As someone who’s more sympathetic to left-wing ideas than perhaps 80-90%+ of the rationalist community, a lot of the reason for avoiding allying with the left is it makes AI safety a partisan cause, and this would really, really nuke their chances of safety policy getting passed, because left-wingers would ask them to take politically controversial stances on a whole host of topics mostly unrelated to AI safety that is actually relevant.
Way too many well-meaning people would ask AI safety people to make something like an omni-cause movement, which has been arguably one of the biggest reasons why a lot of movements in the 2010s failed to achieve their goals.
As someone who’s more sympathetic to left-wing ideas than perhaps 80-90%+ of the rationalist community, a lot of the reason for avoiding allying with the left is it makes AI safety a partisan cause, and this would really, really nuke their chances of safety policy getting passed, because left-wingers would ask them to take politically controversial stances on a whole host of topics mostly unrelated to AI safety that is actually relevant.
Way too many well-meaning people would ask AI safety people to make something like an omni-cause movement, which has been arguably one of the biggest reasons why a lot of movements in the 2010s failed to achieve their goals.