Cofounder of the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance and EA Geneva.
konrad
Karma: 440
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.
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.
it also allows people to qualify and clarify thinking as they go, resulting in what feels like a smooth evolution of thinking as opposed to the seemingly discontinuous and inelegant show of changing your mind after being corrected or learning new information via asynchronous communication.
This gets exactly to the core of the potential I see: groups get stuck in a local equilibrium where progress happens and everybody is content but the payoff from going meta and improving self-knowledge and transparency would compound over time—and that seems to be easier to achieve in written form, exactly because people can’t ignore their kinks. And that seems harmful at first because vulnerability does but in many environments it could easily lead to very productive dynamics because then everybody can help one another become the best possible version of themselves, more easily insure each other,
etc.
Thanks for the feedback! I gave it another pass. Is there anything concrete that threw you off or still does? I’d appreciate pointers as I had other people look at it before.
Yeah, agreed that your conclusion applies to the majority of interactions from a 1-off perspective.
But I observe a decent amount of cases where it would be good to have literal documentation of statements, take-aways etc. because otherwise, you’ll have to have many more phone calls.
I’m especially thinking of co-working and other mutually agreed upon mid- to long-term coordination scenarios. In order to do collective world-modelling better, i.e. to find cruxes, prioritize, research, introspect, etc., it seems good to have more bandwidth AND more memory. But people routinely choose bandwidth over memory, without having considered the trade-off.
I suspect that this is an unconscious choice and often leads to quite suboptimal outcomes for groups, as they become reliant on human superconnectors and those people’s memory—as a local community-builder, this is what I am. And I can’t trust my memory, so I outsource most of it in ways that are legible mostly to me—as it would be too costly for me to make it such that it’s legible also for others.
It is these superconnectors who have a disproportionate effect on the common knowledge and overall culture of a group. If the culture is being developed purposefully, you’d want really good documentation of it to remind, improve and onboard.
Instead, most groups seem to have to rely on leadership and oral communication to coordinate. In part this might be because the pay-off of good documentation and building a culture that uses it is so long-term, that few are currently willing to pay for it?
I am essentially wondering about the causal relationship here: are we (a) not paying for more resource-intensive coordination systems because we consciously aren’t convinced of the value/possibility of it or are we (b) not convinced of the value/possibility of more resource-intensive coordination systems because we haven’t actually tried all that much yet?
I suspect that we’re in the scenario of “not actually having tried enough” because of a) general culture and norms around communication that discourage trying and b) only having had the necessary level of tech adoption to even make this a possibility for <20 years.
Communities of people with mostly technical backgrounds seem to fare massively better on the existence of asynchronous and formal coordination mechanisms than most other groups (e.g. GitLab’s remote culture). Is this because these people are a specific kind of person? Is it because they’ve been trying harder/for longer? How easily transferrable is their culture? What does it take to make it more popular? Or do we believe this attempt is doomed to fail? If so, why?
And if we agree that this seems valuable to popularize, then why is it so hard to mobilize the necessary resources to make it happen more? Is it just general inertia or is there more?
I am afraid that any single individual is making your observation for any single instance but at the collective level and across time, I would be surprised if the calculus holds.
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,
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:
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:
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.