I think basically all of our disagreements here have the same form, so lets just focus on the first one:
NO: Founded the field of AI safety, and incubated it from nothing up to the point where Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and hundreds of others have endorsed it and urged policymakers to take it seriously.
I think this should be a YES. This is clearly about ending up in an influential position in a field.
To my ear, this is not a claim about becoming influential. It is a claim about creating something in the past, and getting a bunch of people to agree. It’s similar to saying “Karl Marx founded Communism and got many people to agree”—the claim is not that Marx is in an influential position (he cannot be, since he is dead) but that he created something. There are related claims that are about influence, like if it had instead said “Founded and remain influential in the field”, but the actual specific claim here is fully consistent with the EAs birthing and then seeing their relevance come to an end. The thing that the hundreds of people endorsed wasn’t the EA movement itself, or even specific EAs, but the abstract claim that AI is risky.
We might mostly be arguing about semantics. In a similar discussion a few days ago I was making the literal analogy of “if you were worried about EA having bad effects on the world via the same kind of mechanism as the rise of communism, a large fraction of the things under the AI section should go into the ‘concern’ column, not the ‘success’ column”. Your analogy with Marx illustrates that point.
I do disagree with your last sentence. The thing that people are endorsing is very much both a social movement as well as some object level claims. I think it differs between people, but there is a lot of endorsing AI Safety as a social movement. Social proof is usually the primary thing evoked these days in order to convince people.
I think basically all of our disagreements here have the same form, so lets just focus on the first one:
To my ear, this is not a claim about becoming influential. It is a claim about creating something in the past, and getting a bunch of people to agree. It’s similar to saying “Karl Marx founded Communism and got many people to agree”—the claim is not that Marx is in an influential position (he cannot be, since he is dead) but that he created something. There are related claims that are about influence, like if it had instead said “Founded and remain influential in the field”, but the actual specific claim here is fully consistent with the EAs birthing and then seeing their relevance come to an end. The thing that the hundreds of people endorsed wasn’t the EA movement itself, or even specific EAs, but the abstract claim that AI is risky.
We might mostly be arguing about semantics. In a similar discussion a few days ago I was making the literal analogy of “if you were worried about EA having bad effects on the world via the same kind of mechanism as the rise of communism, a large fraction of the things under the AI section should go into the ‘concern’ column, not the ‘success’ column”. Your analogy with Marx illustrates that point.
I do disagree with your last sentence. The thing that people are endorsing is very much both a social movement as well as some object level claims. I think it differs between people, but there is a lot of endorsing AI Safety as a social movement. Social proof is usually the primary thing evoked these days in order to convince people.