Hi BiologyTranslated, thanks for sharing your thoughts, and welcome to the forum! A minor format note: your TL;DR could perhaps be more focused on the contents of your post, and less on the 80k post.
It sounds like you disagree with their change. I do as well, so I won’t focus on that.
It sounds like you have other concerns or critiques too, and I’m not sure I share those, so in the interest of hashing out my thoughts, I’ll respond to some of what you’ve written.
no public information or consultation was made beforehand, and I had no prewarning of this change
I understand it came as a shock, but I’m not sure what 80k giving advanced notice of the change would have actually accomplished here. Hypothetically, presume they said in December that they would pivot in March. How would that benefit others? I think the biggest impact would be less “shock”, but I’m not sure, and we would still need to grapple with the new reality. Perhaps some kind of extra consultation with the community would be useful, but that does seem quite resource intensive and haphazard, especially if they think that this is an especially critical time. I presume that they had many discussions with experts and other community members before making such a change anyway. This is a guess and I may be wrong—others in the comments seem to feel it was a rushed decision.
Surely at least some heads up would go a long way in reducing short-term confusion or gaps.
You’ve written about two gaps/confusions I can identify:
1) Introductory programs may decline in quality, due to things like out of date info/linkrot
2) Because people don’t feel like they have autonomy in career choice/cause area, new people may bounce off the movement.
On the first, I don’t know much about linkrot, but I expect it won’t be a major issue for a few years at least, though it depends on the cause area. My model is that most things don’t move that quickly, and things like “number of animals eaten per year”, “best guess of risk of imminent nuclear war” and “novel biohazards” are probably roughly static, or at least static enough that the intro material found in those sections are fine. 80k’s existing introductory resources will probably be fine here for a while. If there are serious updates to things like “number of countries with nuclear weapons”, I do hope that they reconsider and update things there.
On the second, they have discussed that they are ok with shrinking the funnel of new people coming in the 80k/the movement more generally to some degree, and it is still their best bet. I agree it’s disappointing though.
What safeguards are in place in the community to prevent sudden upheaval?
I don’t think there are any, and I think this is largely a strength of the movement, so I don’t think it should change. They’re an independent entity, and I think they should do what they think is best. It’s not a democratic movement and while a more cause neutral org will be missed in future years, I do hope Probably Good or another competitor fills that gap. My guess is that 80k expected that people focused on other cause areas would disagree with this change anyway.
Does this signal a further divide between parts of the community?
I guess I’m not very interested in what it signals, but what it actually does. I don’t think it divides people further. People in EA already disagree on various matters of ethics/fact, and I don’t think an org saying “we’ve considered the arguments and believe one side is correct” is a significant issue. On an interpersonal level, I’m friends with people working in different cause areas despite my disagreements, and on an organisational level I think it’s good that we try to decouple impact from other things where possible.
I might be off here, but I think an unwritten concern of yours is that there was a tonal issue with the communication. I don’t think I had an issue with how it was communicated, especially considering the org members chatting in the comments, but others did seem to feel off-put but it and considered it almost callous. I can understand where they are coming from.
Should we actually all shift to considering direct AI alignment work over just reassessing what risks change in an AGI impacted future?
This is something that we should all think about, but I don’t think so. I would be curious to hear 80k talk more about it though.
That’s a long response. but you wrote about some interesting ideas and I liked thinking about them too. If you have time/interest, I’d be particularly interested in hearing about things you think they could do differently on a more specific level (presuming they were going to make the change) and what counterfactual impact you think it would have.
Thanks, I think you’ve done a decent job of identifying cruxes, and I appreciate the additional info too. Your comment about the XPT being from 2022 does update me somewhat.
One thing I’ll highlight and will be thinking about: there’s some tension between the two positions of
a) “recent AI developments are very surprising, so therefore we should update our p|doom to be significantly higher than superforecasters from 2022” and
b) “in 2022, superforecasters thought AI progress would continue very quickly beyond current day levels”
This is potentially partially resolved by the statement:
c) “superforecasters though AI progress would be fast, but it’s actually very fast, so therefore we are right to update to be significantly higher”.
This is a sensible take, and is supported by things like the Metaculus survey you cite. However, I think that if they thought it was already going to be fast, and yet still only had a small chance of extinction in 2022, then recent developments would make them give a higher probability, but not significantly higher. The exact amount it has changed, and what counts as “significantly higher” vs marginally higher has unfortunately been left as an exercise for the reader, and it’s not the only risk, so I think I do understand your position.