What's your explanation for why they attack EAs rather than, say, the AI ethics crowd?

I think the AI ethics crowd is the subject of attacks (though arguably this is because they tried to seek power and influence).

I also consider this to a lesser extent around animal sentience arguments

+1, "it would be very easy for me to ignore the possibility that nematodes might be conscious" is a major impediment to thinking clearly about animal sentience (including for me).

I don't disagree, it's more that this feels a bit like privileging the hypothesis? I think the modal reason I've heard from people who did capabilities work and now regret it is something like "I knew I was misaligned with leadership but I thought leaving would be even worse." 

If, for some reason, Anthropic asked me how to prevent people from regretting working for them, I would focus much more on "have a thing for people to do once they realize their colleague is corrupt" instead of "have a more nuanced way of telling if their colleague is corrupt."

Downvoted; I think this comment was unnecessarily rude. 

Thanks! I only know a handful of people in this category, but for what it's worth, it again feels like people who were predisposed to thinking that working on pretraining would be okay rather than them being "corrupted." 

E.g., I recently talked to someone who told me that their main takeaway from a safety fellowship was realizing that they didn't fit in because they actually weren't worried about existential risk in the same way that the other attendees were.

People seem surprised and bewildered when AI folks defect away from AI safety towards capabilities. People trust that as AI companies grow, those gaining power and money from shares will not be adversely influenced by that power and money.

fwiw I don't actually know many examples of this, and the ones I hear cited often seem uncompelling to me. E.g.:

• Greg Brockman doesn't seem like a true believer in OpenAI's nonprofit mission who got corrupted but rather someone who went into it wanting to make a profit
• Mechanize's founders don't seem like EAs who got corrupted by AI money but rather EAs with unusual moral and empirical views which result in them thinking that the best course of action is the exact opposite of what most EAs think

(Counterexamples appreciated, though!)

And credit to the AI skeptics that they seem to mostly have updated in light of the new evidence (or at least claimed that they never actually believed in long timelines, which is maybe less noble, but ends up in the same place).

Yeah I agree that if you only have one bit of detail that you can store, then saying it is "hard" rather than "easy" is probably the correct bit. However I would suggest that for something as important as your career you should investigate in substantially more detail. If you do so I expect you will come up with a range of needed skills/attributes for these jobs, some of which you might find easy, others of which you might find hard. 

I no longer work at METR. I would guess that they'd be excited about applicants who have done this, but don't want to speak for them.