All of MoreOfAQuestionThanAComment's Comments + Replies

What are plausible explanations for early "vaccination rollout" authorities' communications having been so aggressively wrongheaded, to hinder the use of about-to-expire doses?

1patio111yExtreme risk-aversion, poor incentives to be right, a true values function which does not actually reflect the one we expect them to have, and extreme undercompetence in areas that we expect competence.

0MoreOfAQuestionThanAComment1y(this question is just a rephrasing of the "existence of the other kind of oversight" one, so please don't answer both.)

Patrick McKenzie AMA

MoreOfAQuestionThanAComment1y1

Are there interests that would have wanted the U.S. pandemic response to be low-efficacy, or is that not a productive line of thinking?

2patio111ySee the VaccinateCA piece, but there are many institutions which were not optimizing for "The US should attempt to maximize the number of lives saved during the pandemic" and we should be scandalized by that.

Patrick McKenzie AMA

MoreOfAQuestionThanAComment1y1

What sort of oversight can prevent a headless (or "committee") venture from being launched, and what explains the existence of the other kind of oversight, that lets it happen?

7sketerpot1yI've worked at some tech companies which had a very effective answer to that question. At those companies here's a strong cultural expectation that anything you want to get done should have a known Directly Responsible Individual. As the name suggests, the DRI is exactly one person who is responsible for making sure the thing gets done, and has the authority to make relevant decisions as an individual. (This sometimes goes by other names, but the concept is more or less the same.) If this person is doing poorly they can be replaced with someone else, but there needs to be one person who is ultimately individually responsible and has the corresponding individual authority. This was probably a formal rule, but the real enforcement was cultural. Everybody Knew that there had to be someone in charge of doing the thing; otherwise how could they possibly expect the thing to get done? Putting a committee in charge instead of a person would have just felt bizarre, as unexpected and transgressive as dropping one's trousers in a meeting. This kind of culture can perpetuate itself easily once it exists, but I don't know how to change an existing organizational culture to be this way, short of having someone at the top with a lot of power and the willingness to use it on this.

Patrick McKenzie AMA

MoreOfAQuestionThanAComment1y1

How do you (Patrick) juxtapose "underpromise and overdeliver" against, when you're asked, assessing what someone with your (Patrick's) perceptions and skills could reasonably achieve going forward, given the opportunity?

3patio111yThis would depend markedly on who I was talking to and what I needed out of them. Certain audiences counsel being much more explicit about e.g. one's level of ambition and where one believes oneself to be on a spectrum of ability/drive/horsepower/etc. Then there is the comms strategy bit of it, where "I have many weird hobbies, like sometimes running the U.S.'s shadow vaccine location data information provider" is both a self-deprecating joke and also a brief and loaded statement about recent realized results suggestive of my efficacy in doing hard things.