What we did well
One of the most important insights from the successes of FHI is to have a long-term perspective on one’s research. While working on currently fashionable and fundable topics may provide success in academia, aiming for building up fields that are needed, writing papers about topics before they become cool, and staying in the game allows for creating a solid body of work that is likely to have actual meaning and real-world effect.
The challenge is obviously to create enough stability to allow such long-term research. This suggests that long-term funding and less topically restricted funding is more valuable than big funding.
Many academic organizations are turned towards other academic organizations and recognized research topics. However, pre-paradigmatic topics are often valuable, and relevant research can occur in non-university organizations or even in emerging networks that only later become organized. Having the courage to defy academic fashion and “investing” wisely in such pre-paradigmatic or neglected domains (and networks) can reap good rewards.
Having a diverse team, both in terms of backgrounds but also in disciplines, proved valuable. But this was not always easy to achieve within the rigid administrative structure that we operated in. Especially senior hires with a home discipline in a faculty other than philosophy were nearly impossible to arrange. Conversely, by making it impossible to hire anyone not from a conventional academic background (i.e., elite university postdocs) adversely affects minorities, and resulted in instances where FHI was practically blocked from hiring individuals from under-represented groups. Hence, try to avoid credentialist constraints.
In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is necessary to also be curious about what other disciplines are doing and why, as well as to be open to working on topics one never considered before. It also opens the surface to the rest of the world. Unusually for a research group based in a philosophy department, FHI members found themselves giving tech support to the pharmacology department; participating in demography workshops, insurance conferences, VC investor events, geopolitics gatherings, hosting artists and civil servant delegations studying how to set up high-performing research institutions in their own home country, etc. - often with interesting results.
It is not enough to have great operations people; they need to understand what the overall aim is even as the mission grows more complex. We were lucky to have had many amazing and mission-oriented people make the Institute function. Often there was an overlap between being operations and a researcher: most of the really successful ops people participated in our discussions and paper-writing. Try to hire people who are curious.
Where we failed
Any organization embedded in a larger organization or community needs to invest to a certain degree in establishing the right kind of social relationships to maintain this embeddedness. Incentives must be aligned, and both parties must also recognize this alignment. We did not invest enough in university politics and sociality to form a long-term stable relationship with our faculty.
There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities. When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders is important.
Another important lesson (which is well known in business and management everywhere outside academia) is that as an organization scales up it needs to organize itself differently. The early informal structure cannot be maintained beyond a certain size, and must be gradually replaced with an internal structure. Doing this gracefully, without causing administrative sclerosis or lack of delegation, is tricky and in my opinion we somewhat failed.
So, you want to start another FHI?
Did FHI become humanity's best effort at understanding and evaluating its own long-term prospects? We leave that to the future to evaluate properly, but we certainly think we did unexpectedly well for a “three-year project”.
FHI is ending and we are sad to see it go. We think it could have achieved far more than it did, but circumstances made it impossible to continue. On the plus side, we know FHI did not live past its time. There is a real risk that organizations lose their mission and become self-perpetuating users of resources that could better be used for other things, preventing the flowering of the new.
In fact, as mentioned above, FHI has seeded a number of new organizations, fields and topics. In a biological or memetic sense, it would count as having had great fitness in propagating successors, although many are not FHI-like or have different goals.
What would it take to replicate FHI, and would it be a good idea? Here are some considerations for why it became what it was:
- Concrete object-level intellectual activity in core areas and finding and enabling top people were always the focus. Structure, process, plans, and hierarchy were given minimal weight (which sometimes backfired - flexible structure is better than little structure, but as organization size increases more structure is needed).
- Tolerance for eccentrics. Creating a protective bubble to shield them from larger University bureaucracy as much as possible (but do not ignore institutional politics!).
- Short-term renewable contracts. Since firing people is basically impossible within the University, only by offering short-term contracts (two or three years) was it possible to get rid of people who turned out not to be great fit. It was important to be able to take a chance on people who might not work out. Maybe about 30% of people given a job at FHI were offered to have their contracts extended after their initial contract ran out. A side-effect was to filter for individuals who truly loved the intellectual work we were doing, as opposed to careerists.
- Valued: insights, good ideas, intellectual honesty, focusing on what’s important, interest in other disciplines, having interesting perspectives and thoughts to contribute on a range of relevant topics.
- Deemphasized: the normal academic game, credentials, mainstream acceptance, staying in one’s lane, organizational politics.
- Very few organizational or planning meetings. Most meetings were only to discuss ideas or present research, often informally.
A comment from a member:
“I think there’s no cookie-cutter template for replicating FHI because it depends critically on having the right (rare) people and a particular intellectual culture. The secret sauce was not an organizational structure or some kind of management process. But with the right people and culture, then shielding from other constraints can become enabling.
“To the extent that it can be replicated, I think it is because (a) it was an existence proof of organization, template ideas and research results, and legitimization, and (b) the intellectual culture has spread (e.g. in the wider rationalist and EA networks). But it could probably not be replicated by having some random administrator or manager trying to reproduce the same organizational structure - that would be like the cargo cult.”
So, the conclusion may be that while the above considerations give a recipe to aim for, the key question for any replication should be: “What are the important topics this organization should aim at?” Pursuing those topics must always be at the center of what is being done (both in research and administration), even when new knowledge and developments change them and their priorities.
I think it is worth appreciating the number and depth of insights that FHI can claim significant credit for. In no particular order:
Note especially how much of the literal terminology was coined on (one imagines) a whiteboard in FHI. “Existential risk” isn't a neologism, but I understand it was Nick who first suggested it be used in a principled way to point to the “loss of potential” thing. “Existential hope”, “vulnerable world”, “unilateralist's curse”, “information hazard”, all (as far as I know) tracing back to an FHI publication.
It's also worth remarking on the areas of study that FHI effectively incubated, and which are now full-blown fields of research:
FHI was staggeringly influential; more than many realise.
Edit: I wrote some longer reflections on FHI here.
I'm awestruck, that is an incredible track record. Thanks for taking the time to write this out.
These are concepts and ideas I regularly use throughout my week and which have significantly shaped my thinking. A deep thanks to everyone who has contributed to FHI, your work certainly had an influence on me.
What a champ. if institutions can be heroes, FHI is surely one.