Studying Behavioral Decision Sciences at Brown University in the US, university group organizer at Brown EA.
Last summer (2022) I participated in CHERI's Summer Research Program, researching interventions to improve institutional decision-making.
Self-published Flores Para los Muertos, a book which contains some of what I've written (fiction & philosophy). In Spanish.
Help/advice/guidance when it comes to IIDM (improving institutional decision-making) research, discuss IIDM as a cause area.
I'm also currently looking for summer internships.
Talk about my experience at CHERI, discuss IIDM as a cause area, give some advice about EAG(x) events to someone who's never gone to one, chat about studying decision/behavioral sciences, chat about moving to other countries and learning languages.
I can also give some advice on facilitating an EA intro fellowship.
Thank you for writing this. This is a really useful insight that I’ll be thinking more about as I engage more with IIDM — I have definitely focused disproportionately more on adding good processes than eliminating bad ones. This could be because I’m not very familiar in general with common processes within institutions, as my studies have really only focused on individual decision-making/rationality so far.
Below are a few quick thoughts on that.
Following your Putin-EU example, I wonder how much of Russia’s nimbleness is enabled by one man having so much decision-making power, which might both enable quick decision-making as well as democratic backsliding.
Although you could argue that quicker experimentation might pay off in the long run, I would worry that modern states having too few checks and balances might increase the risk of solo actors making catastrophically bad decisions. At the same time, I worry about vast bureaucracies failing to make important decisions, and that being equally catastrophic.
I agree, as you say, that the need for “caution and consensus vs. experimentation and accountability” depends on the institution and the decision to be made. I’m also not aware of attempts to describe when exactly you would want more of the former vs. the latter.
If you (or others) have good resources on eliminating bad processes/bureaucracy, I’d love to see them.
Thanks. None of the internal links transferred from Google doc so I missed a few when manually creating them here.
Thank you for the update! I will add this to the post as soon as I can. I find it very exciting that so many constitutions have included legal protections for future generations. Even if it hasn’t influenced policy yet, it could serve as a means of justifying longtermist policy once enough momentum has built up.
Edit: changes made.
Thanks for the feedback! I don’t have access to my computer right now but I’ll try to fix that when I do.
Thank you for researching this; this is incredibly valuable.
I noticed that the OUS-Impartial Beneficence subscale correlates well with expansive altruism and effectiveness focus. Maybe I skipped over it, but did you include in your results whether this OUS subscale had higher predictive power than your two new factors?