I thought EA was too eager to accept fault for a few people committing financial crimes out of their sight. The average EA actually is complicit in the safetywashing of OpenAI and Anthropic! Maybe that’s why the don’t want to think about it…

What you quoted is more like voluntary safety commitments— I think both anti-slavery and AI Safety should not be left to the whims of the guilty parties to carry out.

Follow-ups you may not have seen because they are already downvoted to hell.

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DDtiXJ6twPb7neYPB/you-can-just-leave-ea

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ije4YiHzwBECBDMCQ/eas-would-mostly-not-have-been-abolitionists

Yeah, freeing slaves, but not necessarily abolishing the institution. I’m not trying to be difficult— I think this difference in goals is the point.

And it’s fine if you want to bite the bullet and say you wouldn’t be a radical abolitionist, but most modern people think they would have.

Yeah they really did us dirty by basically stealing our name when I kicked the founders out of PauseAI because they want to do illegal things and disruptive stunts like that.

This isn’t abolitionism. Manumission means “letting go”.

Ah so your objection is that the issue is not important enough to compare to slavery in this way? Interesting, wasn’t expecting that here. Are you saying that more EAs would have been abolitionists because slavery was a tangible harm? Looking around at the number of EAs who aren’t vegetarians or animal donors I’m not so sure of that. 

The people who want to work with the system on AI Safety generally do believe AI risk is that important, though. Or at least they say that.

There’s no need for a group like yours to be implicated in AI company wheeling and dealing. Being connected to EA’s decisions has probably made the issue much more confusing for you than it should be— PauseAI is suited for local groups and only involves talking about the danger and giving grassroots support to AI Safety bills. That should obviously have been the sort of thing local EA groups did for AI Safety, but the AI Safety part of EA has always been this weird elitist conspiracy to have stake in the Singularity.