Lets face it, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, and you can't start a worldwide social and political movement without creating a few power-hungry sociopaths. We get it. It hard, but its necessary. Whether it be dictators or dictresses; terrorists or terrorettes; fraudsters or fraudines. Every great social movement does and did it. Christianity, Liberalism, Communism, and even Capitalism have all created and enabled evil, power-hungry individuals who have caused mass calamity, and even death.
Our guide is aimed at the leaders, and future leaders of these and similar movements, but we believe its also a fun and exciting read for a popular audience, and those who find themselves within such movements.
We offer 5 keys to success in the aftermath of these situations:
Deny, deny, deny. Deny anything happened, and if you can't deny anything happened, deny you had knowledge of anything happening.
Disavow. Convince yourself and the world that the actions of the individual or individuals in question had nothing to do with the principles or ground-level reality of your social movement. This one is easy! We do it by default, but leaders often don't do it loud enough.
Do Something. Often people don't care what, they just want to know you're doing it. Whether it be a cheap and surface level investigation, or calling the next big change you make a reform effort, Do It!
Scapegoat. Lets be honest here, social movements are never unified, and you probably have some political enemies who have or had some features or goals in common with the sociopath, right? Why not blame them! Hit two birds in one stone, and be gone with both your problems.
Change Nothing, say nothing. In case the previous gave you the wrong impression, the last thing you should do is say anything of substance, or do anything of substance. That gives the wider world the ability to legitimately blame you and your social movement for what happened. Not ok!
Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/
Population ethics is an oft-overlooked subfield within ethics. Many people hold views that they don't realize contradict each other, or that have strange implications that they wouldn't endorse if they thought about it more.
Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations....
Headline finding: I audited 17 AI Safety Talent programmes. Zero of 17 have published any comparison group, rejected-applicant follow-up, matched control or randomisation. Not one. Every programme that mentions a counterfactual does it by asking participants to self-report.
Background
At least $70 million...