Does power corrupt?
It's hard to tell
Different people in the EA ecosystem relate very differently to the life strategy of accumulating power so you can later wield it for good. This is not really my beat, and like many people I intuitively feel like it’s a bit icky and scary, and have the vague sense that somewhere along the path to power I’ll lose my way. But I’m really torn about how much credence I should lend to these intuitions.
To get one thing out of the way first: I think SBF is an extreme non-example of “power corrupts.” The man was the same hardcore double-or-nothing utilitarian sociopath both before and after acquiring his billions, and I’ll bet he’s the same now that he’s lost it all. Power changed him very little.
No, SBF exemplifies a different pattern: “the corrupt gain power.”1 If someone seems unusually hungry for power, they’re probably an unusually bad person from a common sense perspective. And the ranks of the ultra-powerful tend to be populated by people who really, really wanted it — who were willing to sacrifice not just norms and decency, but also their own comfort and happiness, for it.
But these two memes make nearly the opposite recommendation to a good person. If power corrupts, you should try to avoid it. If it’s just that the naturally-corrupt tend to gain power, you should actively try to accumulate power to make up for that. I tend to suspect the latter is actually the more robust pattern in the real world.
This doesn’t mean there aren’t paths to corruption. As you get more powerful, people around you will want things from you and want to stay in your good graces and this can screw up your epistemics. If you get used to a certain lifestyle, it can make it harder to make career choices that require you to give that up. And you may need to do harmful things to actually get and hold onto power,2 which you might not be able to make up for when the time comes.3
But also, it might just be…fine. There aren’t actually that many clear-cut examples of people we know tried to acquire power specifically to make the world better, and many of those people turned out to be…fine?4 Overall, I am grateful when people who broadly share my values slug it out in economic and political competition and win, and try not to be too precious about it.
I think only some of the connotations of “corrupt” fit in this case. SBF is evidently very willing to lie and cheat to get what he wants, and it’s fair to call that corruption. But a very important part of his danger comes from his sincerely held ideology.
In the AI x-risk scene, the most classic example is “contribute to accelerating The Singularity.”
Of course, whether or not you can later make up for the harm you cause on the way to accumulating power depends a lot on how much you're allowed to just do a basic utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. Despite not being a utilitarian and taking duties and norms seriously, I generally tend to think that you more or less can offset the harm you caused in the course of doing something that's not actually illegal or strongly norm-violating in our actual real society (e.g. eating meat, working at an AI company) by doing something else more beneficial later. Vibes-wise, this is a disagreement I seem to have with many rats, who want us all to act-as-if AI research is extremely norm-violating to make that more true.
Pretty much all famously-good people in history who got a lot of good stuff done, from MLK to Nelson Mandela to your favorite President, likely tried to acquire more power so they could do more good.
As you say, people often have to make compromises of various kinds to gain and maintain power. If you intend to make up for those compromises in the future then that's fine (to a point). One of the greatest temptations though, is to always push into the future the time when you will actually "spend your political/financial/cultural capital" to do the right thing. One is tempted to think, "perhaps if I keep my powder dry I can use my power for even better purposes in the future." This is so tempting in part because it really is at times true, and yet it's also often just rationalization because you can always tell yourself this.
One example is that many Republican politicians and staffers will say off-the-record that they think Trump is corrupt, enacting bad policies, and unfit to be president. But they were silent publicly. Why? A common rationale was to maintain their influence so that they can act at a more crucial moment in the future. But for most of them, that moment never came, not even after January 6th, and Trump came back to power more in control of the party than ever.
I don't think power inherently corrupts but it's good for powerful people to be very wary of its temptations.
Can’t you get a similar effect of corruption via selection? We don’t know ourselves perfectly and so the selves that acquire power may be mostly bad.
Eg in theory I say have a 5 percent chance to acquire power and then use it for good or evil. I think i have only a 10 percent chance to be evil so i should get power and use it for good. But if I’m much more likely to get power if evil then maybe 30-50 percent of the time I get power I’m evil and will use it for bad instead of good much of the time. Thus I should avoid trying to seek power