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The Animal Advocacy Movement Needs A/B Testing Research Done on Ballot Initiatives
Summary:
Real research is needed to understand the effect of upcoming ballot initiatives on the animal advocacy movement.
This could involve conducting public opinion polls before and after the initiative to gather information about the impact of the movement. Such polling would involve asking US residents questions about their support for animal freedom in a jurisdiction where the ballot initiative is taking place.
This research would provide valuable insights for the movement to effectively carry out their work.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
One thing that I think would be really amazing is to have some real research happening alongside an upcoming ballot initiative so that we can really know what the effect of that ballot Initiative is. And so some of the ways that the $50,000 could go to just getting the movement, the kind of information that we need to be able to do our work effectively could be like doing public opinion Polling before and after a ballot initiative. And that could look like asking a population of US residents in our case. Questions about their support for animal freedom in a jurisdiction where we're going to run a ballot initiative, do that same thing before and after to get some good information about What the effect is that we actually had. That's one thing that I think would be really useful for the movement to have.
Eva Hamer on How the Animal Advocacy Movement Can Improve Its Messaging and Win Over the Public
How I Learned to Love Shrimp
Perspectives on Organizational Strategy & Coordination: Optimizing for Few Coherent Goals v.s. Many Incoherent Goals
Summary:
The corporate world is better at defining goals than the academic world.
Educational institutions struggle to articulate their goals due to disagreement. University administrators have competing goals, which leads to constant infighting.
The speaker prefers universities with plural goals and worries that focusing on one outcome leads to the loss of other important aspects of education.
However, top-level administrators should have reasonably well-defined goals that trickle down and create incentives.
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
the depth of social problems is largely derived from the “stickiness” of power. Power is the ultimate positive feedback loop: simply put, people in positions of power use their positions of privilege to stay there.
The Systems Work of Social Change
Cynthia Rayner and François Bonnici
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