Overcoming bias, March 28, 2019
“Altruist” is not one of my core identities, though many identities that I cherish (e.g., “accurate”, “innovator”) have altruistic effects. But over the last decade I’ve met many who identify directly as altruists. If you are such a person, this post is for you. In it, I will make the case for a particular altruistic cause, a cause that combines two big altruism levers: innovation and institutions.
The main reason that our world today is better off than past worlds is innovation; we have accumulated more better ways to do many things. This strongly suggests that innovation is the main way that people today will help the future. Which suggest that this is how you should also try to help.
I can also tell you with confidence: academics usually drop the innovation ball after they’ve extracted the academic rewards that they can from an institution idea. Academics can be rewarded for studying existing social systems, including both institutional and cultural elements. They can also be rewarded for proving theorems about new institution ideas, and for testing predictions of these theorems in highlyabstracted lab experiments. Sometimes even in simple well-controlled field experiments. But academics are not rewarded for further efforts to adapt promising ideas to messy social worlds, and so they do little of this.