I don’t give much weight to his diagnosis of problematic group decision mechanisms
I have quite a lot of time for it personally.
The world is dominated by a lot of large organizations that have a lot of dysfunction. Anybody over the age of 40 will just agree with me on this. I think it’s pretty hard to find anybody who would disagree about that who’s been around the world. Our world is full of big organizations that just make a lot of bad decisions because they find it hard to aggregate information from all the different people.
This is roughly Hanson’s reasoning, and you can spell out the details a bit more. (Poor communication between high level decision makers and shop-floor workers, incentives at all levels dissuading truth telling etc). Fundamentally though I find it hard to make a case this isn’t true in /any/ large organization. Maybe the big tech companies can make a case for this, but I doubt it. Office politics and self-interest are powerful forces.
For employment decisions, it’s not clear that there is usable (legally and socially tolerated) information which a market can provide
I roughly agree—this is the point I was trying to make. All the information is already there in interview evaluations. I don’t think Robin is expecting new information though—he’s expecting to combine the information more effectively. I just don’t expect that to make much difference in this case.
big organizations that just make a lot of bad decisions because they find it hard to aggregate information from all the different people.
I don’t disagree with the first part, but the “because” clause is somewhere between over-simple and just plain wrong. The dysfunction in large organizations (corporations and governments as primary examples) is analogous to dysfunction in individual humans, which is ALSO rampant, and seems to be more about misalignment of components than about single-powerful-executive information and decision-making.
I have quite a lot of time for it personally.
This is roughly Hanson’s reasoning, and you can spell out the details a bit more. (Poor communication between high level decision makers and shop-floor workers, incentives at all levels dissuading truth telling etc). Fundamentally though I find it hard to make a case this isn’t true in /any/ large organization. Maybe the big tech companies can make a case for this, but I doubt it. Office politics and self-interest are powerful forces.
I roughly agree—this is the point I was trying to make. All the information is already there in interview evaluations. I don’t think Robin is expecting new information though—he’s expecting to combine the information more effectively. I just don’t expect that to make much difference in this case.
I don’t disagree with the first part, but the “because” clause is somewhere between over-simple and just plain wrong. The dysfunction in large organizations (corporations and governments as primary examples) is analogous to dysfunction in individual humans, which is ALSO rampant, and seems to be more about misalignment of components than about single-powerful-executive information and decision-making.