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Perspectives on Organizational Strategy & Coordination: Optimizing for Few Coherent Goals v.s. Many Incoherent Goals Transcript: Speaker 1 I think one of the things where the corporate world is actually much better at this than the academic world or the educational world, because their goal is profit. So it's very clear. It's much harder to say what the goal of an educational institution is. It feels like it should be obvious, but within the general goal of like we want to produce successful, well-rounded people, there's a lot of disagreement about what the goals are. And so shaping the institutional incentives around those goals becomes extremely difficult, because not only do we have to worry about perverse incentives, but we have to worry about Vigorous disagreement about the kinds of things that are valued in the first place. And I think exactly what you're talking about, T, is something that if you went to a bunch of university administrators, let's say, or medical school administrators or doctors, and You said, what is the point to what you're doing? Is it to produce wise, well-rounded people? Is it to minimize costs to insurance companies? Is it to increase donor contributions? What is it? And there are all these competing goals. And so there's this constant infighting about among different people who have different versions of what the best version of their institution is, and it's so difficult to articulate What that is. Speaker 2 I wonder if we're in different sides of this, because are you like worried about the hardness of it? It sounds like you think it's a problem that it's hard to come to agreement and articulate a goal, where I actually prefer the university that disagrees, has many incuit and plural goals, And worry that when it articulates an outcome clearly and starts orienting around that outcome, that's when it starts shedding a lot of what was good about the kind of pluralistic more. So let me just give you this is like from my life, right? So a university I've been employed at has started moving toward orienting everything around student success, where student success is defined as graduation rate, graduation speed, Salary after graduation. When you define that outcome, it becomes really easy to target, and the people that are targeting it, as you say, the people that target it well tend to rise, people that are willing to Go all in on targeting that stuff instead of caring about all the other weird shit that education might be for, tend to have better recordable outcomes and tend to rise in the university Structure. So I actually am happier for something as complicated with education, in which different groups have different conceptions of values about what they're doing, and we don't actually Try to settle it, and we don't hold them all to a high articulability constraint, because I think the business school and the CS department have more easily articulable outcomes than The creative writing department, art history department. A lot of the stuff that I'm writing right now is about like this defense of the inarticulable. Speaker 1 It's a hard question to answer because I think that there are multiple levels of organization going on here. There's like a top administrator level, because these institutions tend to be pretty hierarchical. I think at the top of the hierarchy, there has to be some sort of reasonably well-defined goal, even if it doesn't specify what every individual component of the organization or institution Would do it. And I think that that trickles down to those levels though, and creates incentives. Regardless of whether or not it's a good thing, I think there has to be some sort of coherence at the very top level, even if it doesn't dictate what each individual component is doing.

Paul Smaldino & C. Thi Nguyen on Problems With Value Metrics & Governance at Scale

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

Left unchecked, your team members move from one task to the next, doing the easiest things, the things someone asked them to do, or simply the things right in front of them. Especially as stress increases, prioritization effectiveness declines. In one study of 43,000 encounters of doctors and patients, researchers found that when the workload was heaviest, physicians prioritized their easiest cases, leaving the most severe cases to wait the longest – a tendency known as “completion bias” (Gino and Staats 2016). Among all professions, it can be easy to get sucked into an endless stream of activities that feel like progress but that leave tomorrow looking much like yesterday.

The Leader Lab

Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger

Prediction Markets Are Built on the Principle of Adverserial Engagement Transcript: Speaker 2 There the first is what you're describing is precisely the reason why i am a bit of a skeptic of prediction markets not to say that they don't have a role but i don't think that they are nearly The solution that many believe they are and it's because they set us up in an adversarial relationship with regards to determining the truth it's not at all the say i don't think incentives Have a role or that it isn't worth a listening information for me i believe in all those things but the notion that the way that we should do it is betting against each other so that we want Everyone else to be as wrong as possible so we can be right and we want to get like one big payoff for like the person who's most right and anything that can be like too easily analogized To some sort of like dick measuring contest is not something that like excites me as a mechanism for like coming to good social outcomes and i think that prediction markets have an important Element of that

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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