Tamay's Quick takes

As someone who runs one of EAs advocacy contingents, I think the overall idea of more criticism is probably a good idea (though I suspect I'll find it personally unpleasant when applied to things I work on), but I'd suggest a few nuances I think exist here:

1. EA is not unitary, and different EAs and EA factions will have different and at times opposing policy goals. For example, many of the people who work at OpenAI/Anthropic are EAs (or EA adjacent), but many EAs think working at OpenAI/Anthropic leads to AI acceleration in a harmful way (EAs also have differing views of the relevant merits of those two firms). 
   1. Which views are considered EA can change the composition of who identifies as EA, EA-adjacent, unopposed, and EA-hostile -- e.g. my perception of Sam Altman would be as EA-adjacent, but the perception that EAs have been critical of OpenAI, along with other events, likely pushed him further away from EA than he'd otherwise be; Elon Musk and Peter Thiel may also be related examples.
2. Advocacy is inherently information-lossy, since it involves translating information from one context into a format that will be persuasive in some sort of politically useful way. Usually this involves simplification (because a popular or decision-maker audience has less bandwidth than an expert audience) and may also involve differentiation (since the message will probably tend to be optimized to fit something like the existing views of its audience). This is a hard challenge to manage. 
   1. One type of simplification I've noticed is from an internal EA-organizing perspective -- where the experts/leaders at the center tend to have nuanced, reasonable views, but those views, when being transmitted to organizers who again transmit to less experienced people interested in EA, can become translated into a dogma that is simplistic and rigid.
   2. Two case studies of EA (or EA-adjacent) advocacy -- monetary/macroeconomic policy and criminal justice reform -- have had interestingly different trajectories. With monetary policy in the U.S., EA-funded groups tended to foreground technical policy-understanding and (in my opinion) did a good job transitioning their recommendations as macroeconomic conditions changed (am thinking mainly of Employ America). The criminal justice reform movement (where I founded a volunteer advocacy organization, the Rikers Debate Project) has in my opinion been mostly unable to reorient its recommendations and thinking in response to changing conditions. In my opinion, the macroeconomic policy work had more of a technocratic theory of change than more identity-oriented criminal justice reform efforts funded by EA though there were elements of technocracy and identitarianism in both fields. (Rikers Debate, which was not funded by EA groups, has historically been more identitarian in focus).  

Can you provide a historical example of advocacy that you think reaches a high level of thoughtfulness and consideration?

I'm a bit skeptical that all identitarian tactics should be avoided, insofar as that is what this is. It's just too potent a tool - just about every social movement has promulgated itself by these means, by plan or otherwise. Part of this is a "growth of the movement" debate; I'm inclined to think that more money+idea proliferation is needed.

I do think there are some reasonable constraints:

1. Identitarian tactics should be used self-consciously and cynically. It's when we forget that we are acting, that the worst of in/out groupiness presents itself. Do think we could do with some more reminding of this.

2. I would agree that certain people should refrain from this. Fine if early-stage career people do it, but I'll start being concerned if Macaskill loses his cool and starts posting "I AM AN EA💡" and roasting outgroups.

It seems like you're not arguing about the rhetoric of the people you disagree with but rather on the substantive question of the likelihood of disastrous AGI.

The reasons you have given tend to disconfirm the claim that "doom is the default." But rhetorically, their expression succinctly and well conveys their belief that AGI will be very bad for us unless a very difficult and costly solution is developed.

I take it as a kind of "what do known incentives do and neglect to do" ---- when I say "default" I mean "without philanthropic pressure" or "well-aligned with making someone rich". Of course, a lot of this depends on my background understanding of public-private partnerships through the history of innovation (something I'm liable to be wrong about). 

The standard venn diagram of focused research organizations https://fas.org/publication/focused-research-organizations-a-new-model-for-scientific-research/ gives a more detailed view along the same lines, less clumsy, but still the point is "there are blindspots that we don't know how to incentivize". 

It's certainly true that many parts of almost every characterization/definition of "alignment" can simply be offloaded to capitalism, but I think there are a bajillion reasonable and defensible views about which parts those are, if they're hard, they may be discovered in an inconvenient order, etc. 

Well, sure, but if there a way to avoid the doom, then why after 20 years has no one published the plan for how to do it that doesn't resemble a speculative research project of the type you try when you clearly don't understand the problem and that doesn't resemble the vague output of a politician writing about a sensitive issue?

While I agree that slogans like "doom is the default" should not take over the discussion in favour of actual engagement, it doesn't appear that your problem is with the specific phrasing but rather with the content behind this statement.