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

Scenes are people producing work aimed at impressing and one-upping each other

DARPA is incredibly flexible with who it hires to be program managers

Scenes push the edge of human capability

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

There are many tight feedback loops built into the ARPA model

National labs and other government research centers are a research alternative to universities

Externalized research is a buffer against B players

Corporate labs no longer fill the niche they did in the early-mid twentieth century

The term ‘Double edged sword’ is bothersome

# A players hire A players and B players hire C players
Originally from [[Steve Jobs]]?

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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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§ARPA model

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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Culture is intellectual dark energy

DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years

Culture is what happens when you're not in the room

Universities are able to maintain relevance because they are forced to reinvent themselves for new generations of students

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

An endowment that funds operations out of the interest on a large principle seems like the ideal funding mechanism for a a private ARPA

The Value of Vision in Radical Technological Innovation

How are Universities so institutionally and culturally stable?

DARPA Staff are Important

ICT Distillation

ICT Outline

# Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave
A standing wave is a curious physical phenomenon where instead of rushing forward with the water that it comprises, the structure of the wave stands still while water flows ever forward.[^1] [Here’s a video of a standing wave to get the picture in your mind.](https://youtu.be/vrfvhs0aFko?t=5)

Like a standing wave, intergenerational institutional culture maintains the same shape despite different people passing through and being shaped by it. <[[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]>. Most institutions that maintain long-term cultural continuity seem to have developed this phenomena.  

Coherent intergenerational culture feels like one of the hallmarks of institutions that stay relevant for significant chunks of time. It’s likely worth digging into how strong intergenerational culture works if you care about building long-term institutions. [[Alexander Rose]] seems to have done some good work here. There’s of course a question of causality <[[Counterfactuals are hard]]>, but I suspect that even if strong intergenerational cultures don’t directly add to institutional longevity, the actions you need to take to create an intergenerational culture will contribute to institutional longevity (and cultural consistency is just aesthetically appealing for some of us!)

Counterintuitively, cultures where people have a shorter tenure may maintain coherence longer. You can observe this phenomena in research labs staffed mostly by grad students, DARPA, and British-style university house systems (think Harry Potter) to name a few.[^2] In many these cases, cultural coherence has lasted more than half a century. One reason for this may be that short tenures mean that the organization is forced to refresh itself to get new people more often and in turn those people refresh the organization. [[Universities are able to maintain relevance because they are forced to reinvent themselves for new generations of students]]. Contrast to organizations that feel like they’ve outlived their usefulness — they’re characterized by sitting in a niche that doesn’t change much and bureaucracy. The latter point is crucial because [[Bureaucracies are human algorithms]], so people are fungible and you don’t need to update to appeal to them — you just get people who want a paycheck. 

[[Marissa Weichman]] independently asserted that the transient nature of graduate students also makes people want to make the most of their time. 

### Questions

Is it possible to tease out shared attributes? 

What are the things that enable it?
- Explicit culture building 
- Exclusivity 
- Culture keepers
- A way to update to new contexts

It’s also worth asking, what are organizations with the most robust cultures?

Is it important to have a few people who have been around for a long time so that the cultural wave behaves like a [[Small world networks]] in time?  [[Long lived organizations need culture keepers]]

### Related
- [[Culture is intellectual dark energy]]
- [[Culture is what happens when you're not in the room]]
- [[Geeks, Mops, and sociopaths in subculture evolution]]
- [[Many DARPA Programs are multigenerational]]
- [[The data of long lived institutions]]

[^1]:<sidenote> For completeness it’s important to note that standing waves can happen in many materials besides water and don’t always involve flows (like when they happen in strings or air.)  
[^2]: Weirdly, people tend to stick around for an average of ~4-5 years in all of these examples. Coincidence? 🤔 [[Human timescales]]



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Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions

Fair games are self-limiting

Philanthropists want things to become sustainable

Peer review has failed as an institution

Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game

Politicization of an institution means that the people in the institution are more aligned with external goals than the institutions mission

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

Why aren’t people building more institutions?

Getting to new optima is hard

Palladium Podcast

Experience does not mean expertise

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

# Most institutions have become cancerous
 Let’s look at this assertion through the lens of evolutionary theory and group selection.   [[Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system]].   [^1]

Cells become cancerous when they stop following the rules that all the cells in the organism follow. In this case, the organism is the higher of two levels of a group selection system. One of the [[Observations that lead to the assertion of institutional decay]] is that individuals are prioritizing themselves over their institutional mission. [[Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role]].  

Organizations are weird because they are default alive instead of default dead once they reach a certain size.  [[What if all entities had expiration dates?]]

To further the analogy between cancer, organisms, institutions, and individuals: cancer develops when cells no longer experience senescence. [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]] - which basically is a cancer on the Level II institution. If the Level II institution is functioning well, it forces the organization to either die or continue to support the goals of the level II institution.  So if we’re seeing a proliferation of cancerous Level I institutions, it means that something has gone wrong with the Level II institutions. 

Here I’m going to go off-roading for a bit: hopefully we’ll find our way back.  Level II institutions seem to have experienced a divergence between their  implicit, explicit, and perceived missions. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]].  Why has this happened? There are many explanations that will appeal to different people based on their values and beliefs. 
- Societally, we’ve shifted towards focusing on the importance of the individual over the importance of the institution. This has been helped by the internet removing gatekeepers and giving everybody a voice. Gatekeeping used to be one of the ways that institutions kept individuals in line. 
- Individuals and institutions no longer agree on what the rules one level up the hierarchy *are*. If you dig into it, I suspect that people on different ideological teams actually have different perceived missions of different Level II institutions. This is not inherently a problem in the group-selection model, as long as those different perceptions can compete against some agreed upon fitness function. The problem is that there is no consensus fitness function all the way up. The extreme version of this is the [[Post-consensus world]].
- In business at least, the missions diverged over the idea of “maximizing shareholder value.” Most people perceive businesses to have missions other than just maximizing shareholder value, so if their explicit mission becomes maximizing shareholder value their perceived and explicit missions have diverged. 
- There are fewer resources in the system (less growth) which intensifies competition between Level I institutions and individuals. ie. There’s less [[Slack - concept]]  in the system.  It’s easy to align all your missions when there’s lots of resources to play around with. And since the group selection rules in the Level II institutions were set up in a high-growth world, they were not set up with the teeth to assert themselves when they run up against the incentives of a low-growth world.  ([[Expended list of WTF happened in 1971 and afterwards]]) 

This note was originally titled ‘Most institutions have metasized.’ [[Noah Tye]] noted [That word doesn’t mean what you think it means](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/010/692/19789999.jpg).  It means that a cancer has spread to multiple sites around an organism. However that may actually be true. There isn’t just one Level I institution where the individuals have stopped following institutional rules. It feels like *all* the Level I institutions in many Level II institutions have this problem. One newspaper starts going for clicks instead of sense and other newspapers follow suit. 

### Related
- [[Load Bearing Fiction]]
- [[Fair games can be gamed]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[Fair games have legible rules]]
- [[Institutions need to either be explicitly temporary or have a path to sustainability]]

[^1]: I have very little actual knowledge and training in evolutionary theory so this is mostly just made up hackwork but it feels explanatory and self-consistent enough to be worthwhile mental kindling for different ways to think about real phenomena. 



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The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies

# NSF and DARPA as Models for Research Funding - An Institutional Analysis
- PMs generally come from research world
- although it seems unable to pay exactly what the PMs would earn in the private sector, it is able to negotiate pay scales and contract terms significantly better than those that other government agencies can offer. 
- PMs come to the agency with their own project, an idea which they essentially originate and to which they have a personal commitment (respondents talked of that commitment in fact as if it were an obsession—although that was not the term they actually used)  
- DARPA cultivates a reputation for being open to new, radical ideas originating outside the organization (indeed, listening to people talk, one is led to believe that the ideas *always*originate from outside the organization) whether or not they fit the defined program. But the office managers and the director play an active role in recruiting ideas that fit into the program and in screening proposals to ensure that the program has some coherence and direction 
- Two under noted things
	- Long term relationships with contracting firms that support the staff - organizational memory
	- Continuous review and discussion around a program
		- small group meetings
		- more formal seminars
		- meetings between PMs and Director
		- Reviews and auditing
		- [[There are many tight feedback loops built into the ARPA model]]
- The [[National Science Foundation - NSF]] does not actively solicit proposals. 
- The conservative bias (In the NSF) is widely attributed to the peer review process through which funds are awarded. 
	- Half of NSF PMs are career civil servants ::as opposed to [[DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years]]::
		- [[Intergenerational culture is like a standing wave]]
		- [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]]
- NSF and NIH PMs need to push back against peer review to save a proposal 
	- [[Highest order bit]]
	- [[Decisions made by committees lead to median results]]
- On the one hand they have a profound intellectual commitment to science and engineering, although not necessarily a well-fleshed out research agenda. On the other hand, their position at MIT requires them to raise substantial funds from agencies and organizations on the outside 
- An additional two to three months is viewed as “summer support” and must be raised through research grants and contracts on the outside 
- In many respects the research establishment is like a small business and the terms in which faculty members discuss it makes them sound like independent entrepreneurs 
	- [[The Science of Science Policy - A Handbook]]
- DARPA helped researchers build relationships (and they liked that) 
- DARPA awards are often larger than NSF or NIH
	- [[What is the minimum amount to fund a project in a lab?]]
- Researchers can use DARPA money to buy equipment for other projects
- Funds as contracts rather than grants, so they can be cut off. 
	- Performance expectations are unreasonably high which means they can cut off the contract at any point
	- Super awkward for PhD students
	- Annoying three month reporting intervals ::this might be a government req::
	- [[It is relatively easy for DARPA PMs to re-deploy funding]]
- [[National Institute of Health - NIH]] program officers not respected while [[National Science Foundation - NSF]] program managers are
- The failure (of a performer) triggers a discussion in which the first question is whether the goals were correctly specified and how they might be redefined in the light of the research that has already taken place. [[There are many tight feedback loops built into the ARPA model]]
- there is very little interaction among the PMs themselves (the quip is that the only thing they share is a travel agent)  ::this contradicts mark::

### Published
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Michael Piore]]
- [[Phech Colatat]]
- [[Elisabeth Reynolds]]
## Link

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Institutions shape how individuals interact

Most institutions have become cancerous

Individual actions reflect on Institutions

Observations that lead to the assertion of institutional decay

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

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

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

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



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What makes a good organizational mission?

# People use the purpose and mission of an institution as a proxy for what that organization actually does
For example - people assume that the media creates sense of a noisy world, academia increases our scientific knowledge, the education system educates, and the CDC controls disease regardless of how well any of these institutions actually do this. 

### Related
- [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
- [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]
- [[Complex emergent systems have purposes but causes and effects don’t hold much meaning]]
- [[Complex emergent systems have purposes not causes and effects]]


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Innovation orgs need to be aligned with their money factory

§Philanthropy and Non-Profit Constraints

People have different and unknown caring money thresholds

People always spend money for a purpose

The traditional non-profit structure is a bad idea for an organization that requires a significant chunk of capital and produces uncertain results on a long timescale

Nadia Eghbal conversation 7 Jul 2021

# Philanthropies can easily become misaligned with their money factories
[[People always spend money for a purpose]] and people usually give to philanthropies to make themselves feel good or increase their reputation. Both reputation and ego are such complex, fragile ‘products’ that it’s easy for an organization to take actions that do not deliver - especially risky or controversial actions. 

Wealthy individuals can also be fickle, promising long term support but then pulling it on a whim.

In a worst-case-scenario philanthropies can fall into the trap where as an institution they continue to strive to survive beyond their use. [[The default state of an institution is to become a permanent thing dedicated to its own self preservation]] and this is particularly pernicious among philanthropies devoted to a specific cause that is no longer relevant. The philanthropy becomes incentivized to maintain the very thing that it was fighting against so that it can stay relevant. If people are donating to it in order to fight against whatever it’s supposed to be fighting against  this is the ultimate misalignment. It sounds malicious but it can come about just through optimizing metrics. 

## Related
[[Innovation orgs need to be aligned with their money factory]]
## Reference
[[Email to Sam Molyneux]]
           


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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

Richie Kohman conversation 22 May 2023

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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Goal aligning happens on specific scopes and timescales

Centralized coordination sometimes stops effort from being repeated in smart ways

# What if all entities had expiration dates?
# What if all entities had expiration dates
Senescence 


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Benʼs working notes

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

Related

Links to this note