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Johnicholas comments on Who Wants To Start An Important Startup? - Less Wrong
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There's a lot of similarity between the statistical tests that a scientist does and the statistical tests that auditors do. The scientist is interested in testing that the effect is real, and the auditor is testing that the company really is making that much money, that all its operations are getting aggregated up into the summary documents correctly.
Charlie Stross has a character in his 'Rule 34', Dorothy Straight, who is an organization-auditor, auditing organizations for signs of antisocial behavior. As I understood it, she was asking whether the organizations as a whole are likely to behave badly - though one way that the organization as a whole might behave badly is by sifting out or creating leaders who are likely to individually behave badly.
What I'm trying to say is that there will be a field of auditing an organization's 'safety case' - examining why it believes that it is a Friendly organization, what its internal controls entangling it with the truth are and so on, something like GiveWell for for-profits.
Sounds like internal audit
Yes, I (and Stross) am taking auditors, internal and external, as a model. Why do you comment specifically on internal auditors?
Ordinary audit is audit of the accounts; it is focused on money. Internal audit has a wider remit. Expanding the remit of audit is a natural idea. I thought it was interesting and unexpected that it was already being done. I would never have come across the Institute of Internal Audit if it hadn't been for my brother getting a job with them.