Thanks for this post! I’ve been wondering about how to think about this too.
Some burgeoning ideas:
Maybe try to understand new people’s moral priorities, e.g. understand if they ‘score’ high on “Expansive Altruism” and “Effectiveness-focused” scales. If they actually genuinely ‘score’ [1] high on those moral inclinations, I would tend to trust them more.
Maybe start a clearance process, in the sense of checking the background of people, etc. National security of countries also has to deal with this type of alignment problem.
Teach people how to be intense, ambitious, and actually optimize for the right thing. I think that people may be really interested in doing the highest impact thing but they don’t have the “thinking methods” and general “super ambitious social environment” about those. People who push for high intensity and know what to prioritize are extremely rare and precious. Having workshops or online classes about successful (large) project prioritization, calculating the EV of a project, increasing its ambition, and calculating and reducing risks, may be useful.
Thanks for this post! I’ve been wondering about how to think about this too.
Some burgeoning ideas:
Maybe try to understand new people’s moral priorities, e.g. understand if they ‘score’ high on “Expansive Altruism” and “Effectiveness-focused” scales. If they actually genuinely ‘score’ [1] high on those moral inclinations, I would tend to trust them more.
Maybe start a clearance process, in the sense of checking the background of people, etc. National security of countries also has to deal with this type of alignment problem.
Teach people how to be intense, ambitious, and actually optimize for the right thing. I think that people may be really interested in doing the highest impact thing but they don’t have the “thinking methods” and general “super ambitious social environment” about those. People who push for high intensity and know what to prioritize are extremely rare and precious. Having workshops or online classes about successful (large) project prioritization, calculating the EV of a project, increasing its ambition, and calculating and reducing risks, may be useful.
Noting that it would be easy to Goodhart those existing scales. So this would be mostly through conversations and in-depth interactions.