An EA steelman example of similar points of thinking are EAs who are incredibly anti-working for OpenAI or Deepmind at all because it safety washes and pushes capabilities anyways. The criticism here is the way EA views problems means EA will only go towards solution that are piecemeal rather than transformative. A lot of Marxists felt similarly to welfare reform in that it quelled the political will for “transformative” change to capitalism.
For instance they would say a lot of companies are pursuing RLHF in AI Safety not because it’s the correct way to go but because it’s the easiest low hanging fruit (even if it produces deceptive alignment).
I want to address this point not to argue against the animal activist’s point, but rather because it is a bad analogy for that point. The argument against working for safety teams at capabilities orgs or RLHF is not that they reduce x-risk to an “acceptable” level, causing orgs to give up on further reductions, but rather than they don’t reduce x-risk.
I want to address this point not to argue against the animal activist’s point, but rather because it is a bad analogy for that point. The argument against working for safety teams at capabilities orgs or RLHF is not that they reduce x-risk to an “acceptable” level, causing orgs to give up on further reductions, but rather than they don’t reduce x-risk.