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48        Philosophical Multicore | Michael Dickens
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53        Don't just not do bad things. Do good things.
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97  	<article class="post">
98		
99			<h1><a href="/2026/09/21/campaing_spending_limits/">Campaign spending limits would reduce extinction risk (but spending limits might not accord with Constitutional principles)</a></h1>
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110            <p>Many people support stricter regulations on frontier AI, and some of those people donate to political campaigns for pro-regulation candidates. Not many people oppose AI regulations, but that group includes AI companies and execs who have giant piles of cash to throw at super PACs.</p>
111
112<p>This situation is made possible by three court decisions:</p>
113
114<ol>
115  <li>Buckley v. Valeo (1976) held that limits on independent political spending violate the First Amendment (while limits on direct contributions to candidates do not).</li>
116  <li>Citizens United (2010) extended those First Amendment protections to corporations and unions, thus allowing <em>them</em> to spend unlimited money on political ads.</li>
117  <li>SpeechNow.org v. FEC (2010) built on Citizens United to allow unlimited donations to independent-expenditure-only committees—i.e., super PACs—as long as they don’t directly work with political candidates.</li>
118</ol>
119
120<p>Donations straight to a candidate are still capped at a few thousand dollars per person; donations to a super PAC supporting that candidate are not. If SpeechNow were overturned, or a law passed overriding it, the $5,000 cap on super PAC contributions would apply again, which means the popularity of a position would matter more than how rich its supporters are.</p>
121
122<p><em>(I often hear “Overturn Citizens United” as the slogan, but SpeechNow allows super PACs to exist, and Buckley v. Valeo enables unlimited spending by  individuals. What the advocacy groups in the space really want to do is restore the power of Congress and the states to enforce spending limits.)</em></p>
123
124<p>Restoring spending limits would prevent unpopular but rich anti-regulation special interests (like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_the_Future">Leading the Future</a>) from dominating the political funding landscape. This would make the AI regulation situation better, but it would also improve the situation on any policy issues where unpopular, wealthy special interests wield disproportionate (and arguably un-democratic) influence.</p>
125
126<p>It would also <em>worsen</em> any situation in which rich special interests are in the right, and the majority is in the wrong. But there aren’t many of those, and anyway there’s good reason to dislike an un-democratic process even if it produces a good outcome in a particular case.</p>
127
128<p>An important caveat: Before writing this post, I was confident that imposing campaign spending limits would be a good thing. After doing some more research, I find it hard to dismiss the free speech defense of unlimited campaign spending (I’ll say more about this in the next section). Both sides of the debate have points in their favor. My thesis in this post should be taken as the <em>narrow</em> claim that campaign spending limits would have positive first-order effects on AI extinction risk, and they’re worth exploring on that basis. I don’t have an established view on whether stricter spending limits would be good or bad all-things-considered.</p>
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130
131            
132            <a href="/2026/09/21/campaing_spending_limits/">Continue reading</a>
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134            
135        </div>
136
137        <div class="meta">
138            <div class="alignleft">Posted on <span class="postdate">Sep 21, 2026</span></div>
139        </div>
140
141        <br />
142	</article>
143
144
145  	<article class="post">
146		
147			<h1><a href="/2026/09/14/population_ethics_quiz_results/">Results from the Population Ethics Quiz</a></h1>
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158            <p>Two weeks ago, <a href="https://mdickens.me/2026/08/31/population_ethics_quiz/">I released a population ethics quiz</a>. 582 people took it.<sup id="fnref:2" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> Here’s what I learned from reading the responses.</p>
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162            <a href="/2026/09/14/population_ethics_quiz_results/">Continue reading</a>
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167        <div class="meta">
168            <div class="alignleft">Posted on <span class="postdate">Sep 14, 2026</span></div>
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171        <br />
172	</article>
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174
175  	<article class="post">
176		
177			<h1><a href="/2026/09/07/journal_entries/">Some things I wrote in my journal that might be fit for public consumption</a></h1>
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188            <p>I’m still analyzing the results from the <a href="https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/">population ethics quiz</a> from last week, so in the meantime here are some notes I’ve written to myself that you might find kinda neat.</p>
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191            
192            <a href="/2026/09/07/journal_entries/">Continue reading</a>
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197        <div class="meta">
198            <div class="alignleft">Posted on <span class="postdate">Sep 07, 2026</span></div>
199        </div>
200
201        <br />
202	</article>
203
204
205  	<article class="post">
206		
207			<h1><a href="/2026/08/31/population_ethics_quiz/">Population ethics is a big deal, which is why I made this population ethics quiz</a></h1>
208		
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217            
218            <p>TLDR: Take the population ethics quiz here: <a href="https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/">https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/</a></p>
219
220<p>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.</p>
221
222<p>Not just that—population ethics is a BIG DEAL. A lot of ethical decisions hinge on how you think about changes in future populations.</p>
223
224<p>I’ll give concrete examples below the fold, but reading the examples might change your answers, so you should <a href="https://mdickens.me/pop-ethics/">take the quiz first</a>. It has 13 to 17 short questions. (Questions are skipped when they can’t affect the results.)</p>
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227            
228            <a href="/2026/08/31/population_ethics_quiz/">Continue reading</a>
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233        <div class="meta">
234            <div class="alignleft">Posted on <span class="postdate">Aug 31, 2026</span></div>
235        </div>
236
237        <br />
238	</article>
239
240
241  	<article class="post">
242		
243			<h1><a href="/2026/08/24/don't_treat_ai's_skillset_as_static/">Don't Treat AI's Skillset as Static</a></h1>
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249            
250            <p><em>or: <a href="https://mdickens.me/2026/03/29/future_will_be_weirder_than_that/">The Future Will Be Weirder Than That</a>, Part II</em></p>
251
252<p>People often treat AI as if it will improve on its current capabilities, but won’t gain any new ones. Supposedly, AI will continue to get better at coding and at assisting with research, but it won’t broadly replace human labor. It won’t be able to do good strategic planning, and certainly won’t know how to operate in the physical realm.</p>
253
254<p><em>Maybe</em> that’s true. But we don’t have strong reason to believe it. Just looking at the past few years, AI has rapidly acquired new skills. The simplest extrapolation of recent trends is that it will continue to do so.</p>
255
256<p>Some people think of AI capabilities growth like this, with each colored area representing another few years of progress:<sup id="fnref:1" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup></p>
257
258<p><img src="/assets/images/AI-deepening.png" alt="" /></p>
259
260<p>But it’s more likely to look like this:</p>
261
262<p><img src="/assets/images/AI-broadening.png" alt="" /></p>
263
264
265            
266            <a href="/2026/08/24/don't_treat_ai's_skillset_as_static/">Continue reading</a>
267            
268            
269        </div>
270
271        <div class="meta">
272            <div class="alignleft">Posted on <span class="postdate">Aug 24, 2026</span></div>
273        </div>
274
275        <br />
276	</article>
277
278
279  	<article class="post">
280		
281			<h1><a href="/2026/08/17/unawareness_reply/">Reasons to Act on Your Best Guess: A Reply to the Challenge of Unawareness</a></h1>
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292            <p><em>This post is a submission to the <a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZQhThndgHNXEKFdSx/cluelessness-critiques-week-discussion-thread">Cluelessness Critiques Essay Competition</a>.</em></p>
293
294<p><em><a href="https://mdickens.me/confidence_tags/">Credence</a>: Likely.<sup id="fnref:27" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:27" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup></em></p>
295
296<p>Anthony DiGiovanni’s sequence, <a href="https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/rHqdsrieinyhM5KDv">The challenge of unawareness for impartial altruist action guidance</a> (henceforth “the sequence”), argues that impartial altruists have no non-arbitrary reason to prefer any decision over any other. The central problem is <strong>unawareness:</strong> “many possible consequences of our actions haven’t even occurred to us in much detail, if at all.”</p>
297
298<p>I disagree. Impartial altruists should act <em>as if</em> we have precise probabilities for beliefs and precise expected utilities of decisions, even if we (usually) do not explicitly state them. It’s okay to act on heuristics, but those heuristics are <em>in service</em> of maximizing the expected value of a (non-literal) utility function, rather than being “terminal” heuristics.</p>
299
300<p>“Act as if” means: either I give an explicit precise credence; or I don’t, but I operate under the assumption that I <em>could</em> give a precise credence if I spent enough time reasoning through my beliefs.</p>
301
302<p>This post starts by <a href="#my-interpretation-of-the-central-arguments-for-suspending-judgment">
302explaining the sequence’s central arguments in my own words.</a> Then it offers <a href="#five-defenses-of-acting-on-your-best-guess">five defenses of acting on your best guess.</a></p>
303
304
305            
306            <a href="/2026/08/17/unawareness_reply/">Continue reading</a>
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309        </div>
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311        <div class="meta">
312            <div class="alignleft">Posted on <span class="postdate">Aug 17, 2026</span></div>
313        </div>
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315        <br />
316	</article>
317
318
319  	<article class="post">
320		
321			<h1><a href="/2026/08/10/on_democratizing_ASI/">On Democratizing ASI to Preserve Civil Liberties</a></h1>
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330            <p><em>I continue to believe <a href="https://intelligence.org/briefing/">we should pause frontier AI development.</a> Any discussion of alternative strategies should be thought of as planning for contingencies.</em></p>
331
332<p>A unifying driver behind many <a href="https://mdickens.me/2026/04/11/pause_for_post-alignment_problems/">post-alignment risks</a>—catastrophic risks that remain even if we solve the alignment problem—is that <a href="https://mdickens.me/2026/04/06/by_strong_default_ASI_will_end_liberal_democracy/">by strong default, ASI would end liberal democracy</a>. Liberalism—in which people have individual rights, autonomy, and the ability to choose their own destiny—is an important force protecting human welfare.<sup id="fnref:5" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup> When people are free, we are reasonably good at making our lives better of our own volition.</p>
333
334<p>Many post-alignment risks have a certain flavor. AI-empowered terrorism; coups; permanent dictatorships; concentration of power. Those risks already exist today (and existed 20 years ago), but they’re mitigated by the fact that power is relatively evenly distributed across people. The most powerful person in the world doesn’t have an extraordinary advantage over the 10th-most-powerful person. ASI could change that.</p>
335
336<p>If people still have civil liberties post-ASI, that will only be because the controllers of ASI allow us to have them.<sup id="fnref:9" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote" rel="footnote">2</a></sup></p>
337
338<p>One way of thinking goes: AI will be extremely powerful. If everyone had their own personal AI, we could each use it to protect our own interests, and things will turn out okay for us. But how do you get there? It’s not going to happen automatically, but it may be possible to set up a gradual process to keep power balanced.</p>
339
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341            
342            <a href="/2026/08/10/on_democratizing_ASI/">Continue reading</a>
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345        </div>
346
347        <div class="meta">
348            <div class="alignleft">Posted on <span class="postdate">Aug 10, 2026</span></div>
349        </div>
350
351        <br />
352	</article>
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355  	<article class="post">
356		
357			<h1><a href="/2026/08/03/links_for_august/">Links for August</a></h1>
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367            
368            <p>Here’s some cool stuff I’ve enjoyed recently.</p>
369
370
371            
372            <a href="/2026/08/03/links_for_august/">Continue reading</a>
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375        </div>
376
377        <div class="meta">
378            <div class="alignleft">Posted on <span class="postdate">Aug 03, 2026</span></div>
379        </div>
380
381        <br />
382	</article>
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384
385  	<article class="post">
386		
387			<h1><a href="/2026/07/27/notes_on_moral_progress/">Notes on the possibility of moral progress</a></h1>
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398            <p>To achieve the best possible future, we must know <em>what that future looks like</em>. In other words, we need to solve ethics.<sup id="fnref:11" role="doc-noteref"><a href="#fn:11" class="footnote" rel="footnote">1</a></sup></p>
399
400<p>The problem of solving ethics is so large and abstract that it’s difficult to say useful things about. In lieu of any structured analysis, herein lies a collection of thoughts about the problem.</p>
401
402
403            
404            <a href="/2026/07/27/notes_on_moral_progress/">Continue reading</a>
405            
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407        </div>
408
409        <div class="meta">
410            <div class="alignleft">Posted on <span class="postdate">Jul 27, 2026</span></div>
411        </div>
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413        <br />
414	</article>
415
416
417  	<article class="post">
418		
419			<h1><a href="/2026/07/20/letting_myself_look_foolish/">Letting myself look foolish</a></h1>
420		
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430            <p>I prefer to avoid saying things that I suspect might make me look 
430stupid. Over the last couple of years, however, I’ve made a conscious effort to write publicly about what I’m thinking about, even if I’m afraid it might sound dumb.</p>
431
432<p>Sometimes I have this feeling, like:</p>
433
434<blockquote>
435  <p>I have an observation about the world, about something that doesn’t seem to add up. Probably I’m missing something, and everyone but me can easily see what’s going on, and if I bring it up, then everyone will know how foolish I am for missing this obvious thing.</p>
436</blockquote>
437
438<p>Sometimes I’m right, and I really was missing something obvious. But some of my most well-received writings turned out to be ones where I had this feeling, and I was ambivalent about whether it was worth saying anything.</p>
439
440<p>Lately, I’m making more of an effort to overcome that feeling, and say the stupid thing anyway, because it might turn out not to be stupid.</p>
441
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443            
444            <a href="/2026/07/20/letting_myself_look_foolish/">Continue reading</a>
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449        <div class="meta">
450            <div class="alignleft">Posted on <span class="postdate">Jul 20, 2026</span></div>
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