A Rational Company—Seeking Advisors

[AlignmentOptimizer]

The purpose of this post is to hopefully get some feedback, advice or even advisors, for how to optimize a business using rationalist principles.

Background

We are a team of three people running a small tech/​AI company and currently dedicate the profits to:

1. Donate to AI alignment research.

2. Reinvest in the business to expand the business.

My intuition is that it should be possible to use rationalist principles of decision making, in order to create a scalable and replicable system for decision making, in order to successfully grow the business. We believe our chances of success will increase if we collaborate with external advisors well-versed in rationality.

Benefit of Becoming Our Advisor

1. A chance to engage in discussing rationalist ideas in the context of business.

2. Opportunity to help spread rational discourse in the corporate world.

3. Collaborate with a team dedicated to impactful causes like AI alignment.

4. Monetary compensation.

What We are Looking For

An ideal advisor would:

1. Have business expertise

2. Genuinely enjoy exploring new ideas

3. Have a rationalist mindset

Some Rationality Inspired Ideas for Running a Company We are Considering

1. Prediction Markets
   Internal prediction markets, where employees get to make predictions, and those predictions guide the company’s decision making for major decisions, and could possibly lead to improved results. As with any prediction market, well calibrated predictions would over time get more weight in their votes.
   

2. Performance Based Project Funding (with A/​B testing)
   Through modularization of different projects, the performance of each project can be better measured and rewarded. With time we collect more and more data on what makes a good/​bad project.
   

3. Rationalist Culture
   By fostering a culture of rational thinking, overall decision making can be improved. Culture can be fostered in many ways, a few of which are:

   1. Hiring people with a rationalist inclination (Possibly through LessWrong?)

   2. Leading by example

   3. Give positive feedback when rationalist principles are applied

   4. Allow some work hours

If you’re interested in helping us integrate rationalist principles into our business, please reach out via direct message. We’d love to discuss how we can collaborate.

Or, feel free to share relevant posts/​ideas in the comments.

[Zac Hatfield-Dodds]

This sounds to me like the classic rationalist failure mode of doing stuff which is unusually popular among rationalists, rather than studying what experts or top performers are doing and then adopting the techniques, conceptual models, and ways of working that actually lead to good results.

Or in other words, the primary thing when thinking about how to optimize a business is not being rationalist; it is to succeed in business (according to your chosen definition).

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Happily there’s considerable scholarship on business, and CommonCog has done a fantastic job organizing and explaining the good parts. I highly recommend reading and discussing and reflecting on the whole site—it’s a better education in business than any MBA program I know of.