Someone should start an annual $1m prize for whoever violated government procedures to do the most good for the world.
cc: @paulg / @albrgr / @ESYudkowsky / @robinhanson / @bryan_caplan
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A prize for "doing good at a personal cost" sounds simple to me.
I know you mean well, but this prize would be pointed in exactly the wrong direction. One of the biggest flaws in the nonprofit world is that donors are measured by how much they gave away rather than how much good it did.
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So while in the private sector, people are rewarded for efficiency, in the public sector the incentives point if anything in the opposite direction. It is a huge problem, one of the biggest in the world.
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I agree, but this wouldn't be aimed at fixing that problem. It's aimed more narrowly at making sure people in positions where they ordinarily don't even question rules, recognize that not following the rules is sometimes good. (Tech doesn't have this problem.)https://twitter.com/davidmanheim/status/1330540368056737794 …
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Whatever the measurement of good impact can be, don't think it can be objective
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Perhaps this was misunderstood. The prize would be for whichever *government employee* violated procedures to do the most good for the world.
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I agree there is something to your original proposal. The mistake is when we start weighting cost.
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The difference the good they did and the reward they could expect to get is exactly the degree to which we don't give sufficient incentive to do it.
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...which leads to the next question: how to reliably measure how much good is done?
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We could try having people nominate individuals worthy of being considered, then have a group of people on a board, and have them decide who get the award. It's not a rigorous quantitative process, but on the other hand, it's the way literally every award process works.
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