I generally agree with your response, but wanted to point out one example of establishing credibility: Scott Aaronson says:
It does cause me to update in the direction of AI-risk being a serious concern. For the Bay Area rationalists have now publicly sounded the alarm about a looming crisis for the human race, well before it was socially acceptable to take that crisis too seriously (and when taking it seriously would have made a big difference), and then been 100% vindicated by events. Where previously they were 0 for 0 in predictions of that kind, they’re now 1 for 1.
...
[After Adam Scholl invites him to a workshop]: Thanks for asking! Absolutely, I’d be interested to attend an AI-risk workshop sometime. Partly just to learn about the field, partly to find out whether there’s anything that someone with my skillset could contribute.
(Note: part of what impressed Scott here was being early to raise the alarm, and that boat has already sailed, so it could be that future COVID-19 work won’t do much to impress people like him.)
Note: part of what impressed Scott here was being early to raise the alarm, and that boat has already sailed, so it could be that future COVID-19 work won’t do much to impress people like him.
I think that’s crucial—I’m generally supportive of EAs /​ rationalists to be doing things like COVID-19 work when they have a comparative advantage at doing so, which is a factor in why I support forecasting /​ meta work even now, and I’d certainly want biosecurity people to at least be thinking about how they could help with COVID-19 (as they in fact are). But the OP isn’t arguing that, and whether or not it was intended I could see readers thinking that they should be actively trying to work on COVID even if they don’t have an obvious comparative advantage at it, and that seems wrong to me.
This point about comparative advantage is also why I wrote:
I’d probably change my mind if I thought that these other longtermists could actually make a large impact on the COVID-19 response, but that seems quite unlikely to me.
I generally agree with your response, but wanted to point out one example of establishing credibility: Scott Aaronson says:
(Note: part of what impressed Scott here was being early to raise the alarm, and that boat has already sailed, so it could be that future COVID-19 work won’t do much to impress people like him.)
I think that’s crucial—I’m generally supportive of EAs /​ rationalists to be doing things like COVID-19 work when they have a comparative advantage at doing so, which is a factor in why I support forecasting /​ meta work even now, and I’d certainly want biosecurity people to at least be thinking about how they could help with COVID-19 (as they in fact are). But the OP isn’t arguing that, and whether or not it was intended I could see readers thinking that they should be actively trying to work on COVID even if they don’t have an obvious comparative advantage at it, and that seems wrong to me.
This point about comparative advantage is also why I wrote: