You don't have to just trust media portrayals or ex-advisor testimonies to know how authoritarian Trump is, much of this stuff is publicly available online and you can just look at primary sources. For example, the full Trump call to Georgia Sectary of State is uploaded to Youtube (I linked to the part where he started yelling but honestly the entire call, which you can listen to, is imo pretty damning). Trump afterwards Tweeted 

I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the “ballots under table” scam, ballot destruction, out of state “voters”, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!

Which is interesting because Raffensperger patiently responded to every allegation over a call lasting a whole hour. 

I don't think this is the type of thing that armchair theorizing is good for. If you believe it's good to experiment with signature collection and talking to passerby about AI and/or getting more people on PauseAI mailing lists, I encourage you to do so and report back. 

Another (complementary) framing here is that I assume your "day job" is mostly improving the Forum. So you can ~directly compare how much an additional hour of commenting or post on the Forum is worth in terms of total value add to the Forum, relative to the expected marginal impact of improving the codebase by an hour of coding or other work you do^[1].

This a) sidesteps the absolute value of Forum work, which is potentially more contentious, and b) gives you a direct way to assess how valuable things are relative to the opportunity cost. 

1. ^{^}

   (assuming your direct counterfactual with writing comments is writing code or otherwise improving the forum)

I talked to people who seem to know about this and ~0 modern ballot initiatives are done this way. You need >500,000 signatures, which is a massive logistical undertaking that's not going to be enacted by a couple of volunteers. 

Some people have talked about trying to get something like that as a ballot initiative, since initial polling suggests that something like this might be very popular with the general public.

(Not super well-informed) My guess is that it's 95%+ lip service. He doesn't seem like someone with scruples or object-level opinions about most things other than what gives him power. 

sama's Xitter

More AI news:

4. More OpenAI leadership departing, unclear why. 
4a. Apparently sama only learned about Mira's departure the same day she announced it on Twitter? "Move fast" indeed!
4b. WSJ reports some internals of what went down at OpenAI after the Nov board kerfuffle. 
5. California Federation of Labor Unions (2million+ members) spoke out in favor of SB 1047.

If this is a portent of things to come, my guess is that this is a big deal. Labor's a pretty powerful force that AIS types have historically not engaged with.

Note: Arguably we desperately need more outreach to right-leaning clusters asap, it'd be really bad if AI safety becomes negatively polarized. I mentioned a weaker version of this in 2019, for EA overall. 

I was a bit surprised because a) I thought "OpenAI is a nonprofit or nonprofit-adjacent thing" was a legal fiction they wanted to maintain, especially as it empirically isn't costing them much, and b) I'm still a bit confused about the legality of the whole thing.

AI News today:

1. Mira Murati (CTO) leaving OpenAI 

2. OpenAI restructuring to be a full for-profit company (what?) 

3. Ivanka Trump calls Leopold's Situational Awareness article "excellent and important read"