It seems like having genuinely safety-minded people within orgs is invaluable. Do you think that having them refuse to join is going to meaningfully slow things down?

It just takes one brave or terrified person in the know to say "these guys are internally deploying WHAT? I've got to stop this!" 

I worry very much that we won't have one such person in the know in OpenAI. I'm very glad we have them in Anthropic.

Having said that, I agree that Anthropic should not be shielded from criticism.

Your assumption that influence flows one way in organizations seems based on fear not psychology. If someone believes AGI is a real risk, they should be motivated enough to resist some pressure from superiors who merely argue that they're doing good stuff.

If you won't actively resist changing your beliefs once you join a culture with importantly different beliefs, then don't join an org.

While Anthropic's plan is a terrible one, so is PauseAI's. We have no good plans. And we must'nt fight amongst ourselves.

This seems almost exactly like the repugnant conclusion. Taken to extremes, intuition disagrees with logic. When that happens, it's usually the worse for intuition.

I'm not a utilitarian, but I find the repugnant conclusion impossible to reject if you are.

If you want chose what is good for everyone, there's little argument what that is in those cases.

 And if we're talking about what's good for everyone, that's got to be a linear sum of what's good for each someone. If the sum is nonlinear, who exactly is worth less than the others? This leads to the repugnant conclusion and your conclusion here.

Other definitions of "good for everyone" seem to always mean "what I idiosyncratically prefer for everyone else but me".

We do not have adequate help with AGI x-risk, and the societal issues demand many skillsets that alignment workers typically lack. Surviving AGI and avoiding s-risk far outweigh all other concerns by any reasonable utilitarian logic. 

You were getting disagree votes because it sounded like you were claiming certainty. I realize that you weren't trying to do that, but that's how people were taking it, and I find that quite understandable. Chicken as an analogy has certain death if neither player swerves, in the standard formulation. Qualifying your statement even a little would've gotten your point across better.

 FWIW I agree with your statement as I interpret it. I do tend to think that an objective measure of misalignment risk (I place it around 50% largely based on model uncertainty on all sides) makes the question of which side is safer basically irrelevant. 

Which highlights the problem with this type of miscomunnication. You were making probably by far the most important point here. It didn't play a prominent role because it wasn't communicated in a way the audience would understand.

That's very helpful! They don't try to include the cost of fear; the old story I'd heard about cage-free environments was that there's more fighting and cannibalism. But given the other large benefits, I'm convinced that cage-free is better. 

Wait now - I thought cage-free chickens suffered as much or more than caged?  I heard the claim a long time ago but never looked in to it closely.

Copied from my LW comment, since this is probably more of an EAF discussion:

This is really important pushback. This is the discussion we need to be having.

Most people who are trying to track this believe China has not been racing toward AGI up to this point. Whether they embark on that race is probably being determined now - and based in no small part on the US's perceived attitude and intentions.

Any calls for racing toward AGI should be closely accompanied with "and of course we'd use it to benefit the entire world, sharing the rapidly growing pie". If our intentions are hostile, foreign powers have little choice but to race us.

And we should not be so confident we will remain ahead if we do race. There are many routes to progress other than sheer scale of pretraining. The release of DeepSeek r1 today indicates that China is not so far behind. Let's remember that while the US "won" the race for nukes, our primary rival had nukes very soon after - by stealing our advancements. A standoff between AGI-armed US and China could be disastrous - or navigated successfully if we take the right tone and prevent further proliferation (I shudder to think of Putin controlling an AGI, or many potentially unstable actors).

This discussion is important, so it needs to be better. This pushback is itself badly flawed. In calling out the report's lack of references, it provides almost none itself. Citing a 2017 official statement from China seems utterly irrelevant to guessing their current, privately held position. Almost everyone has updated massively since 2017. (edit: It's good that this piece does note that public statements are basically meaningless in such matters.) If China is "racing toward AGI" as an internal policy, they probably would've adopted that recently. (I doubt that they are racing yet, but it seems entirely possible they'll start now in response to the US push to do so - and the their perspective on the US as a dangerous aggressor on the world stage. But what do I know - we need real experts on China and international relations.)

Pointing out the technical errors in the report seems irrelevant to harmful. You can understand very little of the details and still understand that AGI would be a big, big deal if true — and the many experts predicting short timelines could be right. Nitpicking the technical expertise of people who are essentially probably correct in their assessment just sets a bad tone of fighting/arguing instead of having a sensible discussion.

And we desperately need a sensible discussion on this topic.

I completely agree. 

But others may not, because most humans aren't longtermists nor utilitarians. So I'm afraid arguments like this won't sway the public opinion much at all. People like progress because it will get them and their loved ones (children and grandchildren, whose future they can imagine) better lives. They just barely care at all whether humanity ends after their grandchildren's lives (to the extent they can even think about it).

This is why I believe that most arguents against AGI x-risk are really based on differing timelines. People like to think that humans are so special we won't surpass them for a long time. And they mostly care about the future for their loved ones.

I think the point is making this explicit and having a solid exposition to point to when saying "progress is no good if we all die sooner!"

I don't think it's worth the effort; I'd personally be just as pleased with one snapshot of the participants in conversation as I would be with a whole video. The point of podcasts for me is that I can do something else while still taking in something useful for my alignment work. But I am definitely a tone-of-voice attender over a facial-expression attender, so others will doubtless get more value out of it.