I’m endorsing this, and I’m confused about which part you’re skeptical about.
I think I interpreted your statement as saying something like most people in AI safety are EAs, because you started with “One very brief way you could describe the development of AI safety” which I guess made me think that maybe you consider this to be the main story of AI safety so far, or you thought other people considered this to be the main story of AI safety so far and you wanted to push against that perception. Sorry for reading too much / the wrong thing into it.
There are other questions that I would like answers to, not related to AI safety, and if I trusted EA consensus, then that would make the process much easier.
Ok I see. But there may not be that much correlation between the trustworthiness of EA consensus on different topics. It could easily be the case that EA has done a lot of good investigations on AI safety but very little or poor quality investigations on other topics. It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to just look at the actual investigations for each topic, rather than rely on some sense of whether EA consensus is overall trustworthy.
I think I interpreted your statement as saying something like most people in AI safety are EAs, because you started with “One very brief way you could describe the development of AI safety” which I guess made me think that maybe you consider this to be the main story of AI safety so far, or you thought other people considered this to be the main story of AI safety so far and you wanted to push against that perception. Sorry for reading too much / the wrong thing into it.
Ok I see. But there may not be that much correlation between the trustworthiness of EA consensus on different topics. It could easily be the case that EA has done a lot of good investigations on AI safety but very little or poor quality investigations on other topics. It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to just look at the actual investigations for each topic, rather than rely on some sense of whether EA consensus is overall trustworthy.