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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Innovation orgs need to be aligned with their money factory

Defining clear timescales and scopes for collaborations is a tool to minimize politics

DARPA Program managers have a tenure of four to five years

Alignment requires existential threats

§Institutions and Games

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

Kumar Types of Games Tweet

Principles for Innovation Orgs

It is feasible to consciously cultivate a scene of frontier openers

Minimum Necessary Alignment

Directly acknowledging alignment and misalignment can be powerful

Decision quality is timescale dependent

It is hard to engage with long pieces outside your community

# Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales
### Related
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]

### Reference
- [[Gwendolyn Regina Politics Discussion]]



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gertnerIdeaFactoryBell2012

Reaper functions beat culture decks

Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory

Healthy corporate R+D requires a trifecta of conditions

Expensive research needs to address an existential threat eventually at an organizational level to maintain support

Bell Labs was only profitable in conjunction with AT+T

Regulation drove many of Bell Labs’ actions

Bell Labs was not a business

How do you have skin in the game around ideas?

Having your life on the line forces you to contend with objective reality

Bell labs existed before continuous improvement was expected

Government research is corporate R&D for United States Inc

The niche corporate labs once occupied still needs to be filled

ICT Distillation

An Institute for Creative Technology - Riffing on ARPA

Ed Bice Conversation 4 Jun 2021

ICT Outline

Peter van Hardenberg Conversation 20 Nov 2020

Stan Kugell and Randy Castleman conversation 11 Dec 2020

# Alignment requires existential threats
People often use “Alignment” as a [[Suitcase Handle Word]]. When you look at alignment, especially in the organizational context, it boils down to “is keeping this relationship going holding off some existential threat?” 

Through the lens of [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]] the only way for two entities playing different games to have the same goal is if one or both of the games would come to a crashing halt if the goal was not met. ie. The goal addresses an existential threat.

Of course, “existential threat” is an extreme term that means different things for different entities. In this context one could think of it as something that could end something you really do not want to end. For companies it could be an important revenue stream, or the business itself. For a person it could be your life or just the trajectory of your career. Clearly, what is existential is relative and there’s a continuum of importance in the threats. 

While it’s abstract, I find this concept useful because it allows you to roughly analyze ‘how aligned’ two entities are and have blunt conversations about it.  

### Related
- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]
- [[Bell Labs is one of the few examples of an innovation org that was aligned with its money factory]]
- [[Innovation orgs need a money factory]]
- [[Minimum Necessary Alignment]]
- [[The fewer people there are the easier it is to align on goals and the longer those goals can remain aligned]]
- [[Playing the same game is the only way people can align for extremely long time scales]]



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Fair games have legible rules

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

Individual actions reflect on Institutions

Organizations are groups of people organized to pursue a shared goal

# All institutions are coupled to at least one game
[[Institutions shape how individuals interact]] through a set of spoken or unspoken rules. Those rules create a game. ([[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]].) 

The bigger more missions an institution has, the more games it will also have. [[Institutions have implicit, explicit, and perceived missions]].

Additionally, [[Gatekeepers are essential to Institutions]] - without them there is no boundary between who is part of the institution and who is not (and thus, who should be expected to know and adhere to the rules of the game.) Often there is a separate gatekeeping game to start playing the institutional game. [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]]. 

### Some Examples
- [[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]]



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Long term plans often involve decisions that look stupid over shorter time horizons

# Decision quality is timescale dependent
When you’re evaluating the quality of a decision you can’t decouple it from the timescale you expect it to play out on.

This is the underlying reason why for most decisions in a startup it’s important to just ‘move fast’ because most of the decisions will actually be irrelevant on a relatively short timescale. On the flipside, [[Warren Buffet]] explicitly doesn’t move fast because [[Berkshire Hathaway]] makes only long term investments and he thinks about the whole org lasting beyond himself. 

### Related 
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]
- [[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]



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Fair games can be gamed

Most institutions have become cancerous

Fair games are self-limiting

Government money needs to be fair

Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes

Complicated rules are a way of creating a nominally fair game that is not fair by any common use of the word

Explicit rules are a substitution for learned pattern matching

Attempting to make a game more fair by adding rules has many unintended downsides

Lets just get rid of peer review - article

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

# Fair games have legible rules
For now I’m going to define a ‘fair game’ as one where two people of equal ability have the same chance of winning. 

What, intuitively, makes a game *unfair?* Imagine a game where where you don’t know the rules when you start playing. Experienced players can take advantage of corner cases that other players didn’t even realize existed.  Illegible rules seem to be at the heart of most unfair games.

Legible rules seem necessary but not sufficient for a game to be fair. However, the other components of fair games seem much less … legible, which encourages people to focus on legible rules when they want to make a game more fair.  

What do legibility increasing actions look like?
- Removing discretion on the part of gatekeepers 
- Standardized testing 
- Clear entry criteria
- Certifications 
- Explicit Regulations
- Clear metrics 
- Turning implicit rules into explicit rules
- Systematization of the game 

Looking at the list, many of those ‘legibility increasing actions’ have to do with inputs, or the game you need to win to play the game in the first place. [[Gatekeeping games vary along two important axes]]. 

Intuitively, making games more fair is a good thing. However,  [[Attempting to make a game more fair by adding rules has many unintended downsides]], [[The more legible the rules of the game, the more straightforward it is to optimize for the game]], and [[Optimizing for fair gatekeeping games is often disjoint for optimizing for the real game]]. 

### Related
- [[Kumar Types of Games Tweet]]
- [[“have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]
- [[All institutions are coupled to at least one game]]
- [[Legible games enable people outside of an institution to control it]] 

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Institutions shape how individuals interact

Shadows of the Future

Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

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

People want to be loved and be lovely

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

IBMs proxy game is publishing patents

How does money work in PARPA?

All funding organizations are research organizations

Academics are incentivized to do peer-reviewed publishable work

Why would people want to work with PARPA?

Research requires intrinsic motivation

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

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

Charlie Songhurst conversation 31 Aug 2021

The idea that you need to make a lot of money in software before you can work on sweet sci fi shit is false

Universities have multiple conflicting missions

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

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

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

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

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



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# Playing the same game is the only way people can align for extremely long time scales
This goes for romantic relationships, business relationships, etc.

Everything else is like a side quest
[[Alignment between people playing different games can happen on finite time scales]]

### Related
- [[People and organizations are all playing some game that has different ways of gaining status and power]]
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]



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odlyzkoDeclineUnfetteredResearch1995

Absolute games are anchored to reality

You don’t get to choose the rules of an absolute game

Frontiers lead to absolute games instead of relative games

Notes on the decline of unfettered research

Podcast List

Relative games always have a winner

The term moonshot is romantic bullshit

Does entrpreneurship look more like politics or more like physics?

# Relative vs absolute games
Relative games are games where your success is relative to other people playing the game.

Absolute games are games where your success is relative to some absolute metric. Circumnavigating the world, inventing information theory, and running a mile are all absolute games. 

Relative games can often have messed up feedback loops, and lead to [[Bullshit Ideas]]. However,  relative games that are in direct competition against another human can actually lead to tight feedback loops and beneficially expose you to situations where you can’t make excuses. 

### Related
- [[You don’t get to choose the rules of an absolute game]]
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]



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# The more legible the rules of the game, the more straightforward it is to optimize for the game
Chess has incredibly legible rules. It’s very straightforward how to train for high-level chess, which makes it straightforward to train for it. It is not “easy” per se, but at the same time there isn’t a lot of room for creativity. I’m not deep in the chess world, but my impression is that there isn’t a lot of variation in the way that people get good at it and if you have the time and money you can 

Contrast to League of Legends or Magic: The Gathering. These are not the best examples because it’s still possible to know all the rules, but they have hundreds of pages of rules with complex interactions and several different victory conditions. 

And getting outside of literal games: startups are an institution with one of the least legible games.

### Games with more legible rules
- College admission
- Investing in the stock market
- Chess
- Poker
- Jiu Jitsu
- Marathons 
- Politics in the US
- Violin
- Anything that [[Tim Ferris]] got really good at
- Science more and more so 

### Games with less legible rules
- Starting a company
- Magic: The Gathering
- League of Legends
- European Football
	- A lot still depends on referees 
- Politics in a third world country 
- Rap
- Cooking

### Related
- [[Gary Kasparov]]’s concept of a ‘closed system’
-  [[Kumar Types of Games Tweet]]
- [[“have your cake and eat it too” life-games have led to a toxic society]]
- [[Having more separate games is good for society]]
- [[carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012]]



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Relative vs absolute games

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

All institutions are coupled to at least one game

# carseFiniteInfiniteGames2012
Listened to the audio book 

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