“this person may be longtermist-adjacent and seem to be well-meaning but they just don’t give me enough vibes that they’re x-risk motivated and no I did not actually ask them about it or press them about this”
Fortunately this can be fixed by publishing pamphlets with the correct sequences of words helpfully provided, and creating public knowledge that if you’re serious about longtermism you just need to whisper the correct sequence of words to the right person at the right time.
Jokes aside, there’s an actual threat of devolving into applause light factories (I’ll omit the rant about how the entire community building enterprise is on thin ice). Indeed, someone at Rethink Priorities once told me they weren’t convinced that the hiring process was doing a good job at separating “knows what they’re talking about, can reason about the problems we’re working on, cares about what we care about” from “ideological passwords, recitation of shibboleths”, or that it was one of the things they really wanted to get right and they weren’t confident they were getting right. It’s not exactly easy.
Yeah I certainly don’t think our hiring process is perfect at this either. These kinds of concerns weigh on me a lot and we’re constantly thinking about how we can get better.
Fortunately this can be fixed by publishing pamphlets with the correct sequences of words helpfully provided, and creating public knowledge that if you’re serious about longtermism you just need to whisper the correct sequence of words to the right person at the right time.
Jokes aside, there’s an actual threat of devolving into applause light factories (I’ll omit the rant about how the entire community building enterprise is on thin ice). Indeed, someone at Rethink Priorities once told me they weren’t convinced that the hiring process was doing a good job at separating “knows what they’re talking about, can reason about the problems we’re working on, cares about what we care about” from “ideological passwords, recitation of shibboleths”, or that it was one of the things they really wanted to get right and they weren’t confident they were getting right. It’s not exactly easy.
Yeah I certainly don’t think our hiring process is perfect at this either. These kinds of concerns weigh on me a lot and we’re constantly thinking about how we can get better.