I was only mentioning Karpathy as someone reasonable who repeatedly points out the lack of online learning and seems to have (somewhat) longer timelines because of that. This is solely based on my general impression. I agree the stated probabilities seem wildly overconfident.

I agree that that comment may be going too far with claiming "bad faith", but the article does have a pretty tedious undertone of having found some crazy gotcha that everyone is ignoring. (I'd agree that it gets at a crux and that some reasonable people, e.g. Karpathy, would align more with the OP here)

What have they done or are planning to do that seems worth supporting?

There's a broader point here about the takeover of a non-profit organization by financial interests that I'd really like to see fought back against.

"The most likely explanation for a weird new idea not being popular is that it's wrong. "

I agree with much of the rest of the comment, but this seems wrong - it seems more likely that these things just aren't very correlated.

Just noting that these are possibly much stronger claims than "AGI will be able to completely disempower humanity" (depending on how hard it is to solve cold fusion a-posteriori).

This is not a fair critique of the post, he's responding to a hypothetical discussed on Twitter.

At the risk of sounding, it's really not clear to me that anything "went wrong" - from my outside perspective, it's not like there was a clear mess-up on the part of EA's anywhere here, just a difficult situation managed to the best of people's abilities.

That doesn't mean that it's not worth pondering whether there's any aspect that had been handled badly, or more broadly what one can take away from this situation (although we should beware to over-update on single notable events). But, not knowing the counterfactuals, and absent a clear picture of what things "going right" would have looked like, it's not evident that this should be chalked up as a failing on the part of EA.

From gwern's summary over on lesswrong it sounds like the actual report only stated that the firing was "not mandated", which could be interpreted as "not justified" or "not required". Is it clear from the legal context that the former is implied?

It certainly does seem to push capabilities, although one could argue about whether the extent of it is very significant or not.

Being confused and skeptical about their adherence to their stated philosophy seems justified here, and it is up to them to explain their reasoning behind this decision.

On the margin, this should probably update us towards believing they don't take their stated policy of not advancing the SOTA too seriously.