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

§Institutions and Games

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

# Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?
# Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission
We’ve lost trust and confidence in institutions. We hope that people in institutions act in line with the purpose and mission of those institutions but increasingly that’s no longer the case. It’s almost a tautology to say that the people in those institutions no longer have incentives to act in line with the purpose and mission of those institutions. 

It doesn’t seem like people in institutions have very many incentives to uphold the mission and purpose of the institution. Without their career, power, wealth, etc. being tied to that mission and purpose even good rational people will act out of line with the institution’s mission and purpose.  These people have no [[Skin in the game (SITG)]] in aligning their actions with the institutional purpose. Note how [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]. 

So what if you literally put rules in place that asked whether someone’s actions were in line with the institutional mission and goals? The more extreme version would look like asking whether someone’s actions were the ones that *maximized* the institutions societal goals. The extreme version seems like a good idea because it’s straightforward to that there are actions which are to some degree in line with institutional missions that in aggregate erode the institution. For example a regulator favoring his buddy’s company over one that makes superior products. Without the maximization criteria, favoritism is arguably ok as long as the buddy’s company is not actively going against institutional purpose. It’s much more straightforward to ask “given the possible actions, did this person take the action that contributed maximally the institutional purpose?” 

Institutional SITG would look like  firing and disgracing a journalist because they took an action that didn’t maximize societal sense-making.  

Institutional SITG would require pre-agreeing on the role of an institution. The debate over the role of the institution pops the debate to a higher level leverage point ([[Leverage Points — Places to intervene in a system]]) where you’re arguing about the  goal of a system instead of people in the system. Hopefully this discussion would move us away from the fact that [[People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does]].

This debate would also be useful because it would enable us to precisely call out which institutions had multiple conflicting missions.  For example, [[Universities have multiple conflicting missions]]. It is probably too much to ask that each institution have only orthogonal missions. 

It raises the question what are the purposes and missions of most [[List of Purpose and Missions of Different Institutions]]

### Related
- [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]]
- [[Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave]]



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Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions

Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk

Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave

The ability to say ‘huh that’s funny’ is important for discovering new phenomena

People do not like conforming to external structures

Incentives are the fundamental forces of peopleland

DARPA is relatively tiny and flat

All institutions are coupled to at least one game

Reaper functions dominate other incentives

Grants only go so far

You need to break rules to create new paradigms

Individual actions reflect on Institutions

Heuretics evolve by moving between institutions

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

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

Assertions

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

Organizations are groups of people organized to pursue a shared goal

# Institutions shape how individuals interact
Institutions primarily shape how individuals interact by setting up rules for games. [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]

At the same time [[People do not like conforming to external structures]], so there is always some inherent tension between individual incentives and institutional rules. However the goal of the rules is to get everyone to a better equilibrium by creating a shared set of rules that can themselves compete -  [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]. 

Institutions both shape how individuals interact *within* an institution but also how individuals interact *between institutions.* 

 The ‘within institution’ context includes both interactions within an organization, but also within Level II institutions like ‘The Media.’  [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]]. The former is company culture, while the latter is fuzzy things like ‘journalistic ethics’ or ‘honor.’ 

‘Between institution’ interactions are our expectations and perceptions of individuals knowing that they are part of an institution. You have a different expectation of a police officer, journalist, and professor knowing nothing but their profession[^1] and there may be different spoken or unspoken rules around interactions.  Most people respond differently when a police officer asks them to do something than when a non-police officer asks the same thing, or when a journalist asks for an interview.  These expectations from outside the institution are based on the perceived role of the institution. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]. 

A lot of how institutions shape how individuals interact between institutions is tied up with someone acting in their institutional role. When an individual acts ‘in an institutional role’ they basically become an avatar of that institution. They are imbued with that institution’s power and reputation - both good and bad. Any action they take reflects not on them, but on the institution as a whole. 

Drawing a line between someone acting in an institutional role and as an individual is the tricky piece. At the end of the day, an institutional avatar and an individual are the same physical human, so distinguishing between the two is an act of imagination.  It might even be a [[Load Bearing Fiction]]. In the relatively easy cases, uniforms and shifts distinguish people between their institutional and individual roles: an officer in uniform represents the department and a waiter on shift represents the restaurant. The line between institution and individual just becomes murkier from there until you get to someone like the Queen of England who is *always* in her institutional role. But even when ideally the uniform is a bright line, the real line is not so clear: there are implicit institutional expectations on individuals 24/7. 

Part of these constant expectations are conduct based: there are standards you expect individuals in different institutional roles to obey regardless of whether they are embodying the institutional avatar or not. In a way, these are almost purity standards that determine whether the individual is *worthy* of embodying the avatar. But a bookmark in this notion of purity. Politicians having sex scandals is the classic example here. 

Part of these constant expectations are based on the fact that the institutional avatar and the individual are never truly separated. This incomplete separability is why many people think professors should not have relationships with their students. In a more clear cut situation, the student could be using the relationship to get better grades or the student could feel subtlety coerced.  Even if they both are truly attracted to each other, relationships can end, people an act poorly in response to breakups, and the professor still controls a lever of power. Note that the stronger the individual norms on institutional behavior, the less you need institutional rules mediating behavior. In an extreme case, if all professors would never ever ever let anything affect grades besides the quality of the work, then you need less strict rules about relationships between professors and students. As soon as one professor breaks this standard though, the institution tightens rules on all the professors. Shifting from norms to explicit rules like this creates [[Institutional scar tissue]]. 

The incomplete separability of avatar and individual also shapes how people interact because people *know* that the separability is incomplete. People will treat people with power differently even when they are playing golf or posting about something totally unrelated to their job on twitter. 

Which brings us to two big ways that the ways that institutions have shaped how individuals interact have changed. 
1. [[The post-consensus world has fractured norms]]. These fractured norms especially affected the expectations of where the line lies between acting as an institutional avatar and an individual as well as which individual behaviors reflect back onto the institutional role. Purity is almost taboo to talk about, but there is now strong disagreement over what makes someone too impure to be an institutional avatar. 
2. [[The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions]]

### Related 
- Ideas of Innovation and Invention from [[mokyrLeverRichesTechnological1992]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]

[^1]: Of course, it’s important note which expectations are  institutionally imposed vs. just correlated with people in the institutions, like the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. *However* even that is complicated, because institutions tend to encourage or at least shelter these traits. If someone had some absent-minded tendencies and went into, say, hedge funds, they may have suppressed them while as a professor they let them flourish. This institutional trait-encouragement may be nothing more than the reenforcement from keeping a bunch of people with the same trait in the same place and [[You are the average of the five people you spend the most time around]] doing its work. But since [[Organizations don’t do anything, people in organizations do things]], ‘enhancing traits by getting a bunch of people with similar traits together in the same place’ is a reasonable, if mundane, mechanism by which institutions can reasonably shape how individuals interact. 



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Institutions shape how individuals interact

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

Most institutions have become cancerous

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

Observations that lead to the assertion of institutional decay

# Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role 

[[If you buy that the role of public corporations is to maximize value for their shareholders, they are one of the only institutions that are consistently living up to their purpose and mission]].  

### Tweet
[Ben Reinhardt on Twitter: “On that note - when was the last time anybody resigned for failing at their role in an institution?As opposed to something orthogonal… https://t.co/Pd9RJIDKmG”](https://twitter.com/Ben_Reinhardt/status/1244350864938196993?s=20)

### Related
- [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
- [[Vows]]



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Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it

The post-consensus world has fractured respect lines

National Labs don’t foster efficient or long term research

# Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission
When you think of a politicized institution, you think of people using the institution to further the interests of some outside party rather than doing the thing that aligns with the purpose or mission of the institution. If that outside party is a concrete entity like a person or organization, this is just straight up corruption. But if the outside party is an ideology (or the representative of an ideology) we would call it politicization.

Politicization of an institution is just corruption to an ideology. 

### Related
- [[People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does]]
- [[Politics happens whenever there are three or more people with different goals]]
- [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]
- [[Starting in 2001, DARPA directors began to sync up with presidential administrations]]



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# Reformers are heretics who aren’t kicked out of an institution
Is there any difference between a reformer and a heretic besides the fact that one is kicked out of an institution and the other manages to stay with it long enough to change it? Both have divergent policy ideas. 

There also might be something around heretics being actively hunted, while outcasts are just ignored. 

Institutions have different tolerance for divergent opinions and are more or less open to change. Four quadrants
- High Openess to divergent opinion, high openess to change: Reformers thrive
- High Openess to divergent opinion, low openness to change: frustrated potential reformers lead on their own
- Low Openness to divergent opinion, High Openness to change: Lots of meaningless changes, lots of heretics
- Low Openness to divergent opinion, low openness to change: lots of heretics 

### Related 
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]]
- [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]
- [[Could you design incentives so everyone had skin-in-the-game around institutional purpose and mission?]]
- [[Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission]]



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What if all entities had expiration dates?

Philanthropies can easily become misaligned with their money factories

Institutions need to either be explicitly temporary or have a path to sustainability

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

Dinner 16 Jun 2021

# The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation
As a culture we tend to assume an institution will keep existing by default. It’s “sad” if a company goes out of business, a department is shut down, etc. People associated with the institution are incentivized to keep it alive and prestigious. It looks much better to be a former employee of a rich and powerful company than a fallen one. 

The incentives to keep an institution alive regardless of its outcomes is made worse in situations where it’s hard to fire people. Permanent employees can become people whose comfortable jobs are dependent only on the institution continuing to exist rather than achieving anything. And since people tend to bring on people like themselves ([[A players hire A players and B players hire C players]]) eventually all the people in the institution will become like that the same way volatile gas boils off and leaves more sedate gas. It’s generally harder to fire people in the government so this phenomena is especially apparent in governments. 

Philanthropies dedicated to a specific mission become caught in a trap where they can eliminate their own reason for existing.  Sub-optimal monopolies are the business world instantiation of this phenomena. 

It’s possible that default temporary members of an institution can help combat this phenomenon. Universities have managed to stay pretty constant for hundreds of years [[Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave]] possibly because professors had to be graduate students before that. [[DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years]] and [[Publishing feels more like hardware development than software development]] has managed to stay high quality for decades.

This may have been the founding fathers’ thought behind the temporary congresspeople and executives in the United States government. Sadly, the US government also demonstrates that the temporary nature is clearly not sufficient. Could you make an argument that the ratio of elected to unelected people in the government shifted and led to the change? The same has been true in universities - the number of people who weren’t default temporary graduate students have exploded. 

This note was originally `The default state of a government entity is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation - very hard to fire people` but it’s actually true of large businesses and philanthropies as well. 

Is this related to why people stay in bad marriages and relationships?

### Related
- [[What if all entities had expiration dates?]]
- [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]]
- [[People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does]]
- [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]





From [[Mark McGranaghan]]

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Benʼs working notes

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

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