Rob Wiblin

And I think the willingness to tackle questions like this and just be like, well, here's our answer.

And there is a lot to argue with.

It's very emblematic of EA organizations, including all the best like AI safety EA organizations like Redwood Research.

And within EA, there's kind of like a spectrum in terms of like where in the middle you want to land where like some, you know, everyone's kind of looking at the person more speculative than them and thinking that they're sort of like, yeah, they're just like building castles on sand.

And this is not the way to like, you know, do things.

And they're looking at people less speculative than them.

And they're thinking like, you know, they're just the streetlight effect.

And like, they're just ignoring the most important considerations and like not working in the most important area.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And I think it's interesting to think about like if you imagine EA as one piece of the world's response to crazy changes like AI, there's actually a case that EA should be heavily indexed on research.

I think the community has gone back and forth with how it thinks about this.

And I think at first, people are just naturally attracted to research stuff.

So there was a huge glut of people who wanted to be researchers.

And then there was a big push, including from ADK and others, that no, consider operations roles and policy roles and other things that aren't just research.

And I think that was a good move

at the time.

But I wonder if we if we think about like, what is EA's comparative advantage relative to the world?

Maybe that suggests that some of the people who are doing operations and doing policy, but maybe in their hearts just want to be like a weird truth teller, like, you know, thinking speculative thoughts should consider like, going back and doing that again.

Thanks so much for having me.

Let's talk timelines to artificial general intelligence.