If this is true, then I think the board has made a huge mess of things. They've taken a shot without any ammunition, and not realised that the other parties can shoot back. Now there are mass resignations, Microsoft is furious, seemingly all of silicon valley has turned against EA, and it's even looking likely that Altman comes back.

How much of this is "according to anonymous sources"?

The Board was deeply aware of intricate details of other parties's will and ability to shoot back. Probably nobody was aware of all of the details, since webs of allies are formed behind closed doors and rearrange during major conflicts, and since investors have a wide variety of retaliatory capabilities that they might not have been open about during the investment process.

Agreed, I only used the word "dominance games" because it seemed helpful for understandability and the wordcount. But it was inaccurate enough to be worth effort to find a better combination of words.

Because humans are primates, we have a strong drive to gain social status and play dominance games. The problem is that humans tend to take important concepts and turn them into dominance games.

As a result, people anticipate some sort of dominance or status game whenever they hear about an important concept. For many people, this anticipation has become so strong that they stopped believing that important concepts can exist.

Henrik Karlsson's post Childhoods of Exceptional People did research indicating that there are intensely positive effects from young children spending lots of time talking and interacting with smart, interested adults; so much so that we could even reconsider the paradigm of kids mostly spending time with other kids their age.

It's probably really important to go to lots of events and meet and talk to a bunch of different people and get a wider variety of perspectives; there's only so much that a couple can do from inside one's own two heads.

Western culture is highly individualistic, especially when it comes to major life decisions. However, aligning oneself with empirical reality is typically best done by gathering information from lots of people.

The difficulty of pitching AI safety to someone has been going down by ~50% every ~18 months. This thanksgiving might be a great time to introduce it to family; run Murphyjitsu and be goal-oriented! 🦃

That area is controlled by militaries, who might retaliate against people who find clever ways to smuggle aid into the conflict zone. So trying to help people there instead of elsewhere is the wrong move.

EA was probably wrong to prioritize bednets over a malaria vaccine, even though lots of children would have died horribly if a malaria vaccine was invented 5 years later instead of them getting bednets now. It might seem harsh, but saving fewer lives instead of more is even more harsh for the lives of the people themselves, even if it's accidental.

For more than a century, science fiction was basically the only institution paying people to think about the future. This sculpted the cultural landscape pretty significantly (try thinking of examples!)