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]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/§Institutions_and_Games)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/§Institutions_and_Games)




# Great Founder Theory - Article
- Need to be able to talk about history and the future wrt the same dynamics
- Define institution as a zone of close coordination maintained by automated systems
- Beaurocracies are the most automated institutions
- Institutons can be functional or non functional 
- Asserts that functional institutions require a founder who can coordinate people
- Organizations do not undergo natural selection so it matters less If they copy source code accurately and people can get away with cargo cutting
- Civilization is ecosystem of institutions
- Great founders start functional institutions 
### Published
9/2018
## Questions
## Thoughts
- Not sure I agree with definition of institutions 
## Related
- [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
## Authors
- [[Samo Burja]]
## Link
[Great Founder Theory - Samo Burja - Medium](https://medium.com/@samo.burja/great-founder-theory-93751e25c173)



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Great_Founder_Theory_-_Article)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Great_Founder_Theory_-_Article)




Institutions need to differentiate between individuals inside and outside the institution

Institutions shape how individuals interact

Most institutions have become cancerous

Having more separate games is good for society

§Institutions and Games

Classical liberalism arose in an environment that no longer exists

Reaper functions dominate other incentives

Human capital theory of stagnation

Optimizing individual components of a system is often at odds with the system itself

The internet has disintermediated institutions shaping individual interactions

Is it possible to have a collectivist government built on top of inalienable individual rights?

The way people think drastically changes depending on their context

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

Culturally we expect modern organizations to become a monopoly

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

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

# Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system
In group selection theories of evolution, two-level hierarchies generate [[Slack - concept]] for the lower level to achieve better equilibria via competition between the higher levels. The classic example is the organism-cell dual level hierarchy, which enables cells to achieve their long run goal of replicating better than if the best strategy was  to become cancerous and grow at the expense of all of the other cells.  The second layer of the hierarchy enables entities to escape [[Thomas Hobbes]]. 

From [[alexanderStudiesSlack2020]] : `Group selection works when the group itself has a shared genetic code (or other analogous ruleset) that can evolve. `

Institutions are this `analogous ruleset` for groups of individuals. In [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]], [[Yuval Levin]] literally makes that claim without the evolutionary framing: [[Institutions shape how individuals interact]]. Put differently, institutions set the rules for the game. [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]].

Framed as the second level of a group selection we could also expect institutions themselves to compete and evolve. What are they competing over? In other words, what determines their fitness? Institutions compete over who can achieve their missions the best - [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]]. In an ideal world, news organizations would compete to be the best societal sense-making organization, universities would compete to be the best educational-research organizations, etc. These are all Level I institutions. Remember,  [[There are two levels of institution]]. Perhaps we could think of the fitness function itself as Level II institutions - “The Press,” “Academia,” “Business,” “Government” etc. Seen through that lens, there’s actually another two-layer group selection process between Level I and Level II institutions, where the Level II institutions are the rules of the game that Level I institutions play.  

Going even one step farther - is there yet another layer of the hierarchy? Could we think of ‘culture’ or ‘society’ as rules for how different Level II institutions interact? Here’s where the analogy breaks down because culture doesn’t just act on Level II institutions, but on Level I institutions and individuals as well - revealing that it’s actually a complex system that is not a modularized hierarchy. 

In the same way that cells that have become cancerous stop following the rules of the higher hierarchical level for their own benefit, [[Most institutions have become cancerous]]. This note is important because it implies that the suggestion ‘abandon institutions and empower the individual’ is not a viable solution. 

### Related
- [[Coordination Problems]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Institutions_are_the_second_level_of_a_group_selection_evolutionary_system)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Institutions_are_the_second_level_of_a_group_selection_evolutionary_system)




Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions

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

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

Grants only go so far

You need to break rules to create new paradigms

Individual actions reflect on Institutions

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

Assertions

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

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

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. 



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Institutions_shape_how_individuals_interact)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Institutions_shape_how_individuals_interact)




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

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 
# 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]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Nobody_is_resigning_for_failing_to_do_their_institutional_role)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Nobody_is_resigning_for_failing_to_do_their_institutional_role)




Life Style Guide

Pieces of the Action Forward Intro Notes

Trusted Hierarchies are one way that centralized coordination can happen

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

# 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?]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Organizations_don’t_do_anything,_people_in_organizations_do_things)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Organizations_don’t_do_anything,_people_in_organizations_do_things)




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

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]]


[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/People_use_the_purpose_and_mission_of_an_institution_as_a_proxy_for_what_that_organization_actually_does)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/People_use_the_purpose_and_mission_of_an_institution_as_a_proxy_for_what_that_organization_actually_does)




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

# What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions?
# What if you did skin in the game analyses on institutions
Institutions have pretty clear things they’re *supposed* to be doing \\

### Related
- [[Work on these things - Marginal Revolution]]
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk]]
- [[Skin in the game (SITG)]]



[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What_if_you_did_skin_in_the_game_analyses_on_institutions)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What_if_you_did_skin_in_the_game_analyses_on_institutions)




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

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

Disintermediation destroys institutions and leads to winner take all

Great Founder Theory - Article

Progress Studies 2020-03-28

# 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/)

[Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Yuval_Levin_on_A_Time_to_Build_-_Econtalk)

[Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Yuval_Levin_on_A_Time_to_Build_-_Econtalk)






Benʼs working notes

Yuval Levin on A Time to Build - Econtalk

Published

Questions

Thoughts

Related

Authors

Link

Links to this note