EA - Improving "Improving Institutional Decision-Making": A brief history of IIDM by Sophia Brown

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Improving "Improving Institutional Decision-Making": A brief history of IIDM, published by Sophia Brown on September 12, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Note: I’m undertaking a larger project to assess the potential of improving institutional decision-making (IIDM)—sometimes referred to as “institutional decision-making,” “effective institutions”, etc.—as a cause area or strategy within EA. My goal is to have more public discourse about IIDM. This is my first post in a series, which is the product of my conversations with EAs and research over the last 6 months. My conclusions are all tentative, and I invite all to collaborate with me in understanding and improving institution-focused work in EA. Thank you to Lizka Vaintrob, Konrad Seifert, John Myers, Nathan Young, Nuño Sempere, Jonathan Schmidt, Ian David Moss, Dan Spokojny, and Nick Whitaker for comments during the writing process. Mistakes are my own. Improving institutional decision-making (IIDM) has emerged as a term and point of discussion within EA in the last five years. It’s been discussed both as a cause area in itself and as a strategy within cause areas. It’s associated with other EA areas of interests, such as forecasting and political engagement. There’s an obvious guiding intuition here: institutions are powerful forces in world history and drastically affect global well-being and the longterm future. At the same time, many see EA’s emphasis on IIDM, at least in its current state, as highly uncertain, intractable or, if it is tractable, posing downside risks. There’s a lot to disentangle. Several long posts and articles take stabs at how to understand IIDM, measure its impact, and where to focus attention. 80,000 Hours considers it among the “second-highest priority areas,” alongside nuclear security and climate change. But in comparison, it has a less certain theoretical basis and has seen few projects involving practice. In this post, I trace the development of IIDM in EA. In brief, I believe that, because of its history in EA, IIDM is thought of too much in group rationality and forecasting terms, deemphasizing other tractable and worthwhile institutional reforms. Tracing IIDM Origins There is a deep literature on how governments function, how companies are organized, etc. Academics, particularly economists, political scientists, and sociologists, have studied institutions. Others in epistemology, psychology, and behavioral science have studied decision-making. The general arc of IIDM within EA begins with early conversations about how to engage with institutions broadly, dating back to at least the early 2010s. Around the same time—though as far as I can tell somewhat separately—the Rationality Community began growing in prominence as they investigated how to make better—more rational—decisions. These discussions began in Overcoming Bias (2006), the blog by Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and later the group blog LessWrong (2009). I understand current conceptions of IIDM in EA as blends of these two threads of institutional and decision-making work. The 80,000 Hours problem profile on IIDM—the first big piece making the case for IIDM as an area of interest—drew predominantly from the decision-making thread. But broader notions of institutional work persisted. IIDM was further elevated by the IIDM working group of 2019-2020, which evolved into the Effective Institutions Project (EIP). Since then, several organizations and projects have done explicitly IIDM-branded work, and more have done work that is implicitly or related to IIDM. There has also been a massive growth of adjacent work, like policy advocacy and political engagement. I’ll now go a bit more deeply into each of the originating threads. Effective Altruism and Institutions Early discussion in EA about institutions seems to have...