Thanks EdoArad—hopefully I’ve answered your point when replying to Jonas below but let me know if not :)
Vicky Clayton
Karma: 118
Thanks Jonas. We / I are also really interested in activities that people find promising within this area! The idea with the survey was partly to connect IIDM to categories which exist in other professional communities and academic literatures to help us understand what are considered promising approaches in those fields and allow us to build on existing knowledge.
Thanks EdoAarad! Yes, I think there are definitely parallels. I was a bit personally disappointed not to see meta-science considered more within the scope of IIDM as it’s something I’m very interested in too. And glad you like the name! :)
Thanks Vhanon. We did have some open text boxes so that we could pick up a bit more of the reasons why people gave the answers that they did. We’ve scattered those throughout the post so it’s maybe a bit less obvious where we’ve included that information. I don’t have answers to the questions you’re posing (e.g. what would make respondents change their mind?) but some extra snippets which I thought were interesting but didn’t make it into the final cut were about considering the decisions of non-human agents and also where to place interventions to shift people’s values towards long-termism. The comments on activities tended to be around encouraging us to prioritise based on the skillset of the team.
Thanks! Glad that you’re excited about it :)
Thanks for your comment, Ryan, and apologies for only spotting it just now. I agree there’s lots of efficiency gains to be made on big projects! I wonder whether it’s difficult to gain evidence on “what works” to improve them because there are so few and there’s lots of different complexities (vs small projects—we have a lot more to observe and there’s fewer dimensions).
Thanks for the comment, and apologies that I’ve just seen it now. Similarly to Ian (see the comment above) I was originally drawn to the area because of the focus on decision-making but have since updated that improving institutions is also about the broader landscape of the design of institutions and how they interact with each other. As you mention, they are currently pretty different (at least academic) fields. I can imagine that there would be some crossover where identifying problems within the existing systems at a lower down level help identify what new systems need to do better but I think, as with a lot of these kind of open questions, it’ll be about starting these conversations and seeing whether they are useful. Thanks again.
What are the frameworks you find most helpful in your work supporting clients with their decision-making?
Thanks for writing this up as a post Remmelt—great to have these kind of thoughts written up! I agree that type 2 efforts can i) help us improve the quality of our work through exposing blindspots, and ii) access expertise quickly in response to changing situations (the example you give of working with anthropologists specialising in the funeral rites during Ebola). I also think it could improve the reputation of the EA community through i) above and the act of engaging with others. Also hopefully we can have a positive impact on the groups we interact with (treating it as a two-way learning process)! I think this is particularly important for cause areas where there’s been lots of work done outside EA circles in a range of disciplines. I see an important part of the efforts we’re undertaking on IIDM (improving institutional decision-making) as translating what’s been done by experts already and then understanding how they interact with an EA lens. Thanks again, Vicky
Yes, thank you! Do you know of any institutions which are currently using QV/QF? Thanks
Thanks Tony.Sena for the comment and the great questions. It’s really good to challenge premises, particularly at the beginning! I guess focusing on institutions is on the premise that good decision-making within institutions involves more than each individual within that institution making good decisions separately—there’s coordination, aligning goals etc to think about—and also on the premise that we think most resources / norms are controlled by institutions rather than individuals (even authoritarian leaders operate within a greater decision making operation). I / we shall have to think a bit more about the similarity to economic growth / more macro interventions. I’m imagining you could frame economic growth as the goal and then figure out which institutions to work with and how to support better decision making to promote economic growth, or define “welfare” as the goal and assess economic growth as one of the potential options to get there. I’m much more comfortable on the randomista side of the things myself but shall do some more thinking about what IIDM looks like on a macro level. Thanks again.
Thanks for the comment rorty! It’s a really good question. I think the simple answer is that we don’t know at this stage. I don’t think it has to be the dichotomy you suggest though. A process could help individuals within a group align better and figure out what compromises they are happy to make. The question of whether we try to change people’s goals I think depends on how tractable it is and we also recognise that there is already considerable efforts in EA movement building which may better cover trying to change people’s goals. Thanks again.
Ok great, thanks. :)