A few weeks ago, I was offered a role as a Staff Research Scientist at Resolution (formerly Sequent) to do agent foundations research. However, they later rescinded the offer due to concerns that having someone with my (publicly expressed) political opinions as an early hire might make it harder for them to hire other researchers. I want to give some brief thoughts on this, starting with the concrete details of what happened.

I talked to Jesse Hoogland, Dan Murfet, and Geoffrey Irving before they gave me the offer. These were fairly informal chats, since they all already knew me. I signed the offer a few days later, then soon afterwards I messaged Jesse about my politics curriculum.^[1] Specifically, I suggested that I should run the next iteration of the curriculum before joining Resolution, so that people wouldn't interpret it as work that I was doing at Resolution.

Jesse noted some controversial aspects of the curriculum,^[2] then set up a meeting with me, him, and Dan. I was expecting them to express some concerns, such as asking me not to run it (though I did indirectly mention the possibility that this might put them off from hiring me).^[3] Instead, they directly told me that they'd like to rescind the offer.

I had a long conversation with Jesse and Dan, and later a long conversation with Geoffrey. In the latter I learned that, although the decision was prompted by me sending them my curriculum, Geoffrey in particular was more concerned about my tweets. I've tweeted some fairly controversial things over the last few years, though the only specific thread Geoffrey cited was this one (which led to this exchange with Kelsey Piper). It seems like he's excited about hiring academics who are new to alignment, and worried that those people might not join if they hear about such tweets (though I didn't get the sense that any specific people had given him such indications). Geoffrey claimed that he would have made the same decision if I'd posted equivalent left-wing takes.

Some high-level thoughts:

1. It is to Resolution's credit that they gave me the offer originally despite already having some sense that I was controversial. There are many other organizations that would have ghosted me or rejected me at an earlier stage in the process because of that, and I don't consider rescinding the offer for political reasons to be significantly worse than not having given it in the first place for political reasons.
   1. I also respect them for taking seriously the idea that there are deep, principled theories of intelligence out there waiting to be discovered—this is a major reason why I wanted to join them in the first place.
2. I think that Resolution is doing the wrong thing here both in ethical terms, and also in terms of pursuing their proximate goals.
   1. In terms of ethics, I think that commitment to free and open inquiry is an extremely important ethical principle, especially for leaders of research organizations. Decades of erosion of academic freedoms have made it clear how important taking a strong stance on this is. I'm not going to be any less vocal as a result of this, but it's the kind of thing that makes it fraught for younger (and less independently wealthy) researchers to pursue the truth wherever it leads them.
   2. In terms of their goal of solving alignment: I take these events as a significant update downwards on how good Resolution will be as a place to do open-ended thinking about alignment. My inside view is that the principles of agency are scale-free, so evidence from economics, sociology and politics can significantly improve our work on technical alignment (and vice versa). More generally, the most productive intellectual environments are ones which (like early LessWrong or FHI) are very encouraging of unusual and out-of-the-box thinking. I've updated that Resolution cares about this less than I had hoped.
   3. If Resolution mainly wants to hire people to work on already-scoped-out research directions, rather than going for the kind of broader research environment I describe above, that doesn't seem like a totally unreasonable choice (e.g. ARC seems to be doing this). However, given the amount of money they have and the breadth of hiring they're attempting, there's a plausible world where they become the "rallying point" for principled alignment research, while retaining a more restrictive intellectual environment. That seems like a bad outcome.
3. On a different note, I've become increasingly worried that Resolution's plan to automate alignment research will lead them to produce a lot of capabilities progress (since "automated alignment researcher" and "automated capabilities researcher" are such similar things to aim for). I'd actually written up a doc expressing concern about trying to automate alignment research, and shared it with them during the interview process; however, I didn't press them on how they planned to avoid this issue.
   1. The kinds of virtue that would make me comfortable with an organization doing a bunch of dual-use research seem pretty strongly anticorrelated with decisions like rescinding my offer. AI alignment will only become more central to the coming power struggles over AI, and being willing to give in to vague concerns about potential hires doesn't bode well for Resolution's ability to navigate those struggles in high-integrity ways. (I think Geoffrey would characterize this not as "giving in" but rather as "trying to create a comfortable work environment" or similar. However, the two feel closely related to me. I do view Geoffrey as able to stand up to pressure/local incentives when he decides to, so this is mainly a concern about when and how he'll decide to.)
4. In hindsight, given the poor track record of large alignment-branded research organizations, it was a significant mistake for me to accept Resolution's offer without having thought much more carefully about ways that joining might be bad (such as the points above). There's a common failure mode whereby rationalists and EAs are averse to thinking about how their cognition is skewed by incentives and power dynamics (especially relative to how clearly these groups think about other things); though I often talk about this issue abstractly, I still failed to account for it in this case.

Given the points above, I can't in good conscience recommend that people work at Resolution. It's also worth noting that the weight I place on these points is strongly influenced by my background views on how the alignment community keeps failing to achieve its goals (and often adopts strategies that actively backfire). I'm writing up a much longer and more detailed post on these background views, and intend to post a public version sometime next week.

[Edit: this post originally said "fairly senior role" rather than "Staff Research Scientist". I changed it because the former might have implied that I would be leading a team or managing people, whereas in fact the role was to be an independent contributor.]

1. ^{^}

   In hindsight I should have talked to them about the curriculum before accepting the offer. My reasoning at the time was that accepting the offer first would send a signal that running the curriculum wasn't a hard requirement for me. However, I don't think that message got through.

2. ^{^}

   For context, some of the topics that are covered in the curriculum include the feminization of academia, racial IQ differences, and anti-white racism. Though note that it's a weird curriculum in a few different directions, rather than being uniformly right-wing—e.g. it has some Lacan-inspired stuff, some hippie-inspired stuff on beliefs as emotional strategies, a bunch of rationalist writing, etc.

3. ^{^}

   The specific message I sent them after learning that were concerned about risks from hiring me:
   
   FWIW I’m pretty familiar with feeling a sense of liability related to what allies or affiliates might say, it was a recurring theme at OpenAI. So I expect I have a reasonable sense of where you're coming from, and I'm happy to brainstorm ways to mitigate that sense of liability (e.g. not putting Resolution in my twitter bio). More generally, I want to be collaborative on this topic, and won't hold you to any commitments you guys have made if you want to re-evalaute them now.
   
   I don't know exactly what risks you're most concerned about, but it might be useful for me to explain why I personally don't feel like I'm making a costly tradeoff against making AGI go well by opining on controversial topics online (and in fact believe that it's meaningfully helpful). I'll talk about my inside view and an outside view. Also happy to discuss any qualms you might have on a personal level/re office culture tomorrow.
   
   Inside view: for better or worse, a lot of the strategic considerations around the future of AI are actually deeply entangled with the dysfunctions of the wider modern world. For example, academia's inability to grapple with either AGI or AGI risk seems like a very important dynamic to understand, and that seems quite related to how academia has changed over the last century. As another example, if we want to reason about how more capable entities might dimore sempower less capable ones, probably the best example we have is colonialism—and I think discussions of AI risk would be significantly less vague and abstract if people were less scared of honestly analyzing historical power struggles. (Daniel Kokotajlo's writings on the conquistadors as precedents for takeover are one big exception, but still miss a lot of the potential insights.)
   
   Outside view: one of the biggest lessons of the last few decades politically, I think, has been that the costs of intellectual taboos are much larger than most people expected—e.g. they meant that the massive populist upheavals of the last decade took almost all intellectuals by surprise. I also think that AI safety is in a much worse position today than it would have been if it'd taken a more principled truth-seeking stance a decade ago (for example, AI governance would have been less likely to throw in with the Democrats in a way that alienated MAGA). Indeed, with respect to engaging with the current administration, it seems like standard EA views are more of a liability than any of the things you mentioned by a significant margin, and I expect that having a right-winger at Resolution would be a net gain in political capital. (To be clear, I don't think that this should be a significant consideration for you, I mention it mainly to highlight that the risks are actually more symmetric than they might seem.)
   
   In general, though, I wouldn't want to join Resolution if I planned to spend a significant proportion of my time thinking about this stuff. Indeed, a key reason I'm excited about Resolution is because my research has lately been steering towards much more foundational-level questions that I previously expected, and so I intend to be pretty focused on pinning those down.