• Humans took over the world not because our individual intelligence allowed individual humans to succeed, but because we got just smart enough to coordinate
• We've barely gotten smarter since 10000 years ago, but have gotten much better at coordinating through government law and economic mechanisms (markets, corporations)
  • From families to tribes to cities to nations

Fundamental problem: Our power exceeds our wisdom

If you buy into existential risk as the most important problem of our times, than the bottleneck appears to be something like knowledge or wisdom. What can we do to rapidly acquire more wisdom?

In the early days of the rationality movement, the prescription seemed to be “make individuals smarter”. The tools of choice were Bayesian reasoning, Trigger-action-plans, attacks on akrasia; all aimed at raising the thinking level of a single person

Viewing institutions as agents

What is the equivalent IQ of the institution of Jane Street, if it were a single person? Someone capable of earning millions a day through good decisionmaking, with lightning fast 24/7 response times, processing information in parallel - is that 250 IQ?

At any point in time, a lone trader can play the most efficient game - the market pricing game on Wall Street. But notice that all the large winnings accrue to institutions, not individuals.

Institutional intelligence includes people, networks, processes, and computers

• People: an institution is generally composed of other humans; the raw abilities of those humans tend to be the biggest factor in the success or failure of the institution as a whole.
• Networks: The connections between people; how well they know each other, how much they are willing to cooperate
• Process: The guidelines in place to mediate how the individual subagents talk with each other
  • Good processes:
    • Weekly get-togethers (Catholic mass; startup all-hands)
    • 1:1s (Catholic confession; startup business advice)
    • Shared rituals (Standup; prayer before meals)
• Computers: Or more broadly, the tools that allow us to outsource some amount of our thinking, and reduce communication frictions

What institutions have won? aka Who should we copy?

• Catholicism - largest single religion in the world, with a specific set of beliefs that roll up into a single governing body (the Vatican, the Pope), chapters in every nation, very impressively organized
• United States - the richest country on earth, exporting democratic norms, making English the language of choice and the dollar the default currency. The original US constitution seems worthwhile to examine
  • Is this an output of good governance, or sheer luck at being thrown into a resource-rich land with stark warfare capability differentials vs native Americans?
• Big Tech Companies
• Bitcoin??

Making “you” smart is hard. Making “us” smart might be easier? aka Why IIDM might be tractable