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Is this a game about getting elected; about testing social structure within an existing framework?
Pretty much. You want to find a social incentive structure such that it is at least an evolutionarily stable strategy for the participants to try and maximise their teams score while being selfish agents. And is compatible with human psychology and mental limits.
In response to
Game for organizational structure testing
This would avoid camaraderie, team spirit and reputation management being organisational factors.
Er, why would you want to do this? Do you have a specific management domain in mind, where these things actually don't matter?
If not, perhaps you can just watch what happens in carefully-selected, massively-multiplayer games? Eve, maybe?
Most people don't know the reputations or the personalities of the local councillors or board members they elect. It is these types of political situations I want to improve.
I had suspected you were a sock of someone who had gone to one of CFAR's rationality workshops, and had decided to surreptitiously play the "Be Specific"/"Pitch an Idea to..Paul Graham?" game on LW (perhaps for fun, or to see if anyone would catch on, or as a way to run a "real-world" exercise?)
Then I checked your username, and saw you had 1000+ karma, which probably negates the theory that you are a sock, but doesn't necessarily negate the theory that you are playing the Be Specific game with us....
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Call for participation - Centre for Organisational Rationality
I've not been to CFAR, it is a bit too far. Mostly I've no idea what types of organizations people would actually want to join, not being overly enamoured with organizations myself. But I need bodies to test my theories about organizations....
Any links to descriptions of the game?
In response to
Game for organizational structure testing
I think it would be simplest to use an existing game. Players would send you their moves and you'd make the changes to the game by hand (at least at first). For possible games you could look for suitable turn-based games in this list of multiplayer browser games. Would poker or chess be a possibility?
Poker or chess may be a possibility, if you tweak them to require teamwork. Lets say each person gets a slightly distorted and partial view of the game state(this works better for chess than poker). People would have to share information to synthesize the likely true world state before the ace poker player/chess player (or bot people have made to play that game) could pick the moves.
Game for organizational structure testing
Say we want to try out new organizational structures. Zaine suggests that a game might be a good method. However rather than a game to test a specific method of organizing people, I'm going to make a game where different organizational structures can be pitted against each other and statistics about their operation over time can be collected to inform new organisation designs.
Some organizational structures that might be tested include Democracy, Futarchy, Control Markets, Histocracy, some form of Meritocracy and Direct Democracy.
The conditions under which organizations suffer from corruption of purpose more frequently are when the people inside the organization are generally selfish and only moderately interested in the goals of the organization. So it makes sense to concentrate on these sorts of conditions.
In response to
An Introduction to Control Markets
Can you give an example of an existing organization that could be rearranged to use control markets and specify what its stakeholders, feedback, actors, and resources would be?
Okay lets take the UK house of commons, as I am familiar with it.
In its current form:
- Resource: A seat for a constituency
- Actor: An MP or a prospective MP
- Stakeholder: A voter
- Feedback: A vote
- Resource changing methodology: Tallying the votes
You could use a naive mapping and only change the feedback to be funge and the resource changing methodology to be an auction.
So what would this look like? MPs would try and convince their constituency they were doing a good job, so they get a positive return on their seat. The MPs could pay non-MPs in funge to help them think up good schemes to improve the lives of their constituency or at least make them thinks things were getting better. The non-MPs would thus get capital later on to make bids for their own seats. MPs could make trades of funge between them to get them to help each other out in getting laws passed. These trades would be public (as would bidding histories).
Make sense?
You might want to distinguish between the following two propositions.
"People here are not interested in raising the sanity waterline of organizations."
"People here don't see how your proposal for experimenting with 'control markets' is actually likely to do much to raise the sanity waterline of organizations."
It seems to me that you've had evidence for #2 and have concluded #1.
I've been explicitly recommended to get a concrete outcome by villiam_bur and told to I need to focus on one by Modus Ponies. They got up voted. No one has said, "Hey I like your enthusiasm for trying a different organisational structure, would you be interested in helping me try out this type of system first?". This would have been evidence of 2 for me. And I would have evaluated the system and may have decided to help it.
We probably won't hit on the right one straight away, but we won't get anywhere without fostering a culture of experimentation.
Edit: I think most people are interested in improving organisations in the abstract, lots of people complain about governments etc. I'm looking for people that are actively looking for new organisational methods to try.
A good metaphor would someone wanting to try an organisation controlled by voting, he couldn't say what the organization will end up doing, because it would be dependent upon what the people who voted would make it do. If he had a firm goal that he just had to achieve, then he would probably would be better off without the organization.
Well there's your problem. People didn't create democracy just to see if it would work. People created democracy to answer the question "how the heck are we going to run our nation?" There were firm goals. "Guard civilization against bandits, natives, and the French." (Or "bandits, barbarians, and the Spartans," depending on the era.) "Protect our liberty from the British." "Make sure the government stays beholden to the people."
If you want to build something, you need an actual, concrete thing to build. Locke didn't create modern democracy. That took Jefferson and Hamilton and the rest.
If I can't get people interested in the idea now, building a web app by myself won't make any difference.
I agree. You don't actually want a web app that badly, and frankly, neither do any of us. I see two solutions.
1) Apply this to a real problem whose mere existence causes you real emotional pain. (e.g., "open source software projects are shoddily run," "the healthcare system is fucked up and bullshit," "the technology to do this awesome thing I want doesn't exist.") Use the enthusiasm this generates to get others involved. 2) Follow Zaine's advice. Build a toy example of your system that's fun for its own sake. Use that to gather data.
Either way, I would suggest you learn to write better before you go ahead with any project that requires outside participation. Basic things like sentence structure and punctuation are still holding you back. Posts like your stuff here in Discussion are the best way to do that. Keep writing, keep getting feedback, and focus on specific techniques.
Heh. Part of the reason I posted here was that Lesswrong is associated wtih CFAR. So I thought people would be more amenable to meta-improvement organisations. If people are interested in raising the sanity water-line of individuals, why not the sanity waterline of organizations? I see I was miscalibrated.
Zaines advice would most likely end up being a webapp of some flavour anyway :P The game would need to be multiplayer, no download required. And I may as well make it so the control market software in the game has an api and can be easily extracted from the game if people decide they want to use it in anger.
I will try and write more. But limited time will make it probably slip off my agenda in favour of coding.
Thanks for the feedback.
It sounds like you want to allocate some resources you don't have in furtherance of a goal you haven't defined and don't care about, and would like other people to be passionate enough about this to help you make a go of it.
I don't care about the goal but I do care about the method that the goal is selected and how the people are encouraged to work towards the goal. A good metaphor would someone wanting to try an organisation controlled by voting, he couldn't say what the organization will end up doing, because it would be dependent upon what the people who voted would make it do. If he had a firm goal that he just had to achieve, then he would probably would be better off without the organization. Voting is a method of combining diverse goals and knowledge into one organization; as are control markets.
If I can't get people interested in the idea now, building a web app by myself won't make any difference. I also understand my motivational structures well enough to know that working with other people helps a lot.
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Your summary does not appear to agree with mine; it seems like you want to create a game where the strategy which is personally selfish is also ideal for a group, which is wildly different from a game where getting elected scores points regardless of one's competence.
One solution would be an incentive system that managed to reward each individual proportionately to their contribution to the group; that roughly reduces to free-market capitalism, which appears to be bad at the intended goal (based on previous results). Does that issue boil down to difficulty determining the value of each person's contribution to total welfare?
I didn't quite get your message, so I think I interpretted it incorrectly.
My goal is a game where different organizational structures can be compared for effectiveness.
One of organizational structure would be voting. In this structure getting elected would be a win of some sorts. In another structure there would be a different win condition. Seeing which type of win conditions and rules motivated people the best, is the reason I want to make the game.
I agree there is problems with free market capitilism as it is currently practised. However there are lots of knobs we could twiddled about how they work. E.g. fractional reserve banking or long term land ownership and other monopoly issues. If we could try out these changes on a smaller scale and they are successful compared to our current systems, then we might be able to convince people to make real changes later on.