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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Recent opportunities to take action
I worked at OpenAI for three years, from 2021-2024 on the Alignment team, which eventually became the Superalignment team. I worked on scalable oversight, part of the team developing critiques as a technique for using language models to spot mistakes in other language models. I then worked to refine an idea from Nick Cammarata into a method for using language model to generate explanations for features in language models. I was then promoted to managing a team of 4 people which worked on trying to understand language model features in context, leading to the release of an open source "transformer debugger" tool.
I resigned from OpenAI on February 15, 2024.
FWIW on timelines:
Thank you for your work there. I’m curious about what made you resign, and also about why you’ve chosen now to communicate that?
(I expect that you are under some form of NDA, and that if you were willing and able to talk about why you resigned then you would have done so in your initial post. Therefore, for readers interested in some possibly related news: last month, Daniel Kokotajlo quit OpenAI’s Futures/Governance team “due to losing confidence that it [OpenAI] would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” and a Superalignment researcher was forced out of OpenAI in what may have been a political firing (source). OpenAI appears to be losing its most safety-conscious people.)
Hi William! Thanks for posting. Can you elaborate on your motivation for posting this Quick Take?
No comment.
Presumably NDA + forbidden to talk about the NDA (hence forbidden to talk about being forbidden to talk about ... )