It is an open-to-me question to what extent this (assuming it’s as bad as you’re saying), the effect of (1) boring selection effects; (2) power actually corrupting a lot; (3) people being bad and power revealing them to be so; (4) something sunk-costs-shaped.
(Regarding (2) and (3), I’ve come to be unsure whether they are meaningfully different.)
I am rather skeptical that (1) explains most of this. Surely, it plays a role, but, like, surely not all super-powerful are born with very strong tendencies to develop sociopathy or whatever. It’s more plausible that those extremely powerful people who have reasons to repent their past use of extreme power are the ones who have prior psychological predispositions to use power in very bad ways. But still, IDK, it seems to me that ruling well can be extremely hard, so causing a lot of bad, while trying to do good[1] doesn’t seem super difficult.
Regarding (4), for example, there’s been a lot of repenting recently in the LW/EA sphere, but I can’t think of anyone other than Habryka among the (past or current) leadership-ish positions who said out loud that “yep, we’ve done a lot of bad stuff; maybe it’s net bad overall”. It’s probably just really hard/high-friction to face the truth that one’s past actions have led to really, really nasty stuff, and being at the top of some social pyramid doesn’t make it any easier. It seems plausible that humans derive values from fictitious imputed coherence, so “facing one’s past sins”, especially the ones that one incumbently counts as one’s most meaningful decisions, runs against the natural grain of human value acquisition.
Let’s hand-wavingly put aside the examples of trying to do good, such as the Crusades, or whatever the hell the Soviets were thinking when they stole food from peasants to starve them to death.
Thanks for posting this.
It is an open-to-me question to what extent this (assuming it’s as bad as you’re saying), the effect of (1) boring selection effects; (2) power actually corrupting a lot; (3) people being bad and power revealing them to be so; (4) something sunk-costs-shaped.
(Regarding (2) and (3), I’ve come to be unsure whether they are meaningfully different.)
I am rather skeptical that (1) explains most of this. Surely, it plays a role, but, like, surely not all super-powerful are born with very strong tendencies to develop sociopathy or whatever. It’s more plausible that those extremely powerful people who have reasons to repent their past use of extreme power are the ones who have prior psychological predispositions to use power in very bad ways. But still, IDK, it seems to me that ruling well can be extremely hard, so causing a lot of bad, while trying to do good[1] doesn’t seem super difficult.
Regarding (4), for example, there’s been a lot of repenting recently in the LW/EA sphere, but I can’t think of anyone other than Habryka among the (past or current) leadership-ish positions who said out loud that “yep, we’ve done a lot of bad stuff; maybe it’s net bad overall”. It’s probably just really hard/high-friction to face the truth that one’s past actions have led to really, really nasty stuff, and being at the top of some social pyramid doesn’t make it any easier. It seems plausible that humans derive values from fictitious imputed coherence, so “facing one’s past sins”, especially the ones that one incumbently counts as one’s most meaningful decisions, runs against the natural grain of human value acquisition.
Let’s hand-wavingly put aside the examples of trying to do good, such as the Crusades, or whatever the hell the Soviets were thinking when they stole food from peasants to starve them to death.