Former AI safety research engineer, now AI governance researcher at OpenAI. Blog: thinkingcomplete.blogspot.com
The issue is that both sides of the debate lack gears-level arguments. The ones you give in this post (like "all the doom flows through the tiniest crack in our defence") are more like vague intuitions; equally, on the other side, there are vague intuitions like "AGIs will be helping us on a lot of tasks" and "collusion is hard" and "people will get more scared over time" and so on.
Last time there was an explicitly hostile media campaign against EA the reaction was not to do anything, and the result is that Émile P. Torres has a large media presence,[1] launched the term TESCREAL to some success, and EA-critical thoughts became a lot more public and harsh in certain left-ish academic circles.
You say this as if there were ways to respond which would have prevented this. I'm not sure these exist, and in general I think "ignore it" is a really really solid heuristic in an era where conflict drives clicks.
@Linch, see the article I linked above, which identifies a bunch of specific bottlenecks where lobbying and/or targeted funding could have been really useful. I didn't know about these when I wrote my comment above, but I claim prediction points for having a high-level heuristic that led to the right conclusion anyway.
The article I linked above has changed my mind back again. Apparently the RTS,S vaccine has been in clinical trials since 1997. So the failure here wasn't just an abstract lack of belief in technology: the technology literally already existed the whole time that the EA movement (or anyone who's been in this space for less than two decades) has been thinking about it.
An article on why we didn't get a vaccine sooner: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-didnt-get-a-malaria-vaccine-sooner
This seems like significant evidence for the tractability of speeding things up. E.g. a single (unjustified) decision by the WHO in 2015 delayed the vaccine by almost a decade, four years of which were spent in fundraising. It seems very plausible that even 2015 EA could have sped things up by multiple years in expectation either lobbying against the original decision, or funding the follow-up trial.
This is a good point. The two other examples which seem salient to me:
Ah, I see. I think the two arguments I'd give here:
Hmm, your comment doesn't really resonate with me. I don't think it's really about being monomaniacal. I think the (in hindsight) correct thought process here would be something like:
"Over the next 20 or 50 years, it's very likely that the biggest lever in the space of malaria will be some kind of technological breakthrough. Therefore we should prioritize investigating the hypothesis that there's some way of speeding up this biggest lever."
I don't think you need this "move heaven and earth" philosophy to do that reasoning; I don't think you need to focus on EA growth much more than we did. The mental step could be as simple as "Huh, bednets seem kinda incremental. Is there anything that's much more ambitious?"
(To be clear I think this is a really hard mental step, but one that I would expect from an explicitly highly-scope-sensitive movement like EA.)
These are what I mean by the vague intuitions.
Nobody has come anywhere near doing this satisfactorily. The most obvious explanation is that they can't.