Uhm yeah valid I guess the issue was illusion of transparency: I mostly copied the original post from my tweet, which was quote-tweeting the announcement, and I didn’t particularly think about adding more context because had it cached that the tweet is fine (I checked with people closely familiar with RQB before tweeting, and it did include all of the context by virtue of quote-tweeting the original announceemnt) and when posting to lw did not realize i’m not directly adding all of the context that was included in the tweet if people don’t click on the link.
Added the context to the original post.
Separately, I think an issue is that they’re incredibly non-transparent about what they’re doing and have been somewhat misleading in their responses to my tweets and not answering any of the questions.
Like, I can see a case for doing gain-of-function research responsibly to develop protection against threats (vaccines, proteins that would bind for viruses, etc.), but this should include incredible transparency, strong security (BSL & computer security & strong guardrails around what exactly AI models have automated access to), etc.
Separately, I think an issue is that they’re incredibly non-transparent about what they’re doing and have been somewhat misleading in their responses to my tweets and not answering any of the questions.
I can’t really fault them for not answering or being fully honest, from their perspective you’re a random dude who’s attacking them publicly and trying to get them lots of bad PR. I think it’s often very reasonable to just not engage in situations like that. Though I would judge them for outright lying
That’s somewhat reasonable. (They did engage though: made a number of comments and quote-tweeted my tweet, without addressing at all the main questions.)
Sure, but there’s a big difference between engaging in PR damage control mode and actually seriously engaging. I don’t take them choosing to be in the former as significant evidence of wrong doing
Uhm yeah valid I guess the issue was illusion of transparency: I mostly copied the original post from my tweet, which was quote-tweeting the announcement, and I didn’t particularly think about adding more context because had it cached that the tweet is fine (I checked with people closely familiar with RQB before tweeting, and it did include all of the context by virtue of quote-tweeting the original announceemnt) and when posting to lw did not realize i’m not directly adding all of the context that was included in the tweet if people don’t click on the link.
Added the context to the original post.
Separately, I think an issue is that they’re incredibly non-transparent about what they’re doing and have been somewhat misleading in their responses to my tweets and not answering any of the questions.
Like, I can see a case for doing gain-of-function research responsibly to develop protection against threats (vaccines, proteins that would bind for viruses, etc.), but this should include incredible transparency, strong security (BSL & computer security & strong guardrails around what exactly AI models have automated access to), etc.
Thanks for adding the context!
I can’t really fault them for not answering or being fully honest, from their perspective you’re a random dude who’s attacking them publicly and trying to get them lots of bad PR. I think it’s often very reasonable to just not engage in situations like that. Though I would judge them for outright lying
That’s somewhat reasonable. (They did engage though: made a number of comments and quote-tweeted my tweet, without addressing at all the main questions.)
Sure, but there’s a big difference between engaging in PR damage control mode and actually seriously engaging. I don’t take them choosing to be in the former as significant evidence of wrong doing