EAs have legible achievements in x-risk-adjacent domains (e.g. highly cited covid paper in Science, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback which was used to power stuff like InstructGPT), and illegible achievements in stuff like field-building and disentanglement research.
However, the former doesn’t have a clean connection to actually reducing x-risk, and the latter isn’t very legible.
So I think it is basically correct that we have not done legible things to reduce object-level x-risk like cause important treaties to be signed, ban gain-of-function research in some countries, engineer the relevant technical defenses, etc.
Not an answer, just wanting to say thank you for asking this question! The same question had been percolating in my mind for some time but couldn’t quite put it into words, and you did so perfectly. Thank you!
EAs have legible achievements in x-risk-adjacent domains (e.g. highly cited covid paper in Science, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback which was used to power stuff like InstructGPT), and illegible achievements in stuff like field-building and disentanglement research.
However, the former doesn’t have a clean connection to actually reducing x-risk, and the latter isn’t very legible.
So I think it is basically correct that we have not done legible things to reduce object-level x-risk like cause important treaties to be signed, ban gain-of-function research in some countries, engineer the relevant technical defenses, etc.
See this post by Owen Cotton-Barrat as well.
Not an answer, just wanting to say thank you for asking this question! The same question had been percolating in my mind for some time but couldn’t quite put it into words, and you did so perfectly. Thank you!