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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# ‘Have your cake and eat it too’ life-games have led to a toxic society 
*Everybody* wants to play a game with no tradeoffs. [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]. 

In the past all ‘life games’ had perceived tradeoffs.  If you were nobility or wealthy, you traded off religious purity (“It is harder for a wealthy man to enter heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”) If you were royalty, you were expected to be at the greatest risk of physical death. If you were clergy, you were supposed to renounce earthly possessions. Merchants could accumulate great wealth, but had little political power. The idea of these tradeoffs is built into western culture. Of course, the reality often differed from the ideal - Popes accumulating great wealth, Kings buying indulgences etc. but the *idea* that this was wrong is still powerful because it means the system would regress to a mean that enforced the tradeoffs. [[Having more separate games is good for society]].

Life-game tradeoffs were the perceived norm in the 20th century as well. Scientists could achieve great acclaim, but didn’t make that much money. Businessmen could make lots of money but weren’t held in great esteem. Politicians had power but it was understood that they wouldn’t make much money.  Journalists kept everybody in check but claimed few of the spoils.

Now, it seems like the winners in all the categories bleed into each other and everybody is now playing a single game where you can have your cake and eat it too. No tradeoffs. Famous scientists start companies and become fabulously wealthy. Politicians leverage their positions to get paid a ton by lobbyists and speaking tours. Successful entrepreneurs are also celebrities and can now pivot to whatever they want - science, politics, entertainment. 

The two questions that demand answers are “why did this happen” and “why is this bad?” 

### Why is this bad?

Shifting to the evolutionary analogy the single societal game breaks down the group selection hierarchy. [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]. It would be like all the cells of all the animals in the world all of a sudden competing with each other. It breaks the brain a little to think about. Is it a return to a primordial ooze? A [gelatinous cube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelatinous_cube)? Some kind of [ooze monster](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/89/99/ce/8999ce8a21742d46e495c4e90c9605ce.jpg)where all the animals have melded together? ![](../BearImages/6EAB3C07-08C0-43F8-91B3-44D37E5A5850-32352-00033E8E7EF8DCFB/8999ce8a21742d46e495c4e90c9605ce.jpg)

Regardless, a single game means that every individual is competing with every other individual, which removes all the advantages of group selection, especially the [[Slack - concept]] to work on things that are not immediately valuable.  

You could also look at the situation as every individual now being a member of every institution, which might be more accurate. Everybody is in business, everybody is a journalist, everybody is a scientist. We’ve been conditioned to think this is a good thing - democratize all the things. I think that would be true *if* people learned and respected the rules of whichever institutional capacity they were acting in and could firewall between the different roles in their lives. Instead it’s all become mushed together (see ooze monster picture.) This admonition to firewall between different roles in the same person is never going to be followed perfectly but it is an ideal that is no longer being strived for at all. 

For example, Ben Franklin was a man of *many* institutions: business, journalism, science, politics. He did a poor job firewalling between his role as a businessman and his role as a journalist - using kind of sketchy business practices to force competitors out of business. However, as far as I can tell, he *didn’t* use his position as a journalist to push his scientific theories or his position in politics to enhance his business. So there was at least some personal fireballing going on. Additionally, he knew and respected the rules of the different games he was playing. So while he was in many institutions he did not break down the barriers between them. 

When everybody wants to be an ‘entrepreneur’ or ‘influencer’ regardless of what they actually want, it increases the noise in the system and basically creates a lottery. A toxic situation. 

### Why did this happen?
Some of these reasons will inevitably overlap with [[Most institutions have become cancerous]].  It’s also interesting that many of these points are the tails side of a coin - they can be seen as good things as well. 
1. Social media and the internet enabled people to start participating in different institutions - politics, science, journalism - without any sort of introduction to what the rules of the game were. Again, lowering barriers to entry, in and of itself is not a bad thing, but without an additional … *something* (learning? Guidance?) it breaks down the walls between the institutions and creates a single game. 
2. The internet enabled people to not only participate but become major players in a game without needing to pass through any gatekeepers. Again, in a way this is a good thing, but the benefit of gatekeepers is that they can ensure that rules are at least understood before they are broken. It also causes a situation where anybody can try to set themselves up as a gatekeeper. [[Full-time thought leaders try to become gatekeepers to knowledge]]. My sense is that some sort of stability of gatekeeper succession is a good thing. 
3. *Fuzzy* An increasing sense that all institutional games should be fair, and therefore legible to people outside the institution. [[Fair games have legible rules]].  Legible rules made people inside the institution directly answerable to everyone outside of it.  This all sounds good so far! Light is the best disinfectant! However, the exposed rules could not capture all of the implicit rules of the game ([[The Map is not the Territory]])  so all the players are now incentivized to optimize for whatever those legible rules are and ignore all of the illegible rules. This leads to scientists chasing citations and politicians saying “well it’s not strictly illegal!”
4. Institutional democratization created a common currency between institutions: attention. If you can amass a large enough group of followers, people in other institutions will take you seriously. Thus, everybody is now playing the attention game. 

### Related
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]], which used to create ‘firewalls’ between different games but [[Most institutions have become cancerous]] so everything bleeds together.
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies]]
- https://twitter.com/ArtirKel/status/1284940928805994497



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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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Peer review has failed as an institution

Peer review doesn’t catch duplications

People are incentivized to work on nodes higher up the tech tree

It is easier to have a multipoint mutation in technology than in evolution

Peer review gives peers veto power over each other

Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints

# Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work
Peer review published papers both determine an academics livelihood and status. Therefore, they are incentivized to spend their time doing work they think can be published. 

On top of this [[Academic credit is a first-to-the post system]]

[[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]] In Academia there are a couple of long term games:
- Gain [[Kleos]] through contribution to the [[Knowledge frontier]]
- Just get to scratch your itch to investigate certain things
- ….

[[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]] and in academia the entwined proxy games are:
- Peer reviewed Published papers
- Citations on those papers
- Grants (which are usually based on papers) 
- Awards (which are usually based on who knows you which comes from papers)

It’s a safer strategy to publish lots of papers than to try to write one super-cited paper because it’s very hard to know which papers will be highly cited. Additionally everybody is impressed when you say “I’ve published a bajillion papers” while only a subgroup might know your super-cited paper by title unless you’ve [[hit the top of the columnade]]. 

Tenure is based on the number of papers you’ve published and the amount of grant money you’ve brought in.  Without tenure, academia is extremely rough. People who don’t think they can get tenure leave universities. [[National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities]].

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

### Related
- [[§Academia Constraints]]



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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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Research management matters

Week of 11 April 2022

Andy Matuschak conversation 8 April 2022 around funders

29 Apr 2022

Organizations can do any or none of funding, performing, managing, or consuming research

# All funding organizations are research organizations
[[Research management matters]]. Many people hold an implicit idea that research management and research funding are decoupled. The story goes that researchers (whether organizations or individuals) propose projects that they will then manage and funders decide who to fund. This is wrong. 

Funding organizations are managing research whether anybody wants to acknowledge it or not. Any filter on what gets funded is a type of management: in addition to the obvious fact that work that doesn’t get funded will happen less frequently, researchers will propose things that they think will get funded, which in turn shapes what kind of research ideas even get thought.[^2] [[The way people think drastically changes depending on their context]]. Until [[Focused Research Organization]]s became “a thing” nobody would have even proposed something like [[The Rejuvinome Project]] to a serious funder. Reporting requirements are another way that funding organizations are in the management business: research takes very different trajectories if it needs to show progress every quarter. 

At the same time, there is valuable work that doesn’t happen because funding organizations are reneging on their management role and researchers bristle at the idea of being managed. Funding is a critical coordination mechanism for work that requires coordination between multiple organizations. Without some hierarchy, individual organizations (whether they’re labs, companies, or just individual researchers) only coordinate when doing so is heavily aligned with the games they are already playing. ([[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]) Labs will coordinate when it leads to a prestigious paper,  companies will coordinate when it leads to revenue, etc.  [[Funding can be seen as buying time from some game to enable someone to play another game]] — enabling a professor to buy that new piece of equipment in exchange for work that is less publishable, for example. Funding is a unique coordination mechanism because of its ability to shift games so directly. Everybody has their price. 

Funding is a powerful coordination mechanism. A large part of DARPA’s modern success happened because they pushed researchers to work on things they would not otherwise have worked on in conjunction with other researchers across several disciplines and industries (see: autonomous cars, advances in electronics, etc.) In the past, other government agencies (like the Energy Research and Development Administration before it was disbanded in the early 80s[^1]) played a more opinionated role and acted as a hub between different research groups — iteratively figuring out what was feasible and how to nudge research projects towards a higher-level goal. Before the era of state-dominated research, systems-level coordination was less important, but wealthy individuals like [[Alfred Loomis]] still brought together researchers in places like [[Tuxedo Park]] and nudged them to collaborate on things he thought were interesting, resulting in fundamental work on radar and other systems.  Research coordination can certainly happen without money involved, but it is much weaker and harder to do, especially in the hyper-competitive environment we find ourselves in today. 

Organizations that fund research are research organizations regardless of whether they directly hire the hands doing the experiments. In situations that need heavy coordination, organizations need to both do research design and actively manage different projects. Calling DARPA a “funding organization” is a misnomer. In many cases DARPA PMs do not simply put out a call for applications and pick which ones they like. Instead, they first create a concrete vision for what needs to be done, work closely with researchers on project ideas, and then make sure those projects coordinate towards a broader goal in a way that would never happen if the researchers doing the projects were left to their own devices. Of course, even within DARPA, the involvement in the process sits on a spectrum. But management is a form of coordination, and all funding organizations manage research whether they admit it or not. That management makes them part of the research process.

Thinking of research management and research funding as decoupled is not only wrong, but harmful. It incorrectly absolves funders of responsibility for being good managers and the critical role they play in activities that require cross-organizational coordination. Conversely, it gives many researchers expectations of autonomy that sabotage higher-level research goals.  

I suspect [[Donald Braben]] would say that this notion of funding=management=research is bullshit. [[brabenScientificFreedomElixir2008]] makes the case that funders shouldn’t go near management with a ten-foot pole — even reporting requirements and judging the feasibility of proposals hamstrings the process of scientific exploration. Many researchers would agree —  one of the most striking results in [[collisonWhatWeLearned2021]] was the fact that `In our survey of the scientists who received Fast Grants, 78% said that they would change their research program “a lot” if their existing funding could be spent in an unconstrained fashion. `.  

However, Braben’s position isn’t actually mutually exclusive with funders as research managers. As any good manager knows,[^3] different people and projects need different management styles. There are incredibly important people and classes of work that are crushed by any constraints. Imagine Einstein’s grant proposal and progress reports for the eight years it took him to formulate [[General Relativity]]. At the same time, there are people and goals that get nowhere if everybody pursues their own agenda. It’s a big, messy spectrum with ample room for argument about how many and which constraints are important. Which activities benefit from which kind of management is a deeply understudied area of metascience. My hunch is that a more rigorous treatment would find that research targeted at building radically new systems needs more direct management to coordinate different components and make sure they’re integrated, while research into core mechanisms of biology and chemistry needs *less* management to allow researchers to quickly pivot to new avenues of exploration that don’t seem promising to an outsider. Any approach is a management choice, regardless of what that choice is. 

It’s misleading to draw a bright line between organizations that fund research and execute on research. Research management matters, and any organization participating in the research process, even if it’s doing nothing but giving away money, is doing some form of research management.  More radically, the idea of “funding organizations” is misleading, reenforcing the proposer/funder dichotomy and collapsing the space of possible management styles. Acknowledging the inevitable importance of research management could enable people within organizations to mindfully shape their management to enable the specific activities they want to see in the world.

### Snippets

Just as there’s a spectrum of management appr  

There is a spectrum between giving an individual or organization funding to do whatever they want to hiring a contractor to hiring an employee (and employees have a similar spectrum). 

It’s also true that there are many ways around the system on both the funding and performing front.  

Different organizations will (and should!) focus on different activities 
There is indeed a distinction between organizations that hire people who are executing on a research agenda and those that do not, like DARPA, the NSF, or Fast Grants. But the mistaken  

If research management does indeed matter, it means that the common perception that “research enablement = research funding” is wrong. To focus only on funding is to implicitly say that filtering-based research enablement is the *only* option.

There’s an implicit attitude that coordination should always happen at the the best way to enable good research is simply by finding high quality people/projects and getting them money to do their own thing. It’s important to acknowledge is 

The thing that makes DARPA work is *good research management*. The same thing could be said about Bell Labs. The balance of freedom and focus 

The missing management on the part of funders has also led to a rent-seeking system. A repeated interaction I see is that professors have their own agenda that they want to sell — the game is whether they can convince a funder to finance that program. *Rent seeking*

Giving out money *is* research management. 

It might be possible to think of research management as having two axes

This is tightly related to the [[Heilmeier — Licklider — Braben — Elon quadrants of Research Management]]

If you’re only giving out money you’re only able to actuate along the enablement axis. 

Some people might object to the term “research management” — that scientists should be left to their own devices and not managed. I agree! But no intervention is in fact a management style. 

### Related
- [[Program design could be done as a residence program]]
- [[Activity design indicates how power and coordination are distributed]]
- [[Vision is not enough]]
- [[Grants only go so far]]
- [[Activity design indicates how power and coordination are distributed]]
- [[Motivation is not context-free]]
- [[An important question is who is doing the research design]]

### References
- [[odlyzkoDeclineUnfetteredResearch1995]]
- [[A new structure for scalable research]]
- [[barberAdvancedResearchProjects1975]]

[^2]: There have been proposals for randomized funding, which certainly does reduce the amount of filtering, but unless you want to give the [[Timecube]] guy an equal chance of funding as anyone else, there will still be some filter. 
[^3]: I am not (yet) a good manager, but I don’t think this statement is very controversial. 
[^1]: See [[Stephen Dean podcast 20 Aug 2021]] and [[deanFusionPowerMagnetic1976]]



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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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§ARPA model

Opacity is important to DARPA’s outlier success

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

Why do people become DARPA Program managers?

The definition of the ARPA model has changed over time

Reaper functions beat culture decks

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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People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games

How does money work in PARPA?

# IBMs proxy game is publishing patents
People are promoted based on how many patents they created. IBM makes a lot of money through licensing.  This is why IBM is the top patent publisher but nobody thinks of them as an exciting innovative company. 

In some ways IBM has basically become a patent troll. 

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



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Institutions shape how individuals interact

Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution

Most institutions have become cancerous

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?

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

The way people think drastically changes depending on their context

Culturally we expect modern organizations to become a monopoly

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

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

# 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

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

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

Institutions force people to give up optionality

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

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

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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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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# Magic - The Gathering



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Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

Marissa Weichman Conversation 2020-04-10

# National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities
Government researchers are still in the ‘academia’ game in that they want to publish papers and discover and invent cool shit.  [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]

Government researchers have both less freedom and more freedom than university researchers. If they can justify how their research is aligned with the higher-level missions of the organization, they don’t need to spend time writing grants or teaching like professors in universities. [[Professors do three or more jobs]]. The need to spend the majority of their time on organizationally aligned research means that they can’t do super crazy things. Additionally [[The people setting research priorities at AFRL are often not technical]], which is another constraint that may kill promising projects.

Research at national labs is perceived by people in academia as being lower impact than at universities. [[University professorships are the highest status jobs in academia]]. The lower impact is because their research needs to align with the department they are part of. ([[Innovation orgs need to be aligned with their money factory]]. This creates a feedback loop where the really good researchers don’t work at government labs and the phenomenon of [[A players hire A players and B players hire C players]]  happens.

This whole story is so similar to [[§Corporate R+D Constraints]], I would go so far as to say that government labs are basically tax-payer funded Corporate R&D.  [[Government research is corporate R&D for United States Inc]].

Questions about the orgs:
- [[How are research agendas set at National Labs?]]
- Are the people who work there technically government or university employees?
- How is the money allocated
- How does your career progress?

### Related
- [[Federally funded research and development centers - FFRDC]]
-  [[Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research]]
- [[Air Force Research Laboratory - AFRL]]
- [[Naval Research Laboratory]]
- [[Jeff Graham Conversation 4-17-2020]]

[^1]:// According to [[Marissa Weichman]] :



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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

All funding organizations are research organizations

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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Many things cannot be measured well

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

Experience does not mean expertise

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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§Misalignment between funders and nonprofits in research

People want to be able to live where they want  and have a family

Most people give money to philanthropy to make themselves look and feel good

People tend to talk about successes more than failures

How do you motivate people via Kleos if they can’t take credit for their work?

People want to be counterfactually important

Shared context is a core variable for human relationships

# People want to be loved and be lovely
[[Adam SmithThe type of growth discussed by [[Adam Smith]]) is growth that happens via specialization and trade. See [[Comparative advantage model]].]] is a smart guy (see [[The Theory of Moral Sentiments]]). The more powerful assertion (and perhaps this should be in the note title) is that this is actually the core human motivation and that every other motivation (fame, power, money) is some projection of this core motivation into a different space.  

The widely-adopted fame, power, money framework runs into many [[Epicycles]]: what about stability? What about intrinsic motivation? What about the fact that many people seem to treat each of those three as an instrumental goal <[[Instrumental vs Intrinsic goals]]> that they can then convert into one of the others? Investors parlay money into fame or power; actors parlay fame into money and power; politicians parlay power into money and fame. You could perhaps argue that the F/P/M thing that someone is motivated by over the course of their life shifts or that they were always *really* seeking one but saw an easier way to it through the other. The biggest flaw in the F/P/M framework is that it doesn’t account for the fact that most people’s desires for each of those things has dramatically diminishing marginal utility beyond which additional F/P/M just becomes a point in a game or people go all in on intrinsic motivations and stability. [[People want to be able to live where they want  and have a family]]. It also doesn’t account for the fact that people very much treat fame and power as vectors, not scalars (money is, almost by definition, a scalar). People can be extremely famous in one corner of the world (say, business) but desperately want to be more well known in another (say, the arts) — you could say that they “are fame motivated” but that wouldn’t actually predict their behavior. Similarly, many academics don’t actually care about power outside their particular field — they’re content to be the biggest fish in a non-global pond. Are they power motivated? Yes, but again that wouldn’t predict their behavior. 

Instead, I would suggest that we should ask:
1. Who does this person want to be loved by?
2. What do those people find lovely in another person?
3. What does this person find lovely in themselves?
4. How much does this person weight #1 vs #3? 
5. What form does this person want the love to be in?

(Here “love” is a very [[Nebulous]] mushy term that captures some combination of “respect” “adoration” “positive attention” that varies for each person.)

In a large part these questions boil down to which game is this person playing? [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]. Noting the game that people are playing and why they are playing it is incredibly predictive of their behavior. It also suggests more fine-grained interventions than “help them get M/F/P”: you can help them get points in the game they’re playing, or create an alternate game that will more effectively get them love from the people they want it from and feel more lovely. 

It’s worth noting that like many “unified theories” this one could be operationally useless. I’ll try to poke that hard because my suspicion is that it is operationally very useful — and more so than the money/fame/power framework. 

One could argue that the real unifying theory is some hand wavy group-selection mediated thing around passing on genes.  But *that* I think is operationally not very useful. 

I think this theory does well with money, fame, intrinsic motivations, and stability but struggles a bit with power. It might be that power is simply what people find lovely in themselves or an instrumental goal to achieve whatever the person finds intrinsically lovely. It’s hard to know the inner mind of people who seem to seek power intrinsically, but my hunch is that they do have at least a vague reason for it, if only to never be hurt again. 

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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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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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When is push or pull appropriate for innovation orgs?

Decreased trust is crippling research

Coordination and Coercion in Research Funding

Hunting vs Farming Ideas

Researchers see their work in many different ways

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

# Research requires intrinsic motivation
`Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.`
- From [[bushScienceEndlessFrontier1945]]

Good research[^1] requires massive intrinsic motivation. “Massive intrinsic motivation” unpacks into two pieces: (1) researchers must have massive motivation and (2) it’s important that motivation is intrinsic. A lot has been written about #1 — great research is a punishing, demanding, creative pursuit that can’t just between the hours of 9 and 5 and requires your full self. Maybe I’ll write about that later but it seems pretty straightforward. Instead, I want to examine why research seems to stand out, even among creative pursuits, in its demand for intrinsic motivation. 

To some extent, this intrinsic motivation is important because research doesn’t lead to the other things that incentivize people. 

Unlike startups, investing, or business in general, research is not aiming to make you rich. Note that this is not always true - some people do go into research with the intention of making a lot of money. While equally prioritizing knowledge and value creation+capture can work in some domains, [[It is hard to capture value from research]].

Doing great research does not translate into status the way that art does. It’s ineffable, but even a highly regarded researcher feels lower status than even middling tier artists. A starving artist has a certain aesthetic appeal while a poor unknown researcher is just pathetic. Perhaps it’s because everybody feels like art is something accessible while the edge of knowledge is often out of sight and out of mind - ie. People don’t care. Of course, this is not the case if a researcher goes out of their way to elevate their own status, but again I would argue that the knowledge is no longer the priority and the research itself will suffer. 

Unlike politics, research does not cash out into power. Researchers certainly  can be powerful of course. 

So research ends up as an activity that is a poor path to external things that people seek - wealth, status, and power - and yet requires just as much if not more dedication, discomfort, and creativity. 

What this note doesn’t address is *where intrinsic motivation comes from*. The common view is that intrinsic motivation comes from some magical platonic source. But in reality [[Motivation is not context-free]].

### Related
- [[Contemporary research has multiple failure modes]]
- The need for massive intrinsic motivation stands at odds with the fact that [[Research has become a commodity]].
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]
- [[Research requires more trust than other disciplines]]

[^1]: Of course, there’s the question “what is research?”  Here I think I mean “the quest for new knowledge.” That’s obviously a [[Nebulous]] concept, and the *reason* you want that new knowledge can be very different. There’s a sense though, that the knowledge is the priority over other factors. 

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Asymmetric career risk

Catalytic funding needs to launch into an existing ecosystem to be effective

What are the alternatives to grants?

Matt Clifford conversation 12 Aug 2021

Astera Lab Meeting Notes

Untapped technical people near the end of their careers may have more potential than young people

There is no career path for building new institutional structures

Narrative Runway

New kinds of ARPAs need new kinds of performers

Legible career paths are shockingly important for social status and mate finding

Michael Jewett conversation 16 Dec 2022

luttigIndexMindset2021

The pipeline model of research casts its own shadows of the future

The possibility of money is often more important than the money itself

One reason people hew so much to top institutions might be because of their external legibility

A desire for career stability is not just a matter of risk tolerance

Career hysteresis

There is a chicken and egg getting amazing program managers when you need to bootstrap a program

# Shadows of the Future
Many people are implicitly or explicitly always asking the question “what future do these actions point towards?” both about themselves and others.  They’re back-projecting the future. This flash-forward drives a shocking amount of behavior. These behavior-driving extrapolations are *Shadows of the Future*.
  
People who want to work in the magazine industry take horrific unpaid internships because they can see a clear path to their dream job. Doctors suffer through something like 25 years of schooling and abuse because they know if they can power through they will be respected and well paid.  People date MBA students because there’s a clear path towards them becoming a good partner. Brand-name organizations have an advantage hiring because people know that having that name on their resume will likely open future opportunities. ([[Organizations and people lend each other social capital]].) People *don’t* quit their job because they don’t know what they will do after and fear how people in the future will react to a blank spot. People are hesitant to take a role that will confuse people in the future, or work for a company that might die in a year or two. Shadows of the future is a nebulous term, but it especially applies to situations where people *don’t* do something because of its anticipated future repercussions.

Most alternatives to existing institutions fail to address the shadows of the future. You get a grant that pays the rent for a few months, perhaps hire a contractor, buy some equipment, or do work that wouldn’t normally be funded in your university. Then what? You need to either land in an institution or get another grant. Either way, you need to tune work that you did on the grant to set you up for your next steps. You haven’t actually escaped institutional incentives at all.    

Almost tautologically, if you’re doing something that doesn’t fit into an existing institutional structure, it’s impossible to foresee a career doing that thing. The phenomenon is more subtle than “grants don’t help you know how you’ll pay rent when the grant runs out” (though that is an issue) — everything from status to the ability to the ability to have a family are coupled to legible career options. 

The evolution of starting a [[Grahamian Startup]] is illustrative. Before perhaps 2012, and certainly before the ’90s, starting a startup was both low-status and risky. Venture capital existed but the process of starting a company and scaling it was incredibly illegible. If you failed, people would look at the (now nonexistent) company on your resume and effectively see a blank spot. You would be straight up behind your peers who stayed in the tracked positions in both status and earning power. The shadows of the future weighed heavy on those who dared to start a startup. Now, starting a company is just as risky in terms of success rates but the process is more legible (thanks in large part to YC, but also a cultural shift), high status (“startup founder” is now a badge of pride), and there are many high status jobs (mostly at big Tech companies) where being a failed startup founder is not only a setback, but potentially even a boon. The shadows of the future have for the most part been lifted from starting a high-growth startup. As a result, starting a startup shifted from the domain of the weird and the outcasts to a perfectly acceptable career choice for MBAs, Ivy graduates, and others who by default have a bright future. 

 This isn’t exactly an expected value calculation — you can’t quantify status, satisfaction etc. But it does tend to hinge on the ability to *visualize* success. 

Shadows of the future is in part why titles matter. 

Shadows of the future has a lot to do with status. [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]] — stepping out of the game. 

This concept is from [[Michael Nielsen]] and [[Kanjun Qiu]]

https://twitter.com/jpsenescence/status/1466179936427859968

### Related 
- [[Asymmetric career risk]]
- I suspect shadows of the future is often confused with [[Loss aversion]]
- Staff scientists need career trajectories https://twitter.com/pdhsu/status/1436403822138572800?s=20
- [[People want to be able to live where they want  and have a family]]
- [[What are the alternatives to grants?]]

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neumannOneProcess2020

Dwight Crow conversation 13 Oct 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
The line of thinking goes: “I am smart. What I really care about is filling the world with spaceships, underwater cities, and teleportation. Trying to do that is hard, risky, and low margin. Software/startups/hedge funds are high margin and I’m confident in my ability to make a lot of money and prestige doing that. So I’m going to spend the first part of my career doing software/startups/hedge funds and then use that money and prestige to make sweet sci-fi shit. 

In general this is the scheme where people say “I’m going to make a lot of money/prestige at X so I can pivot and go after Y which is the thing I really care about.”  Obviously it can work - there are many salient examples - Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, EA Hedge fund folks who give away money. 

Abstractly, the strategy is to try to win at one game, A, so you can then go attack game B. [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]. The trick is that in order to win at game A, you need to get yourself to really care about game A. If game A is lucrative enough that the wealth and power it enables you to accumulate can have a massive impact on game B you won’t be able to win unless you convince yourself to really care about it. When you start caring about game A, you will also start caring about the people who play game A and what they think. You will start caring about their proxy games ([[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]) like fancy cars and houses in the Hamptons if you’re in the hedge fund world. This caring shift is almost inevitable because [[You are the average of the five people you spend the most time around]]. If people playing game A think playing game A is the best thing in the world or that playing game B is stupid, you will too if you emulate those people’s priorities, which you did in order to win at their game. 

On top of a shift in priorities, at some point you will need to make the decision to stop playing a game that you are presumably winning. That is really hard! “Just one more software startup” you tell yourself. A successful software startup leads to a high ranking position at a tech company leads to an awesome VC job where people are constantly fawning over you as long as you focus your time and attention on high-margin endeavors that come to fruition in 3-5 years. [[Venture capitalists need to fund things that increase valuation in a few years and return in 5-7 years]]. 

Note also that if game A is lucrative and high prestige, it will still be hard to achieve a really great result. Failure is very much an option. Would you rather fail at something you supposedly are only using at a tool to get to the thing you actually care about, or the thing itself?

Another thing to note is that ways of thinking don’t transfer as easily as you might hope. 

### Related Tweet 
[Ben Reinhardt on Twitter: “3. Elon set a precedent of “you need to go make a bunch of money in software before you can work on sweet sci fi shit” My hunch is that this is net negative because of the number of people who go for the first part and get stuck.”](https://twitter.com/Ben_Reinhardt/status/1206132376188801024)



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Internal incentive structures within a large organization work against high quality R&D labs

# The returns to politics is higher at large organizations - Stake v Rank
Each individual has less ability to make a big difference in the outcome at larger organizations. Small organizations are like a canoe - extremely maneuverable and every person has a huge effect on the total speed.  ([[Slow is smooth smooth is fast]].) Large organizations are like oil tankers - for the most part people’s jobs are just to keep the thing running and even if you grab the wheel and spin it wildly, it will have a slow effect. 

Additionally, at small organizations (often) each individual’s outcome is strongly tied to the outcome of the organization either through reputation or equity. At large organizations, you might get stock options but for the most part people’s success is more decoupled from the organization’s success. This decoupling of personal success from organizational success means that it’s harder for everybody to share the same goal and [[Politics happens whenever there are three or more people with different goals]].

These two factors combine to make it hard to judge and reward people purely based on their output the larger the organization gets. In this situation, it’s more worthwhile to spend an hour hanging out and making people like you (especially those with power) than it is to put your head down and do work. That is, the returns to politics is higher.

### Related 
- [[Defining clear timescales and scopes for collaborations is a tool to minimize politics]]
- [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]

### References
- [[bahcallLoonshotsHowNurture2019]] captures this concept in the mental model of Stake v Rank



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# What are proxy games that lead to more awesome sci-fi shit?
# What are proxy games that lead to more awesome sci-fi shit
You need to align whatever other games people want to play with making awesome sci fi shit - fame, feeling good, making money

### Related
[[Gwendolyn Regina Politics Discussion]]


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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)]]



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# Who Wants to Play the Status Game? | The Point Magazine
# Who Wants to Play the Status Game- - The Point Magazine
Advanced games where people try to subtlety show they’re better than someone Else
[Who Wants to Play the Status Game? | The Point Magazine](https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/who-wants-to-play-the-status-game-agnes-callard/)
Via [[Visakhan Veerseemy]]


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Relative vs absolute games

# carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012
Listened to the audio book 

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

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