Ben Millwood🔸 comments on 80,000 hours should remove OpenAI from the Job Board (and similar EA orgs should do similarly)

[Ben Millwood🔸]

Thanks for raising this. I’m kind of on board with 80k’s current strategy, but I think it’s useful to have a public discussion like this nevertheless.

To the extent the proposed move is a political /​ diplomatic move, how much leverage do we actually have here? Does OpenAI nontrivially value their jobs being listed in our job boards? Are they still concerned about having a good relationship with us at all at this point? If I were running the job board, I’d probably imagine no-one much at OpenAI really losing sleep over my decision either way, so I’d tend to do just whatever seemed best to me in terms of the direct consequences.

[Raemon]

I do basically agree we don’t have bargaining power, and that they most likely don’t care about having a good relationship with us.

The reason for the diplomatic “line of retreat” in the OP is more because:

• it’s hard to be sure how adversarial a situation you’re in, and it just seems like generally good practice to be clear on what would change your mind (in case you have overestimated the adversarialness)

• it’s helpful for showing others, who might not share exactly my worldview, that I’m “playing fairly.”

I’d probably imagine no-one much at OpenAI really losing sleep over my decision either way, so I’d tend to do just whatever seemed best to me in terms of the direct consequences.

I’m not sure about “direct consequences” being quite the right frame. I agree the particular consequence-route of “OpenAI changes their policies because of our pushback” isn’t plausible enough to be worth worrying about, but, I think indirect consequences on our collective epistemics are pretty important.