There are a number of experiments that seem like they can only be done in the context of an organization]]
- [[Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things]]
- 

[^1]: See [[RIM Dunbar]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Creating_an_organizational_structure_around_a_project_prematurely_can_have_many_downsides)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Creating_an_organizational_structure_around_a_project_prematurely_can_have_many_downsides)




§Tech Tree Model of Heuretics

arthurNatureTechnologyWhat2009

strevensKnowledgeMachineHow2020

Most human knowledge is not encoded

New ideas need to come out of a single mind

Just having the piece of literature doesn’t solve the problem

In order to extend a heuretic it must be legible to you

Program design is like creating the lego instruction book

Researchers are more important than the research

In defense of academia outline

You need a human to resolve conflicting information

Spec Tech should pragmatically prioritize relationships and permissive licensing

Many approaches to augmented knowledge generation ignore humans

The most important role of program design is to build a shared context and connectivity between stakeholders

The affordance of a heuretic dictates how it can connect with another node on the tech tree

Technology transfer is a mystifying abstraction

Roadmaps need to be coupled to people

Boris Hanin conversation 30 Aug 2021

Most approaches to augmented knowledge generation ignore humans

James Cooper conversation 7 Sep 2021

Program managers are the most important piece of a program

APM Roadmap

Kumar Garg conversation 18 Nov 2021

Jean-Damien Louise conversation 29 Aug 2022

DARPA's Approach to Innovation and Its Reflection in Industry

Heuretics cannot exist separate from humans\*

In a positivistic world knowledge just keeps growing

Understanding the edge of knowledge is a human endeavor

# Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)
TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE rests on three arguments:
1. [[Heuretics cannot exist separate from humans*]]
2. [[New ideas need to come out of a single mind]]
3. [[Brains are wombs for heuretics]]

#### Why is this not naval-gazing?   
- [[Many approaches to augmented knowledge generation ignore humans]] - this is why they are built on shaky assumptions.
- Any model of technological development that ignores humans is limited
- Incentives matter
- [[Researchers are more important than the research]]
- Realizing that [[Most human knowledge is not encoded]] is important
- [[You need a human to resolve conflicting information]]
- If you ignore that technology is people, you give up a lot of control authority over how technology evolves.  ([[What does technological genetic engineering look like?]], [[What does technological husbandry look like?]])

### Related
- [[Dupont was unable to replicate viscose rayon]] even though they acquired the IP
- [[alexanderYouWantRun2022]] points to a common pattern where people want to put money into a thing and assume some manager type will show up 



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Heuretics_come_out_of_people’s_brains_(TECHNOLOGY_IS_PEOPLE) )

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Heuretics_come_out_of_people’s_brains_(TECHNOLOGY_IS_PEOPLE) )




New institutions need champions

People are using institutions as platforms

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]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Individual_actions_reflect_on_Institutions)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Individual_actions_reflect_on_Institutions)




Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions

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

The Strengths of the Academic Enterprise

Organizations and people lend each other social capital

Individual actions reflect on Institutions

What makes a good organizational mission?

National service could unfuck the US

New fields need to be exclusive

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

You can think about institutions as systems

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.



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Institutions_need_to_differentiate_between_individuals_inside_and_outside_the_institution)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Institutions_need_to_differentiate_between_individuals_inside_and_outside_the_institution)




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

Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

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

All institutions are coupled to at least one game

Reaper functions dominate other incentives

Grants only go so far

You need to break rules to create new paradigms

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

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

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

Assertions

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

Organizations are groups of people organized to pursue a shared goal

# 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. 



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Institutions_shape_how_individuals_interact)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Institutions_shape_how_individuals_interact)




Accept invitations in public and decline them in private

Make living documents

Taking something off someone’s plate is one of the greatest gifts

Having someone’s back is underrated

titusMoreContinuingArt2021

Make friends with people before they’re useful to you

Work with people you like working with, not the ones who are the most qualified

How to ask for help

Mary Kondoing the people you know is underrated

Management not to dos

Credit actually matters a lot because its the difference between someone writing a blog on the side and getting to do it as their job

When you communicate you should strive to demystify the world

People with veto power should not be part of a core gameplay loop

People in support roles need to be more precise and action-oriented not less

Unless you give people a hard deadline things will always slip

Being a good friend is expensive

You need to treat human interactions probabilistically

It’s impossible to know what’s going on inside someone else’s head

Work with people’s existing tools and workflows

Asking for extraneous information when helping someone can actually make things worse

Describing work as ‘fundamental’ is bullshit

Good teachers go to where a student is instead of making the student come to them

How to tell if someone is going to waste your time

If you reference an organization or person on your website, have links to them

It is more useful to point out areas where a system fails than to point out that a system is broken

Lookahead should heavily weight items by their frequency of use

Never use a naked this or that does not refer to a noun in the current sentence

Precise Communication is careful with pronouns

Say ‘X is more important than Y’ instead of ‘X is important’

When people help you circle back with them

When you ask someone to “look at something” you should specify what you hope to get out of it

You can’t evaluate pens independently of the paper you’re writing on

It is exponentially easier to answer a tight well framed question than a big fuzzy one

weaverNSNotesOfficer1946

When digging into a topic it is important to keep a salient list of people you have talked to and what you talked about

cowenHighreturnActivityRaising2018

Bill Watterson is one of the few people who retired from the public beautifully

Slides should be a teaser for a written doc

The phrase AI and Machine Learning is a strong litmus test

Tweet on emailing busy people

Work is the actions you take on behalf of others

bahatIntroductionsForwardIntro2020

# Life Style Guide
* [[When you ask for intros, say why]]
* [[All introductions should be double opt in]]
* [[When you ask someone to “look at something” you should specify what you hope to get out of it]]
* [[As the communicator it’s your job to make sure they understand.]]
* [[If you’re pulling a lot of data, always save intermediate steps]]
* [[“There’s a thing for that” is a bad signal]]
* [[There is value to forcing yourself to just sit with something]]
* [[Every stage in a pipeline needs to have an associated action]]
* [[It’s a natural human tendency to talk to someone about all the things you want to talk to them about at once, but it’s more important to trickle]]
- [[Always show the most searched for thing first is a good principle of UX]]
- [[Always show the shortest option first is a good principle for autocomplete]]
- Whenever possible [[Explain it like I’m Five]]
- [[When you communicate you should strive to demystify the world]]
- [[People who have done a thing should be in charge of a thing]]
- [[People should be more open to small discrete questions]]
- [[Emails should have explicit social norms]]
- [[Notes and statements should be bloody]]
- [[Write down your hypotheses]]
- [[How to ask for help]]
- It is not classy to make someone sign up for a new service to talk to you. (A new slack channel counts)
- Endnotes are always terrible, footnotes are ok, popups or sidenotes are best 
- Don’t ask for five minutes of someone’s time - just ask them the question
	- https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1361359049846001666?s=20
- When you ask a question in a question and answer session in a talk/seminar/lecture you get *one* (1) question. It must end in a question mark. It must not be a speech followed by a question.
- [[Be serious but not solemn]]
- [[Make living documents]]
- [[Taking something off someone’s plate is one of the greatest gifts]]
- [[Having someone’s back is underrated]]
- [[Make friends with people before they’re useful to you]]
- Don’t start emails with “hello my name is X” — I can see your name both in your signature and generally in the from: line.
-  [[Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things]]
- [[Intros should be double opt-in]]
- [[When you communicate you should strive to demystify the world]]
-  [[Work with people you like working with, not the ones who are the most qualified]]
- [[Mary Kondoing the people you know is underrated]]
- [[When you ask someone to “look at something” you should specify what you hope to get out of it]]
- Ask tight, well-framed questions and answer other people’s questions  quickly
- [[Credit actually matters a lot because its the difference between someone writing a blog on the side and getting to do it as their job]]
- [[People with veto power should not be part of a core gameplay loop]]
- [[Management not to dos]]
- [[Being a good friend is expensive]]
- [[You need to treat human interactions probabilistically]]
- [[It’s impossible to know what’s going on inside someone else’s head]]
- [[Work with people’s existing tools and workflows]]
-  [[Describing work as ‘fundamental’ is bullshit]]
- [[Good teachers go to where a student is instead of making the student come to them]]
-  [[How to tell if someone is going to waste your time]]
- [[If you reference an organization or person on your website, have links to them]]
- [[It is more useful to point out areas where a system fails than to point out that a system is broken]]
- [[Lookahead should heavily weight items by their frequency of use]]
- [[Never use a naked this or that does not refer to a noun in the current sentence]]
- [[People in support roles need to be more precise and action-oriented not less]]
- [[Precise Communication is careful with pronouns]]
- [[Say ‘X is more important than Y’ instead of ‘X is important’]]
- Raise other people’s aspirations
-  [[When people help you circle back with them]]
-  [[You can’t evaluate pens independently of the paper you’re writing on]]
- The term ’Talent’ is both vague and dehumanizing when used in the context of “We need to find more talent.” Instead you should be specific: “talented engineers” etc.
- [[Accept invitations in public and decline them in private]]
- [[Asking for extraneous information when helping someone can actually make things worse]]
- When drawing diagrams, circles are for state machines and other discrete graphs; rectangles are for continuous systems
- [[Curate people based on who gives you energy]]
- [[Thoughts should be written, Questions should be verbal]]
- [[Writing style guide]]
- [[Dweebling — concept]]
- Don’t go into debt unless you’re already very wealthy
- [[Turn communication around in 24 hours if you are in a management or coordination position]]
- Always label your axes
- [[Unless you give people a hard deadline things will always slip]]
- [[Examples over adjectives]]

### Other People’s Life Style Guides
- [[Laura Evans]]: [30 Things I’ve Learned in 30 Years](https://www.lauraevans.io/30-things-ive-learned-in-30-years/)
- [[Kevin Kelly]]: [The Technium: 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice](https://kk.org/thetechnium/99-additional-bits-of-unsolicited-advice/)
- [[Michael Girdley]]: https://twitter.com/girdley/status/1409139969646596099
- Now a life style guide per se but [[Purported Tesla rules about meetings]] are pretty good



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Life_Style_Guide)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Life_Style_Guide)




Institutions shape how individuals interact

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

Most institutions have become cancerous

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

Observations that lead to the assertion of institutional decay

# Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role 
# 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]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Nobody_is_resigning_for_failing_to_do_their_institutional_role)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Nobody_is_resigning_for_failing_to_do_their_institutional_role)




Life Style Guide

Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution

Pieces of the Action Forward Intro Notes

Trusted Hierarchies are one way that centralized coordination can happen

Creating an organizational structure around a project prematurely can have many downsides

# Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things
The direct consequence of this is that one should never put a verb in front of an inanimate object. This may be too extreme: Is it actually better to say “People have used computer simulations for discovery …” than “Computer simulations have aided in discovery …?”

[[Human brains put all entities in the same bucket]]

### Related
- [[Life Style Guide]]
- Inspired by [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
- [[Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[Heuretics come out of people’s brains (TECHNOLOGY IS PEOPLE)]]
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]
- [[What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Organizations_don’t_do_anything,_people_in_organizations_do_things)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Organizations_don’t_do_anything,_people_in_organizations_do_things)




§Trusted Hierarchy

Trust is transitive

# Trusted Hierarchies are one way that centralized coordination can happen
Trusted hierarchies are one way to structure centralized coordination.  Trusted hierarchies and centralized coordination are coupled but not the same. Specifically, centralized coordination is the verb and trusted hierarchies are the noun performs the verb. Of course, [[Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things]]

In fact,  [[Trusted hierarchies are not always the best way to do centralized coordination]]. Other structures that can enable centralized coordination include algorithms, committees, or pure democratic forums like in Athens. Each of these methods have strengths and weaknesses.



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Trusted_Hierarchies_are_one_way_that_centralized_coordination_can_happen)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Trusted_Hierarchies_are_one_way_that_centralized_coordination_can_happen)




Analyze by who can tap the breaks and who can open the throttle

# What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?
# What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions
Institutions have pretty clear things they’re *supposed* to be doing \\

### Related
- [[Work on these things - Marginal Revolution]]
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
- [[Skin in the game (SITG)]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What_if_you_did_skin_in_the_game_analyses_on_institutions)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What_if_you_did_skin_in_the_game_analyses_on_institutions)




Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role

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

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

Disintermediation destroys institutions and leads to winner take all

Great Founder Theory - Article

Progress Studies 2020-03-28

# Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk
- Institutions enable people to act collectively (2:20)
- Hugh Heclo tried to write down all the definitions of institution and stopped at 100 https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Institutionally-Politics-Hugh-Heclo/dp/0199946000
- We’ve lost both trust and confidence in institutions 
	- The difference between trust and confidence is relevant
- Institutions mold and form people into forms that conform to the purpose of the insititution
	- People don’t like to be molded and formed
- We hope that people in institutions act in line with the purpose and mission of institutions but more and more that is no longer the case
- Institutions have nominal organizational goals
- Insiderism is when people use an institution as cover for bad behavior. This is corruption and has always happened and is different than the phenomenon we see now
- People are using institutions as platforms (14:28)
	- The example is the professor who just uses the university as a platform to publicize his research
- example - media has set of ethics consistent with informing you about the truth
	- [Yuval Levin on A Time to Build — EconTalk — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/09:57)
- Jarring when people do things inconsistent with what you thought their job was - need a word for this and with orgs
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/11:11
- It’s about expectations 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/11:39
- Confirming to expectations 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/13:29
- People using institutions as platforms instead of molds
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/14:28
- Researchers see themselves as self employed 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/17:58
- Don’t use verbs after non human thjnfs
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/18:34
- Conservative progressive difference on whether people need to change 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/20:51
- Institutions have changed regardless of if you think it’s good or bad 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/20:51
- Institutions have become performarive instead of formative 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/22:03
- Profession gives people a method and a form
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/23:40
- Trump doing to presidency what journalists are doing to journalism
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/25:39
- Free rider problem in institutions 
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/25:56
- Thing that has changed is willingness of people in power to punish freeriders
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/26:39
- Fragmentation if media has turned us all into our own paparazzi and micro celebrities
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/29:57
- Congress becoming a performstive instituion
	- https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/32:28
- Free rider problem in institutions 
https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/25:56
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]

### Published
Feb 2020
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Russ Roberts]]
- [[Yuval Levin]]
## Link
[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build — EconTalk — Overcast](https://overcast.fm/+JDYbWog/)

[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Yuval_Levin_on_A_Time_to_Build_-_Econtalk)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Yuval_Levin_on_A_Time_to_Build_-_Econtalk)






Benʼs working notes

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

Related

Links to this note