Jill sits down with everyone, understands all the points of views, and does her best to understand all the arguments. In the end, she determines Jezebel was correct.
What if, instead, Jill determines that Jezebel was wrong—but Jezebel still disagrees?
She sits down with each of them and explains why, based on the values, she decided that Jezebel was correct.
What if all said people are not satisfied with Jill’s explanation?
Once again, the answers to these questions are highly context specific. Are the values in question new, or very established? Does the decision seem highly idiosyncratic and hard to justify with previous decisions? How many people are involved/disagree?
Depending on these issues, the next steps could involve anything from changing onboarding procedures, norms, and rituals(because the values are not being imparted well), to going to a leadership oversight commitee (because the leader’s doing a bad job), to telling people to respect the leaders decision, to firing or banning people.
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On a meta note, both of the above questions (Zach’s and Said’s) feel a bit weird to me, like there are clear answers to them if you spend a few minutes steelmanning how the aforementioned organization would work well. My sense is that either the questions are being very uncharitable, they’re looking for impossible certainty in an obviously context specific and highly variable situation, or they’re doing some sort of socratic move (in the latter case, this is a style of conversation I’d rather not have on my posts, and in the former cases, I’d prefer people to be more charitable and work to steelman).
It could also be that I’m just assuming a much smaller inferential gap than there actually is, and the answers would not be clear to most people who aren’t as steeped in this stuff as I am.
they’re looking for impossible certainty in an obviously context specific and highly variable situation
We’re looking for a decision procedure. “It’s context-specific; it depends” is a good start, but a useful proposal needs to say more about what it depends on.
A simple example of a decision procedure might be “direct democracy.” People vote on what to do, and whichever proposal has more votes is implemented. This procedure provides a specific way to proceed when people don’t agree on what to do: they vote!
In both the OP and your response to me, you tell a story about people successfully talking out their differences, but a robust institution needs to be able to function even when people can’t talk it out—and the game theory of “What happens if we can’t talk it out” probably ends up shaping people’s behavior while talking it out.
For example, suspects of a police investigation might be very cooperative with the “good cop” who speaks with a friendly demeanor and offers the suspect a cup of coffee: if you look at the radically transparent video of the interview, you’ll just see two people having a perfectly friendly conversation about where the suspect was at 8:20 p.m. on the night of the seventeenth and whether they have witnesses to support this alibi. But the reason that conversation is so friendly is because the suspect can predict that the good cop’s partner might not be so friendly.
I feel like having a trusted leader is a pretty clear tiebreaking decision procedure, no? However, the important parts of this model and the organizations I’ve been a part of is all the OTHER parts that come before that last resort, where people have a clear sense of values, buy into them, and recognize themselves or as a group when they’re not following them. But in the end, if all of those important bits failed, these organizations still have a hierarchy.
ETA: The decision procedure IS the values. The values are hard to pin down because values are hard to pin down, they’re taught through examples and rituals and anecdotes and example and the weights on the neural nets in people’s heads get to learn what following them and breaking them look like. Ultimately theres leaders who can help make tough calls and fix adversarial examples and ambiguous options and the like, but the important part of these organizations is mostly how they’re set up to train that neural net.
The decision procedure IS the values [...] taught through examples and rituals and anecdotes and example and the weights on the neural nets in people’s heads
That makes sense; I agree that culture (which is very complicated and hard to pin down) is a very important determinant of outcomes in organizations. One thing that’s probably important to study (that I wish I understood better) is how subcultures develop over time: as people leave and exit the organization over time, the values initially trained into the neural net may drift substantially.
Edit: I hadn’t read Zack’s long reply when making this comment, so it wasn’t factored into it. Likely would have said something very slightly different if I had.
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Entirely fair of you to make the meta-note. Data point from me: I actually found the question/answer pairs quite helpful + think they’re reasonable; I probably could have generated answers for a system I set up, but I haven’t fully absorbed your proposal enough to do so on your behalf.
Actually, something generally helpful to hear is the “it’s highly context specific.” That seems true and a good answer. I think I would have tried to specify some overarching principle for all these cases and done so poorly.
Treading carefully, I’ll say that I can’t speak to the motivations/attitudes behind the questions, and I thought the wording in the other question wasn’t very good, but both questions themselves seem good to me.
What if, instead, Jill determines that Jezebel was wrong—but Jezebel still disagrees?
What if all said people are not satisfied with Jill’s explanation?
Once again, the answers to these questions are highly context specific. Are the values in question new, or very established? Does the decision seem highly idiosyncratic and hard to justify with previous decisions? How many people are involved/disagree?
Depending on these issues, the next steps could involve anything from changing onboarding procedures, norms, and rituals(because the values are not being imparted well), to going to a leadership oversight commitee (because the leader’s doing a bad job), to telling people to respect the leaders decision, to firing or banning people.
------
On a meta note, both of the above questions (Zach’s and Said’s) feel a bit weird to me, like there are clear answers to them if you spend a few minutes steelmanning how the aforementioned organization would work well. My sense is that either the questions are being very uncharitable, they’re looking for impossible certainty in an obviously context specific and highly variable situation, or they’re doing some sort of socratic move (in the latter case, this is a style of conversation I’d rather not have on my posts, and in the former cases, I’d prefer people to be more charitable and work to steelman).
It could also be that I’m just assuming a much smaller inferential gap than there actually is, and the answers would not be clear to most people who aren’t as steeped in this stuff as I am.
Very well. I will endeavor to be more direct.
The fourth virtue is evenness! If you first write at the bottom of a sheet of paper, “And therefore, the aforementioned organization would work well!”, it doesn’t matter what arguments you write above it afterward—the evidential entanglement between your position and whatever features-of-the-world actually determine organizational success, was fixed the moment you determined your conclusion. After-the-fact steelmanning that selectively searches for arguments supporting that conclusion can’t help you design better organizations unless they have the power to change the conclusion. Yes requires the possibility of no.
We’re looking for a decision procedure. “It’s context-specific; it depends” is a good start, but a useful proposal needs to say more about what it depends on.
A simple example of a decision procedure might be “direct democracy.” People vote on what to do, and whichever proposal has more votes is implemented. This procedure provides a specific way to proceed when people don’t agree on what to do: they vote!
In both the OP and your response to me, you tell a story about people successfully talking out their differences, but a robust institution needs to be able to function even when people can’t talk it out—and the game theory of “What happens if we can’t talk it out” probably ends up shaping people’s behavior while talking it out.
For example, suspects of a police investigation might be very cooperative with the “good cop” who speaks with a friendly demeanor and offers the suspect a cup of coffee: if you look at the radically transparent video of the interview, you’ll just see two people having a perfectly friendly conversation about where the suspect was at 8:20 p.m. on the night of the seventeenth and whether they have witnesses to support this alibi. But the reason that conversation is so friendly is because the suspect can predict that the good cop’s partner might not be so friendly.
I feel like having a trusted leader is a pretty clear tiebreaking decision procedure, no? However, the important parts of this model and the organizations I’ve been a part of is all the OTHER parts that come before that last resort, where people have a clear sense of values, buy into them, and recognize themselves or as a group when they’re not following them. But in the end, if all of those important bits failed, these organizations still have a hierarchy.
ETA: The decision procedure IS the values. The values are hard to pin down because values are hard to pin down, they’re taught through examples and rituals and anecdotes and example and the weights on the neural nets in people’s heads get to learn what following them and breaking them look like. Ultimately theres leaders who can help make tough calls and fix adversarial examples and ambiguous options and the like, but the important part of these organizations is mostly how they’re set up to train that neural net.
That makes sense; I agree that culture (which is very complicated and hard to pin down) is a very important determinant of outcomes in organizations. One thing that’s probably important to study (that I wish I understood better) is how subcultures develop over time: as people leave and exit the organization over time, the values initially trained into the neural net may drift substantially.
Edit: I hadn’t read Zack’s long reply when making this comment, so it wasn’t factored into it. Likely would have said something very slightly different if I had.
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Entirely fair of you to make the meta-note. Data point from me: I actually found the question/answer pairs quite helpful + think they’re reasonable; I probably could have generated answers for a system I set up, but I haven’t fully absorbed your proposal enough to do so on your behalf.
Actually, something generally helpful to hear is the “it’s highly context specific.” That seems true and a good answer. I think I would have tried to specify some overarching principle for all these cases and done so poorly.
Treading carefully, I’ll say that I can’t speak to the motivations/attitudes behind the questions, and I thought the wording in the other question wasn’t very good, but both questions themselves seem good to me.