How is it silly? It seems perfectly acceptable, and even preferable, for people to be involved in shaping EA only if they agree for their leadership to be scrutinized.

My argument is that barring them doesn't stop them from shaping EA, just mildly inconveniences them, because much of the influence happens outside such conferences

With all the scandals we've seen in the last few years, I think it should be very evident how important transparency is

Which scandals do you believe would have been avoided with greater transparency, especially transparency of the form here (listing the names of those involved, with no further info)? I can see an argument that eg people who have complaints about bad behaviour (eg Owen's, or SBF/Alameda's) should make them more transparently (though that has many downsides), but that's a very different kind of transparency.

I'm not expressing an opinion on that. The post makes a clear claim that their legal status re tax deductibility will change if more EU citizens sign up. This surprises me and I want to understand it better. I agree there are other benefits to having more members, I'm not disputing that

I'm surprised that having more members let's you offer better tax deductions (and that they don't even need to be Danish taxpayers!), what's up with that? 

Seems like she'll have a useful perspective that adds value to the event, especially on brand. Why do you think it should be arms length?

This seems fine to me - I expect that attending this is not a large fraction of most attendee's impact on EA, and that some who didn't want to be named would have not come if they needed to be on a public list, so barring such people seems silly (I expect there's some people who would tolerate being named as the cost of coming too, of course). I would be happy to find some way to incentivise people being named.

And really, I don't think it's that important that a list of attendees be published. What do you see as the value here?

Seems reasonable (tbh with that context I'm somewhat OK with the original ban), thanks for clarifying!

when they're considering buying mansions in the Oxford countryside/other controversial multimillion dollar calculations, publishing the cost-benefit calculation rather than merely asserting its existence

Huh? That wasn't CEAs decision, they just fiscally sponsored Wytham

1 is very true, 2 I agree with apart from the word main, it seems hard to label any factor as "the main" thing, and there's a bunch of complex reasoning about counterfactuals - eg if GDM stopped work that wouldn't stop Meta, so is GDM working on capabilities actually the main thing?

I'm pretty unconvinced that not sharing results with frontier labs is tenable - leaving aside that these labs are often the best places to do certain kinds of safety work, if our work is to matter, we need the labs to use it! And you often get valuable feedback on the work by seeing it actually used in production. Having a bunch of safety people who work in secret and then unveil their safety plan at the last minute seems very unlikely to work to me

I personally think that "does this advance capabilities" is the wrong question to ask, and instead you should ask "how much does this advance capabilities relative to safety". Safer models are just more useful, and more profitable a lot of the time! Eg I care a lot about avoiding deception. But honest models are just generally more useful to users (beyond white lies I guess). And I think it would be silly for no one to work on detecting or reducing deception. I think most good safety work will inherently advance capabilities in some sense, and this is a sign that it's actually doing anything real. I struggle to think of any work I think is both useful and doesn't advance capabilities at all

Ah, thanks, that's important context - I semi-retract my strongly worded comment above, depending on exactly how bad the removed post was, but can imagine posts in this genre that I think are genuinely bad