@IanDavidMoss, thanks for the reply. I would love if you could go a little deeper into what is an institution to you. How do you characterize it, and why is this nomenclature important? I just would like to go back to my apples to apples comparison question. My first instinct is that comparing Meta to Blackrock to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to the Office of the President of the USA to the CCP Central Commitee is going to create some false parallels and misunderstandings of degree of importance or possibility for change ( I will just call this power).
I would suspect that the amount of power of the President of the USA is orders of magnitude greater than the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. So while they might be on a long list together, they are a bit like comparing our moon and the Sun. So we would have a magnitude issue.
In addition we would have a capabilites issue. The office of the President is much more powerful than Mark Zuckerberg, I would argue, but Meta can also do things that the President could only dream of. Facebook has been an incredible tool for spreading information, both for good and nefarious purposes. The US government could only wish for that ability to reach peoples’ brains.
These thoughts lead me to imagine what you final recommendations will look like, and I am not sure. I suspect you will discover that you end up making very specific suggestions for different insitutions. Other than a standard 80k be flexible and build up your career capital suggestion, I think it might be difficult to give thematic recommendations that are equally useful in all of the types of organizations you tackle here.
Hi Charlie, if you haven’t already read the post we wrote last year introducing the prioritization framework used in this article, I recommend you do so as it goes over many of these theoretical questions in depth. In that post we offered the following characterization of an institution:
The definition of an institution is not completely standardized across disciplines or academic fields, but in this context we mean a formally organized group of people, usually delineated by some sort of legal entity (or an interconnected set of such entities) in the jurisdiction(s) in which that group operates. In tying our definition to explicit organizations, we are not including more nebulous concepts like “the media” or “the public,” even as we recognize how broader societal contexts (such as behavior norms, history, etc.) help define and constrain the choices available to institutions and the people working within them. By “key” or “powerful” institutions, we are referring in particular to institutions whose actions can significantly influence the circumstances, attitudes, beliefs, and/or behaviors of a large number of morally relevant beings.
As you can see, under this definition there is nothing particularly weird about grouping government and non-government organizations together; they are both formally organized groups of people delineated by legal entities. And even if you were to limit your analysis to, say, tech companies, you would still face the same issue of vastly divergent magnitudes and capabilities within that set of organizations and have to figure out a way to derive meaning from that. Basically, I don’t disagree at all with the observations you’re making, but my takeaway is “yes, and this is all the more reason why a holistic and cross-sector analysis is relevant and valuable,” not “well, I guess we shouldn’t bother because this is all too hard.”
I suspect you will discover that you end up making very specific suggestions for different insitutions.
This has always been the plan. I’ve believed and argued for a long time that while institutions have some common features and problems, identifying the most actionable and promising levers for change requires a highly tailored approach. And this type of work seems to me more neglected within EA than more general, intervention-level analysis (e.g., here and here). So I think we are on the same page.
@IanDavidMoss, thanks for the reply. I would love if you could go a little deeper into what is an institution to you. How do you characterize it, and why is this nomenclature important? I just would like to go back to my apples to apples comparison question. My first instinct is that comparing Meta to Blackrock to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to the Office of the President of the USA to the CCP Central Commitee is going to create some false parallels and misunderstandings of degree of importance or possibility for change ( I will just call this power).
I would suspect that the amount of power of the President of the USA is orders of magnitude greater than the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. So while they might be on a long list together, they are a bit like comparing our moon and the Sun. So we would have a magnitude issue.
In addition we would have a capabilites issue. The office of the President is much more powerful than Mark Zuckerberg, I would argue, but Meta can also do things that the President could only dream of. Facebook has been an incredible tool for spreading information, both for good and nefarious purposes. The US government could only wish for that ability to reach peoples’ brains.
These thoughts lead me to imagine what you final recommendations will look like, and I am not sure. I suspect you will discover that you end up making very specific suggestions for different insitutions. Other than a standard 80k be flexible and build up your career capital suggestion, I think it might be difficult to give thematic recommendations that are equally useful in all of the types of organizations you tackle here.
Hi Charlie, if you haven’t already read the post we wrote last year introducing the prioritization framework used in this article, I recommend you do so as it goes over many of these theoretical questions in depth. In that post we offered the following characterization of an institution:
As you can see, under this definition there is nothing particularly weird about grouping government and non-government organizations together; they are both formally organized groups of people delineated by legal entities. And even if you were to limit your analysis to, say, tech companies, you would still face the same issue of vastly divergent magnitudes and capabilities within that set of organizations and have to figure out a way to derive meaning from that. Basically, I don’t disagree at all with the observations you’re making, but my takeaway is “yes, and this is all the more reason why a holistic and cross-sector analysis is relevant and valuable,” not “well, I guess we shouldn’t bother because this is all too hard.”
This has always been the plan. I’ve believed and argued for a long time that while institutions have some common features and problems, identifying the most actionable and promising levers for change requires a highly tailored approach. And this type of work seems to me more neglected within EA than more general, intervention-level analysis (e.g., here and here). So I think we are on the same page.