This makes sense to me if you feel my comment is meant as a description of you or people-like-you. It is not, and quite the opposite. As I see it, you are not a representative member of the LessWrong community, or at least, not a representative source of the problem I’m trying to point at. For one thing, you are willing to work for OpenAI, which many (dozens of) LessWrong-adjacent people I’ve personally met would consider a betrayal of allegiance to “the community”. Needless to say, the field of AI governance as it exists is not uncontroversially accepted by the people I am reacting to with the above complaint. In fact, I had you in mind as a person I wanted to defend by writing the complaint, because you’re willing to engage and work full-time (seemingly) in good faith with people who do not share many of the most centrally held views of “the community” in question, be it LessWrong, Effective Altruism, or the rationality community.
It would help if you specified which subset of “the community” you’re arguing against. I had a similar reaction to your comment as Daniel did, since in my circles (AI safety researchers in Berkeley), governance tends to be well-respected, and I’d be shocked to encounter the sentiment that working for OpenAI is a “betrayal of allegiance to ‘the community’”.
To be clear, I do think most people who have historically worked on “alignment” at OpenAI have probably caused great harm! And I do think I am broadly in favor of stronger community norms against working at AI capability companies, even in so called “safety positions”. So I do think there is something to the sentiment that Critch is describing.
Agreed! But the words he chose were hyperbolic and unfair. Even an angrier more radical version of Habryka would still endorse “the idea that people outside the LessWrong community might recognize the existence of AI risk.”
This makes sense to me if you feel my comment is meant as a description of you or people-like-you. It is not, and quite the opposite. As I see it, you are not a representative member of the LessWrong community, or at least, not a representative source of the problem I’m trying to point at. For one thing, you are willing to work for OpenAI, which many (dozens of) LessWrong-adjacent people I’ve personally met would consider a betrayal of allegiance to “the community”. Needless to say, the field of AI governance as it exists is not uncontroversially accepted by the people I am reacting to with the above complaint. In fact, I had you in mind as a person I wanted to defend by writing the complaint, because you’re willing to engage and work full-time (seemingly) in good faith with people who do not share many of the most centrally held views of “the community” in question, be it LessWrong, Effective Altruism, or the rationality community.
If it felt otherwise to you, I apologize.
It would help if you specified which subset of “the community” you’re arguing against. I had a similar reaction to your comment as Daniel did, since in my circles (AI safety researchers in Berkeley), governance tends to be well-respected, and I’d be shocked to encounter the sentiment that working for OpenAI is a “betrayal of allegiance to ‘the community’”.
To be clear, I do think most people who have historically worked on “alignment” at OpenAI have probably caused great harm! And I do think I am broadly in favor of stronger community norms against working at AI capability companies, even in so called “safety positions”. So I do think there is something to the sentiment that Critch is describing.
Agreed! But the words he chose were hyperbolic and unfair. Even an angrier more radical version of Habryka would still endorse “the idea that people outside the LessWrong community might recognize the existence of AI risk.”