Quick takes

Some quick observations on the attacks on METR, EA, and other AI safety orgs (from my perspective as a political campaigner and former Communications Director for a union and mayor during COVID): 1. If you're explaining, you're losing: Every rebuttal repeats the accusation to people who haven't heard it yet. Answer the accusation once, link to it, and stop explaining. This is the "illusory truth" effect (information is true when it's repeated). 2. Silence doesn't work either: Not responding on the record suggests something is being hidden. Make one clear statement rather than amplifying in multiple twitter threads. 3. Concede what you can: A concept I know from political comms is the "admission against interest". This buys trust, disarms cynical voters, and establishes credibility. Saying "yes, AND here's what we're doing about it" will take some air out of the critique. 4. Messenger > message: Ideally people who know the organization being attacked, are from outside the AI safety world, have independent standing, or better yet, have disagreed with the organization publicly will land the defense better. 5. Going after people's personal lives or spouses is overreach: Ordinary people will obviously find this unfair and it's where their attacks will backfire. 6. Don't quote tweet and rebut: You're just distributing their message for them. I want to write something longer on this but don't have time right now. Lots of opportunity for good crisis comms here. Let me know what's wrong about this take and if you'd like to hear more!

The "Desperate" AI Safety Talent Bottleneck is deeply misleading. Please.stop. I worked at Google. Google does not tell applicants that there is a talent bottleneck and they are desperately hiring. They say "we're cool, join us!"  I didn't get into Harvard.  Harvard does not tell applicants that they are desperately seeking students. I am not misled.  I've gotten rejected from countless AI Safety organizations. AI Safety tells applicants - we are in desperate need of talent (operators/generalists)! Please join us!  I've coached 70+ aspiring career pivoters on navigating the ecosystem. A common theme is the dejection & disappointment from all this rejection. Because of this false marketing, I am the one picking up the pieces to calibrate professionals on how difficult, competitive, and picky organizations are, how to build context, and how to endure the marathon, which is like any other job hunt.  Please.stop. Some alternatives: * We are an exciting, growing organization and you should apply for our roles! * Many people are excited to work for us - here are qualities of candidates we're especially excited about. * EA roles are competitive, and we would still love to see your application. Relevant posts: * https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/B6d8Wzk4gNzHsXvdi/ai-safety-is-extremely-bottlenecked-on-grantmakers?commentId=n2Rd7RR4y9EnKP42F * https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/b82SLXwEHRCs3TFJA/why-experienced-professionals-fail-to-land-high-impact-roles * https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jmbP9rwXncfa32seH/after-one-year-of-applying-for-ea-jobs-it-is-really-really 

Will anyone take the other side of this bet? By January 1, 2034, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg will all agree the AI bubble has popped. (As in, they will all report it as news, not just publish an opinion column saying so.) The stakes: $20 to the charity of the winner's choice. Why this bet? Mainly just for fun. But also to make a point. I chose 7 years as the time horizon for the bet because I read that 5 to 7 years is the time horizon for many AI investments. My hunch is that the AI bubble will pop within 3 years, but who knows. Markets can keep lending and investing in unprofitable ventures for a very long time.

AI safety needs people everywhere but quickly stated, current talent bottlenecks to me look like: -- Founders -- Grantmakers -- (technical) Research leads  -- Policy entrepreneurs and implementors (which includes a lot of technical work) -- bets in international coordination and/or cooperation -- All manner of supporting talent -- program leads, ops proper, public outreach, content creators, comms   Most sought-after qualities for talent are: -- context, mission alignment, domain understanding, sophisticated views on AI strategy and threat modelling etc. -- "good judgement", "sound epistemics", "reasoning transparency" and other similar ideas/meta-skills from the EA/rationalist cannon -- a willingness to get shit done/bias for action (rather than be in learning mode, or people who need a lot of management and oversight, or folks with too many preferences/constraints) -- low ego, similar to above -- ambitious folks, since they would be really trying to be their own managers, take on bigger projects, grow themselves and their teams etc.    Finally, even having these, it's not enough to just claim to have these; job-seekers mainly trip up in being able to demonstrate and be legible about having them.

tl;dr: Stop The AI Race is organizing some rapid-response protest march this Thursday 9am-12pm in San Francisco, calling the Mayor of San Francisco and the board of supervisors to declare an AI Emergency and enforce a pause of frontier AI model development in San Francisco Over the past week, we have seen Dario Amodei and Sam Altman advocate for government intervention in pacing the frontier. However, the US Government has yet to answer their calls. Which is why on Thursday at 9am Stop The AI Race will be organizing another protest march, asking local authorities to step in. We will be marching from OpenAI to Anthropic to City Hall, asking AI company employees to join us in calling on the Mayor of San Francisco and the Board of Supervisors to declare an AI Emergency and enforce a full pacing of frontier AI model development in San Francisco. Schedule: - 9am: Rally at OpenAI - 10-10:45am: March To Anthropic - 10:45am: Rally at Anthropic - 11am-11:30am: March to City Hall - 11:30am: Rally at City Hall Sign up here.

A lot of AI safety people I know are excited about Anthropic and I don't fully understand why. My instinct is to distrust company because they're the one pushing the AI arms race, autonomously hacking three companies, and IPO'ing, but am likely missing something because of how respected they are within this space. Are there examples where they have counterfactually produced some result, policy, or finding that has slowed down capabilities progress more than they have themselves pushed capabilities? 

From SE Geyges: Is METR a meaningful check on Anthropic?. Part of the reason we are in this position is because nobody outside the EA community cares about AI safety enough to fund it or work in it. I’m very sympathetic to this; some of these close connections are inevitable. However, it can also be true that these connections are completely unacceptable (edit), and that Anthropic should be trying harder than they are to find or create auditors that are genuinely independent. How do we do that?

More EA undergrads should do political volunteering. It's impactful AND fun. Choose an election that's impactful (e.g. AI safety candidate) and neglected (e.g. primaries in always-blue/red places), couch-crash the weekend there, and volunteer with the campaign. I say this after doing 15 hours of street canvassing myself. I was surprised by how anecdotally impactful and fun it was. If you like people-watching, talking to strangers, and/or joining passionate projects for a weekend, I think you'll also love this. I wish I thought of this earlier. Literature on the impact (Claude-generated): Kalla & Broockman's meta-analysis of 49 field experiments finds zero average persuasive effect in general elections, but effects do show up when voters lack a partisan cue (i.e. primaries and ballot measures). Mann & Haenschen (2024) find mobilization effects (e.g. canvassing) are 33-76% larger in low-attention races than in high-attention ones. Your marginal volunteer hour goes much further in a primary.