You can pursue both goals, but you have chosen not to, and I find that alarming.
There are many, many concrete accusations in this post. It doesn't particularly matter whether there is a "main" one. Vassar is a serial psychological and sexual abuser, and has caused multiple deaths. That is bad.
Plex opening up about his experiences with this abuser was a terrifying thing to do. The appropriate response in this circumstance is to respond with empathy. If you aren't going to do that, it is better not to say anything at all. I understand that we are on LessWron...
The rationalist community makes itself vulnerable to bad actors when it lacks the ability to just "be normal about things" and strongly reject bad behavior.
It's great to ask clarifying questions and weigh evidence appropriately. But the central premise here isn't in doubt. If survivors speak out and the go-to response is to nitpick the way in which they communicated about the harm, that just tells me you aren't safe people.
It sounds like he doesn't have any interest in saving the world at all. He is playing a completely different game from the people who actually value humans.
Do you think it is more important to dissect the way that people communicate, or to protect vulnerable people from predators?
My takeaway from this post is that an exceptionally evil man has caused significant harm to the rationalist community, leading directly to deaths and damaging the community's ability to do extremely important work. Is that not your primary takeaway?
On tractability:
I am in Washington DC today and will speak with the offices of both of my senators tomorrow, with 3 others also from Arizona, to educate them on the issue and demand that they call for a global agreement to ban the creation of superintelligent AI. 50+ others are doing the same thing for their state on the same day.
My representative Greg Stanton already (quietly for now) supports an ASI ban, primarily due to my personal efforts to educate him on the topic. My state-level representative Stacey Travers introduced an AI safety transparency bill...
If you model fighting with Anthropic as "infighting", we have very different ideas of what people and organizations are acceptable to associate with. Anthropic is doing an extraordinarily evil thing by trying to create a superintelligence. To the degree that there are "sides" anywhere, they are approximately maximally not on my side.
Many thanks for this analogy! I plan to make good use of it in the future.
Good post. "Just stop" has been and continues to be an option, and is most likely our only option. Every answer to the question "How could we just stop?" boils down to "By actually wanting to." Once enough of the right people want to stop, they won't need me around to tell them how to do it. My duty, same as for most of us, is just to get enough of the right people to want to stop.
I have personally made some progress on that front with my own representative, which is more than I expected to be capable of. We should all expect more from ourselves, I think.
1This is huge progress! Congratulations to the whole ControlAI team, as well as to humanity as a whole for starting to put up some fight!
If AI boosts productivity by a large factor in the roles that it can automate within a given sector, that would cause a significant increase in the demand for human labor in the remaining bottlenecks. Total employment in the sector could even increase, right up until AI passes a capability threshold with respect to a given bottleneck and completely wipes out those jobs all at once.
There are also many papers on various parts of governance solutions, such as Building The Pause Button: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20530
I am a superforecaster, and I endorse this message.
(Edit: To clarify, I am not a GJ Superforecaster®, just a professional forecaster with a comparable track record.)
1Probably '41haiku' for me.
I am confused about how what you said is related to what you quoted. I don't take any of this to be speaking to employees of the AGI companies, since none of them have any agency with respect to making AI go well.
AGI companies exist to create AGI, and their structures don't allow for voluntary courses of action where they intentionally do that more slowly or not at all. Whether they have access to reasonable-sounding justifications for doing so is not a causal factor, and whether individual employees care about making a good human future is not a causal factor in whether that occurs.
For support in self-actualization situations, there is therapy. For support in emergency situations, there is the heavy internal screaming of an even deeper terror than that of public humiliation. (And there is also therapy.)
Most people in the PauseAI movement are not in the LW/rationalist circle. Some joined as rationalists or EAs, especially early on, but today most are normies (or were when they joined, anyway).
I personally found LessWrong and the forecasting community through AI Safety, not the reverse. I now organize for PauseAI Phoenix, a local group of PauseAI US. I have face-to-face conversations on a regular basis with people who believe ASI will be created within 2-20 years unless we prevent that from happening.
My personal experience:
These days, I am anxious when I take action and depressed when I don't. But I'm not anxious about the end of the world anymore, just about, like, talking to people and preparing presentations and stuff. I've done a lot of processing at this point.
That's how it's going, but here's how it started:
Over the course of about a year starting in March 2023, I became increasingly anxious about AI extinction risk. During that time, I donated to AI risk organizations, helped out on AI Safety field-building projects, and became an active digital...
2
The mechanism isn't [public disapproval] -> [AI moratorium]. That sounds hopeless to me, too. What I'm actually relatively optimistic about is [public awareness] -> [educating policymakers] + [signal to policymakers that they are allowed to do something about it] -> [common knowledge of the desire to act] -> [AI moratorium]. This feels very doable to me after getting back from speaking with my congressional offices in DC.
The key here is that most politicians don't want to take these risks either. Really very few people are on board with the who... (read more)