For many months, they will sit down many days a week and ask themselves the question “how can I write this grant proposal in a way that person X will approve of” or “how can I impress these people at organization Y so that I can get a job there?”
I would flip this and say, it’s inevitable that this will happen, so what do we do about it? There are areas we can learn from:
Academia, as you mention—what do we want to avoid here? Which bits actually work well?
Organisations that have grown very rapidly and/or grown in a way that changes their nature. On a for-profit basis—Facebook as a cautionary tale of what happens when personal control and association isn’t matched with institutional development? On a not-for-profit basis—I work for Greenpeace and we’re certainly very different to what we were decades ago, with a mix of ‘true believers’ and people semi-aligned, generally in more support roles. Some would say we’ve sold out and indeed some people have abandoned us for other groups that are more similar to our early days, but we certainly have a lot more political influence that we did when we were primarily a direct action / protest group.
Corruption studies at a national level. What can we learn of the institutions of very low corruption countries e.g. in Scandinavia that we might adapt?
I think the question is predictivity. How can you run the most predictive systems possible for selecting good grants/employing suitable people?
I guess over time, networks will be worse predictors and the average trustworthiness of applicants will fall slightly, to which we should respond accordingly.
Though I guess that we have to ackowledge that some grants will be misspent and that the optimal amount of bad grants may not be 0.
Definitely agree that networks will become worse predictors and ultimately grants, job offers etc. will become more impersonal. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. For example personal and network-oriented approaches have significant issues around inclusivity that well-designed systems can avoid, especially if the original network is pretty concentrated and similar (see: the pic in the original post...)
As this happens this may also mean that over time people who have been in EA for a while may feel that ‘over time the average person in the movement feels less similar to them’. This is a good thing!… if recognised, and well-managed, and people are willing to make the cognitive effort to make it work.
I would flip this and say, it’s inevitable that this will happen, so what do we do about it? There are areas we can learn from:
Academia, as you mention—what do we want to avoid here? Which bits actually work well?
Organisations that have grown very rapidly and/or grown in a way that changes their nature. On a for-profit basis—Facebook as a cautionary tale of what happens when personal control and association isn’t matched with institutional development? On a not-for-profit basis—I work for Greenpeace and we’re certainly very different to what we were decades ago, with a mix of ‘true believers’ and people semi-aligned, generally in more support roles. Some would say we’ve sold out and indeed some people have abandoned us for other groups that are more similar to our early days, but we certainly have a lot more political influence that we did when we were primarily a direct action / protest group.
Corruption studies at a national level. What can we learn of the institutions of very low corruption countries e.g. in Scandinavia that we might adapt?
I think the question is predictivity. How can you run the most predictive systems possible for selecting good grants/employing suitable people?
I guess over time, networks will be worse predictors and the average trustworthiness of applicants will fall slightly, to which we should respond accordingly.
Though I guess that we have to ackowledge that some grants will be misspent and that the optimal amount of bad grants may not be 0.
Definitely agree that networks will become worse predictors and ultimately grants, job offers etc. will become more impersonal. This isn’t entirely a bad thing. For example personal and network-oriented approaches have significant issues around inclusivity that well-designed systems can avoid, especially if the original network is pretty concentrated and similar (see: the pic in the original post...)
As this happens this may also mean that over time people who have been in EA for a while may feel that ‘over time the average person in the movement feels less similar to them’. This is a good thing!… if recognised, and well-managed, and people are willing to make the cognitive effort to make it work.