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.
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.