“Altruist” is not one of my core identities, though many identities that I cherish (e.g., “accurate”, “innovator”) have altruistic effects. But over the last decade I’ve met many who identify directly as altruists. If you are such a person, this post is for you. In it, I will make the case for a particular altruistic cause, a cause that combines two big altruism levers: innovation and institutions.
The effective altruism non-profit 80,000 Hours has published a problem profile on 'Improving Institutional Decision-Making' two years ago which states they believe 'This is among the most pressing problems to work on.'
They also mention Robin's work on prediction markets in passing.
What is a positive example of a "promising institution idea" being adapted to a messy social context as part of its path to greater adoption? I'd love to see more than one example if you have them at hand.
One charity with strong EA backing that may fit this description is the Center for Election Science, which organized a ballot initiative to convince the city of Fargo, ND to adopt approval voting rather than first-past-the-post. They are now expanding to more cities, with help from a grant by the Open Philanthropy Project (and a lot of support by individuals within EA).
As a long time lurker (here, on Twitter etc.), this sounds really interesting and is something I would love to act upon. I think I have a good idea of "business people are often willing to take a social innovation that has mostly been adapted well and do the last few adaptation steps" but would hope for some concrete examples to be able to direct my thinking.
Could you give some examples of "academics know many useful things about institutions, and have many good elegant simple ideas for institution change, ideas that they have explored in math and lab experiments"?
Also, what does "context-specific adaptation and re-adaptation" look like?
My knowledge concerning Effective Altruism is pretty superficial, so this might be a naive question: Have you gotten feedback on this from folks in the EA community? If so (or if EA supporters reading this have such feedback) I'd love to hear about it.
I wonder immediately about how the competition with new vs. old institutions would play out. For example, I expect customers mostly don't care whether they get their goods and services from a {private individual, publicly traded corporation, public benefit corporation, employee-owned corporation, cooperative}, because these are all judged mostly by whether the customer's need is met. Businesses certainly don't care whether their customers are a {private individual, church, government agency, other business} so long as their money is good.
It feels useful to give attention to the boundary where people who inhabit an institution interact with people outside of it, such as through transactions. It seems like it would be a lot easier to get to new areas of social-system-space which can map to similar interactions as current ones. It might even be a useful way to carve up the space. It would certainly be easier to measure how well they are doing, because of how easily we could apply standard methods.
The effective altruism non-profit 80,000 Hours has published a problem profile on 'Improving Institutional Decision-Making' two years ago which states they believe 'This is among the most pressing problems to work on.'
They also mention Robin's work on prediction markets in passing.
https://80000hours.org/prob...
What is a positive example of a "promising institution idea" being adapted to a messy social context as part of its path to greater adoption? I'd love to see more than one example if you have them at hand.
One charity with strong EA backing that may fit this description is the Center for Election Science, which organized a ballot initiative to convince the city of Fargo, ND to adopt approval voting rather than first-past-the-post. They are now expanding to more cities, with help from a grant by the Open Philanthropy Project (and a lot of support by individuals within EA).
As a long time lurker (here, on Twitter etc.), this sounds really interesting and is something I would love to act upon. I think I have a good idea of "business people are often willing to take a social innovation that has mostly been adapted well and do the last few adaptation steps" but would hope for some concrete examples to be able to direct my thinking.
Could you give some examples of "academics know many useful things about institutions, and have many good elegant simple ideas for institution change, ideas that they have explored in math and lab experiments"?
Also, what does "context-specific adaptation and re-adaptation" look like?
Thank you!
I haven't gotten feedback, and would also like to hear.
My knowledge concerning Effective Altruism is pretty superficial, so this might be a naive question: Have you gotten feedback on this from folks in the EA community? If so (or if EA supporters reading this have such feedback) I'd love to hear about it.
That's interesting.
I wonder immediately about how the competition with new vs. old institutions would play out. For example, I expect customers mostly don't care whether they get their goods and services from a {private individual, publicly traded corporation, public benefit corporation, employee-owned corporation, cooperative}, because these are all judged mostly by whether the customer's need is met. Businesses certainly don't care whether their customers are a {private individual, church, government agency, other business} so long as their money is good.
It feels useful to give attention to the boundary where people who inhabit an institution interact with people outside of it, such as through transactions. It seems like it would be a lot easier to get to new areas of social-system-space which can map to similar interactions as current ones. It might even be a useful way to carve up the space. It would certainly be easier to measure how well they are doing, because of how easily we could apply standard methods.
Universities are on average less willing to try innovative ideas than are other organizations.