I’m sure there are a bunch of leaders you have some opinions of—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jamie Dimon, Peter Thiel, Kim Jong Un, Joe Biden etc. You made those evaluations based on some mixture of different factors—reading their tweets, seeing them interviewed, observing whether their plans work out, reading other people’s views on them. If they were a big wikipedia editor, you could even read internal wikipedia disputes they participated in, just as reading their EAF/LW comments can help you judge people here.
The key step is that you make this evaluation for the one single leader, and then if they seem intelligent and ethical and motivated and organised and so on, infer that the organisation they lead is good also. You don’t have to read all the wikipedia disputes to judge the collective decision making of the editors, or even a representative sample—just read some controversial ones Jimmy got stuck into, and see if the King ruled wisely.
The reason this is not ‘right back where we started’ is I think most people find it much easier to evaluate a single human (a task we practice all our lives at, and did in the ancestral environment) than to evaluate large organisations (a much more difficult skill, with worse feedback mechanisms, that did not exist in the ancestral environment).
The reason this is not ‘right back where we started’ is I think most people find it much easier to evaluate a single human (a task we practice all our lives at, and did in the ancestral environment) than to evaluate large organisations (a much more difficult skill, with worse feedback mechanisms, that did not exist in the ancestral environment).
Sure, that seems reasonable. Another point is that large groups may have competing internal factions, which could create a source of variability in their decision-making which makes their decisions harder to understand and predict.
Lower variability with the CEO approach should mean a smaller sample size is required to get a bead on their decision-making style.
BTW, did you get the private message I sent you regarding a typo in your original comment? Wondering if private messages are working properly.
I’m sure there are a bunch of leaders you have some opinions of—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jamie Dimon, Peter Thiel, Kim Jong Un, Joe Biden etc. You made those evaluations based on some mixture of different factors—reading their tweets, seeing them interviewed, observing whether their plans work out, reading other people’s views on them. If they were a big wikipedia editor, you could even read internal wikipedia disputes they participated in, just as reading their EAF/LW comments can help you judge people here.
The key step is that you make this evaluation for the one single leader, and then if they seem intelligent and ethical and motivated and organised and so on, infer that the organisation they lead is good also. You don’t have to read all the wikipedia disputes to judge the collective decision making of the editors, or even a representative sample—just read some controversial ones Jimmy got stuck into, and see if the King ruled wisely.
The reason this is not ‘right back where we started’ is I think most people find it much easier to evaluate a single human (a task we practice all our lives at, and did in the ancestral environment) than to evaluate large organisations (a much more difficult skill, with worse feedback mechanisms, that did not exist in the ancestral environment).
Sure, that seems reasonable. Another point is that large groups may have competing internal factions, which could create a source of variability in their decision-making which makes their decisions harder to understand and predict.
Lower variability with the CEO approach should mean a smaller sample size is required to get a bead on their decision-making style.
BTW, did you get the private message I sent you regarding a typo in your original comment? Wondering if private messages are working properly.