Helpless Individuals
Previously in series: Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes
When you consider that our grouping instincts are optimized for 50-person hunter-gatherer bands where everyone knows everyone else, it begins to seem miraculous that modern-day large institutions survive at all.
Well - there are governments with specialized militaries and police, which can extract taxes. That's a non-ancestral idiom which dates back to the invention of sedentary agriculture and extractible surpluses; humanity is still struggling to deal with it.
There are corporations in which the flow of money is controlled by centralized management, a non-ancestral idiom dating back to the invention of large-scale trade and professional specialization.
And in a world with large populations and close contact, memes evolve far more virulent than the average case of the ancestral environment; memes that wield threats of damnation, promises of heaven, and professional priest classes to transmit them.
But by and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions - some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization - simply fail to exist in the first place.
I first realized this as a result of grasping how Science gets funded: namely, not by individual donations.
Science traditionally gets funded by governments, corporations, and large foundations. I've had the opportunity to discover firsthand that it's amazingly difficult to raise money for Science from individuals. Not unless it's science about a disease with gruesome victims, and maybe not even then.
Why? People are, in fact, prosocial; they give money to, say, puppy pounds. Science is one of the great social interests, and people are even widely aware of this - why not Science, then?
Any particular science project - say, studying the genetics of trypanotolerance in cattle - is not a good emotional fit for individual charity. Science has a long time horizon that requires continual support. The interim or even final press releases may not sound all that emotionally arousing. You can't volunteer; it's a job for specialists. Being shown a picture of the scientist you're supporting at or somewhat below the market price for their salary, lacks the impact of being shown the wide-eyed puppy that you helped usher to a new home. You don't get the immediate feedback and the sense of immediate accomplishment that's required to keep an individual spending their own money.
Ironically, I finally realized this, not from my own work, but from thinking "Why don't Seth Roberts's readers come together to support experimental tests of Roberts's hypothesis about obesity? Why aren't individual philanthropists paying to test Bussard's polywell fusor?" These are examples of obviously ridiculously underfunded science, with applications (if true) that would be relevant to many, many individuals. That was when it occurred to me that, in full generality, Science is not a good emotional fit for people spending their own money.
In fact very few things are, with the individuals we have now. It seems to me that this is key to understanding how the world works the way it does - why so many individual interests are poorly protected - why 200 million adult Americans have such tremendous trouble supervising the 535 members of Congress, for example.
So how does Science actually get funded? By governments that think they ought to spend some amount of money on Science, with legislatures or executives deciding to do so - it's not quite their own money they're spending. Sufficiently large corporations decide to throw some amount of money at blue-sky R&D. Large grassroots organizations built around affective death spirals may look at science that suits their ideals. Large private foundations, based on money block-allocated by wealthy individuals to their reputations, spend money on Science which promises to sound very charitable, sort of like allocating money to orchestras or modern art. And then the individual scientists (or individual scientific task-forces) fight it out for control of that pre-allocated money supply, given into the hands of grant committee members who seem like the sort of people who ought to be judging scientists.
You rarely see a scientific project making a direct bid for some portion of society's resource flow; rather, it first gets allocated to Science, and then scientists fight over who actually gets it. Even the exceptions to this rule are more likely to be driven by politicians (moonshot) or military purposes (Manhattan project) than by the appeal of scientists to the public.
Now I'm sure that if the general public were in the habit of funding particular science by individual donations, a whole lotta money would be wasted on e.g. quantum gibberish - assuming that the general public somehow acquired the habit of funding science without changing any other facts about the people or the society.
But it's still an interesting point that Science manages to survive not because it is in our collective individual interest to see Science get done, but rather, because Science has fastened itself as a parasite onto the few forms of large organization that can exist in our world. There are plenty of other projects that simply fail to exist in the first place.
It seems to me that modern humanity manages to put forth very little in the way of coordinated effort to serve collective individual interests. It's just too non-ancestral a problem when you scale to more than 50 people. There are only big taxers, big traders, supermemes, occasional individuals of great power; and a few other organizations, like Science, that can fasten parasitically onto them.
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Comments (55)
I'd like to see some examples of types of large institutions that you believe should exist, but don't due to lack of coordination.
But individuals do fund science (at least in the US): individuals give pretty substantial amounts to universities, even if it's less overall than what's provided by governments.
As you sort of allude to later, the issue may be less that individuals don't fund science, as that they don't fund particular science. I would speculate that this is in no small part because we generally realize that we wouldn't be very good at picking particular science to fund, so we give general, and let other people decide exactly what projects to pursue. This opens the process up to lots of problems, but it's not obvious that it's worse than the feasible alternatives.
(In the same way, lots of people choose to give to generalist charities like Oxfam, rather than trying to evaluate specific projects for themselves, though (a) I suspect it's easier to tug people's heartstrings for charitable projects; and (b) people probably overestimate their knowledge of what works in charity more than in science.)
I recall reading somewhere that one of the reasons Harvard has so much money is that the majority of donations they receive are earmarked for a narrow range of projects and they receive more money than they can spend in those areas (while other areas remain underfunded). I can't find the article but maybe someone else remembers it. Regardless I wouldn't be so quick to assume that many people are funding universities without restrictions on how the funds must be used.
I'm not sure I buy the Harvard story (even if it had some truth to it, there are lots of ways to get around this sort of thing, and if it were ever a serious constraint I'd imagine Harvard would be pretty good at finding those ways by now). But your broader point is valid; it would be good to have actual data about this.
I'm not sure I'm following the logic here. The failure of science to raise money via voluntary means is evidence that it is too much of a non-ancestral problem?
Well, I'll agree that if we somehow had science as it exists now for a few hundred generations, we'd probably be better at funding it. But thats true of anything. Standard economics predicts that funding large-scale public goods is difficult via voluntary means, and public choice explains why its difficult for governments too. If you believe Coase this difficulty is a feature, not a bug, because it takes transaction (i.e., organizational) costs into account.
Of course, it shouldn't come as any surprise to anyone that a scientist is complaining that people don't fund enough science ;) To be honest, I don't know where I could donate money to science to make a difference. Its very hard for non-scientists to judge the feasibility of scientific projects. So much of science seems to be a complete and utter waste of smart people and resources.
One thing we can do is promote the use of prizes over normal funding.
"But it's still an interesting point that Science manages to survive not because it is in our collective individual interest to see Science get done, but rather, because Science has fastened itself as a parasite onto the few forms of large organization that can exist in our world."
Can't it be both? It's not as if the government's support of science is completely unrelated to its being in our collective interest. It's awfully cynical simply to presume, without comment, that governments don't ultimately work for our collective interest (even if they can at times be very misguided).
More generally, this post seems full of lots of lines, like the above, that sort of seem true at first glance, but upon closer inspection are either quite banal, vacuous, or only questionably correct. How about some supporting evidence or arguments?
No, seriously! How can Eliezer say that when they obviously do? For example, many countries are more than a hundred years old.
I think you are being too literal. I interpreted Eliezer as saying that the obstacles to good large institutions are so great, that most of them never get off the ground. The rest of the post mentions some of the explanations for and implications of this fact. (Completely rewritten comment to be more polite and helpful)
As has been already mentioned, science of old was largely funded by individuals; scientists (or 'natural philosophers') were largely patrons of wealthy individuals. Presumably, this was because supporting an individual provides a good emotional fit (and thus serves as a good signal of status) in a way that funding pure research does not.
In conservation biology, flagship species play the role of cute puppies:
This is fighting a bias with a bias: people do not care as much as they should about conservation while they care too much of cute puppies. Science in general could adapt this technique: use "popular" subjects to attract funds to "good but unpopular" subjects.
If this is too much of the "dark side" for you, umbrella species might be more appropriate.
Surely this is fighting your preference with a bias. How robust do you think your argument is, not that conservation is important, but that it's more important that the other things people invest in?
The concept of a large modern-day institution that fails to exist strikes me as bizarre and incoherent. Is the idea a large institution that could exist if we were somehow able to twiddle causal factor X Judea-Pearl-style? (If so, it immediately poses the question of what causal factor X is for any specific proposed non-existent institution.)
I'm not really following your comment. When Robin advocates large prediction markets on all sorts of topics, or specifically markets on CEOs & whether they should resign, is he saying bizarre incoherent nonsense?
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with Pearl; would a Pearl-style explanation be 'if a wealthy influential person believes my writings about prediction markets and creates something that meets my specifications, the results will be good (with high probability)'?
I think it's simply a choice of phrasing that happened to cause an incongruous mental image for me; hence my attempt to work it around to a description I could encompass. I think of "to fail" as an active verb -- futarchy doesn't exist because we fail to enact it. In my brain, something that doesn't exist can't do anything, including fail to exist. As for the Pearl reference, I think I'll just point you to the source.
As I understand it, this is supposed to be one of the things government is for - to coordinate spending when trying to do these things privately would suffer from a free rider problem. I try not to talk about politics on here - mind-killer and all that - but one way to address this would be to try to improve the rationality of voters. I increasingly believe that preparing people to be participants in a democracy should be the primary function of schools.
Couldn't you greatly increase voter rationality much faster and cheaper by limiting the franchise or encouraging less rational people not to vote?
There aren't enough of them. Obvious problems would result.
Does a concept of "less rational people" even have any sense
And most likely it would be highly damaging, I don't have any evidence with me but I'm willing to bet real money on prediction market for that, that in cases where some class of people are excluded from voting (vote rarely like young people, or don't matter much due to the way votes are counted), their interests are seriously underrepresented in government decisions, relative to interests of classes of people who are voting a lot, in a way that matters (old people, regional interests in first past the post systems).
Just the weekend before last I was hearing a scientist say "we have 30 projects we know, know, will give good results. That's not even counting the worthy speculative work. We can fund: maybe five."
Science as an institution is absolutely poverty-bound. Find a way of getting it a bigger bite of GDP, and the speedup could be immense.
Find a way to give it a bigger bite of GDP, and new bureaucrats will arise to seize the money for worthless projects, generating more noise in the journals? We could be in a situation analogous to the situation in some countries where giving money to beggars just reallocates more of the economy to begging without increasing the income of the average beggar.
No doubt some of the marginal money would be wasted, but that's always true and is true now. Science is and would be worth it even if the haircut was immense, and I don't see a reason that the additional spending would be that much more wasted.
Also, the begging scenario you describe isn't particuarly scary. If giving more money to scientists meant there were more scientists each with the same funding levels we have now, that seems like a perfectly fine outcome. If it meant there were more fundraisers seeking money for science and each raised the same quantity of funds, that also seems like a fine outcome.
I'm confused a bit. You see existing science funding as being mostly/entirely wasted on worthless projects?
Could you elaborate here?
Are you saying you think the impact of a higher portion of GDP spent on "science" would be negative, more or less neutral, or positive (but with diminishing returns)?
You're only looking at funds for "Science" that get used for something useful. How much of the funds are used suboptimally or completely wasted? Pretty much every funding (science, charities, government etc.) except for capitalist free market (and even that only in case where there's little potential for abuse) is extremely inefficiently spent, as there's no optimization mechanism based on results, so it's optimized for some very indirect proxies (number of publications, emotional appeal, political interest). Basic research almost by definition doesn't have anything to directly optimize on. So no - just giving "Science" more money wouldn't necessarily improve everyone's well-being.
I cannot think of any plausible mechanism how basic research can be funded in a self-optimizing manner. Prediction markets on its long term impact? That's the best I can think of, but considering how unproven real world prediction markets are even in far easier cases I wouldn't really have high hopes for that.
There are optimization pressures from peer review and academic jostling for position. My point above was that things which passed all the quality checks were being stopped for no reason except lack of money. If you expect any good from the existing research, you should expect those unfunded efforts would have been at least as good, giving a linear speedup per added money.
The market optimizes for the aggregate desires of the buying public and for the ability to produce something valued more by the public than its raw materials - if it achieves scientific usefulness, that's a byproduct.
In the old days science was done by independently wealthy people, and how successful it was. Can today's scientists create profitable enterprises to fund their work? FHI is supposedly full of good programmers. Say, everyone works on a joint project half a week and does science the other half. Sounds like a real world application for the community's rationality and cooperation abilities, what do you say Eliezer?
More part-time and/or amateur scientists would be a good thing. This is more difficult today because there are fewer projects that one person, or even a handful of people can do on their own.
The canonical examples of 'big science' are the humane genome project, particle physics and atmospheric prediction. All three rely on massive international investment in infrastructure, the coordinated contributions of many specialists, and research programs with very long timelines, and where progress is mostly incremental (another bug sequenced, another 0.1 improvement in anomaly correlation, another dB of evidence in favour of some micro-theory).
That's not to say there are no problems left that a genius in a garage can't attack, just that it seems to me they are fewer than back in Lord Kelvin's day, and that the big problems that most of agree we want to solve require massive cooperation: the only effective system we have yet devised for this is via national science agencies.
Much more so than today not just per scientist but even compared to world population. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18625066.500-entering-a-dark-age-of-innovation.html
Do we have any data about effectiveness of old science? Even if it was more productive per scientist (I'd love to see any evidence for that) it also had very low scale and there was plenty of low hanging fruit around, so it's not directly comparable. Maybe compare productivity adjusted for discipline maturity?
Was the low hanging fruit depleted in music too? Any musicians at the level of Beethoven lately? Patronage just worked better?
While old science seems to have had greater total, bulk impact on the world than new science, I have polemically overblown the independence factor. "Gentleman scientists" were few, most scholars had patrons of some kind.
It was more of an invitation to consider non-donation-based funding models. We have evidence that part-time scientists can do great work. Wouldn't it be better if researchers spent their non-scientific hours together producing short-range value rather than fight each other over grants and tenure?
I think part-time science is a cool idea. I would like that, rather than a full-time corporate job (as I have now) or a full-time science job. There are disadvantages of course - science requires an awful lot of time investment - but it might get scientists out of their ivory tower (without corrupting them or killing their time with fund-raising).
"But by and large the answer to the question "How do people maintain the functioning of their bodies" is "They don't!" The vast majority of people - some of them extremely skilled in medicine and physiology - simply fail to exist in the first place."
Managing to misunderstand a question you yourself ask is a pretty impressive feat.
I appreciated the post, but can't deny Annoyance has a point here...
What???
I also found this confusing. The interpretation that I came up with which made sense was that "They don't!" is meant to mean "mu" (being an interjection to say that the premise of the question is false) and that "large institutions" is a stylistically unqualified reference to public-benefit institutions directly supported by individuals. The false premise is that large (individually-supported, public-benefit) institutions exist, from which we could ask how.
The double whammy was momentarily confounding and a bit fun, but resulted in some forum heat loss and annoyance.