I don’t believe that the people who are currently doing high quality Xrisk advocacy would counter-factually be writing nasty newspaper hit pieces; these just seem like totally different activities, or that Timnit would write more rigourously if people gave her more money.
I don’t think that’s what the OP argues though.[1] The argument is that the people motivated to seek funding to assess X-risk as a full time job tend to be disproportionately people that think X-risk and the ability to mitigate it significant. So of course advocates produce more serious research, and of course people who don’t think it’s that big a deal don’t tend to choose it as a research topic (and on the rare occasions they put actual effort in, it’s relatively likely to be motivated by animus against x-risk advocates).
If those x-risk advocates had to do something other than x-risk research for their day job, they might not write hit pieces, but there would be blogs instead of a body of high quality research to point to, and some people would still tweet angrily and insubstantially about Sam Altman and FAANG.
Gebru’s an interesting example looked at the other way, because she does write rigorous papers on her actual research interests as well as issue shallow, hostile dismissals of groups in tech she doesn’t like. But funnily enough, nobody’s producing high quality rebuttals of those papers[2] - they’re happy to dismiss her entire body of work based on disagreeing with her shallower comments. Less outspoken figures than Gebru write papers on similar lines, but these don’t get the engagement at all.
EAs may not necessarily actually disagree with her when she’s writing about implicit biases in LLMs or concentration of ownership in tech rather than tweeting angrily about TESCREALs, but obviously some people and organizations have reason to disagree with her papers as well.
I don’t think that’s what the OP argues though.[1] The argument is that the people motivated to seek funding to assess X-risk as a full time job tend to be disproportionately people that think X-risk and the ability to mitigate it significant. So of course advocates produce more serious research, and of course people who don’t think it’s that big a deal don’t tend to choose it as a research topic (and on the rare occasions they put actual effort in, it’s relatively likely to be motivated by animus against x-risk advocates).
If those x-risk advocates had to do something other than x-risk research for their day job, they might not write hit pieces, but there would be blogs instead of a body of high quality research to point to, and some people would still tweet angrily and insubstantially about Sam Altman and FAANG.
Gebru’s an interesting example looked at the other way, because she does write rigorous papers on her actual research interests as well as issue shallow, hostile dismissals of groups in tech she doesn’t like. But funnily enough, nobody’s producing high quality rebuttals of those papers[2] - they’re happy to dismiss her entire body of work based on disagreeing with her shallower comments. Less outspoken figures than Gebru write papers on similar lines, but these don’t get the engagement at all.
I do agree people love to criticize.
the bar chart for x-risk believers without funding actually stops short of the “hit piece” FWIW
EAs may not necessarily actually disagree with her when she’s writing about implicit biases in LLMs or concentration of ownership in tech rather than tweeting angrily about TESCREALs, but obviously some people and organizations have reason to disagree with her papers as well.