The Mad Scientists Theory of Governance is that most organizations would be more effective if they empowered employees with the freedom to make bold, apparently reckless decisions if they take responsibility for their decision.

The name comes from common lore about Manifold itself, that we operate like mad scientists (or, "crazed scientist barons"), first articulated by this comment from Odocare:

We liked this comment so much we printed it on a poster that hangs in our office.

When someone has the freedom to pick what they think is most important to work on, without restriction, you get more creative and more impactful output. In particular, you get more bets that pay off a huge amount, and those more than outweigh the failures.

When applied across an organization, a lot more gets done. Experimenting leads to a lot of collective learning and new sources of value are unlocked. Moreover, employees enjoy working in this environment because they have more control over their work and can see clearly the difference they are making.

It might even appear chaotic. Some customers might get upset when things are changed on them or seemingly anything that could go wrong does go wrong.

But there's a utilitarian calculation that justifies it. You are not optimizing to serve one customer — not even all your current customers. You are optimizing to serve current and future customers. Taking risks is commonly worth it in service of building an exponentially increasing business.

Dominic Cummings on No. 10
The direct inspiration for writing up this piece comes from an interview with Dominic Cummings on Dwarkesh's podcast where he diagnoses the failures of the UK government to effectively govern.

One problem is that no part of the bureaucracy is empowered to change anything or get anything new done, except for the Prime Minister. The PM alone is able to bless a new initiative and waive all the red tape of regulations, including from HR, the Treasury, and other departments. All progress is thus bottlenecked on one person (who is mostly busy dealing with the media and various crises).

It occurred to me that the right way to govern even bigger and more serious organizations, like the UK government, is the same mad scientists model that our small startup operates on.

Hire talented people and let them be live players and make mistakes. When the stakes are high, our natural inclination is to slow down and be more careful, but I think that is wrong.

The stakes are higher, so not experimenting with a land tax could mean lots of inefficiency in land use for years to come. In other words, the upsides are also larger when the stakes are higher, so the underlying utilitarian calculation doesn't change.

I submit that the best executed governance of the UK (or any country) would look fairly chaotic: lots of new initiatives with others being phased out; young bright people taking over huge departments and changing their mission; lots of hiring and firing; private data being leaked; media storms about controversial comments made by government employees; a few people dying in the construction of mega-projects or from trials of experimental drugs; high stakes negotiations with foreign powers including some unprecedented deals and failures; upset citizens who are protesting a change that they think devalues their neighborhood; and so on.

Early Google

Or, think about early Google and what made it so cool. They had a bunch of brilliant people that were very free to work on what they want, with a variety of cool initiatives, like Google Books or Gmail. Empowering employees made the place dynamic, with the sense that cool new stuff was being created every day, and also made it a fun place to work. Now, Google is more often trying to protect the businesses that it already built, and even their core search product has degraded.

I think that if Google had kept up the willingness to experiment (perhaps by only hiring people willing to experiment), their search would be better, and they would have higher revenue, in addition to many more successful products.

Proposed structure

In an organization of mad scientists, everyone is dictator. Meaning, they are free to do whatever they want. The only exception is that they are arranged in a hierarchy and must obey their manager, though managers should use their power sparingly. Of course, managers would probably find it impactful to coach their reports on what areas and initiatives to work on. They should encourage experimentation and try not to reject an idea that their report is fired up about.

To pull this off, you'll need to encode experimentation into the core tenets of the organization and speak about it frequently to set the culture and expectations. You should try to hire only independently-minded people who can come up with their own ideas and pursue them.

There's a question of whether this structure can scale — does it only work at small startups?

I think that large organizations are merely correlated with not having a culture of experimentation. I don't think that it is impossible or that it would not be efficient. I think it would be very efficient, actually, because each employee would be more likely to find something impactful to do and efforts compound. Perhaps the only reason it doesn't exist in larger organizations is that no one has seriously tried.

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Thanks for reading. I will resolve this to YES if someone at least as important as Scott Alexander (according to my judgment) references "The Mad Scientists Theory of Governance" before 2030.