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

Different institutions have created monopolies on various enterprises

People are using institutions as platforms

Being Elite should be painful

Academic administrators and professors are playing very different games

The Roman Empire was built on an aristocracy of service

Week of 26 July 2020

# §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]]
- [[Finite and Infinite Games]]



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Life Style Guide

Institutions shape how individuals interact

Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution

Pieces of the Action Forward Intro Notes

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

Individual actions reflect on Institutions

Trusted Hierarchies are one way that centralized coordination can happen

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

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

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



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Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

Shadows of the Future

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

People want to be loved and be lovely

DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years

Yuval Levin

IBMs proxy game is publishing patents

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

How does money work in PARPA?

§Institutions and Games

Reaper functions beat culture decks

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

Why would people want to work with PARPA?

Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

Charlie Songhurst conversation 31 Aug 2021

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

Research requires intrinsic motivation

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

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
- [[Finite and Infinite Games]]
- [[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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Nassim Taleb

Uncertainty always involves risk but risk does not always involve uncertainty

Most predictions suck

High-risk research is a malnomer

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

# Skin in the game (SITG)
Popularized by [[Nassim Taleb]] in [[Antifragile]]

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

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

# 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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Tyler Cowen

# Work on these things - Marginal Revolution
- **More studies of super-effective people.** Either individually or collectively. 
- **A comprehensive analysis and critique of the NIH and NSF.**
- **Why is life expectancy so long in Hong Kong?**
- **Bloomberg Terminal for everything.**
- **A comprehensive guide to the American healthcare system.** 
- **Better answers for how to quantify worker productivity.**
- **What should Widodo do?**Indonesia is a large, populous middle-income country. 
- **A comparative study of foundations and their efficacy.** 
- **Institutional critiques.**More broadly, there is no discipline of *institutional criticism*. There is a very rich literature of *policy criticism* in economics, journalism, and non-fiction books. There is also a rich literature of “corporate criticism”: there are thousands of articles about how Facebook (budget: $20 billion) works and how it might be good or bad. But there is relatively little analysis of the most important institutions in our society: government departments. How is the Department of Agriculture (budget: $150 billion) organized and how effective or not is it? How about the Department of Energy (budget: $32 billion)? And why are not those questions paramount in the minds of policymakers?
- 
- **Cultures of excellence.**
- **Regeneration at the government layer.**Herbert Kaufman (unsurprisingly) concludes in an empirical study that  [government organizations don’t die](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0815748396) . While we might all agree that this is a problem, actionable solutions are in short supply. What can or should we do about this?
- **Credible plans for new top-tier universities.**7 of the best 25 universities in the world (Times ranking) were started in the US between 1861 and 1891 by ambitious reformers. It’s probably harder in many ways to start an impactful new university today… but it’s likely not *impossible* and the returns to doing so successfully might be very high. What might be a good plan? Why have so few of these plans come to fruition? 
- **Summaries of the state of knowledge in different fields.** As a general matter, a lot of oral knowledge in the world is still not readily available, and reflection on this fact might lead one in many interesting directions. One obvious application is helping people more readily understand the present state of affairs in different domains. If I want to know “how we’re doing” in, say, antiviral drug development, I could spend a few hours hunting for top researchers, email a few, and perhaps get on calls to obtain their candid assessments. Are we making good progress? What are the most important open problems? What’s holding things back? And so on. How can we make all of this knowledge publicly available across all fields?
- **Mechanisms for better matching.** One of the single interventions that could do the most to improve global welfare would be to improve the efficiency of the partner/marriage matching ecosystem.
- **What should Durkan do?**Jenny Durkan is the current mayor of Seattle. 
### Published
- 12/2019
## Questions
## Thoughts
## Related
## Authors
- [[Tyler Cowen]]
## Link
[Work on these things - Marginal REVOLUTION](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/work-on-these-things.html)

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Russ Roberts

Nobody is resigning for failing to do their institutional role

People do not like conforming to external structures

Progress Studies 2020-03-28

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

Great Founder Theory - Article

Disintermediation destroys institutions and leads to winner take all

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

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

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Ben's working notes

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

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