Sam Glover

It's hard to describe the state of free speech in the UK as anything short of shocking. ~10000 people per year are arrested for non-violent speech "crimes" and so this isn't merely accidental or happenstance. Police forces across the country have teams that monitor social media posts. Private messages are being intruded upon. Simply expressing support for groups is leading to arrests.

It's hard to know what is good to do to set humanity on a good longterm trajectory but I think free speech norms are of particular importance for figuring out good values and allowing humanity to come to good values. The UK has historically been an important country for shaping precedent and still has an outsized influence

Sam and Co are running a fairly lean operation and working hard on something that seems time sensitive and tractable and are working to make free speech issues non-partisan. I spoke to Sam for ~2 hours on this and he far surpassed many of my informal "tests". He seems reasonable, committed, honest and principled. I have furthermore read some of his writings and they are good. I further support not working on forecasting research and doing something tractable and tangible instead.