Fear of crowding out

jchan
Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:20:47 GMT

[Part of Organizational Cultures sequence]

Where does your opinion fall on this spectrum?:

(A) If someone is Doing a Thing for the benefit of others, then one should refrain from needling him/her with complaints about how the Thing is being Done less-than-optimally. Nobody likes backseat-drivers or Monday-morning-quarterbacks; if that's all the thanks people get for their benevolence, the likely outcome is just that the Thing doesn't get Done at all. "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena..."

(B) Chances are, somebody is going to end up Doing the Thing; the only question is who. And there is only a limited background capacity for Thing-Doing, so one person's initiative crowds out that of others. Therefore, someone who Does the Thing less-than-optimally is actively making the situation worse, and so, if they wish to claim credit for their altruism, they have a responsibility to incorporate criticism and strive towards perfection, or else stop Doing the Thing.

The arguments for (A) are well-known and need not be recapitulated here. So, I will briefly try to shore up (B):

It is often the case that initiatives are competing for a limited pool of resources. Expanding the pie is hard, and grabbing a share of an existing pie is easier; but these two strategies are often indistinguishable according to straightforward success metrics, so people tend to optimize for the latter, oblivious to the fact that they are thereby suppressing the emergence of alternatives. Therefore the fact that no better alternatives currently exist does not mean that no improvements are possible.

And many things are a natural monopoly, or at least an economy-of-scale up to a size which is bigger than the current enterprise can reasonably hope to attain. This applies whenever the good is of a "network" type - an exchange platform, an establishment of shared standards, a collaborative project with many contributors, etc. In such cases, a norm that the only acceptable way to improve things is to "Do your own Thing" will persistently prevent anything meaningful from being accomplished.

(A) is an "authoritarian" attitude in the sense in which I use that term, while (B) is "egalitarian". (A) is the affect of green fields and open frontiers; (B) that of long-settled cities.

I have been on both sides of this. It's frustrating to watch someone waste my and others' time doing a subpar job at something that I'm pretty sure I could've done a better job at, and even more so when the improvements I suggest are not addressed in their substance, but rather met with (A)-type pushback. The challenge (explicit or implicit) is something like "If you think you can do better, why don't you?", when in fact I would have (and happily at that), and the only reason why I’m not doing so now is that I thought someone else was already taking care of it and I expected they’d do a better job, so I made other plans.

However, by the same token, I have also found myself beset by the titular "FOCO" when trying to please others. For example, when I host a party on a highly-coveted date (e.g. the weekend before Halloween), I am intensely conscious of the fact that a number of the guests would certainly have hosted their own party if I (or someone else) hadn't, and so in some sense they have a "right" to be annoyed at me if my party has prevented a counterfactually-more-fun party that would otherwise have taken place on the same date. But then this thought makes me obsessive and stressed out about making everything perfect, to the point where I don't get to enjoy my own party anymore and I'm ill-inclined to host another one.

Or maybe I'll be working on some project and I'll get feedback which may or may not be helpful, but when I have to add "Evaluate this feedback, figure out how/whether it can be integrated with other work-in-progress that might not yet be visible to the other person, and figure out how to explain all of this to them" to the already-large collection of balls I'm juggling, it makes accomplishing things that much more burdensome and annoying. I am tempted to simply cite (A) in reply, but then I remember how frustrating it is to be on the receiving end of that, so perhaps I just don't reply at all.

There's a proper balance here, and different people may find themselves needing oppositely-inclined advice. In general I sense that there's a little too much of (A) going around and not enough (B) - that people tend to become overly possessive of their "creative vision" and hostile even to helpful feedback. Perhaps your experience gives you the opposite impression.

But consider also the scope of what's at stake. If I throw a boring Halloween party, the worst that happens is that I've wasted a bunch of people's time for one evening. Someone will throw a better party for the next occasion, and life goes on. But, tying this article back to the overall topic of the sequence, community building - there, crowding-out is a much bigger deal.

The opportunity cost created by a lackluster community institution is persistent and ongoing. When a considerable activation barrier stands in the way of convincing everyone to quit en masse and do a new thing, and when the institution is unresponsive to internal feedback, it may plug along for quite some time before it gets any external feedback (i.e. by way of alternatives emerging). To that extent, such an enterprise makes its local world worse as long as it keeps existing. Therefore, if you take it upon yourself to step into this arena, remember that your task is one of service, not leadership; that there will be little credit for a job well done, and much blame for anything less. A tough bargain to accept - but then again, community-building was never about you, was it?

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