I find it unusual that this end of year review contains barely any details of things you've actually done this year. Why should donors consider your organization as opposed to other AI risk orgs?

"It seems hard to predict whether superintelligence will kill everyone or not, but there's a worryingly high chance it will, and Earth isn't prepared," and seems to think the latter framing is substantially driven by concerns about what can be said "in polite company."

Funnily enough, I think this is true in the opposite direction. There is massive social pressure in EA spaces to take AI x-risk and the doomer arguments seriously. I don't think it's uncommon for someone who secretly suspects it's all a load of nonsense to diplomatically say a statement like the above, in "polite EA company".

Like you: I urge people who think AI x-risk is overblown to make their arguments loudly and repeatedly. 

To be clear, Thorstadt has written around a hundred different articles critiquing EA positions in depth, including significant amounts of object level criticism. 

I find it quite irritating that no matter how much in depth object level criticism people like Thorstadt or I make, if we dare to mention meta-level problems at all we often get treated like rabid social justice vigilantes. This is just mud-slinging: both meta level and object level issues are important for the epistemological health of the movement. 

I'm worried that a lot of these "questions" seem like you're trying to push a belief, but phrasing it like a question in order to get out of actually providing evidence for said belief. 

Why has Open Philanthropy decided not to invest in genetic engineering and reproductive technology, despite many notable figures (especially within the MIRI ecosystem) saying that this would be a good avenue to work in to improve the quality of AI safety research?

First, AI safety people here tend to think that super-AI is imminent within a decade or so, so none of this stuff would kick in time. Second, this stuff is a form of eugenics which has a fairly bad reputation, and raises thorny ethical issues even divorced from it's traditional role in murder and genocide. Third, it's all untested and based on questionable science and i suspect it wouldn't actually work very well, if at all.

Has anyone considered possible perverse incentives that the aforementioned CEA Community Health team may experience, in that they may have incentives to exaggerate problems in the community to justify their own existence? If so, what makes CEA as a whole think that their continued existence is worth the cost?

Have you considered that the rest of EA is incentivised to pretend there aren't problems in EA, for reputational reasons? If so, why shouldn't community health be expanded instead of reduced? 

This question is basically just a baseless accusation rephrased into a question in order to get away with it. I can't think of a major scandal in EA that was first raised by the community health team. 

Why have so few people, both within EA and within popular discourse more broadly, drawn parallels between the "TESCREAL" conspiracy theory and antisemitic conspiracy theories?

Because this is a dumb and baseless parallel? There's a lot more to antisemitic conspiracy theories than "powerful people controlling things". In fact, the general accusation used by Torres is to associate TESCREAL with white supremacist eugenicists, which feels kinda like the opposite end of the scale 

Why aren't there more organizations within EA that are trying to be extremely hardcore and totalizing, to the level of religious orders, the Navy SEALs, the Manhattan Project, or even a really intense start-up? It seems like that that is the kind of organization you would want to join, if you truly internalize the stakes here.

Because this is a terrible idea, and on multiple occasions has already led to harmful cult-like organisations. AI safety people have already spilled a lot of ink about why a maximising AI would be extremely dangerous, so why the hell would you want to do maximising yourself?

For as long as it's existed the "AI safety" movement has been trying to convince people that superintelligent AGI is imminent and immensely powerful. You can't act all shocked pikachu that some people would ignore the danger warnings and take that as a cue to build it before someone else does. This was all quite a predictable result of your actions. 

I would like to humbly suggest that people not engage in active plots to destroy humanity based on their personal back of the envelope moral calculations. 

I think that the other 8 billion of us might want a say, and I'd guess we'd not be particularly happy if we got collectively eviscerated because some random person made a math error. 

On multiple occasions, I've found a "quantified" analysis to be indistinguishable from a "vibes-based" analysis: you've just assigned those vibes a number, often one basically pulled out of your behind.  (I haven't looked enough into shrimp to know if this is one of those cases). 

I think it is entirely sensible to strongly prefer cause estimates that are backed by extremely strong evidence such as meta-reviews of randomised trials, rather than cause estimates based on vibes that are essentially made up. Part of the problem I have with naive expected value reasoning is that it seemingly does not take this entirely reasonable preference into account.

I have a PHD on computational quantum chemistry (ie, using conventional computers to simulate quantum systems). In my opinion quantum technologies are unlikely to be a worthy cause area. I have not researched everything in depth so I can only give my impressions here from conversations with colleagues in the area. 

First, I think the idea of quantum computers having any effect on WMD's in the near future seems dodgy to me. Even if practical quantum computers are built, they are still likely to be incredibly expensive for a long time to come. People seem unsure about how useful quantum algorithms will actually be for material science simulations. We can build approximations to compounds that run fine on classical computers, and even if quantum computers opens up more approximations, you're still going to have to check in with real experiments. You are also operating in an idealised realm: you can model the compounds, yes, but if you want to investigate, say, it's effect on humans, you need to model the human body as well, which is an entirely different beast. 

The next point is that even if this does work in the future, why not put the money to investigate it then, rather than now, before it's been proven to work? We will have a ton of advance warning if quantum computers can actually be used for practical purposes, because they will start off really bad and develop over time. 

From what I've heard, theres a lot of skepticism about near-term quantum computing anyway, with a common sentiment among my colleagues being that it's overhyped and due for a crash. 

I'm also a little put off by lumping in quantum computing with quantum sensing and so on: Only quantum computing would have an actually transformative effect on anything if actually realised, with the others being just a slightly better way of doing things we can already do. 

I'm highly skeptical about the risk of AI extinction, and highly skeptical that there will be singularity in our near-term future. 

However, I am concerned about near-term harms from AI systems such as misinformation, plagiarism, enshittification, job loss, and climate costs. 

How are you planning to appeal to people like me in your movement?