A good summary, but it's worth noting that while the death penalty for failing to fight was on the books, Byng's execution was the only time it was ever actually carried out. It's a bit similar to how the US military legally has the authority to execute deserters, but in the past century has only ever exercised this once out of tens of thousand of sentences (Eddie Slovak during WWII).

From reading the autobiography of Lord Cochrane, an insanely aggressive and insanely successful captain during the Napoleonic Wars, my impression is that the Royal Navy was very concerned with the allocation of credit, glory, and prestige, as well as money prizes. He describes a system where officers are writing to the Admiralty headquarters to describe the meritorious or shameful actions of their peers and subordinates after every major action, and sometimes convoked courts martial to resolve disputes, as in the case of Lord Cochrane's rival Lord Gambier. Lord Cochrane also argues that the prize system is critical to maintaining the Royal Navy's morale and effectiveness.

Overtly, OP is trying to shun Cremieux for failing to meet an assumed-widely-agreed "standard of care and compassion". This is obviously based on OP's belief that Cremieux's conduct is unacceptably outside the Overton window, even if they used the word "standard" instead of the word "Overton window". The only point of deploying phrases like "Hoo boy" and "do better" is to appeal to a social consensus. OP isn't being sneaky here or anything, you're just misinterpreting their dialect.

Selection bias isn't the whole story. The median paper in almost every field is notably worse than it was in, say, 1985. Academia is less selective than it used to be—in the U.S., there are more PhDs per capita, and the average IQ/test scores/whatever metric has dropped for every level of educational attainment.

Grab a journal that's been around for a long time, read a few old papers and a few new papers at random, and you'll notice the difference.

OKcupid is certainly a better product for hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of unusually literate people, including ~all potential developers and most people in their social circles. It's not a small niche.

Hm, this timing suggests the change could be a consequence of Karnofsky stepping away from the organization.

Which makes sense, now that I think about it. He's by far the most politically strategic leader Open Philanthropy has had, so with him gone, it's not shocking they might revert towards standard risk-averse optionality-maxxing foundation behavior.

"Open Phil higher-ups being friends with Anthropic higher-ups" is an understatement. An Open Philanthropy cofounder (Holden Karnofsky) is married to an Anthropic cofounder (Daniela Amodei). It's a big deal!

>Are the near-term prospects of AGI making long-term prospects like suspension less attractive?

No. Everyone I know who was signed up for cryonics in 2014 is still signed up now. You're hearing about it less because Yudkowsky is now doing other things with his time instead of promoting cryonics, and those discussions around here were a direct result of his efforts to constantly explain and remind people.

I agree with your argument here, especially your penultimate paragraph, but I'll nitpick that framing your disagreements with Groves as him being "less of a value add" seems wrong. The value that Groves added was building the bomb, not setting diplomatic policy.