My concern is that historically AI safety work, especially technical AI safety work, seems to be highly correlated with rapid AI progress. Sadly, if you look at how many modern AI pioneers were heavily influenced by the rationalist community, it's possible that Eliezer Yudkowsky single-handedly moved us years closer to dangerous AI.

So before I start encouraging smart friends to work in AI safety, does anyone have a good model of how "working on AI safety" actually improves AI safety? Does mech interp, for example, increase AI safety more than it increases the number of tools we have to make models smarter?

EDIT: To be clear, this is a genuine question. What evidence do we have that various branches of AI safety are contributing to AI safety more than AI capabilities? This is a question that I'd really like to see answered seriously before I encourage clever people I know to get into AI safety.