Dear God, Please Do Not Resign In Protest

Kabir Kumar

Dear God, Please Do Not Resign In Protest — LessWrong

126 Dear God, Please Do Not Resign In Protest

7th Sep 2026

2 min read

126

Just refuse to work on bad things and see if they fire you. There's not much time left for resumes to matter. Also, firing someone for refusing to work on bad things is actually very costly.

If it's not obvious that you're working on bad things, but the company is obviously doing broadly bad things, consistently, just refuse to work at all until those change. E.g. if at Anthropic or OpenAI, refuse to work until training runs stop

Some, such as Mateusz may say: "They would fire you after a month or two and the firing wouldn't have the same social effect as voluntary quitting of, say, Daniel Kokotajlo or Richard Ngo."

I understand why it may feel that way, but I disagree very strongly, I predict it would have much more of a social effect.

"They fired him because he refused to help AI capabilities"

"They fired him because he didn't want to work on bad policies"

etc, much bigger headlines.

Also, I think you may not be factoring in the extent to which there is a cost to the company executives to be seen as firing someone. Especially someone who is refusing to work on moral grounds and has already proven themselves to be high status, respected, etc.

And especially how it would look to the other employees if they refused to even listen to the striking employee before firing them or refused to even negotiate at all.

The company leadership try to present themselves as very thoughtful, sincere, doing their best, etc. This is a large part of why many of the most talented people are there.

Imagine for a second that one of the people on your team said "Mateusz, everyone else on the team, I'm not going to work on this because I think it's morally wrong".

And then you fire them.

What would the other teammates think? What would they think of you? What would happen to their trust in you? What would happen to the trust that investors have in you? Or funders?

Obviously bad things. So obvious that you wouldn't even do it. You'd talk with them instead, see what could be changed, so that they feel better and this is less of a risk. So something would actually change in the company, to better reflect the employee's values, or you suffer a huge blow to your image and your employees trust in you.

And this would then mean that the other teammates know they can also do this.

Some may ask "would this give teammates courage or 'set an example'?". Even if it 'sets an example', it will do so in the short term, until the next moral outcry comes, where people get some courage again. And, more critically, they would much less believe in the nice things that the leadership say, the moral image they build.

And even better than quitting - there's a much, much lower chance of the protesting employee, who has moral courage, being replaced by one who has less moral courage.

Also, this is a much, much, much costlier signal. It's much harder to get funding to start a new lab, join Anthropic, etc, if you're known to be someone who might just stop working one day because you don't believe in it.

And this matters. People see that. Your colleagues see that. Journalists see that. Regular people see that.

Think of Daniel Kokotajlo refusing to sign the NDA and losing out on a lot of money because of it. It was a very very costly signal. And it's mattered and been trusted more because of that.

Refusing to work and taking on expensive cost and risk every day that you do so, is a much bigger cost and signal.

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Dear God, Please Do Not Resign In Protest

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[-]habryka2d8868

"They fired him because he refused to help AI capabilities"
"They fired him because he didn't want to work on bad policies"

Ok, but they probably just won't fire you. The labs have infinite money, they can just sideline you in the organization, give you some sinecure position, while waiting on you to make a mistake that allows them to fire you right after you made some gaffe that actually makes that seem reasonable. Choosing the context for your own exit is a powerful tool!

8leogao1d

how would you distinguish this from a null hypothesis of gaining influence inside companies being hard in general for mundane reasons?

3habryka1d

I think I am failing to parse the argument structure. I was mostly reasoning here from first principles and a broader model of labs acting strategically in their interest. What's the hypothesis I am proposing here?

2leogao1d

the hypothesis is that people who refuse to work on capabilities will be given no power, even if they are otherwise treated well. but if you are at an ai lab and have no power, should you conclude that this is because you fundamentally can never gain power (your hypothesis), or that in general gaining power requires you to be pretty competent in ways that are rare and therefore most people will have no power anyways (the null hypothesis)

6habryka1d

Is this... my hypothesis? My hypothesis is just that if you are already planning to quit and think working at the lab you are at is bad, then the strategy of "refuse to work on capabilities, or anything at all, and try to goad the lab into firing you" will work worse than choosing the time you resign carefully (this post has also aged particularly badly, since Jacob Coxon's resignation is approximately the biggest AI safety news story in terms of public attention, probably in attention just behind Huggingface).

2leogao1d

oh sure. if you've already decided you want to quit, then you should just quit.

5keltan1d

Maybe this doesn't work because of NDAs, but perhaps the employee could make high level details of their protest common knowledge within our community? Any firing of that person would then be seen as suspicious.

4OVERmind1d

"The labs have infinite money," I would say companies-corporations, not labs

0habryka21h

“Labs” is the currently accepted term in SV. Saying or typing “AI companies” every time is too long, sorry.

3Connor Williams21h

That it is the currently-accepted term does not in itself mean we should accede to it when the term is wrong and misleading. Linguistic precision is very useful. [...] It takes ~1 second.

-2habryka15h

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-trivial-inconveniences

2Elliott Thornley1d

Seems like they probably would if you started trying very hard to convince other employees to down tools?

3habryka1d

I of course agree that if you are disruptive enough internally then you can get fired, but in that case I think you are more likely to harm people taking these risks seriously, and that would create almost exactly the kind of pretense I was warning here about.

2Elliott Thornley1d

Why do you think it would harm other people taking the risks seriously? I'm thinking that if an employee tries to persuade others to down tools and the lab responds by sidelining other safety-minded people, that would look very bad for the lab. It also seems like there must be some way to try to persuade other employees such that (i) you're a big enough nuisance that the lab fires you, and (ii) it's obvious that you're getting fired for your safety advocacy rather than for some other reason. If that turns out not to be the case, you can always quit later.

2habryka21h

What do you mean by “down tools”? In general, I think people consider being a nuisance a legitimate reason to fire you (not always, there exist unions which sometimes succeed at this, but it’s rare and usually requires some additional threat). The lab can indeed be explicit and say “look, we are not firing you for your safety concerns, but because you have been uncooperatively disrupting our work”. This for example ended up working reasonably well with Leopold at OpenAI.

1Kabir Kumar2d

I'd bet against that happening

[-]cata1d8146

Today there was an example where an ordinary research engineer, Jacob Coxon, quit and tweeted that he quit, and that alone apparently warranted an article in the WSJ, which I would not have expected. See https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-researcher-quits-over-out-of-control-ai-fears-707b7628.

This suggests that quitting for moral reasons seems like unusually important new information to people outside the AI bubble. It seems to me that probably means that it's more useful than communicating similar info only to coworkers by taking a principled approach inside.

[-]sjadler1d677

Nit, but I would clarify: his quitting and tweeting about it didn't happen to warrant an article in the WSJ. Articles like that have an associated lead-time, and so he first had to find an interested journalist who would write the story, then time his quitting/tweeting to their release of the story

That is: I would not expect another employee quitting spontaneously to get an article like this, without having done a media engagement strategy ahead of time. If someone is going to quit, please try to line up a good media opportunity to pair it with, not just shoot from the hip! An exclusive like that is juicy; but merely covering it once it's already happened (and anyone could write the same story about it) is much less enticing

5cata1d

Thank you for this info, I was not media savvy enough to know that he had to seek out the coverage and line up the timing; I figured maybe there was just a WSJ reporter on the "reading Twitter for AI news" beat who thought it was interesting and banged out a column. I think that makes it weaker evidence.

[-]Connor Williams1d172

Coxon's resignation also led to Evan Hubinger, an 'Alignment Science lead' at Anthropic [I'm not sure if he's an alignment science lead or the alignment science lead, to be clear] to say:

"Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to." (source)

This is very useful information - it's important and relevant for the world to know that frontier AI employees in such a position believe this sort of thing! And Anthropic is notably secretive compared to the leading AI companies in terms of how much we know about what their employees think. So Coxon's departure was valuable not just for its own sake (and direct coverage thereof), but for eliciting additional info from other employees.

2Caelum Forder1d

I feel this is the strongest case for quitting, so long as you have the media lined up to cover your departure.

[-]Neel Nanda3d7944

I feel like the main reason to quit is because you think you can have more impact elsewhere (or can have a bunch of impact in the act of quitting). My guess is that in most cases, someone refusing to work on capabilities work would not be fired, but might be somewhat sidelined, wouldn't have that much influence, and be somewhat socially uncomfortable. The company is unlikely to make someone a safety martyr by firing them if they can just have a less useful employee around instead (and if said employee is doing safety work, that's typically pretty good from the company's perspective)

[-]Joseph Miller2d1914

If they don't fire you, sit outside and join the protest.

[-]Neel Nanda1d149

That plan seems more reasonable! Being a current employee of an AGI lab will make protesting and other comms things notably more effective. I do expect loudly quitting in protest to be even more effective though (see eg Jacob Coxon today)

2Kabir Kumar3h

Yes, this is essentially what I intended and perhaps I should just add it to the post

[-]Raemon2d5644

I think "stop doing harmful work until you are fired, instead of quitting" is fairly compelling.

But, I do think most people working on prosaic safety are mostly doing harm.

If you don't have a particular story for how what you're doing scales to superalignment*, I a) don't think you're solving particularly important problems in the nearterm, b) in the medium term, mostly making it marginally faster to roll out stronger capabilities, which is bad because it's burning calendar time for serial research time, and solving the legible problems leaving the illegible ones.

[-]Richard_Ngo1d3610

I am somewhat dismayed to see how highly-upvoted this post is; I think I have literally never seen a post this poorly-reasoned get 200 karma (before my strong downvote). It reads like a grab-bag of arguments hastily thrown at a strong pre-written bottom line.

To be clear, I'm not saying that Kabir shouldn't have posted this, I generally am very pro people quickly writing up their takes (though I do think the title is unusually bad). Rather, I'm mainly trying to figure out why the community reaction was so positive.

I might engage more on the object level later but for now my default hypothesis is that people are seeing AI safety people get in public loud conflict with the labs by quitting, are having a knee-jerk conflict-averse reaction, and instinctively supporting anything that might defuse that immediate conflict.

In general we see this pattern a lot with the labs: people do something that is somewhat critical or disagreeable, and then everyone quickly generates a morass of FUD and reasons why, yes, they support people taking action in principle, it's just that this particular action is a terrible idea that will lead to so much backlash compared with all the other possible actions.... (read more)

6Tapatakt22h

Isn't refusing to work more... conflict-y then just leaving?

4Richard_Ngo22h

Conflict-aversion doesn't work by minimizing total conflict, it instead works by locally moving away from current conflict even when that might increase long-term conflict. Think about e.g. someone not telling their partner that they forgot to do something they promised to do, because it feels aversive (even though not telling them will definitely lead to a bigger problem later down the line). This leads me to predict that if someone actually did the "refusing to work" thing in any loud or disruptive way, AI safety people would also complain about that. Separately, I think refusing to work is more conflict-y than just quitting, but less conflict-y than quitting with a strong public statement. It also provides many more opportunities for the conflict to just fade into the background (e.g. maybe someone decides not to work, the company doesn't fire them, and then things carry on as usual). There's a whole meme about how Googlers for example can just do a few hours of work a week and it's fine.

2Tapatakt22h

I probably agree with "less conflict-y than quitting with a strong public statement". But "strong public statement" is a separate factor. Is "refusing to work with a strong public statement" usually not an option?

3Kabir Kumar22h

I do think I wrote this in maybe the worst way I could have written it and was also surprised at the reception - though, I do think the ideas themselves are good, I haven't given a lot of the reasoning and evidence that has led me to them. And a lot of them, such as the reasons why for outside perception, striking is a clearer signal than resigning, I haven't said at all. And the counters to some of the obvious counterarguments such as "look how much attention people get to AI risk when they resign". My guess is it was a catchy/emotive title expressing a clear frustration with the selection effects that happen from all the people who object strongly enough to do something about it, leaving a company that's very powerful and influential, leaving behind people who lack that trait, combined with an unvoiced frustration of what many have likely felt is the overly aggrandizing reception towards people who finally make a decision to leave a company that's doing bad things. And the first sentence not being repulsive or obviously wrong, combined with the upvote button being in the top right of the post, meaning that it can get upvotes relatively quickly, before people have read the whole thing. I predict, e.g. if the post voting buttons were only on the bottom of the post (which I think would be better voting design for LessWrong, as people could only vote on posts after getting to the bottom of it in some way, being somewhat more likely to catch another part of it that might change their mind on the way), my post would have a lot less upvotes.

2Richard_Ngo22h

Just one quick note (might respond to the rest later): re "striking", the crucial difference here is that unlike strikers, people who declare that they won't work will continue (by default) to be paid a massive salary. That undermines a lot of their credibility.

2Kabir Kumar21h

Interested in your takes on the other ideas when you get the time - also, no worries at all if the responses aren't in the absolute best form, I also have confusions I'm interested in clarifying on this.

2Kabir Kumar21h

Yes, that's a good point. Perhaps saying they'll be refusing or donating all of the salary that they continue to receive to either protestors, people suing the company (e.g. families whose children died due to gpt 4o) or others?

[-]Richard_Ngo21h1011

The problem here is that creating common knowledge that people are following a given set of norms (and therefore should be treated as coalition members in good standing) becomes far more complicated the more complicated the strategy is.

Leave the company: very simple, easily verifiable, everyone knows (that everyone knows) what happened.

Staying but not working, and doing internal agitation, and donating one's salary: complicated plan, many parts are hard to externally verify, easy to rationalize.

In particular, I claim that most of the people working on "alignment" at Anthropic and OpenAI are significantly deceiving themselves about the impact of their work. Your plan has no safeguard against people doing that. We could try to build stronger norms of what counts as "real alignment work", but nobody inside the labs should be trusted to do that, because that's how we lost the concept of real alignment work in the first place.

4Kabir Kumar21h

Yes, I broadly agree. I think essentially anyone at Anthropic/OpenAI right now should refuse to work until training runs stop and there is a treaty agreed upon and enforced, to stop training runs. Probably this proxy will have problems as well, but it's less bad than the other ones I know of atm.

[-]jacquesthibs2d*3415

I don't find this convincing.

Tons of people who left AI labs have left our world better off because of it (you can disagree on some, but the overall picture is there). Ex-lab employees have an unfair advantage in founding new organizations (research non-profits) because they have the credibility and status to secure funding. Many high-profile AI safety non-profits were founded by ex-lab employees!

Examples:

Miles Brundage (AVERI)
Daniel Kokotaljo (AI Futures Project)
Alex Turner (his work will surely be more impactful on the outside, likely already has been)
Steven Adler, Page Hedley (Guidelight)
Jeffrey Ladish (Palisade Research)
Geoffrey Irving (Resolution, UK AISI)
Paul Christiano, Jacob Hilton (ARC)
Jade Leung (UK AISI)
Geoffrey Hinton (!)
Gretchen Krueger (Evitable)
Beth Barnes (METR)
Many more...

If it's so costly for labs to fire employees for not doing x work, then they'll likely just not do it and, as Habryka said, wait until a firing looks bad on the employee, not on them.

In addition, their outside takes can be treated as more trustworthy (in general) and generate more momentum to pause.

Lastly, their inside knowledge of how frontier labs work can be valuable at many external organizati... (read more)

4jacquesthibs1d

I would appreciate comments or emojis explaining why this got disagree votes and negative karma (edit: it was at -2 karma / -7 agreement when I posted this comment, 12 hours after posting) despite imo effectively making similar points to Neel and Habryka.

2MichaelDickens12h

I've noticed a similar thing happen on a few of my recent comments: they got early downvotes and disagree-votes, but then ended up significantly positive a few hours later. I wonder if there's some systematic reason for that, or just a coincidence.

1Caelum Forder1d

And how many have gone on to try and start new organizations and failed? there's a pretty big sampling bias involved here. They'll be 'stealth' on linkedin until it works out or they join somewhere else. What do you think the ratio would be for people who worked at the labs in any capacity? I'm not confident to say, but I'm feeling like 1 in 30 will have made a sustainable organization. Probably important to identify what counts as "the labs" vs the much broader number of positions where you could be tasked with something harmful. When you leave to become a founder, you're also making the capital system more directly your boss, you have more freedom to search over a larger space, but depending on who your connections are and who you're involved with, you could be in pretty similar situations and easily end up coping about how your approach is really net positive (Anthropic, METR (Come on it is obvious that making a benchmark on harmful goodness would just promote harmful goodness! These people are so smart, cope is so powerful)) I'm actually not convinced either, though I am intrigued and not not convinced. Maybe this actually gives the people above you in the organization more agency to not be enslaved by technocapital, if they are in a "yeah but it is what it is" stance about the matter you're leaving over, imagine how different the scenarios are with 3/20 reports leavers vs soft strikers. This is also has an interesting effect on allowing for a mass of people to build up. If you leave, or make an ultimatum, it could be a case that your line was crossed, and another person's line will be crossed in a few weeks, and so on, but if you each of them hang around, the incentives to not do harmful things pile up

[-]Eli Tyre2d324

I upvoted this, mainly on the strength of the suggestion of the first paragraph. That's maybe a better strategy, and I want to promote it to attention.

I don't endorse it as a recommendation, because I just don't know, man.

I think that in the typical case working for an AGI company is probably evil (though it's complicated and so I might just turn out to be wrong about that, given the hindsight of the future).

It seems pretty surprising if people broadly shouldn't go to work at AGI companies in the first place, but that if such people happened to have already done that, and suddenly conclude that what the company is doing is bad, that they should then do something other than leave?

Or are they now, having already worked there for some years, in a different situation because they have credibility within the company?

Does that imply that people should (if they have the psychological resilience to actually follow through, which ANACT approximately no one does), they should start working at a company, do what they're told for n months to build credibility , and then when their n-month timer rings, switch to refusing to do work that they think is harmful?

Or is the implication that someon... (read more)

[-]leogao2d270

when i first joined openai, on day one i was already committed to not working on anything harmful (including capabilities). for various reasons, i think i had an unusual experience (openai culture was different back then, my first manager was extremely chill, i already had a reputation in ML, etc). but it's a useful data point.

7Yair Halberstadt2d

I think in terms of preventing x risk, it's clearly a better strategy than quitting. However joining a company with intention to do this is clearly dishonest, and when in doubt, I think it's best to take the Kantian view on dishonesty - second order impacts of normalising such behaviour usually outweighs first order benefits.

3Eli Tyre2d

Agreed. And I think it's at least sus to endorse a set of actions, on the condition that that person's intentions sincerely change part way through, if, had they taken the literal same actions as part of a coherent plan, we would think they're doing something deontology-violating. That creates an incentive to self-deceive about about your intentions, and onlookers should promote the hypothesis that you are self-deceiving in this way.

2abstractapplic2h

Modulo the other premises, this seems obviously true? The Achilles Heel of unethical orgs is their trouble recruiting and retaining workers in general and white-collar talent in particular. I'm constantly surprised by how e.g. people who hate the Troubled Teen industry don't gum up the recruitment pipeline by getting jobs in it and then immediately quitting (except very occasionally as a means to doing investigative journalism). Like, to be clear, this seems like such an overdeterminedly good and asymmetric strategy that I take the fact I've never heard of anyone doing it as strong evidence there's something I'm not seeing. But I'd sure like to know what that something is!

[-]MichaelDickens3d1911

Saw the title and was about to disagree but

Just refuse to work on bad things and see if they fire you.

Yeah this is an underrated strategy. Refusing to work on bad things likely has an outsized effect on internal company culture.

[-]Linch3d103

My guess is that it would not be obvious for someone within the system which work tasks are "bad things." It's not obvious from the outside and my guess is that it'd be unobvious from the inside either.

5Kabir Kumar2d

If not obvious but the company is obviously doing broadly bad things, consistently, just refuse to work at all until those change. E.g. if at Anthropic or OpenAI, refuse to work until training runs stop

3Leksu2d

I think something like this ~fixes the ambiguity and corporate sidelining issues people are commenting about. I also expect it's the kind of thing you had in mind when writing: perhaps worth adding a note at the beginning and/or end of the post about how one might protest from within while being legible, and possibly while being as public[1] as someone who quits in protest? 1. ^ As a sidenote I'd want to know the extent to which an employee vs an ex-employee can be held legally liable for their protest-y actions and words

7MichaelDickens12h

Changed my mind after reading this post, but now 2 days later I am forced to update again— Jacob Coxon's resignation got way more publicity than I would've predicted. (Staying at AI companies may still be the right move in many cases, but my model of the tradeoffs has been updated.)

2Kabir Kumar10m

I think generally, the best action would be to strike and join in protesting the company - potentially also whistleblowing, if one has information that could help with a charge against the company

[-]cousin_it3d1615

Yeah. I think this is good advice (though anyone following it should prepare themselves for a few stressful months: being pressured by management, becoming a rumor target, gaslit, accomplishments minimized etc). And your algorithmic liability plans are also really good. One of the few "rays of light" lately.

[-]Vaniver2d1213

For years I've thought people should consider the strategy of joining labs to only work on things-good-for-the-world, and people at labs staying to work on those things also seems promising. But I think I mostly don't buy this at present margins. Sodom and Gomorrah aren't destroyed until Lot leaves, and every respectable person who sticks around not committing any crimes themselves is acting as cover for the organization that is happily committing crimes. Resign today.

[-]Thane Ruthenis2d123

Probably-unhelpful side-comment:

Going off the title, I expected that this post was going to be about imploring God not to abandon this universe despite what people are doing in it.

[-]Kabir Kumar3d120

Shout out to @leogao

2Kabir Kumar3d

also, thanks to @Mateusz Bagiński, whose comment inspired me to finally write down most of these words

[-]RHollerith2d*92

This post offers only a handful of vague category labels — "bad things," "bad policies," "AI capabilities," "morally wrong" — but no definition or operationalization of any of those terms and no example of a task that straddles the border between "morally acceptable" and "morally wrong".

The considerations in this post are unimportant IMHO compared to the important task of choosing (as a community) and then promoting / advertising a standard of conduct, then discussing tactics and strategies for pressuring researchers, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, e... (read more)

[-]Mikhail Samin1d80

I think this is falsified by https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843?s=20.

-16Kabir Kumar1d

[-]WillPetillo2d77

Another alternative strategy to just quitting: become the point-person for organizing a union. Employees won't necessarily care about safety, but having another locus of power in the company besides just shareholders could substantially increase leverage along values other than short-term profit maximizing. And if you get fired for organizing, that seems like it would net extra martyr points.

[-]Leksu2d67

People have different expectations on how this'd go → perhaps some people who'd otherwise quit should try variations of protesting without quitting so that we can be more informed

[-]Eli Tyre2d54

Imagine for a second that one of the people on your team said "Mateusz, everyone else on the team, I'm not going to work on this because I think it's morally wrong".

Isn't it kind of important for the impact of this statement that the "on this" is also bolded?

If you say "I'm not going to work", you're in fact being very annoying, and not doing your job, and I sympathize with your boss for firing you for not doing your job.

If you say "I'm not going to work on this", then you are correspondingly more reasonable?

[-]Tyler Henderson2d*42

I don't think this works so cleanly for most safety positions? Usually what you are being asked to do (for the pay you are presumably accepting if you haven't quit) is not something obviously evil that will make a clean headline, or something the company will conveniently announce to the media.

If you work for OpenAI, in an AI safety position, you are probably being tasked to do "safety work" even if it is only prosaic safety work. If you refuse to work on the general principals of how the company is working, they probably wait until a convenient quarter, and fire you for refusing to work, and even if you tell people it was because of the general direction of the company, they can justifiably say you were simply refusing to work on anything and I don't think you will have as much impact as quitting at an opportune moment that actually signals that it was specific choices or outcomes that triggered your quitting.

[-]RedMan2d40

The experience of covid vaccine refusers was that forcing their employer to fire them or their apartment to evict them was a much more effective form of resistance than quitting or moving on their own.

Also, if you're an expert and you're in a job with a lot of discretion, when tasked to work on something you disagree with, just nod your head and go back to doing what you want to do.

[-]Nathan Young14h33

This quitting was one of the probably 1000 largest tweets of all time with huge cut through. Seems like you are wrong.

2Kabir Kumar8m

I do not think this is a representative case (not everyone's quitting happens around the same time as a Millennium Problem being solved) and we do not know if it wouldn't have been larger if he'd said he's going to go on strike against Anthropic. That reasoning feels like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/arwATwCTscahYwTzD/the-most-common-bad-argument-in-these-parts#comments to me

[-]Mateusz Bagiński1d20

I am now less certain about my comment that sparked this post (especially about the "fire you after 1 or 2 months" part), but I remain rather unconvinced about the cluster of strategies you're suggesting here.

I would update more strongly if I saw side-by-side-ish examples of something like what you're proposing vs quitting loudly from harmful industries (tobacco? lead gasoline? social media clusterfuckery?). Admittedly, they might be difficult to find.

I think the best reasons to stay are (1) you can do good/beneficial work on the inside; and (2) you can try to influence the culture from the inside. (1) can work for some people, but it seems to me like they are — god bless them — an anomaly. I don't expect (2) to reliably have a strong enough effect.

There's also the issue of working in this sort of environment warping your epistemics a lot, for a combination of reasons, which gives you an additional reason to quit in order to reason more clearly about what would be good for you to do. Again, some people are fairly immune to this, but, again, I expect them to be an anomaly, and most people underestimate the extent to which social reality warps their cognition. @Richard_Ngo had a twee... (read more)

2Kabir Kumar22h

I think I should have clarified that I meant for people to openly and loudly say they're not going to do work for the company anymore, until they change X, not just stay at the company

[-]MellowIrony1d10

Perhaps even more impactful (but much riskier!) than loudly refusing to work: quietly undermining the bad work.

If you are trusted with important projects that you disagree strongly with, that seems like a unique opportunity to gum up the works à la Simple Sabotage Field Manual: slow-walk progress while getting people to believe a breakthrough is just around the corner, pick less competent team members for the more difficult parts of the project, add highly burdensome bureaucracy in response to minor mishaps...

Full disclosure, I don't think I would have the chutzpah to attempt this. You'd need to make sure none of your acts of resistance is flashy enough to get headlines or get you sued if found out. And even so, it could require taking your motivations to the grave lest you tarnish the cause. But (alongside WillPetillo's fascinating suggestion to try to organize a union) it's another option on the table.

[-]Canaletto2d10

I actually read the title of this post as directed to The God and urging it to not resign, as a maybe philosophical position that existence of everything that currenly exists is better than non existence, or maybe some incremental improvements are better or something.

[-]Connor Williams2d*0-1

My strong sense is that almost all tasks at OAI/Anthropic are bad to work on.

That would mean essentially getting fired for refusing to do work at a company that is paying you comical amounts of money. Will this in fact have more leverage/cachet/newsworthiness than someone like Kokotajlo or Ngo if/when it comes out that you were basically sandbagging?

[Edit: I guess I was thinking more about people newly joining OAI/Anthropic intending to "do good" there. I've realized my analysis doesn't account for people who are already there, especially those with long tenures.]

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