Once again, I think I agree, although I think there are some rationality/decision-making projects that are popular but not very targeted or value-oriented. Does that seem reasonable?
It does, and I admittedly wrote that part of the comment before fully understanding your argument about classifying the development of general-use decision-making tools as being value-neutral. I agree that there has been a nontrivial focus on developing the science of forecasting and other approaches to probability management within EA circles, for example, and that those would qualify as value-neutral using your definition, so my earlier statement that value-neutral is “not really a thing” in EA was unfair.
If I were to draw this out, I would add power/scope of institutions as a third axis or dimension (although I would worry about presenting a false picture of orthogonality between power and decision quality). The impact of an institution would then be related to the relevant volume of a rectangular prism, not the relevant area of a rectangle.
Yeah, I also thought of suggesting this, but think it’s problematic as well. As you say, power/scope is correlated with decision quality, although more on a long-term time horizon than in the short term and more for some kinds of organizations (corporations, media, certain kinds of nonprofits) than others (foundations, local/regional governments). I think it would be more parsimonious to just replace decision quality with institutional capabilities on the graphs and to frame DQ in the text as a mechanism for increasing the latter, IMHO. (Edited to add: another complication is that the line between institutional capabilities that come from DQ and capabilities that come from value shift is often blurry. For example, a nonprofit could decide to change its mission in such a way that the scope of its impact potential becomes much larger, e.g., by shifting to a wider geographic focus. This would represent a value improvement by EA standards, but it also means that it might open itself up to greater possibilities for scale from being able to access new funders, etc.)
Would you mind if I added an excerpt from this or a summary to the post?
It does, and I admittedly wrote that part of the comment before fully understanding your argument about classifying the development of general-use decision-making tools as being value-neutral. I agree that there has been a nontrivial focus on developing the science of forecasting and other approaches to probability management within EA circles, for example, and that those would qualify as value-neutral using your definition, so my earlier statement that value-neutral is “not really a thing” in EA was unfair.
Yeah, I also thought of suggesting this, but think it’s problematic as well. As you say, power/scope is correlated with decision quality, although more on a long-term time horizon than in the short term and more for some kinds of organizations (corporations, media, certain kinds of nonprofits) than others (foundations, local/regional governments). I think it would be more parsimonious to just replace decision quality with institutional capabilities on the graphs and to frame DQ in the text as a mechanism for increasing the latter, IMHO. (Edited to add: another complication is that the line between institutional capabilities that come from DQ and capabilities that come from value shift is often blurry. For example, a nonprofit could decide to change its mission in such a way that the scope of its impact potential becomes much larger, e.g., by shifting to a wider geographic focus. This would represent a value improvement by EA standards, but it also means that it might open itself up to greater possibilities for scale from being able to access new funders, etc.)
No problem, go ahead!