I lead the DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team
I agree that people's takes in response to surveys are very sensitive to framing and hard to interpret. I was trying to gesture at the hypothesis that many people are skeptical of future technologies, afraid of job loss, don't trust tech, etc, even if they do sincerely value loved ones. But anyway, that's not a crux.
I think we basically agree here, overall? I agree that my arguments here are not sufficient to support a large pause for a small reduction in risk. I don't consider this a core point of EA, but I'm not confident in that, and don't think you're too unreasonable for doing so
Though while I'm skeptical of the type of unilateral pause pushed for in EA, I am much more supportive of not actively pushing capabilities to be faster, since I think the arguments that pauses are distortionary and penalise safety motivated actors, don't apply there, and most acceleration will diffuse across the ecosystem. This makes me guess that Mechanize is net negative, so I imagine this is also a point of disagreement between us.
I broadly agree that the costs of long pauses look much more expensive if you're not a longtermist. (When I wrote this post, pauseAI and similar were much less of a thing).
I still stand by this post for a few reasons:
Strong agree that people talk about AI timelines way too much. I think that the level of EG 2 Vs 5 Vs 20 Vs way longer is genuinely decision relevant, but that much more fine grained than that often isn't. And it's so uncertain and the evidence is so weak that I think it's difficult to do much more than putting decent probability on all of those categories and shifting your weightings a bit
My argument is essentially that "similar income, non impactful job" is as relevant a reference class to the "similar income, impactful job person" as it is as a reference class to the "high income, non impactful job" person. I also personally think reference classes is the wrong way to think about it. If taking a more impactful job also makes someone obliged to take on a lower post donation salary (when they don't have to), I feel like something has gone wrong, and the incentives are not aligned with doing the most good.
This is reasonable. I think the key point that I want to defend is that it seems wrong to say that choosing a more impactful job should mean you ought to have a lower post donation salary.
I personally think of it in terms of having some minimum obligation for doing your part (which I set at 10% by default), plus encouragement (but not obligation) to do significant amounts more good if you want to
My point is that, even though there's a moral obligation, unless you think that high earning people in finance should be donating a very large fraction of their salary (so their post donation pay is less than the pay in AI safety), their de facto moral obligation has increased by the choice to do direct work, which is unreasonable to my eyes.
I would also guess that at least most people doing safety work at industry labs could get a very well paying role at a top tier finance firm? The talent bar is really high nowadays
This presupposes that the way something gets to change community direction is by having high karma, while I think it's actually about being well reasoned and persuasive AND being viewed. Being high karma helps it be viewed, but this is neutral to actively negative if the post is low quality/flawed - that just entrenches people in their positions more/makes them think less of the forum. So in order for this change to help, there must be valuable posts that are low karma that would be high karma if voting was more democratic - I personally think that the current system is better at selecting for quality and this outweighs any penalty to dissenting opinions, which I would guess is fairly minor in practice