Cofounder of the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance and EA Geneva.
konrad
Karma: 440
The role of tribes in achieving lasting impact and how to create them
Our World in Data has created two great posts this year, highlighting how the often proposed dichotomy between economic growth & sustainability is false.
In The economies that are home to the poorest billions of people need to grow if we want global poverty to decline substantially, Max Roser points out that given our current wealth,
the average income in the world is int.-$16 per day
Which is far below what we’d think of as the poverty line in developed countries. This means that mere redistribution of what we have is insufficient—we’d all end up poor and unable to continue developing much further because we’re too occupied with mere survival. In How much economic growth is necessary to reduce global poverty substantially?, he writes:
I found that $30 per day is, very approximately, the level below which people are considered poor in high-income countries.
in the section Is it possible to achieve both, a reduction of humanity’s negative impact on the environment and a reduction of global poverty?, he adds:
As you will see in our writing there are several important cases in which an increased consumption of specific products gets into unavoidable conflict with important environmental goals; in such cases we aim to emphasize that we all as individuals, but also entire societies, should strongly consider to reduce the consumption of these products – and thereby reduce the use of specific resources and forgo some economic growth – to achieve these environmental goals. We believe a clear understanding of which specific reductions in production and consumption are necessary to reduce our impact on the environment is a much more forceful approach to reducing environmental harm than an unspecific opposition to economic growth in general.
So for discussions on how to approach individual “consumption” or policymaking around it, we could start a list of specific products to avoid. Would somebody be up for compiling this? It would be a resource I’d link to quite regularly. You can apparently just extract them from the 13 links Max Roser put just above the paragraph cited above. It would make for a great, short and crisp EA Forum post, too.
To avoid spamming more comments, one final share: our resource repository is starting to take shape. Two recent additions that might be of use to others:
United Nations for the future—a collection of key international texts for long-term governance
An overview of fields to improve decision-making in policy systems
In the works: a brief guide to decision-making on wicked problems, an analysis of 28 policymaker interviews on “decision-making under uncertainty and information overload” and a summary of our first working paper.
We have set up an RSS feed for the blog (or just subscribe to the ~quarterly newsletter).
And last but not least, we now have fiscal sponsorship for tax-deductible donations from the US, UK and the Netherlands via EA Funds and a lot of room for more funding.
We have published a few additional blog posts of interest:
Disclaimer: I am a co-founder.
The Simon Institute for Longterm Governance. We help international civil servants understand individual and group decision-making processes to foster the metacognition and tool-use required for tackling wicked problems like global catastrophic risks and the representation of future generations.
We have a well-researched approach and direct access to senior levels in most international organizations. Given that we just launched, we have no sense of our effectiveness yet but hope to provide a guesstimate by 2023.
Hi! We uploaded drafts for two pieces last week:
The preprint of “Computational Policy Process Studies” (also has a video presentation linked to it)
A draft of working paper #1 “Policymaking for the Long-term Future: Improving Institutional Fit”
It’s all somewhat mixed up—highly targeted advocacy is a great way to build up capacity because you get to identify close allies, can do small-scale testing without too much risk, join more exclusive networks because you’re directly endorsed by “other trusted actor x*, etc.
Our targeted advocacy will remain general for now—as in “the long-term future matters much more than we are currently accounting for” and “global catastrophic threats are grossly neglected”. With increasing experience and clout, it will likely become more concrete.
Until then, we think advocating for specific recommendations at the process level, i.e. offering decision-making support, is a great middle way that preserves option value. We are about something very tangible, have more of a pre-existing knowledge base to work with, do not run into conflicts of interest and can incrementally narrow down the most promising pathways for more longtermist advocacy.
Regarding public advocacy: given that we interact mostly with international civil servants, there aren’t any voting constituencies to mobilize. If we take ‘public advocacy’ to include outreach to a larger set of actors—NGOs, think tanks, diplomatic missions, staff unions and academics—then yes, we have considered targeted media campaigns. That could be impactful in reframing issues/solutions and redirecting attention once we’re confident about context-appropriate messaging.
Yup, the portfolio approach makes a lot of sense to us. Also, as always, thanks for the summary and links!
A big question is how to define “extremely nearby”. Within the next 5 years, SI should be in a position to directly take meaningful action. Ironically, given SI’s starting point, making short-term action the main goal seems like it could make it less likely to attain the necessary capacity. There’s just no sustainable way in which a new actor can act urgently, as they first have to “stand the test of time” in the eyes of the established ones.
Yeah, public attention can also be a carrot, not just a stick. But it’s a carrot that grows legs and will run its own way, possibly making it harder when you want to change course upon new learnings.
Our current take here is something like “public advocacy doesn’t create windows of opportunity, it creates windows of implementation”. When public pressure mounts, policymakers want to do something to signal they are trying. And they will often do whatever looks best in that moment. It would only be good to pressure once proposals are worked out and just need to be “pushed through”.
To influence agendas, it seems better, at least mid-term, to pursue insider strategies. However, if all you have is one shot, then you might as well try public advocacy for reprioritization and hope it vaguely goes into the right direction. But if you think there’s time for more targeted and incremental progress, then the best option probably is to become a trusted policy actor in your network of choice.
Thanks a lot for the compliments! Really nice to read.
The metrics are fuzzy as we have yet to establish the baselines. We will do that until the end of September 2021 via our first pilots to then have one year of data to collect for impact analysis.
The board has full power over the decision of whether to continue SI’s existence. In Ralph Hertwig’s words, their role is to figure out whether we “are visionary, entirely naïve, or full of cognitive biases”. For now, we are unsure ourselves. What exactly happens next will depend on the details of the conclusion of the board.
I prefer the lower pitch “wob-wob-wob” and thus would like to make a bid to simply rename Robert Wiblin to “the Wob”. Maybe Naming What We Can could pick this up?
Hi Khorton, thanks for the pointer—we will make sure to update. Is there something you’d be particularly keen on reading? We’re happy to share drafts—just drop me an email konrad@simoninstitute.ch
4. Two of our forthcoming working papers deal with “the evidence underlying policy change” and “strategies for effective longtermist advocacy”. A common conclusion that could deserve more scrutiny is the relative effectiveness of insider vs outsider strategies (insiders directly work within policy networks and outsiders publicly advocate for policy change). Insider strategies seem more promising. What is well-validated, especially in the US, is that the budget size of advocacy campaigns does not correlate with their success. However, an advocate’s number of network connections and their knowledge of institutions do correlate with their performance. These findings are also consistent with this systematic review on policy engagement for academics.
As it’s not our top priority, we’re happy to share what we’ve got with somebody who has the capacity to pick this up. To do so, get in touch with Max (max@simoninstitute.ch).
3. I sympathize strongly with the feeling of urgency but it seems risky to act on it, as long as the longtermist community doesn’t have fully elaborated policy designs on the table that can simply be lobbied into adoption and implementation.
Given that the design of policies or institutional improvements requires a lot of case-specific knowledge, we see this as another reason to privilege high-bandwidth engagement. In such settings, it’s also possible to become policy-entrepreneurs who can create windows of opportunity, instead of needing to wait for them.
Whenever there are large-scale windows of opportunity (e.g. a global pandemic causing significant budget shifts), we’d only be confident in attempting to seize them in a rushed manner if (a) the designs are already on the table and just need to be adopted/implemented or if (b) we were in the position to work in direct collaboration with the policymakers. Of course, SI leverages COVID-19 in its messaging but that’s to make its general case, for now.
If an existential catastrophe is happening very soon, SI is not in a position to do much beyond supporting coordination and networking of key actors (which we’re doing). Being overly alarmist would quickly burn the credibility we have only begun to consolidate. Other actors are in positions with higher leverage and we hope to be able to support them indirectly. Overall, we see most of SI’s impact potential 5-20 years down the line—with one potential milestone being the reassessment of the 2030 UN Agenda.
2. You’re right. We’re assuming that policy analysis is being done by more and more organizations in increasing quantities. Highly targeted advocacy is well within the scope of what we mean by “building capacity locally”. There are some things one can propose to advance discussions (see e.g. Toby Ord’s recent Guardian piece). The devil is in the details of these proposals, however. Translating recommendations into concrete policy change isn’t straightforward and highly contextual (see e.g. missteps with LAWS). As advocacy campaigns can easily take on a life of their own, it seems highest leverage to privilege in-depth engagement at this point in time.
Toby’s Guardian article is an interesting edge case, as it could be seen as “advocacy campaign”-ish. But given its non-sensationalist nature and fit with the UK’s moves towards a national health security agency—in which a bunch of EAs seem to be involved anyway—that’s a well-coordinated multilevel strategy that seems unlikely to catch on fire.
1. Quick definitions first, an explanation below. “Policy engagement”—interacting with policy actors to advance specific objectives; “start locally”: experimenting with actions and recommendations in ways that remain within the scope of organizational influence; “organizational capacity” capability to test, iterate and react to external events in order to preserve course.
Achieving policy change requires organizational capacity to sustain engagement for indefinite amounts of time because (a) organizations have to have sufficient standing within, or strong connections to, the relevant networks in order to be listened to and (b) the funding to hire staff with appropriate experience to react to what arises.
For example, we wrote this announcement because input from the EA community is of high quality and worth engaging with. If, instead, we had written a big online newspaper announcement for international Geneva and beyond, the reactions would likely have been more overwhelming and interactions more likely to harm SI’s standing than here. This illustrates one way in which SI currently lacks the “capacity” to react to big events in its direct environment and thus needs to build up first.
I really liked this comment. I will split up my answer into separate comments to make the discussion easier to follow. Thanks also for sharing Hard-to-reverse decisions destroy option value, hadn’t read it and it seems under-appreciated.
Introducing the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance (SI)
Thanks, I have this wherever possible. Strong upvote for the practical usefulness of the comment.
There are cases, though, where the core problem is not the ability to record but the lack of appreciation of the value of making things explicit and documenting them as such. Then I can one-sidedly record all I want, it won’t shape my environment in the way I want to.
That’s why I’m asking about the appreciation aspect in particular. I think there are a lot of gains from attitudes that are common in EA that are just lost in many other circles because people don’t have the same commitment to growth.
This is especially the case when you alone can’t do much but need a whole group to buy into this attitude. That’s also why I’m less interested in meetings that are clearly only limited to 1-1 exchange. There are settings where you need to asynchronously update multiple people and having explicit communication would be much better, yet people seem to have a clear preference for 1-1 calls etc.
I’m also not talking about situations where you can impose your norms—but rather about situations where you have to figure out carefully how to go meta while avoiding triggering any individual’s defensiveness to then level up the group as a whole.
Essentially, I guess, I’m interested in case studies for what pieces are missing in people’s models that this seems so hard for many groups outside of EA. The answers here have already given some insight into it.
Dear Khorton, I just wanted to say thank you for this vote of confidence—it is very motivating to see civil servants who think we’re on to something.