This is my post. It is fundamentally a summary of an overview paper, which I wrote to introduce the concept to the community, and I think it works for that purpose. In terms of improvements there are a few I would make; I would perhaps include the details about why people choose megaprojects as a venue, for completeness’ sake. It might have helped if I provided more examples in the post to motivate engagement; these are projects like powerplants, chip fabs, oil rigs and airplanes, or in other words the fundamental blocks of modern civilization.
I continue to think it is an important problem and the subject urgently needs advancement. It seems trivially, overwhelmingly true to me that our systematic badness at big things is a huge issue and the benefits of solving that would be enormous. It is also now topical: the paper references other work which argues in favor of treating megaprojects as a distinct organizational form, and suggests it would be a good method of managing things like stimulus packages or defense procurement. If true, it would trivially be a good method for handling a problem like COVID-19 vaccine procurement and distribution.
The real opportunities here are writing further on the problem. There are a lot of different directions this could (should) go:
- Epistemic spot checks: a lot of the information comes from the business and management literature, which is not held in high regard for rigor. Validating some of the key claims, especially about the scale of megaproject spending overall, would make a good post.
- Book reviews: reviews/summaries of the available books specific to the subject should be doable; there are only a couple of them and it would make it easier for the community to get more information if they needed to.
- Case studies: these would also be book reviews, but this time of individual high profile successes (Apollo) or failures (Big Dig). This would provide a lot more color and context than high-level data like GDP percentages and budget timelines.
- Comparison with established knowledge: For example, comparing the suggested remedies in the literature with techniques taught at CFAR or something like murphyjitsu and planning fallacy, or even basic Bayesian calculation (which according to my reading is basically what they advocate). I have a notion for using the metaphor of a stag hunt to illustrate what some of the problems are.
- Current events: looking at the current state of vaccine procurement and distribution and seeing which problems might have been prevented in a megaproject management format might still provide useful information.
- Investigate actionability: in the paper, we aren’t left with any information about what a person could do about this, beyond something maddeningly vague like “be chosen by a government or large corporation to manage a megaproject; don’t suck.” More details about how the selection process works for jobs like that, and what kind of incentives those people are under, would be important information. This is especially true in terms of evaluating it on an EA basis, where it would fall under Improving Institutional Decision Making.
Turning to the question of whether it is important to LessWrong, it seems to me the answer is clearly no. The post received very little engagement even though it voted well, and the thread wasn’t picked up by anyone else.
This is my post. It is fundamentally a summary of an overview paper, which I wrote to introduce the concept to the community, and I think it works for that purpose. In terms of improvements there are a few I would make; I would perhaps include the details about why people choose megaprojects as a venue, for completeness’ sake. It might have helped if I provided more examples in the post to motivate engagement; these are projects like powerplants, chip fabs, oil rigs and airplanes, or in other words the fundamental blocks of modern civilization.
I continue to think it is an important problem and the subject urgently needs advancement. It seems trivially, overwhelmingly true to me that our systematic badness at big things is a huge issue and the benefits of solving that would be enormous. It is also now topical: the paper references other work which argues in favor of treating megaprojects as a distinct organizational form, and suggests it would be a good method of managing things like stimulus packages or defense procurement. If true, it would trivially be a good method for handling a problem like COVID-19 vaccine procurement and distribution.
The real opportunities here are writing further on the problem. There are a lot of different directions this could (should) go:
- Epistemic spot checks: a lot of the information comes from the business and management literature, which is not held in high regard for rigor. Validating some of the key claims, especially about the scale of megaproject spending overall, would make a good post.
- Book reviews: reviews/summaries of the available books specific to the subject should be doable; there are only a couple of them and it would make it easier for the community to get more information if they needed to.
- Case studies: these would also be book reviews, but this time of individual high profile successes (Apollo) or failures (Big Dig). This would provide a lot more color and context than high-level data like GDP percentages and budget timelines.
- Comparison with established knowledge: For example, comparing the suggested remedies in the literature with techniques taught at CFAR or something like murphyjitsu and planning fallacy, or even basic Bayesian calculation (which according to my reading is basically what they advocate). I have a notion for using the metaphor of a stag hunt to illustrate what some of the problems are.
- Current events: looking at the current state of vaccine procurement and distribution and seeing which problems might have been prevented in a megaproject management format might still provide useful information.
- Investigate actionability: in the paper, we aren’t left with any information about what a person could do about this, beyond something maddeningly vague like “be chosen by a government or large corporation to manage a megaproject; don’t suck.” More details about how the selection process works for jobs like that, and what kind of incentives those people are under, would be important information. This is especially true in terms of evaluating it on an EA basis, where it would fall under Improving Institutional Decision Making.
Turning to the question of whether it is important to LessWrong, it seems to me the answer is clearly no. The post received very little engagement even though it voted well, and the thread wasn’t picked up by anyone else.