Internal legibility, rules, and democratic pressure. These incentives are good enough for some kinds of work.
They are not good enough for project prioritization and entrepreneurship, which can’t be (reliably) internally legible, which follow no regular patterns that fixed rules can accommodate, and judging them takes lots of time and specialist knowledge. So we end up needing this special qualitative post-hoc accountability mechanism that is more suited to them.
But not everything requires that sort of mechanism.
What I think I might have done here is separated the work of public goods funding into two departments that run under different incentive systems, each suited to the job they’re assigned.
Internal legibility, rules, and democratic pressure. These incentives are good enough for some kinds of work.
They are not good enough for project prioritization and entrepreneurship, which can’t be (reliably) internally legible, which follow no regular patterns that fixed rules can accommodate, and judging them takes lots of time and specialist knowledge. So we end up needing this special qualitative post-hoc accountability mechanism that is more suited to them.
But not everything requires that sort of mechanism.
What I think I might have done here is separated the work of public goods funding into two departments that run under different incentive systems, each suited to the job they’re assigned.