My understanding is that some electric and water utilities did a similar thing in the early days of the pandemic, for the same reasons.

If you are wondering how this change was received by the media, well

• Bloomberg: Anthropic Drops Hallmark Safety Pledge in Race With AI Peers
• The Wall Street Journal: Anthropic Dials Back AI Safety Commitments
• Gizmodo: Anthropic Rolls Back Safety Protocols as It Waits to Find Out If It’s Being Drafted by the Army
• TIME: Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge
• Engadget: Anthropic weakens its safety pledge in the wake of the Pentagon's pressure campaign

I thought this was video game jargon!

I think putting yourself out there in a database is a good idea, as is finding recruiters that can introduce you to opportunities.

As far as rejections... I think there is this common mindset that you just need to grind away at applications until you eventually make it through, but personally I think it's more likely that if one is being rejected from >90% of applications, that is a sign that something is wrong. I feel like these two are the most common (but there could be many others):

• The applicant is not actually qualified / not a good fit for these jobs, and should apply to other different jobs that are a better fit.
• There is some problem with the way the applicant is presenting during the application process (for example, a problem with the resume, or unprofessional interview performance); in this case, the applicant should try to figure out what the problem is and fix it.

Is there a reason why the first sentence of this post would not suffice (even if perhaps moved to the end of the document)?

Hmm, I'm not confident that Bob is wrong here. It seems to me that there's a quite plausible argument that EA's involvement in AI has been net-negative, possibly so net-negative as to cancel out all of the rest of EA. You seem to assume that this was knowable in advance, but that's not necessarily so.

Your argument seems to assume that one should "shut up and multiply" and then run with that estimated EV number; but there have been many arguments on this forum and elsewhere about why we shouldn't trust naive EV estimates.

Median household (not personal) income in the bay area is well under $200,000, so I disagree that $600k is not doing "extremely well".

However, I personally believe that most EA executives earning in the mid six figures could easily earn even more if they were to move to the private sector.

Just a note that in 2013, Google's headcount was a little less than 50,000 people, so we are talking about a completely different scale from any EA or EA-adjacent organization. When you are hiring at scale, you can afford to take more risks on any given hire.

Personally I don't think Sam Altman is motivated by money. He just wants to be the one to build it.

I sense that Elon Musk and Dorio Amodei's motivations are more complex than "motivated by money", but I can imagine that the actual dollar amounts are more important to them than to Sma.

TBH my sense is that GiveWell is just being polite.

A perhaps more realistic motivation is that admitting animal suffering into GiveWell's models would implicitly force them to specify moral weights for animals (versus humans), and there is no way to do that without inviting huge controversy leaving at least some groups very upset. Much easier to say "sorry, not our wheelhouse" and effectively set animal weights to zero.

FWIW I agree with this decision (of GiveWell's).