Absolutely love the specialist/generalist 2x2. I've thought about that a bit and tried to express it at times, and your framing certainly makes that easier!

Sample size one here, when I joined the Cambridge EA group I remember hugely respecting that these people who thought chickens were so important they only ate vegan at their gatherings. It attracted me and didn't put me off at all.

But maybe that kind of signaling was more important to me, a religious person who often values personal integrity above impact.

I agree with your great communication strategy about why they serve that food, super helpful. Maybe EAGs should have a line in their application form about that as well?

Also maybe the vibe has changed since 7 years ago...

Personally I love long oats the same. I think 9/10 times I can sniff LLM written stuff a mile off then I don't read it. I also appreciate that the forum flags it for me to 

I don't think an LLM can yet sound not like an LLM

I think METRs checks are meaningful and maybe the best we have at the moment. They are also like you say compromised and the conflict of interests are immense with huge personal overlap between the labs and safety orgs, and funding streams too.

Geyges seems largely correct, but if we can't convince governments to regulate properly its better METR is in there doing it. After all METR exposed more about the hugging face hack than Open AI did on its own.

I don't think a framing of "these connections are completely unacceptable" is helpful given these problems. I think "compromised and far from ideal" is a better framing. Its better to do something than do nothing. I agree its best if government installed internal auditors like they do for banks, but that ain't happening any time soon.

Companies like Anthropic and Open AI are selfish animals by nature. They may have moments where good humans inside might do the right thing, but fundamentally they thirst for profit and growth. After IPO this will only get worse. We should never expect a company to regulate itself or its industry. Self regulation for harmful companies is a terrible idea and never works.

How can ANthropic "create" a  genuinely independent auditor? this seems impossible, almost and Oxymoron.

I love this "Are there other justice movements that ignored the fact that they were justice movements?" and would perhaps even take it further to...

"Are there other justice movements that won without being justice movements."

The moral underbelly, and even the passion in that underbelly which keeps me going personally is indeed a thirst for justice and liberation (in my case for humans in poverty not animals suffering but same diff). EA helps me enact this chance through finding cost-effective ways to fix the problem. Even among more "intellectual" EAs, I think a decent number of us are still (emotionally at least) motivated towards those ends rather than a utilitarian suffering minimisation mindset.

I 100% agree with every sentiment here, I just haven't seen this as a huge problem. I feel like the mods have done a pretty good job recently of removing AI slop. I only consider posts when they get past about 10 Karma too which might be saving me tho...

I don't think "The EA name and brand" is that tricky to reason about really. Also what we "wish" the public could do is unfortunately not reality. I think there are a number of reasonable takes and good arguments for and against focusing on brand, which have been discussed much on the forum. These 2 might be the most obvious

1) "Don't worry about PR it hurts epistemics and decision making. We should openly discuss any topic even if the public find it revolting or outside the overton window. This will help us truly do what has the highest EV, and achieve the most good - public perception be darned"

2) " EA being in good standing towards most people helps EA's do more good. PR is important for attracting people to the movement and makes community building easier. It helps  It also helps donors outside EA feel more warm towards EA ideas and spend their money more cost-effectively. If we are not pariahs, or even better seen as good by most people, that will help us redirect more thought, talent and resouces towards the movement.

And everything in between, and probably some orthoganal takes too. There are arguments for and against these. But I don't think its tricky to reason about as you state here.

From my perspective when we call ourselves EAs, or EA adjacents or even just vaguely part of the community, then we do have responsibility to others and the movement for the consequences of actions like hiring someone like Caroline Ellison. You've taken some of that responsibility which is great by posting here and having a discussion. 

That said my take (FWIW) I understand your reasons for hiring here, but its probably not wise. I do have a STRONG bent towards second chances though, but I feel it might have been wiser for PR reasons at least to put her in a position which had nothing at all to do with finance. Also you are opening yourself up to a lot of risk if anything bad happens with Manifund finances, even if she had nothing to do it.

@Laura Thomas-Walters  I think he's arguing against my idea not yours. I agree 100% I think there's no reason at all not to do the retrospective design (AI could do most of it anyway), I'm just saying its still a pretty low level of research really. I agree a big improvenet though.