The point of the letter is to raise awareness for AI safety, not because they actually think a pause will be implemented. We should take the win.

Thanks!

I hate to be someone who walks into a heated debate and pretends to solve it in one short post, so I hope my post didn’t come off too authoritative (I just genuinely have never seen debate about the term). I’ll look more into these.

Note that, if you are going to start thinking about these cofounders, you have to consider cofounders working against this relationship as well:

• there is often a trade-off between more lucrative and more personally rewarding jobs
• intuitively I think people who get more stressed are harder workers, though I'm certainly not confident in this claim.

The difference, from my perspective, is that the mixing of romantic and work relationships in a poly context has much more widespread damage. In monogamous relationships, the worst that can happened is that there is one incident involving 2 or so people, which can be dealt with in a contained way. In poly relationships, when you have a relationship web spanning a large part of an organization, this can cause very large harm to the company and to potential future employees. I, frankly, would feel very uncomfortable if I was at an organization where most of my coworkers were in a polyamorous relationship.

I think a better way of looking at this is that EA is very inviting of criticism but not necessarily that responsive to it. There are like 10 million critiques on the EA Forum, most with serious discussion and replies. Probably very few elicit actual change in EA. (I am of the opinion that most criticism just isn’t very good, and that there is a reason it hasn’t been adopted, but obviously this is debatable).

I have opposite  intuition actually - I'd guess that people closer to animals have more empathy for their suffering. Either way I think this is mostly orthogonal to the cultural values of masculinity you are talking about.

Small point here but unless you think that even after adjusting for partisanship working-class or rural Americans are more likely to oppose animal welfare action, I would take out the part about working class and rural and just leave right-wing. Otherwise, it just detracts from epistemic value as people create stereotypes about what political parties' voting bases  look like.

Yeah, in fact I think most of the domestic opposition also comes from this backlash (in poli sci it's called "negative partisanship"). The right starts to oppose animal welfare policy not on its merits but simply because the left supports it - another reason to strive not to polarize the issue.