Case Against delegating to Organisations
“I have much stronger confidence in a promise of a mafia boss than a well meaning social worker”(paraphrasing N. N. Taleb)
Why? Mafia don is giving promises on behalf of himself, has his goodwill and reputation at stake, the latter of which is a very important asset in mafia business and in life in general. A social worker acts on behalf of an organization whose decisions he rarely influences or controls. Even in a case he can have influence over those things, he has no reputation at stake.
Even thought we like to anthropomorphize organizations and often think of them as of people they have no conscience, shame, compassion and other basic feelings that tend to make humans behave much nicer to other humans than they would if they were strictly rational agents (easily observed when compared online vs offline interactions of the same people). It’s no coincidence that psychopathy and sociopathy is more prevalent in higher management than in staff and lower management, since they can be more ruthful and effective. The point being that organizations have only incentives and no moral inhibitions that would keep them in check.
Currently we are in a quite happy early days since crypto is still full of early enthusiasts whose primary motivation is not money. Many companies are currently lead by founders who are value driven, passionate about self sovereignty, decentralization and building a better world. Many organizations reflect these values, but as crypto continues become more mainstream it will also become more incentive driven and less value driven. Main company incentive is profit, which is neither good nor bad, but I would not want to have delegates who are profit seeking automatons, which all companies move towards.
Google also started with “don’t be evil” slogan which currently seems laughable, but there is no reason to believe it wasn’t genuine belief of the founders. The founders though are long gone (as all will eventually be) and if the whole business model of company is built on selling ads, it’s hard to avoid the scenario where it is harvesting users for data and attention. Any CEO who would want to go against it would be quickly replaced by someone who can better act in the company interest of profit maximization.
It is theoretically possible to have organizations whose incentives are set up in a way that they are incentivized to be promoting the values they claim to be promoting. This is the spirit of web3 that we try to design better systems to avoid “negative externalities” of trad companies but still have long way to go.
Delegates indorsed by organisations
I would much rather see individuals “endorsed by” organisations than organisations themselves. It is clear that the person currently represents their values, but acts under his name and has his reputation at stake.