The magnitude and the complexity of the cynicism displayed by some people when it comes to AI risks is mind-blowing.

It's like if the NRA reported on school shootings and people said "oh, they probably fake these shootings to make guns sound dangerous and sell more of them".

OpenAI could report that its AI started spontaneously generating illegal porn and sending it to people and you'd still think it was a marketing stunt.

The gleeful spite and disdain for building community norms isn't an accident, it's an attitude they want to normalize.

ChatGPT says "I can't help you hide this, escape, destroy evidence, or avoid being caught", and a lawyer would say the exact same thing; a lawyer that doesn't would be disbarred.

What a lawyer will do is help you argue that you didn't murder your wife. A lawyer can give you advice on your defense strategy, tell you what to say, what to avoid mentioning, etc. They can't give you advice like "here's what you can do so the neighbors don't get suspicious about the new hole in your backyard".

If your tech company calls its product "The Genophage™" it's fair to ask if they're taking the safety/ethics implications very seriously.

I do think you need to defend your assertion, because the difference between a driver and a pedestrian is that the driver "knew the risks" while the risks were imposed on the pedestrian.

By contrast, Biden at the same point in his term was hovering around 39%, for the heinous crime of... rebuilding the US economy? Including some woke riders in his infrastructure bill?

At this point, a fair assessment of US citizens is that on average, they seem to consider that being a right-wing autocrat wannabe, threatening to invade allied countries "as a negotiating tactic", being a climate change denier, starting a humiliating failed war, trying to blackmail the press into compliance, etc, are about 3% worse than being a cringe center-left bureaucrat.

"US citizens don't seem to care" is an apt hyperbole.

The people I have met at effective altruist conferences are not rich, though they lean upper-middle class. I've seen way more "enthusiastic broke student" types than millionaires.

> When someone invests a ton of money and energy into something they genuinely care about, they don't call themselves effective altruists, do they?

Well N=1, but I do.

(And also I've met tons of EA people who were not shy about investing all their energy in a cause they care about, even when all mainstream society tells them it's pointless.)

The longer non-snappy explanation is that "I will arbitrarily set numbers on things and call it impartial" obviously doesn't match EA's self-conception, that lots of EA cause areas are speculative and don't focus on numbers, that EAs that do focus on numbers do a lot of work to make sure the numbers aren't arbitrary, that EAs as a general rule don't claim to be impartial, and that awareness of Goodhart's law doesn't mean "never trying to objectively measure anything at all".

> I am interested in showing to the world that I am well-intentioned and trying to do something, even if that something doesn't make sense".

This is the kind of pre-conception that's essentially immune to reality. I hear the same thing about vegans (oh they say they care about animal suffering, but everybody knows about factory farms, they just want to feel superior to everybody else) or environmentalists (they say that climate change is a threat to humanity but really they just want to lecture us about our cars).

All I can say is that it doesn't match my experience, and that the effective altruists I've met spend quite a lot of time "thinking about whether or not it can work" and trying to learn from other people's mistakes.

> Look. I’m the last person who’s going to deny that the road we’re on is littered with the skulls of the people who tried to do this before us. But we’ve noticed the skulls. We’ve looked at the creepy skull pyramids and thought “huh, better try to do the opposite of what those guys did”.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/07/yes-we-have-noticed-th...

We can think ill of the Israeli state without jumping to "fuck you for living in Israel and having nice things" as soon as someone mentions their city name.

> The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay

"Undue delay" is subjective, but "we'll keep backups of your data for a week in case you change your mind" seems easy to justify in court.