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Thanks for publishing the results of the survey! I found it very interesting and informative.
When addressing the scope of IIDM, I think that the survey might conflate a bit between what topics can be considered in scope based on the approaches and goals taken and what topics should be prioritized when we want to improve decision making. So for example, I wouldn’t take these results to mean that “Whole-institution governance, leadership, and culture” should be the most likely prioritized topic in IIDM.
Thanks EdoArad—hopefully I’ve answered your point when replying to Jonas below but let me know if not :)
Yea, mostly 😊 There might be a problem on the other direction, where people who took the survey had in mind “which topics are high priority” and that may have caused either early elimination of potentially relevant topics or, more likely I think, a scope-creep where somewhat related topics which seem important might find their way in.
But I’m not that concerned about that! I’m sure that you can handle the upcoming strategic considerations and prioritization. It was mostly important for me to add that comment for readers who might make the mistake of taking your results as a prioritization within IIDM
Ok great, thanks. :)
I’m excited that there’s now more work happening on Effective Institutions / IIDM!
Some questions and constructive criticism that’s hopefully useful:
It seems that you’re starting out with the assumption that IIDM is a useful category/area, and that figuring out its scope is helpful for determining what’s the most impactful. Was there a particular reason for taking the intermediate step via the scope/definition of IIDM? I personally would be curious to learn which kinds of activities people find most promising in this area, and why so. In comparison, the scope question might just track a ‘verbal dispute’ rather than opinions on ground truths. (Edit: Looks like EdoArad pointed out something similar above.)
Relatedly, the survey gives a picture of what some people interested in IIDM believe about some high-level abstract categories. I wonder if the survey also gave you any insight into the types of activities that people think we should work on. E.g., what specific things do people have in mind when they talk about “Institutional design / governance”, and why exactly do they think it’s important? Does their reasoning hold up on closer inspection? I personally would feel very excited to see more object-level discussion of that kind. Perhaps a small number of people who have thought about IIDM carefully and systematically could share their object-level arguments on which approaches seem the most promising to them.
Hi Jonas, I can share some personal reflections on this. Please note that the following are better described as hunches and impressions based on my experiences rather than strongly held opinions—I’m hopeful that some of the analysis and knowledge synthesis EIP is doing this year will help us and me take more confident positions in the future.
Re: institutional design/governance specifically, I would guess that this scored highly because of its holistic and highly leveraged nature. Many institutions are strongly shaped and highly constrained by rules and norms that are baked into the way they operate from the very beginning or close to it, which in turn can make other kinds of reforms much more difficult or less likely to succeed. The most common problem I see in this area is not so much bad design as lack of design, i.e., silos and practices that may have made sense at one particular moment for one particular set of stakeholders, but weren’t implemented with any larger vision in mind for how everything would need to function together. This is a common failure mode when organizations grow opportunistically rather than intentionally. My sense is that opportunities to make interventions into institutional design and governance are few and far between, but can be tremendously impactful when they do appear. It’s generally easiest to make changes to institutional design early in the life of an institution, but because the scale of operations is often smaller and the prospects for success unclear at that point, it’s not always obvious to the participants how much downstream impact their decisions during that period can have.
One of the biggest bottlenecks to improved decision-making in institutions is simply the level of priority and attention the issue receives. There tends to be much more focus in institutions on specific policies and strategies than on the process by which those priorities are determined. At the same time, institutional cultures tend to reflect their leaders’ priorities, especially if the leaders are in place for a while. Thus, I’m optimistic about interventions that target the selection and recruitment of leaders with an eye toward choosing people who understand the importance of decision-making processes and are committed to making high-quality decision-making a priority in the organizations they come into.
I think there’s a version of moral circle expansion that is very relevant to institutional contexts. Institutions tend to prioritize first and foremost their direct stakeholders, i.e. the interests of people close to the institution. If more of them took seriously the effects of their decisions on everyone, not just those who are their primary voting constituents or intended beneficiaries or paying customers, that would represent a dramatic cultural shift that would make lots of other improvements more feasible. I see this as more of a long-term strategy that will not be easy to pull off, but the potential benefits from making progress on this dimension are massive.
Thanks Jonas. We / I are also really interested in activities that people find promising within this area! The idea with the survey was partly to connect IIDM to categories which exist in other professional communities and academic literatures to help us understand what are considered promising approaches in those fields and allow us to build on existing knowledge.
I like the move from IIDM to Effective Institutions :)
Ian David Moss mentioned some overlap between IIDM and “improving science”, which is something I’ve been thinking about a bit lately. From this survey, I think that overlap exists in at least
Funding mechanisms.
Designing mechanisms to align incentives more with social merit or scientific merit.
Maybe any other thing that causes the academic institution to be more efficient.
Thanks EdoAarad! Yes, I think there are definitely parallels. I was a bit personally disappointed not to see meta-science considered more within the scope of IIDM as it’s something I’m very interested in too. And glad you like the name! :)
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.