Hmm, I expected to agree with this post based on the title, but actually find I disagree with a lot of your reasoning.
For example, if someone has chosen to work for a very harmful organisation because it pays well, that seems like a totally respectable reason to criticise them; it is not acceptable to inflict large harms on humanity for the sake of personal enrichment. Similarly, if someone is doing something very harmful, it is totally acceptable to give them unsolicited feedback! To take a unambiguous example, if someone told me they planned to drunk drive, I would definitely tell them not to, regardless of whether or not they requested feedback, and regardless of whatever secret justifications they might have. Your more humble suggested phrasing - ‘not working for OpenAI works well for me because I prefer to not cause the end of the world’ - seems absurd in this context. Overall this seems like a recipe for a paralysis of humility.
I agree with the title, because I think it’s pretty plausible that EAs working for these organisations is very good. Similarly, I don’t think “selling out” is a good mental model for why EAs work for such places, vs the more charitable “they disagree about optimal strategy”. My theory of change for how we can successfully navigate AI relies on AI workers being convinced to worry about safety, so I think EAs working for these orgs is (often) good. But if this thesis was wrong, and they were simply endangering mankind with no offsetting benefit, than it seems absurd to think we should bite our tongues.
Hmm, I expected to agree with this post based on the title, but actually find I disagree with a lot of your reasoning.
For example, if someone has chosen to work for a very harmful organisation because it pays well, that seems like a totally respectable reason to criticise them; it is not acceptable to inflict large harms on humanity for the sake of personal enrichment. Similarly, if someone is doing something very harmful, it is totally acceptable to give them unsolicited feedback! To take a unambiguous example, if someone told me they planned to drunk drive, I would definitely tell them not to, regardless of whether or not they requested feedback, and regardless of whatever secret justifications they might have. Your more humble suggested phrasing - ‘not working for OpenAI works well for me because I prefer to not cause the end of the world’ - seems absurd in this context. Overall this seems like a recipe for a paralysis of humility.
I agree with the title, because I think it’s pretty plausible that EAs working for these organisations is very good. Similarly, I don’t think “selling out” is a good mental model for why EAs work for such places, vs the more charitable “they disagree about optimal strategy”. My theory of change for how we can successfully navigate AI relies on AI workers being convinced to worry about safety, so I think EAs working for these orgs is (often) good. But if this thesis was wrong, and they were simply endangering mankind with no offsetting benefit, than it seems absurd to think we should bite our tongues.