Our White Paper The Odyssean Process outlines our innovative approach to decision making for an uncertain future.
In it, we combine expert elicitation, complexity modelling, and democratic deliberation into a new way of developing robust policies.
This addresses the democratic deficit in civilisational risk mitigation and facilitates resilience through collective intelligence.
Any feedback, collaboration, or interest in supporting our work is most welcome contact@odysseaninstitute.org
Thanks for posting this!
I want to highlight up front that I am a big supporter of any work that aims to improve institutional decision making. I believe it’s a highly impactful area with unparalleled potential given the decision power (in both terms of spending and benefit potential) of large institutions is immense. I personally feel there’s a big moral and EA argument in supporting solutions that could practically deliver benefits (even small returns given the scale).
In terms of cleaner questions upfront which get to the heart of my uncertainties:
Further reflections if interested/useful
Having read your paper, I have some concerns over how the solution can be implemented at a beneficial scale. I raise this particularly as a number of the problems you’ve mentioned in the White Paper (e.g. unstructured/limited consultations with experts or limited analysis of the problem space) are driven more by time constraints rather than a clear framework of how to do it. This is an important consideration as planning for catastrophic risks is only half of the problem - we can’t consistently (or at all) predict black swan events and thus decision making at speed in crises is incredibly (if not more) important, as Covid showed us.
Given decision science research, I query the heavy reliance on expert judgment as a key node to improve the predictive accuracy, as there’s a healthy body of evidence that suggests quality of reasoning as opposed to domain expertise is a better predictor for such accuracy. Your White Paper actually seems to account for this by proxy when it highlights specific reasoning methods to drive improved accuracy (e.g. IDEA framework).
In addition, I’m less sure how beneficial the democratic/deliberation process with citizens is for the risks you are targeting. The examples you note (such as abortion and LGBTQ+ issues) are primarily social issues which lend themselves well to citizen assemblies given they are moral in nature. On the other side, planning policy is quite heavily democratised in the UK and arguably has led to very bad outcomes given wider economic or societal benefits from construction are less tangible than personal concerns around changes to the local area. These externalities aren’t always accurately priced into people’s incentives and thus their judgements aren’t necessarily what’s best for society. Do you see a similar issue for catastrophic risks/how will you mitigate if so?
Thank you James for such a thorough response! Always pleased to see recognition of the still neglected potential of political technologies and existing best practices.
1. We aim to do aspects of the modelling ourselves, but by identifying in literature review existing open access models rather than building them from the data directly, time can be saved. An assembly can be conducted over a few months, as can the modelling be undertaken simultaneously with effective resourcing to parallelise phases of the Process, which is not unusual for a large polic... (read more)