Looking back, my sense remains that we basically succeeded—i.e., that we described the situation about as accurately and neutrally as we could have. If I’m wrong about this… well, all I can say is that it wasn’t for lack of trying.
I think CFAR ultimately succeeded in providing a candid and good faith account of what went wrong, but the time it took to get there (i.e. 6 months between this and the initial update/apology) invites adverse inferences like those in the grandparent.
A lot of the information ultimately disclosed in March would definitely have been known to CFAR in September, such as Brent’s prior involvement as a volunteer/contractor for CFAR, his relationships/friendships with current staff, and the events as ESPR. The initial responses remained coy on these points, and seemed apt to give the misleading impression CFAR’s mistakes were (relatively) much milder than they in fact were. I (among many) contacted CFAR leadership to urge them to provide more candid and complete account when I discovered some of this further information independently.
I also think, similar to how it would be reasonable to doubt ‘utmost corporate candour’ back then given initial partial disclosure, it’s reasonable to doubt CFAR has addressed the shortcomings revealed given the lack of concrete follow-up. I also approached CFAR leadership when CFAR’s 2019 Progress Report and Future Plans initially made no mention of what happened with Brent, nor what CFAR intended to improve in response to it. What was added in is not greatly reassuring:
And after spending significant time investigating our mistakes with regard to Brent, we reformed our hiring, admissions and conduct policies, to reduce the likelihood such mistakes reoccur.
A cynic would note this is ‘marking your own homework’, but cynicism is unnecessary to recommend more self-scepticism. I don’t doubt the Brent situation indeed inspired a lot of soul searching and substantial, sincere efforts to improve. What is more doubtful (especially given the rest of the morass of comments) is whether these efforts actually worked. Although there is little prospect of satisfying me, more transparency over what exactly has changed—and perhaps third party oversight and review—may better reassure others.
I can’t help with the object level determination, but I think you may be overrating both the balance and import of the second-order evidence.
As far as I can tell, Yudkowsky is a (?dramatically) pessimistic outlier among the class of “rationalist/rationalist-adjacent” SMEs in AI safety, and probably even more so relative to aggregate opinion without an LW-y filter applied (cf.). My impression of the epistemic track-record is Yudkowsky has a tendency of staking out positions (both within and without AI) with striking levels of confidence but not commensurately-striking levels of accuracy.
In essence, I doubt there’s much epistemic reason to defer to Yudkowsky more (or much more) than folks like Carl Shulman, or Paul Christiano, nor maybe much more than “a random AI alignment researcher” or “a superforecaster making a guess after watching a few Rob Miles videos” (although these have a few implied premises around difficulty curves/ subject matter expertise being relatively uncorrelated to judgemental accuracy).
I suggest ~all reasonable attempts at idealised aggregate wouldn’t take a hand-brake turn to extreme pessimism on finding Yudkowsky is. My impression is the plurality LW view has shifted more from “pretty worried” to “pessimistic” (e.g. p(screwed) > 0.4) rather than agreement with Yudkowsky, but in any case I’d attribute large shifts in this aggregate mostly to Yudkowsky’s cultural influence on the LW-community plus some degree of internet cabin fever (and selection) distorting collective judgement.
None of this is cause for complacency: even if p(screwed) isn’t ~1, > 0.1 (or 0.001) is ample cause for concern, and resolution on values between (say) [0.1 0.9] is informative for many things (like personal career choice). I’m not sure whether you get more yield for marginal effort on object or second-order uncertainty (e.g. my impression is the ‘LW cluster’ trends towards pessimism, so adjudicating whether this cluster should be over/under weighted could be more informative than trying to get up to speed on ELK). I would guess, though, that whatever distils out of LW discourse in 1-2 months will be much more useful than what you’d get right now.