Quick thoughts: 1. I think I want to see more dialogue here. I don’t personally like the thought of the Mechanize team and EA splitting apart (at least, more than is already the case). I’d naively expect that there might still be a fair bit of wiggle room for the Mechanize team to do better or worse things in the world, and I’d of course hope for the better size of that. (I think the situation is still very early for instance). 2. I find it really difficult to adjudicate on morality and specifics of the Mechanize spinnoff. I don’t know as much about the details as others do. It really isn’t clear to me what the previous funders of Epoch believed or what the conditions of the donations were. I think those details matter in trying to judge the situation. 3. The person you mentioned, Holly Elmore, is really the first and and one of the loudest to get upset about many things of this sort of shape. I think Holly disagrees with much of the EA scene, but in the opposite way than you/Matthew does. I personally think Holly goes a fair bit too far much of the time. That said, I know there were others who were upset about this who I think better represent the main EA crowd. 4. “the idea that we should decelerate AI development is now sometimes treated as central to the EA identity in many (albeit not all) EA circles.” The way I see it is more that it’s somewhat a matter of cooperativeness between EA organizations. There are a bunch of smart people and organizations working hard to slow down generic AI development. Out of all the things one could do, there are many useful things to work on other than [directly speeding up AI development]. This is akin to how it would be pretty awkward if there were a group that calls themselves EA that tries to fight global population growth by making advertisements attacking GiveWell—it might be the case that they feel like they have good reasons for this, but it makes sense to me why some EAs might not be very thrilled. Related, I’ve seen some arguments for longer timelines that makes sense to me, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen many arguments in favor of speeding up AI timelines that make sense to me.
Quick thoughts:
1. I think I want to see more dialogue here. I don’t personally like the thought of the Mechanize team and EA splitting apart (at least, more than is already the case). I’d naively expect that there might still be a fair bit of wiggle room for the Mechanize team to do better or worse things in the world, and I’d of course hope for the better size of that. (I think the situation is still very early for instance).
2. I find it really difficult to adjudicate on morality and specifics of the Mechanize spinnoff. I don’t know as much about the details as others do. It really isn’t clear to me what the previous funders of Epoch believed or what the conditions of the donations were. I think those details matter in trying to judge the situation.
3. The person you mentioned, Holly Elmore, is really the first and and one of the loudest to get upset about many things of this sort of shape. I think Holly disagrees with much of the EA scene, but in the opposite way than you/Matthew does. I personally think Holly goes a fair bit too far much of the time. That said, I know there were others who were upset about this who I think better represent the main EA crowd.
4. “the idea that we should decelerate AI development is now sometimes treated as central to the EA identity in many (albeit not all) EA circles.” The way I see it is more that it’s somewhat a matter of cooperativeness between EA organizations. There are a bunch of smart people and organizations working hard to slow down generic AI development. Out of all the things one could do, there are many useful things to work on other than [directly speeding up AI development]. This is akin to how it would be pretty awkward if there were a group that calls themselves EA that tries to fight global population growth by making advertisements attacking GiveWell—it might be the case that they feel like they have good reasons for this, but it makes sense to me why some EAs might not be very thrilled. Related, I’ve seen some arguments for longer timelines that makes sense to me, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen many arguments in favor of speeding up AI timelines that make sense to me.