There is a questionable trend to equate ML skills with the ability to do alignment work.
I’d arguably say this is good, primarily because I think EA was already in danger of it’s AI safety wing becoming unmoored from reality by ignoring key constraints, similar to how early Lesswrong before the deep learning era around 2012-2018 turned out to be mostly useless due to how much everything was stated in a mathematical way, and not realizing how many constraints and conjectured constraints applied to stuff like formal provability, for example..
I’d arguably say this is good, primarily because I think EA was already in danger of it’s AI safety wing becoming unmoored from reality by ignoring key constraints, similar to how early Lesswrong before the deep learning era around 2012-2018 turned out to be mostly useless due to how much everything was stated in a mathematical way, and not realizing how many constraints and conjectured constraints applied to stuff like formal provability, for example..