I’m interested in whether or not modern prestigious universities were founded with similar goals in mind. Is this theory of how to optimizing for being a Schelling point really a good way to create a Schelling point?
To value-add to this post, I’m going to add a few summaries of how various prestigious US universities and research institutions were founded. I’ll focus on institutions founded in the last 150 years or so away from the East Coast.
University of Washington (1876): Establishment of a university recommended by the Washington Territory governor, boosted by prominent residents as a Seattle prestige- and potential-enhancing measure. Influential people were persuaded that a university had greater prestige-enhancing potential than moving the state’s capital. The school initially struggled, closing three times, but took off as Seattle grew. As a result of its president Charles Odegaard persuading the state legislature to increase funding, it grew massively from 1958-1973, and benefitted from the presence of major tech companies in Seattle.
University of Chicago(1856): A state Senator who was a big booster of Chicago and may have wanted to increase the value of his adjoining lots donated the land for what would become the Old University of Chicago. The Old U never became financially successful, and actually was called the University of Chicago until changing its name to “Old UoC” to allow a completely separate and much better-funded institution to take over the UoC name in 1890. For a while, UoC tried to affiliate with smaller regional universities on condition they improve their quality, but UoC professors disliked the program as they felt it undermined the reputation of UoC, and they stopped by 1910.
California Institute of Technology (1891): Started and disbanded as a vocational school, then became the Polytechnic School. George Ellergy Hale worked to develop the school into a “major scientific and cultural destination.” President Roosevelt and the California Legislature latched onto these efforts, pouring political support and funding into this project. This is in the context of a national effort to improve the United State’s standing as a scientific leader, in an era when Germany was perhaps the world’s leader in scientific accomplishment.
Stanford (1891): Founded by Leland Stanford, a powerful and wealthy man. From wikipedia, Stanford’s rise to high prestige occurred about 50 years after its founding, under the oversight of its president Wallace Sterling. At that time, the university had financial troubles. He built sources of income and started a massive fundraising program, better integrated the medical school, increased financial aid, grew the student body by 35% and tripled the size of the faculty, build a huge number of buildings, and started an overseas campus program.
Fom looking at these four universities (which are the only four I examined), I get the impression that:
Universities were often founded as a way to make their city more prestigious.
Universities achieved that goal in turn by explicitly optimizing for prestige.
It seems like one of the underlying factors here is that as the USA grew, it had a lot of territory and people who had just as much academic potential as anyplace else, but lacked the institutions to identify and develop that potential. At the same time, other places in the world had underutilized leadership—great professors and administrators who were perhaps jockeying for position in the Ivy Leagues of the east coast. In the run up to WWII, a lot of great German scientists fled the country and many of them came to America. My impression is that this was the turning point when then USA became the world leader in science and technology.
I’ll put my interpretations of this in a separate reply to this comment.
One of the functions of institution-building triangulate underutilized funding, leadership, and talent to create value and opportunity for the local community. Successful efforts at the city and state level were seen as creating value for the country as a whole. These agglomerations are now also seen as creating value for the entire planet.
Many of these founders were explicitly optimizing for prestige.
Founders were working cooperatively with cities, states, and founders to mutually enhance their collective prestige.
A lot of care was given to trying to craft the right culture, and balance growth with protecting the reputation of the institution. Not all of the decisions were correct, but it was a constant concern.
This analysis is flawed in all kinds of ways: small sample size, qualitative, susceptible to selection bias.
Universities may not be the right reference class for EA movement growth. This is particularly because EA often seeks to fill in gaps in altruistic work that are not adequately filled by current institutions, including universities.
There are forms of altruistic work that are neglected precisely because they are not very prestige-enhancing. There is not a lot of money or power to be had in alleviating insect suffering, for example, and by the ITN framework, that’s what makes it an ideal EA cause.
On the other hand, I think this points out the operating strategy for EA, which is to engineer prestige, funding, and visibility in order to better align it with the altruistic work that we think is most pressing. In this, we may be most successful if we figure out how to benefit from and to enhance the prestige of other supporters.
These universities focused on mutual prestige-enhancement with their cities and states. We seem to be focusing on our relationships with media outlets (i.e. Vox, and perhaps now the New Yorker and similar), and also with universities themselves. I suspect that succeeding in establishing the nucleic acid observatory system would be a coup—we’d then be enhancing the prestige of the US government, and the US government may then see EA as a source of prestige.
I see a realignment of prestige being one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s major contributions to the field of AI safety. While there are plenty of AI researchers who dismiss his concerns out of hand, it’s increasingly difficult to do so, and he’s made it higher prestige to at least act as if you care about AI safety, and to legitimize AI safety as a field of research.
We also have failures to account for. I think that the Carrick Flynn campaign has to count as prestige-degrading. Not only did we fail in a rather humiliating way to get our candidate elected, “crypto-funded shadow group tries to buy election” is going to be something critics can say about us in the future. I think one concern about our current reliance on billionaire dollars is that we’re pretty susceptible to our broader perception in society being colored by their whims and judgment and aesthetics.
I’m interested in whether or not modern prestigious universities were founded with similar goals in mind. Is this theory of how to optimizing for being a Schelling point really a good way to create a Schelling point?
To value-add to this post, I’m going to add a few summaries of how various prestigious US universities and research institutions were founded. I’ll focus on institutions founded in the last 150 years or so away from the East Coast.
University of Washington (1876): Establishment of a university recommended by the Washington Territory governor, boosted by prominent residents as a Seattle prestige- and potential-enhancing measure. Influential people were persuaded that a university had greater prestige-enhancing potential than moving the state’s capital. The school initially struggled, closing three times, but took off as Seattle grew. As a result of its president Charles Odegaard persuading the state legislature to increase funding, it grew massively from 1958-1973, and benefitted from the presence of major tech companies in Seattle.
University of Chicago(1856): A state Senator who was a big booster of Chicago and may have wanted to increase the value of his adjoining lots donated the land for what would become the Old University of Chicago. The Old U never became financially successful, and actually was called the University of Chicago until changing its name to “Old UoC” to allow a completely separate and much better-funded institution to take over the UoC name in 1890. For a while, UoC tried to affiliate with smaller regional universities on condition they improve their quality, but UoC professors disliked the program as they felt it undermined the reputation of UoC, and they stopped by 1910.
California Institute of Technology (1891): Started and disbanded as a vocational school, then became the Polytechnic School. George Ellergy Hale worked to develop the school into a “major scientific and cultural destination.” President Roosevelt and the California Legislature latched onto these efforts, pouring political support and funding into this project. This is in the context of a national effort to improve the United State’s standing as a scientific leader, in an era when Germany was perhaps the world’s leader in scientific accomplishment.
Stanford (1891): Founded by Leland Stanford, a powerful and wealthy man. From wikipedia, Stanford’s rise to high prestige occurred about 50 years after its founding, under the oversight of its president Wallace Sterling. At that time, the university had financial troubles. He built sources of income and started a massive fundraising program, better integrated the medical school, increased financial aid, grew the student body by 35% and tripled the size of the faculty, build a huge number of buildings, and started an overseas campus program.
Fom looking at these four universities (which are the only four I examined), I get the impression that:
Universities were often founded as a way to make their city more prestigious.
Universities achieved that goal in turn by explicitly optimizing for prestige.
It seems like one of the underlying factors here is that as the USA grew, it had a lot of territory and people who had just as much academic potential as anyplace else, but lacked the institutions to identify and develop that potential. At the same time, other places in the world had underutilized leadership—great professors and administrators who were perhaps jockeying for position in the Ivy Leagues of the east coast. In the run up to WWII, a lot of great German scientists fled the country and many of them came to America. My impression is that this was the turning point when then USA became the world leader in science and technology.
I’ll put my interpretations of this in a separate reply to this comment.
My takeaways:
One of the functions of institution-building triangulate underutilized funding, leadership, and talent to create value and opportunity for the local community. Successful efforts at the city and state level were seen as creating value for the country as a whole. These agglomerations are now also seen as creating value for the entire planet.
Many of these founders were explicitly optimizing for prestige.
Founders were working cooperatively with cities, states, and founders to mutually enhance their collective prestige.
A lot of care was given to trying to craft the right culture, and balance growth with protecting the reputation of the institution. Not all of the decisions were correct, but it was a constant concern.
This analysis is flawed in all kinds of ways: small sample size, qualitative, susceptible to selection bias.
Universities may not be the right reference class for EA movement growth. This is particularly because EA often seeks to fill in gaps in altruistic work that are not adequately filled by current institutions, including universities.
There are forms of altruistic work that are neglected precisely because they are not very prestige-enhancing. There is not a lot of money or power to be had in alleviating insect suffering, for example, and by the ITN framework, that’s what makes it an ideal EA cause.
On the other hand, I think this points out the operating strategy for EA, which is to engineer prestige, funding, and visibility in order to better align it with the altruistic work that we think is most pressing. In this, we may be most successful if we figure out how to benefit from and to enhance the prestige of other supporters.
These universities focused on mutual prestige-enhancement with their cities and states. We seem to be focusing on our relationships with media outlets (i.e. Vox, and perhaps now the New Yorker and similar), and also with universities themselves. I suspect that succeeding in establishing the nucleic acid observatory system would be a coup—we’d then be enhancing the prestige of the US government, and the US government may then see EA as a source of prestige.
I see a realignment of prestige being one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s major contributions to the field of AI safety. While there are plenty of AI researchers who dismiss his concerns out of hand, it’s increasingly difficult to do so, and he’s made it higher prestige to at least act as if you care about AI safety, and to legitimize AI safety as a field of research.
We also have failures to account for. I think that the Carrick Flynn campaign has to count as prestige-degrading. Not only did we fail in a rather humiliating way to get our candidate elected, “crypto-funded shadow group tries to buy election” is going to be something critics can say about us in the future. I think one concern about our current reliance on billionaire dollars is that we’re pretty susceptible to our broader perception in society being colored by their whims and judgment and aesthetics.