Having worked there and interfaced with the Faculty for 4 years, yes, I would expect garden variety incompetence on Bostrom's part in terms of managing the relationship was a big part; I would predict the single biggest contributer to the eventual outcome.

Strong +1 re: 'hero' work culture. especially for ops staff. This was one of the things that bothered me while there and contributed to my moving on - an (admittedly very nice) attitude of praising (especially admin/management) people who were working stupidly hard/long, rather than actually investing in fixing a clearly dysfunctional situation. And while it might not have been possible to fix later on due to embedded animosity/frustration on both sides => hiring freeze etc, it certainly was early on when I was there.

The admin load issue was not just about the faculty. And the breakdown of relationship with the faculty was really was not one-sided, at least when I was there (and I think I succeeded in semi-rescuing some of the key relationships (oxford martin school, faculty of philosophy) while I was there, at least temporarily).

I can't imagine it helped in winning allies in Oxford, but relationship with Faculty/University was already highly dysfunctional. (I was consulted as part of a review re: FHI's position within Oxford and various options before said personal controversies). 

Also, there is famously quite a lot of antisemitism on the left and far left. Sidestepping the academic debate on whether antisemitism is or is not technically a form of racism, it seem strange to me to claim that racism-and-adjacent only exist on the right.

(for avoidance of doubt, I agree with the OP that Hanania seems racist, and not a good ally for this community)

April Fools is

A strange game.

The only high-utility move is

Not to play.

Huge congratulations, you have made the world better. Thank you.

I quite liked it, but I'd happily give up praise posts if it meant not having the denouncement posts. 

Supervolcanoes being unlikely to be a human extinction risk was also my conclusion when I looked into it for an extinction risk review (currently under peer review) late last year, from speaking to volcanologists - McGraw (2024) was not released at that point so I'm grateful for this analysis and to be pointed to the paper.

Datapoint: I put money in my pension.

I agree. I suspect that responses to calls for evidence over the years played a big role in introducing and normalising xrisk research ideas in the UK context, before the big moves we've seen in the last year.

e.g. a few representative examples
(2016) https://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/science-and-technology-committee/robotics-and-artificial-intelligence/written/32690.pdf

(2017)

https://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/artificial-intelligence-committee/artificial-intelligence/written/69587.html

(2022)

https://www.longtermresilience.org/post/future-of-compute-review-submission-of-evidence

And many more.