The improving institutional decision-making (IIDM) working group (now the Effective Institutions Project) ran a survey asking members of the EA community which topics they thought were in scope of “improving institutional decision-making” (IIDM) as a cause area. 74 individuals participated.
I have the impression you asked people: is discussing about dogs or cats in the scope of improving decision in animal welfare? I would be very surprised if somebody did disagree.
That is a pity you stop at the presentation of the results. I believe the interesting part of the story is in the reason why some people disagreed. Would those reasons make the positive respondents change their mind? Are those negative answer a reason of concern for IIDM?
The survey results will help target the Effective Institutions Project’s priorities and work products going forward. For example, the list of in-scope topics will form the guardrails for developing a directory of introductory resources to IIDM.
I believe this is a more interesting question, and it certainly feels like IIDM is working toward a transparent and fair decision making approach.
However, results are presented but not discussed. I would be curious to hear an analysis about whether the population of the respondents could have had any impact on the results.
For example the lowest priority item “Compare IIDM to other cause areas” could rank low because respondents are already well aware of the topic or because the imagine the findings might not tell a favourable story.
Thanks Vhanon. We did have some open text boxes so that we could pick up a bit more of the reasons why people gave the answers that they did. We’ve scattered those throughout the post so it’s maybe a bit less obvious where we’ve included that information. I don’t have answers to the questions you’re posing (e.g. what would make respondents change their mind?) but some extra snippets which I thought were interesting but didn’t make it into the final cut were about considering the decisions of non-human agents and also where to place interventions to shift people’s values towards long-termism. The comments on activities tended to be around encouraging us to prioritise based on the skillset of the team.
I have the impression you asked people: is discussing about dogs or cats in the scope of improving decision in animal welfare? I would be very surprised if somebody did disagree.
That is a pity you stop at the presentation of the results. I believe the interesting part of the story is in the reason why some people disagreed. Would those reasons make the positive respondents change their mind? Are those negative answer a reason of concern for IIDM?
I believe this is a more interesting question, and it certainly feels like IIDM is working toward a transparent and fair decision making approach.
However, results are presented but not discussed. I would be curious to hear an analysis about whether the population of the respondents could have had any impact on the results.
For example the lowest priority item “Compare IIDM to other cause areas” could rank low because respondents are already well aware of the topic or because the imagine the findings might not tell a favourable story.
Thanks Vhanon. We did have some open text boxes so that we could pick up a bit more of the reasons why people gave the answers that they did. We’ve scattered those throughout the post so it’s maybe a bit less obvious where we’ve included that information. I don’t have answers to the questions you’re posing (e.g. what would make respondents change their mind?) but some extra snippets which I thought were interesting but didn’t make it into the final cut were about considering the decisions of non-human agents and also where to place interventions to shift people’s values towards long-termism. The comments on activities tended to be around encouraging us to prioritise based on the skillset of the team.