My belief is that the Open Philanthropy Project, EA generally, and Oxford EA particularly, had bad AI timelines and bad ASI ruin conditional probabilities; and that these invalidly arrived-at beliefs were in control of funding, and were explicitly publicly promoted at the expense of saner beliefs.
There is a surprising amount of normative judgment in here for a fact check. Are you looking just for disagreements that people held roughly the beliefs you later outline (I think you overstate things but are directionally correct in describing how beliefs differed from yours), or also disagreements about whether they were bad beliefs?
For flavour: as I ask that question, I’m particularly (but not only) thinking of the reports you cite, where you seem to be casting them as “OP really throwing its weight behind these beliefs”, and I perceived them more as “earnest attempts by people at OP to figure out what was legit, and put their reasoning in public to let others engage”. I certainly didn’t just agree with them at the time, but I thought it was a good step forwards for collective epistemics to be able to have conversations at that level of granularity. Was it confounding that they were working at a big funder? Yeah, kinda—but that seemed second order compared to it just being great that anyone at all was pushing the conversation forwards in this way, even if there were a bunch of aspects of them I wasn’t on board with. I’m not sure if this is the kind of disagreement you’re looking for. (Maybe it’s just that I was on board with more of them than you were, and so I saw them as flawed-but-helpful rather than unhelpful? Then we get to the general question of what standards bad should be judged by given our lack of access to ground truth.)
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.
There is a surprising amount of normative judgment in here for a fact check. Are you looking just for disagreements that people held roughly the beliefs you later outline (I think you overstate things but are directionally correct in describing how beliefs differed from yours), or also disagreements about whether they were bad beliefs?
For flavour: as I ask that question, I’m particularly (but not only) thinking of the reports you cite, where you seem to be casting them as “OP really throwing its weight behind these beliefs”, and I perceived them more as “earnest attempts by people at OP to figure out what was legit, and put their reasoning in public to let others engage”. I certainly didn’t just agree with them at the time, but I thought it was a good step forwards for collective epistemics to be able to have conversations at that level of granularity. Was it confounding that they were working at a big funder? Yeah, kinda—but that seemed second order compared to it just being great that anyone at all was pushing the conversation forwards in this way, even if there were a bunch of aspects of them I wasn’t on board with. I’m not sure if this is the kind of disagreement you’re looking for. (Maybe it’s just that I was on board with more of them than you were, and so I saw them as flawed-but-helpful rather than unhelpful? Then we get to the general question of what standards bad should be judged by given our lack of access to ground truth.)
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.