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

People are using institutions as platforms

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

Different institutions have created monopolies on various enterprises

Being Elite should be painful

Academic administrators and professors are playing very different games

Week of 26 July 2020

The Roman Empire was built on an aristocracy of service

# §Institutions and Games
### What are Institutions
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]
- [[List of Purpose and Missions of Different Institutions]]
- [[There are two levels of institution]]
- [[Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution]]
- [[Individual actions reflect on Institutions]]
- [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]
- [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]
- Institutions have [[Institutional scar tissue]]
- [[Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution]]
- [[Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions]]
- [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]]
- [[Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it]]
- [[Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution]]

### Institutions working well or badly
- [[Market failures are actually failures of the existing institutions to allow markets to work]]
-  [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]
- [[Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions]]
- [[“Have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[Lowering barriers to entry is clutch for healthy institutions]]

### Games
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[Fair games can be gamed]]
- [[Fair games have legible rules]]
- [[Fair games are self-limiting]]
- [[Making a game more fair reduces its variance]]
- [[Attempting to make a game more fair by adding rules has many unintended downsides]]
- [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]]
- [[Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game]]
- [[Relative vs absolute games]] ::needs work::
- [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]
- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]
- [[Reaper functions beat culture decks]]
- [[Reaper functions dominate other incentives]]

### Different Games in the World
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]]
- [[Academia is the game where you gain status by getting attention for new knowledge]]

### Questions
- [[Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?]]
- [[What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?]]
- [[What if all entities had expiration dates?]]
- [[Why aren’t people building more institutions?]]
- [[What are proxy games that lead to more awesome sci-fi shit?]]

### References
- [[Venkatesh Rao thread on institution building]]
- [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
- [[Problematic 5 — The Media is Dead, Long Live the Media]]
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]



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§Academia Constraints

Peer review has failed as an institution

Peer review doesn’t catch duplications

Human capital theory of stagnation

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

Startups and Academia are bad at addressing structural constraints

Peer review gives peers veto power over each other

# 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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§ARPA model

DARPA underutilizes the internet to execute on its model

DARPA’s aversion to people with a web presence hints at a way that the internet has eroded institutions

How could the ARPA Model take advantage of the internet?

You need to minimize actions that lead to short term glory if you want to emulate DARPA

# DARPA’s aversion to people with a web presence may be how they avoid asymmetric career risk
[[Asymmetric career risk]] happens when you know that the downsides of doing the ’safe’ thing are capped while the downsides of doing the ‘risky’ things are uncapped. Therefore it makes sense that you would be more willing to make risky moves in an institutional context if you know you aren’t going to be judged on your actions either way after you leave ([[The transient nature of most people at DARPA enables ideas to be revisited]].)  

People with a web presence tend to be focused on playing status games ([[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]) or at least are in a world where they realize that their career depends on their output. [[Internet people are playing a game to maximize engagement]].  So being an internet person could be taken as being a signal that a potential PM would have in the back of their mind “what will other people think about this?”

People are more likely to judge a crazy act positively if they know the reasons why it happened.  So if the people you care about are a small group of peers ([[DARPA is relatively tiny and flat]]) rather than the whole internet it increases incentives to just go for it.  

Low web presence also tends to be correlated with a high ratio of doing to talking.  [[DARPA PMs need to think for themselves, be curious, and have low ego]]

Additionally, less internet presence means less grand announcements and fewer expectations. [[If you know it’s easy to shut something down it’s easier to start]]. Contrast this to something like [[Peter Diamandis]] and the [[X-Prize]].

Of course, it could be more simple and DARPA just doesn’t like people who are too loud because they like to keep things hush hush. [[Opacity is important to DARPA’s outlier success]]. But then maybe there is something to keeping things hush hush. If you keep things hush hush, you don’t have to deal with lock-in from publicly announcing you’re going to do something. 

### Related
- [[Asymmetric career risk impacts corporate R+D]]
- Interestingly [[Regina Dugan]] is the one DARPA director with a heavy internet presence who has also been investigated for conflict of interest. 



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

Opacity is important to DARPA’s outlier success

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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When should we defer to experts?

# Experience does not mean expertise
We often mistake two separate classes of experience for expertise. Both experience and badges certainly *correlate* with expertise but are not causal and the correlation is weaker than our brains assume. 

Of course, all of this is predicated on the question “what do we mean by an expert?”  [[There are secretly three kinds of experts]]. Generally when we’re looking for experts, we’re implicitly referring to experts with proficiency. [[Experts should have proficiency even if their primary function is to exercise power or speak to a platform]]. 

However, proficiency is often illegible to people outside of the discipline. [[Disciplines where it is clear to an outsider whether you are proficient]].  Duration is a direct proxy for proficiency. Duration is perhaps not the right word but it’s the thought pattern that goes “you’ve done thing X a lot or at least talk about it often, so you must be proficient.” Expertise-based power and platforms are more discernible via proxies. These proxies include badges and popularity. Badges mean that someone has gone through some kind of gatekeeping process  eg. publishing a book or holding a position) Popularity implies that many *other* people think they’re an expert.  

Duration is a poor proxy because there are *many* disciplines where you can get by without improving or developing a keen intuition for the affordances of a domain. People can run every day for years and not become faster or do a job for decades and not necessarily be more proficient than a journeyman or highly-competent novice.

Badges and popularities have always been shaky proxies but arguably their ability to reflect underlying proficiency has eroded because of several later 20th and early 21st century trends. The number of badges has exploded, while the gatekeeping quality of the institutions giving them out has declined. [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]. Similarly, the internet has allowed (and encouraged) popularity predicated on, but entirely divorced from proficiency.

### Related
- [[How can you tell if an expert has a minimum level of proficiency to wield power or speak to a platform?]]
- [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]
- [[Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game]]



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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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# Is it possible that we’re actually getting less research because we have more researchers?
# Is it possible that we’re actually getting less research because we have more researchers
[[The number of researchers has exploded]] When you have more researchers, it’s harder to judge them directly on their process or quality of thinking. Instead, because [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]] there are a ton of academic proxy games: number of peer-reviewed papers, citations, prizes etc. as proxy games for research quality.  [[§Academia Constraints]]. For each of these, there is an argument why they get in the way of doing good research. In the extreme case, standardized grant application processes could push the world towards the [[Szilard point]].

Separately, the proxy games can also be explained by universities being run by administrators who themselves are not researchers. [[People who have done a thing should be in charge of a thing]]. The 

### Related
- [[The peer review and citation system incentivizes people to work on things that other people think is interesting]]
- [[What is the difference between administering, managing, operating, and staffing an organization?]]



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Fair games have legible rules

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

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

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



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Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it

Research requires more trust than other disciplines

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

Streetlight Effect

Regulations create paradigm lock-in

Financialization is the scalarization of the world

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

We stand on the shoulders of too many giants to give them all credit

Technology increases the number of externalities in the world

Academia judges via novelty because there are no metrics but there are no metrics when the thing is still research

Explicit rules are a substitution for learned pattern matching

There are many questions and issues with the idea of pay-it-forward tithing

Scalarization in a changing environment

# Many things cannot be measured well
This might seem vacuously true. However, many people act as though it is not true which leads to two coupled effects. 

1. People use a thing they *can* measure well as a proxy for a thing that cannot be measured well. This leads to the [[Streetlight Effect]].
2. People measure something poorly and then forget how bad the metric is at representing the thing they’re actually trying to measure. It’s arguable but I think a lot of the happiness literature falls into this category. 

People desperately want to measure things because metrics lead to legibility and [[Legibility enables action]].

The desire to measure *all the things* can enable amazing outcomes, like modern science! If you go from “when you increase the pressure while holding volume constant things get hotter” to precisely measuring how much volume, how much pressure and how how much the temperature goes up you can actually figure out important laws of nature. 

### Related
- [[Metrics don’t distinguish between Type I and Type II progress]]
- [[Organizations run by practitioners have less bureaucratic bs]]
- [[Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it]]
- [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]



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Lee Ricketson conversation 6/5/20

# National Labs don’t foster efficient or long term research
- [[The game in national labs is roughly the same as academia but with different constraints]] 
	- Promotions and raises are done by the management stack ranking everybody and putting them into bins based on:
			- Papers
			- Talks
			- Grants
			- Peer opinions
			- Milestones hit
		- The promotion process screws over people working on long-term projects because even if they hit milestones, it looks better to actually complete a project
		- [[Decisions made by committees lead to median results]]

Notice that “quality of research” is not on this list. It means that the national labs are totally dominated by proxy games. [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]].
	
A system where promotions and raises are done by management stack ranking and judges you on peer opinions and milestones hit encourages you to try to get everybody to like you and set easily hittable milestones. [[Stake vs Rank]]. [[The returns to politics is higher at large organizations - Stake v Rank]].

### Related
- [[Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission]]
- [[The government grant process depends on politics and committees]]
- [[All the incentives in research drive towards conservatism]]



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Someone needs to buy manufactured technology eventually in a monetized economy

Different axes of where research gets done in the US

§Axes for Looking at Funding and Organizations

Often spending money is the primary goal over the output of that money

What do organizational boundaries actually mean?

# Organizations can get incomes via Contracts, budgets, or products 
# Organizations can get incomes via Contracts, budgets, or products 

Contracts have more or less fuzzy deliverables.  You need to do some sort of sales to get a contract. Contracts have more or less fuzzy deliverables. Grants are a form of contract funding with fuzzy deliverables.

Products are something where you build the thing and then people pay you for them. In a way, prizes are a form of ‘product funding.’ 

The line between contract and product is not always well-delineated.

Budgets you just get money from someone else that you’re in a relationship with. Everything is implicit.  Budgets for organizations are analogous to salaries for people. Budgets are fragile - if you have a budget you have a steady source of income … until you don’t. Organizations with budgets can be defunded at any time. They generally don’t have any buffer. 

At the end of the day the knobs that get turned are 
- Direction setting 
	- In a contract system the funder sets the direction
	- In a product system the fundee sets the direction
	- In a budget system the fundee sets the direction
- Tightness around deliverables 
	- In a contract system the agreement is tight
	- In a product system the agreement is loose 
	- In a budget system the agreement is tight
- Explicitness of the agreement
	- In a contract system the agreement is explicit
	- In a product system the agreement is explicit
	- In a budget system the agreement is implicit

All the possibilities 
- Funder direction + tight deliverables + explicit agreement *Contract*
- Funder direction + loose deliverables + explicit agreement *Bad contract?*
- Funder direction + tight deliverables + implicit agreement  *Prize?*
- Funder direction + loose deliverables + implicit agreement *Grant  call*
- Fundee direction + tight deliverables + explicit agreement  ??
- Fundee direction + loose deliverables + explicit agreement *Product*
- Fundee direction + tight deliverables + implicit agreement  ??
- Fundee direction + loose deliverables + implicit agreement *Career Grant*

### Related
- [[It is relatively easy for DARPA PMs to re-deploy funding]]
- [[Organizations and their funding mechanisms are coupled]]
- [[People create proxy games for long term or hard-to-measure games]]
- [[Lee Ricketson conversation 6/5/20]]
- [[Innovation orgs need to be aligned with their money factory]]



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Institutions shape how individuals interact

Shadows of the Future

Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

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

People want to be loved and be lovely

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

IBMs proxy game is publishing patents

DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years

§Institutions and Games

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

All funding organizations are research organizations

Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

Why would people want to work with PARPA?

Research requires intrinsic motivation

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

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

Universities have multiple conflicting missions

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

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

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

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

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

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



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Many things cannot be measured well

Kumar Types of Games Tweet

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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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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DARPA is relatively tiny and flat

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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It is feasible to consciously cultivate a scene of frontier openers

# 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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Benʼs working notes

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

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