Scandals don’t just happen in the vacuum. You need to create the right conditions for them. So I suggest:
We spread concern about the riskiness of all altruistic action so that conscientious people (who are often not sufficiently scandal-prone) self-select out of powerful positions and open them up to people with more scandal potential.
We encourage more scathing ad-hom attacks on leadership so that those who take any criticism to heart self-select out of leadership roles.
We make these positions more attractive to scandal-prone people by abandoning cost-effectiveness analyses and instead base strategy and grantmaking on vibes and relationships.
We further improve the cushiness of these positions by centralizing power and funding around them to thwart criticism and prevent Hayekian diversity and experimentation.
We build stronger relationships with powerful, unscrupulous people and companies by, e.g., helping them with their hiring.
We emphasize in-person networking and move the most valuable networks to some of the most expensive spots in the world. That way access to the network comes with even greater dependency on centralized funding, making it easier to control.
[Meta: I’m not claiming anyone is doing these things on purpose! It would be nice, though, if more people were trying to counter these risk factors for scandals and generally bad epistemics.]
Has anyone tested this? Because if we could create them in a vacuum, that might save a lot of energy usually lost to air resistance, and thus be more effective
We make these positions more attractive to scandal-prone people by abandoning cost-effectiveness analyses and instead base strategy and grantmaking on vibes and relationships imaginary Bayesian updates.
Scandals don’t just happen in the vacuum. You need to create the right conditions for them. So I suggest:
We spread concern about the riskiness of all altruistic action so that conscientious people (who are often not sufficiently scandal-prone) self-select out of powerful positions and open them up to people with more scandal potential.
We encourage more scathing ad-hom attacks on leadership so that those who take any criticism to heart self-select out of leadership roles.
We make these positions more attractive to scandal-prone people by abandoning cost-effectiveness analyses and instead base strategy and grantmaking on vibes and relationships.
We further improve the cushiness of these positions by centralizing power and funding around them to thwart criticism and prevent Hayekian diversity and experimentation.
We build stronger relationships with powerful, unscrupulous people and companies by, e.g., helping them with their hiring.
We emphasize in-person networking and move the most valuable networks to some of the most expensive spots in the world. That way access to the network comes with even greater dependency on centralized funding, making it easier to control.
[Meta: I’m not claiming anyone is doing these things on purpose! It would be nice, though, if more people were trying to counter these risk factors for scandals and generally bad epistemics.]
Has anyone tested this? Because if we could create them in a vacuum, that might save a lot of energy usually lost to air resistance, and thus be more effective
Even scandal-prone individuals can’t survive in a vacuum. (You may be thinking of sandals, not scandals?)
Is it definitely established that a living person is required for every scandal?
Only half a person per sandal I think!
you can totally have scandals involving dead or imaginary people. So, definitely no.
Right? Also you can have a person turn on the scandal machine, which then creates more than one scandal associated with them.
FTFY