seems like the marginal value is much higher

I've done this.

I think this is a very good use of time and encourage people to do it.

yeah I totally agree

Alex Wellerstein notes the age distribution of Manhattan Project employees:

Sometimes people criticize EA for having too many young people; I think that this age distribution is interesting context for that.

[Thanks to Nate Thomas for sending me this graph.]

Note: When an earlier private version of these notes was circulated, a senior figure in technical AI safety strongly contested my description. They believe that the Anthropic SAE work is much more valuable than the independent SAE work, as both were published around the same time, but the Anthropic work provides sufficient evidence to be worth extending by other researchers, whereas the independent research was not dispositive.

For the record, if the researcher here was COI’d, eg working at Anthropic, I think you should say so, and you should also substantially discount what they said.

I’d bet against that but not confident

I don’t think he says anything in the manifesto about why AI is going to go better if he starts a “hedge fund/think tank”.

I haven’t heard a strong case for him doing this project but it seems plausibly reasonable. My guess is I’d think it was a suboptimal choice if I heard his arguments and thought about it, but idk.

I'd bet that he didn't mean black people here.

For what it's worth, I'm 75% confident that Hanania didn't mean black people with the "animals" comment.

I think it's generally bad form to not take people at their word about the meaning of their statements, though I'm also very sympathetic to the possibility of provocateurs exploiting charity to get away with dogwhistles (and I think Hanania deserves more suspicion of this than most), so I feel mixed about you using it as an example here.