If your theory of change is convincing Anthropic employees or prospective Anthropic employees they should do something else, I think your current approach isn’t going to work. I think you’d probably need to much more seriously engage with people who think that Anthropic is net-positive and argue against their perspective.
Possibly, you should just try to have less of a thesis and just document bad things you think Anthropic has done and ways that Anthropic/Anthropic leadership has misled employees (to appease them). This might make your output more useful in practice.
I think it’s relatively common for people I encounter to think both:
Anthropic leadership is engaged in somewhat scumy appeasment of safety motivated employees in ways that are misleading or based on kinda obviously motivated reasoning. (Which results in safety motivated employees having a misleading picture of what the organization is doing and why and what people expect to happen.)
Anthropic is strongly net positive despite this and working on capabilities there is among the best things you can do.
An underlying part of this view is typically that moderate improvements in effort spent on prosaic safety measures substantially reduces risk. I think you probably strongly disagree with this and this might be a major crux.
Personally, I agreee with what Zach said. I think working on capabilities[1] at Anthropic is probably somewhat net positive but would only be the best thing to work on if you had very strong comparative advantage relative to all the other useful stuff (e.g. safety research). So probably most altruistic people with views similar to mine should do something else. I currently don’t feel very confident that capabilities at Anthropic is net positive and could imagine swinging towards thinking it is net negative based on additional evidence
If your theory of change is convincing Anthropic employees or prospective Anthropic employees they should do something else, I think your current approach isn’t going to work. I think you’d probably need to much more seriously engage with people who think that Anthropic is net-positive and argue against their perspective.
Possibly, you should just try to have less of a thesis and just document bad things you think Anthropic has done and ways that Anthropic/Anthropic leadership has misled employees (to appease them). This might make your output more useful in practice.
I think it’s relatively common for people I encounter to think both:
Anthropic leadership is engaged in somewhat scumy appeasment of safety motivated employees in ways that are misleading or based on kinda obviously motivated reasoning. (Which results in safety motivated employees having a misleading picture of what the organization is doing and why and what people expect to happen.)
Anthropic is strongly net positive despite this and working on capabilities there is among the best things you can do.
An underlying part of this view is typically that moderate improvements in effort spent on prosaic safety measures substantially reduces risk. I think you probably strongly disagree with this and this might be a major crux.
Personally, I agreee with what Zach said. I think working on capabilities[1] at Anthropic is probably somewhat net positive but would only be the best thing to work on if you had very strong comparative advantage relative to all the other useful stuff (e.g. safety research). So probably most altruistic people with views similar to mine should do something else. I currently don’t feel very confident that capabilities at Anthropic is net positive and could imagine swinging towards thinking it is net negative based on additional evidence
Putting aside strongly differential specific capabilities work.