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I note, because I think that even now it still matters: On my history, EAs generally and Amodei specifically, indulged in politically polarizing "AI safety" in a leftist direction, because that got them short-term power; stymieing others' attempts to stay right-left neutral. ... Now that the cost TO YOU of what got THEM some short-term goodies has become apparent... well, it's frankly too late to take away what Amodei gained by fucking you over...
He adopts an extremely uncharitable frame, both for their motivations and outcomes. When EAs gain influence, this is evil and selfish; when EAs lose influence, this is also evil and selfish. Somehow they perfectly socialize the losses and privatize the gains; EAs gaining influence is for their benefit, EAs losing influence hurts all of us.
In reality, I don't think EAs or Anthropic ever went particularly hard on leftism; I don't think they gained that much from being vaguely left wing; and I would guess Anthropic has bore a fair bit of the brunt of the administration polarizing against it.
You don't have to be left wing to find the neoreactionaries annoying.
They bring a few interesting ideas, but after a while you have already heard them all, and then it's just endless obscurantist writing. They are good at criticizing status quo, but unable to respond to criticism of their own ideas (such as "have you guys noticed that North Korea is actually not a paradise?"). I would delete them from my Facebook wall too, if they bothered to go there, because all they can do is repeat their slogans.
Not true, I was the grantmaker for Resolution and I was very happy that they hired the Agent Foundations team, as were my colleagues on CG’s Technical AI Safety team.
We’ve also made a few other agent foundations-y grants this year and would be excited to make more.