Thanks for this Tyler!
The references are great, I wasn’t aware of them. Re the first, how exactly do you think low institutional path-dependence and institutional innovativeness interact? They seem like related but distinct concepts to me.
I agree that it would be great to see more research on those questions, though I wonder if a thorough review of the policy diffusion literature might be sufficient. I definitely would like a clearer characterization of governmental innovativeness; I felt kind of hand-wavey in this post.
I think that’s mostly right, with a couple of caveats:
You only mentioned non-profits, but I think most of this applies to other longtermists organizations with pretty illegible missions. Maybe Anthropic is an example.
Some organizations with longtermists missions should not aim to maximise something particularly illegible. In these cases, entrepreneurialism will often be very important, including in highly autonomous roles. For example, some biosecurity organization could be trying to design and produce, at very large scales, “Super PPE”, such as masks, engineered with extreme events in mind.
Like SpaceX, which initially aimed to significantly reduce the cost, and improve the supply, of routine space flight, the Super PPE project would need to improve upon existing PPE designed for use in extreme events, which is “ bulky, highly restrictive, and insufficiently abundant”. (Alvea might be another example, but I don’t know enough about them).
This suggests a division of labour where project missions are defined by individuals outside the organization, as with Super PPE, before being executed by others, who are high on entrepreneurialism. Note that, in hiring for leadership roles in the organization, this will mean placing more weight on entrepreneurialism than on self-skepticism and reflectiveness. While Musk did a poor job defining SpaceX’s mission, he did an excellent job executing it.
This seems true. It also suggests that if you can be extremely high on both traits, you’ll bring significant counterfactual value.