Holly_Elmore's Quick takes

It would be really great if EAs didn't take out their dismay over SBF's fraud on each other and didn't try to tear down EA as an institution. I am wrecked over what happened with FTX, too, and of course it was major violation of community trust that we all have to process. But you're not going to purify yourself by tearing down everyone else's efforts or get out ahead of the next scandal by making other EA orgs sound shady. EA will survive this whether you calm down or not but there's no reason to create strife and division over Sam et al.'s crimes when we could be coming together, healing, and growing stronger. 

I ran a successful protest at OpenAI yesterday. Before the night was over, Mikhail Samin, who attended the protest, sent me a document to review that accused me of what sounds like a bait and switch and deceptive practices because I made an error in my original press release (which got copied as a description on other materials) and apparently didn't address it to his satisfaction because I didn't change the theme of the event more radically or cancel it.

My error: I made the stupidest kind of mistake when writing the press release weeks before the event. The event was planned as a generic OpenAI protest a ~month and half ahead of time. Then the story about the mysteriously revised usage policy and subsequent Pentagon contract arose and we decided to make rolling it back the "small ask" of this protest, which is usually a news peg and goes in media outreach materials like the press release. (The "big ask" is always "Pause AI" and that's all that most onlookers will ever know about the messaging.) I quoted the OpenAI charter early on when drafting it, and then, in a kind of word mistake that is unfortunately common for me, started using the word “charter” for both the actual charter document and the usage policy document. It was unfortunately a semantic mistake, so proofreaders didn’t catch it. I also subsequently did this verbally in several places. I even kind of convinced myself from hearing my own mistaken language that OpenAI had violated a much more serious boundary– their actual guiding document– than they had. Making this kind of mistake is unfortunately a characteristic sort of error for me and making it in this kind of situation is one of my worst fears.

How I handled it: I was horrified when I discovered the mistake because it conveyed a significantly different meaning than the true story, and, were it intentional, could have slandered OpenAI. I spent hours trying to track down every place I had said it and people who may have repeated it so it could be corrected. Where I corrected "charter" to "usage policy", I left an asterisk explaining that an earlier version of the document had said "charter" in error. I told the protesters in the protester group chat (some protesters just see flyers or public events, so I couldn't reach them all) right away about my mistake, which is when Mikhail heard about it, and explained changing the usage policy is a lot less bad than changing the charter, but the protest was still on, as it had been before the military story arose as the “small ask”. I have a lot of volunteer help, but I'm still a one woman show on stuff like media communications. I resolved to have my first employee go over all communications, not just volunteer proofreaders, so that someone super familiar with what we are doing can catch brainfart content errors that my brain was somehow blind to.

So, Mikhail seems to think I should have done more or not kept the no-military small ask. He's going to publish something that really hurt my feelings because it reads as an accusation of lying or manipulation and calls for EA community level "mechanisms" to make sure that "unilateral action" (i.e. protests where I had to correct the description) can't be taken because I am "a high status EA".

This is silly. I made a very unfortunate mistake that I feel terrible about and tried really hard to fix. That's all. To be clear, PauseAI US is not an EA org and it wouldn't submit to EA community mechanisms because that would not be appropriate. Our programming does not need EA approval and is not seeking it. I failed in my own personal standards of accuracy, the standards I will hold PauseAI US to, and I will not be offering any kind of EA guarantees on what PauseAI does. Just because I am an EA doesn't sign my organization up for EA norms or make me especially accountable to Mikhail. I'm particularly done with Mikhail, in fact, after spending hours assisting him with his projects and trying to show him a good time when he visits Berkeley and answering to his endless nitpicks on Messenger and getting what feels like zero charity in return. During what should have been a celebration for a successful event, I was sobbing in the bathroom at the accusation that I (at least somewhat deliberately-- not sure how exactly he would characterize his claim) misled the press and the EA community.

I made suggestions on his document and told him he can post it, so you may see it soon. I think it's inflammatory and it will create pointless drama and he should know better, but I also know he would make a big deal and say I was suppressing the truth if I told him not to post it. I think coming at me with accusations of bad faith and loaded words like "deceptive" and "misleading" is shitty and I really do not want to be part of my own special struggle session on this forum. It wounds me because I feel the weight of what I'm trying to do, and my mistake scared me that I could stumble and cause harm. It's a lot of stress to carry this mission forward against intense disagreement, and carrying it forward in the face of personal failure is even tougher for me. But I also know I handled my error honorably and did my best. 

We all know EAs and rationalists are anxious about getting involved in politics because of the motivated reasoning and soldier mindset that it takes to succeed there (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-is-the-mind-killer).

Would it work to have a stronger distinction in our minds between discourse, which should stay pure from politics, and interventions, which can include, e.g. seeking a political office or advocating for a ballot measure?

Since EA political candidacies are happening whether we all agree or not, maybe we should take measures to insulate the two.  I like the "discourse v intervention" frame as a tool for doing that, either as a conversational signpost or possibly to silo conversations entirely. Maybe people involved in political campaigns should have to recuse themselves from meta discourse?