Instead of creating new ingroups and outgroups and tribal signifiers for enforcing such, we should focus on careful truth-seeking. Some mythologies and terms that engage our more primal instincts can be useful, like when Scott introduced “Moloch”, but others are much more likely harmful. “Orthodox vs Reform” seems like a purely harmful one, that is only useful for enforcing further division and tribal warfare.
To summarize, in this post Aaronson,
Enforces the idea that AI safety is religion.
Creates new terminology to try and split the field into two ideological groups.
Chooses terminology that paints the other one as “old, conforming, traditional” and the other as, to quote wiktionary, “the change of something that is defective, broken, inefficient or otherwise negative”.
Immediately adopts the tribal framing he has created, and already identifies as “We Reform AI-riskers”, to quote him directly.
This seems like a powerful approach for waging ideological warfare. It is not constructive for truth-seeking.
You are not directly vouching for anyone here, but as a general point I’d like to argue that friendship is a poor predictor of ethical behavior.
It may be tempting to consider positive social experiences and friendship as evidence that someone behaves generally ethically and with high standards, but when dealing with more capable people, it’s not. Maintaining ethical behavior and building trust in low-stakes settings like friendship with few temptations to try and exploit for profit is trivially easy. Especially if you are socially skilled and capable of higher level power games and manipulation. The cutthroat moves are saved exclusively for situations where the profits are large enough.
(And a skilled manipulator will rarely engage in obviously cutthroat moves anyways, because the cost of being outed as an unethical cutthroat is high enough to outweight the potential profit of most situations..)
Because you’re someone with influence in the community, anyone with a manipulative bent and any smarts will absolutely give you their best impression. You have more value as an ally, and probably provide few opportunities for direct profit otherwise.