My view of the tragedy of OpenPhil is indeed that they were very earnest people trying to figure out what was legit, but ended up believing stuff like “biologically anchored estimates of AI timelines” that were facially absurd and wrong and ultimately self-serving, because the problem “end up with beliefs about AI timelines that aren’t influenced by what plays well with our funders and friends” was hard and frankly out of their league and OpenPhil did not know that it was a hard problem or treat it with what I would consider seriousness.
If you’d like to view them as blameless on account of being earnest about it, that’s between you and your own moral judgments. I don’t particularly think we end up living through this if only we go around morally judging people enough, even correctly. But people ask me for my takes and I am giving a take that makes OpenPhil look bad and my rules do say that I ought to not just do all that behind their backs.
I suppose if you thought that nobody could possibly look bad if my account of them includes, “They were being very earnest in their error”, then I wouldn’t be obliged to give them a chance to respond to what I was saying about them. But I should prefer to have the chance to respond if somebody was saying that about me. Of course I am earnest, and when I err, it comes from a place of my having tried to be virtuous rather than viceful as best I understood virtue. What of it? There are higher things to aspire to in life besides earnest error.
My view of the tragedy of OpenPhil is indeed that they were very earnest people trying to figure out what was legit, but ended up believing stuff like “biologically anchored estimates of AI timelines” that were facially absurd and wrong and ultimately self-serving, because the problem “end up with beliefs about AI timelines that aren’t influenced by what plays well with our funders and friends” was hard and frankly out of their league and OpenPhil did not know that it was a hard problem or treat it with what I would consider seriousness.
If you’d like to view them as blameless on account of being earnest about it, that’s between you and your own moral judgments. I don’t particularly think we end up living through this if only we go around morally judging people enough, even correctly. But people ask me for my takes and I am giving a take that makes OpenPhil look bad and my rules do say that I ought to not just do all that behind their backs.
I suppose if you thought that nobody could possibly look bad if my account of them includes, “They were being very earnest in their error”, then I wouldn’t be obliged to give them a chance to respond to what I was saying about them. But I should prefer to have the chance to respond if somebody was saying that about me. Of course I am earnest, and when I err, it comes from a place of my having tried to be virtuous rather than viceful as best I understood virtue. What of it? There are higher things to aspire to in life besides earnest error.