[Question] Dan Hendrycks and EA

[jeffreycaruso]

According to public reports, Dan Hendrycks has been influenced by EA since he was a freshman (https://​​www.bostonglobe.com/​​2023/​​07/​​06/​​opinion/​​ai-safety-human-extinction-dan-hendrycks-cais/​​).

He did the 80,000 hours program.

He worries about AI bringing about the end of humanity, if not the planet.

After getting his Ph.D., he started an AI safety organization instead of joining one of the many AI startups.

And he’s taken $13M in donations from two EA orgs—OpenPhilanthropy and FTX Foundation.

Yet he denies being an Effective Altruism member when asked about it by the press. For instance (https://​​www.bloomberg.com/​​news/​​newsletters/​​2024-06-27/​​an-up-and-coming-ai-safety-thinker-on-why-you-should-still-be-worried)

As an aside, Hendrycks is not alone in this. The founders of the Future of Life Institute have done the same thing (https://​​www.insidecyberwarfare.com/​​p/​​an-open-source-investigation-into).

I’m curious to know what others think about Hendryck’s attempts to disassociate himself from Effective Altruism.

[Charlie Steiner]

See this Steve Byrnes meme:

I too have accepted money from EA orgs, attended EA conferences, and yet am not “an EA.” So I don’t find DanH’s behavior odd or dishonest. It still could be, and in some places he could definitely be strategically saying this because it sounds better. But I think the main-line hypothesis should be that he’s basically being honest—see the meme again if confused.

[robo]

If someone wants to distance themselves from a group, I don’t think you should make a fuss about it. Guilt by association is the rule in PR and that’s terrible. If someone doesn’t want to be publicly coupled, don’t couple them.

[1a3orn]

Whether someone is or was a part of a group is in general an actual fact about their history, not something they can just change through verbal disavowals. I don’t think we have an obligation to ignore someone’s historical association with a group in favor of parroting their current words.

Like, suppose someone who is a nominee for the Supreme Court were to say “No, I totally was never a part of the Let’s Ban Abortion Because It’s Murder Group.”

But then you were to look at the history of this person and you found that they had done pro-bono legal work for the “Abortion Is Totally Murder” political action group; and they had founded an organization that turned out to be currently 90% funded by the “Catholics Against Murdering Babies”; and in fact had gone many times to “Let’s Make Laws Be Influenced by the Catholic Church” summit; and he was a close personal friend to a bunch of archbishops and Catholic philosophers.

In such a case, it’s reasonable to be like “No, you’re lying about what groups you were and are a part of.” I think that you should be able to reasonably say this—regardless of whether you think abortion is murder or not. The nominee is in fact lying; it is possible to lie about the group that you are a part of.

Similarly—well, the linked article from OP doesn’t actually contain a disavowal from Dan Hendryks, afaict? This one contains the claim he was “never an EA adherent,” which is closer to a disavowal.

Whether or not this claim is true, it is the kind of claim that certainly admits truth. Or lies.

[robo]

Statements made to the media pass through an extremely lossy compression channel, then are coarse-grained, and then turned into speech acts.

That lossy channel has maybe one bit of capacity on the EA thing. You can turn on a bit that says “your opinions about AI risk should cluster with your opinions about Effective Altruists”, or not. You don’t get more nuance than that.^[1]

If you have to choose between outputting the more informative speech act^[2] and saying something literally true, it’s more cooperative to get the output speech act correct.

(This is different from the supreme court case, where I would agree with you)

1. ^

   I’m not sure you could make the other side of the channel say “Dan Hendrycks is EA adjacent but that’s not particularly necessary for his argument” even if you spent your whole bandwidth budget trying to explain that one message.

2. ^

   See Grice’s Maxims