As willbradshaw and Ozzie commented, it seems to me that the COI policy can benefit from categorizing more of the cases as “requiring the fund manager to recuse themselves from casting a vote”.
I can’t imagine myself being able to objectively cast a vote about funding my room-mate / close friend / partner’s boss / someone who I had a substantial romantic relationship with that ended 2 years ago (especially if the potential grantee is in a desperate financial situation!). I’m skeptical that humans in general can make reasonably objective judgments in such cases.
If fund managers that recuse themselves from casting a vote can still provide their analysis and final recommendation to other fund managers, it seems to me that the downsides are mitigated to a large extent.
One of the things that I am most concerned about if you were to just move towards recusal, is you just end up in a situation where by necessity the other fund members just have to take the recused person’s word for the grant being good (or you pass up on all the most valuable grant opportunities). Then their own votes mostly just indirectly represent their trust in the fund member with the COI, as opposed to their independent assessment. This to me seems like it much further reduces accountability and transparency, and muddles a bunch of the internal decision-making.
These considerations indeed seem important! Perhaps the problem of muddling internal decision-making can be mitigated by making the voting anonymous (or having the final discussions and voting process being visible only to the fund managers who cast a vote).
I can’t imagine myself being able to objectively cast a vote about funding my room-mate / close friend / partner’s boss / someone who I had a substantial romantic relationship with that ended 2 years ago (especially if the potential grantee is in a desperate financial situation!). I’m skeptical that humans in general can make reasonably objective judgments in such cases.
(emphasis added)
This isn’t a point about the OP, but I thought I’d mention that I think humans can make these choices, if they have the required discipline and virtue, and I think in many situations we see that.
When you’re the CEO of a successful company, you often have very close relationships with the 5-20 staff closest around you. You might live / have lived with them, work with them for hours every day, be good friends with them, etc. And many CEOs make sensible decisions about when to move these people around and fire them—it’s not remotely standard practise to ‘recuse’ yourself from such decisions, you’re the person with the most information about the person and how the organisation works, and if you actually care about those things enough and are competent enough to know your own mind and surround yourself with good people and a healthy environment, many CEOs are massively successful at making these decisions. I think this is true in other groups as well—I expect many people are pretty good at deciding e.g. if a close friend is unhealthy for them and that they want to cut ties.
I agree many people make quite unfortunate decisions here, but it is no iron law of psychology that ‘humans in general’ cannot make ‘reasonably objective judgments’ in such cases.
I can’t imagine myself being able to objectively cast a vote about funding my room-mate
So, I think I agree with this in the case of small houses. However, I’ve been part of large group houses with 18+ people in it, where I interacted with very few of the people living in it, and overall spent much less time with many of my housemates than I did with only very casual acquaintances.
Maybe we should just make that explicit? Differentiate living together with 3-4 other people, from living together with 15 other people? A cutoff at something like 7 people seems potentially reasonable to me.
As willbradshaw and Ozzie commented, it seems to me that the COI policy can benefit from categorizing more of the cases as “requiring the fund manager to recuse themselves from casting a vote”.
I can’t imagine myself being able to objectively cast a vote about funding my room-mate / close friend / partner’s boss / someone who I had a substantial romantic relationship with that ended 2 years ago (especially if the potential grantee is in a desperate financial situation!). I’m skeptical that humans in general can make reasonably objective judgments in such cases.
If fund managers that recuse themselves from casting a vote can still provide their analysis and final recommendation to other fund managers, it seems to me that the downsides are mitigated to a large extent.
You commented:
These considerations indeed seem important! Perhaps the problem of muddling internal decision-making can be mitigated by making the voting anonymous (or having the final discussions and voting process being visible only to the fund managers who cast a vote).
(emphasis added)
This isn’t a point about the OP, but I thought I’d mention that I think humans can make these choices, if they have the required discipline and virtue, and I think in many situations we see that.
When you’re the CEO of a successful company, you often have very close relationships with the 5-20 staff closest around you. You might live / have lived with them, work with them for hours every day, be good friends with them, etc. And many CEOs make sensible decisions about when to move these people around and fire them—it’s not remotely standard practise to ‘recuse’ yourself from such decisions, you’re the person with the most information about the person and how the organisation works, and if you actually care about those things enough and are competent enough to know your own mind and surround yourself with good people and a healthy environment, many CEOs are massively successful at making these decisions. I think this is true in other groups as well—I expect many people are pretty good at deciding e.g. if a close friend is unhealthy for them and that they want to cut ties.
I agree many people make quite unfortunate decisions here, but it is no iron law of psychology that ‘humans in general’ cannot make ‘reasonably objective judgments’ in such cases.
So, I think I agree with this in the case of small houses. However, I’ve been part of large group houses with 18+ people in it, where I interacted with very few of the people living in it, and overall spent much less time with many of my housemates than I did with only very casual acquaintances.
Maybe we should just make that explicit? Differentiate living together with 3-4 other people, from living together with 15 other people? A cutoff at something like 7 people seems potentially reasonable to me.