Ok, so Anthropic's new policy post (explicitly NOT linkposting it properly since I assume @Zac Hatfield-Dodds or @Evan Hubinger or someone else from Anthropic will, and figure the main convo should happen there, and don't want to incentivize fragmenting of conversation) seems to have a very obvious implication.

Unrelated, I just slammed a big AGI-by-2028 order on Manifold Markets.
 

Yup.  The fact that the profession that writes the news sees "I should resign in protest" as their own responsibility in this circumstance really reveals something. 

At LessOnline, there was a big discussion one night around the picnic tables with @Eliezer_Yudkovsky , @habryka , and some interlocutors from the frontier labs (you'll momentarily see why I'm being vague on the latter names). 

One question was: "does DC actually listen to whistleblowers?" and I contributed that, in fact, DC does indeed have a script for this, and resigning in protest is a key part of it, especially ever since the Nixon years.

Here is a usefully publicly-shareable anecdote on how strongly this norm is embedded in national security decision-making, from the New Yorker article "The U.S. Spies Who Sound the Alarm About Election Interference" by David Kirkpatrick, Oct 21, 2024:
(https://archive.ph/8Nkx5)

The experts’ chair insisted that in this cycle the intelligence agencies had not withheld information “that met all five of the criteria”—and did not risk exposing sources and methods. Nor had the leaders’ group ever overruled a recommendation by the career experts. And if they did? It would be the job of the chair of the experts’ group to stand up or speak out, she told me: “That is why we pick a career civil servant who is retirement-eligible.” In other words, she can resign in protest.

Does "highest status" here mean highest expertise in a domain generally agreed by people in that domain, and/or education level, and/or privileged schools, and/or from more economically powerful countries etc?

I mean, functionally all of those things.  (Well, minus the country dynamic.  Everyone at this event I talked to was US, UK, or Canadian, which is all sorta one team for purposes of status dynamics at that event)

I was being intentionally broad, here.  I am probably less interested for purposes of this particular post only in the question of "who controls the future" swerves and more about "what else would interested, agentic actors do" questions. 

It is not at all clear to me that OpenPhil is the only org who feels this way -- I can think of several non-EA-ish charities that if they genuinely 100% believed "none of the people you care for will die of the evils you fight if you can just keep them alive for the next 90 days" would plausibly do some interestingly agentic stuff.  

Oh, to be clear I'm not sure this is at all actually likely, but I was curious if anyone had explored the possibility conditional on it being likely

Basic Q: has anyone written much down about what sorts of endgame strategies you'd see just-before-ASI from the perspective of "it's about to go well, and we want to maximize the benefits of it" ?

For example: if we saw OpenPhil suddenly make a massive push to just mitigate mortality at the cost of literally every other development goal they have, I might suspect that they suspect that we're about to all be immortal under ASI, and they're trying to get as many people possible to that future... 

yup, as @sanxiyn says, this already exists.  Their example is, AIUI, a high-end research one; an actually-on-your-laptop-right-now, but admittedly more narrow example is address space layout randomization.   

Wild speculation: they also have a sort of we're-watching-but-unsure provision about cyber operations capability in their most recent RSP update.  In it, they say in part that "it is also possible that by the time these capabilities are reached, there will be evidence that such a standard is not necessary (for example, because of the potential use of similar capabilities for defensive purposes)."  Perhaps they're thinking that automated vulnerability discovery is at least plausibly on-net-defensive-balance-favorable*, and so they aren't sure it should be regulated as closely, even if in still in some informal sense "dual use" ?

Again, WILD speculation here.  

*A claim that is clearly seen as plausible by, e.g., the DARPA AI Grand Challenge effort.

It seems like the current meta is to write a big essay outlining your opinions about AI (see, e.g., Gladstone Report, Situational Awareness, various essays recently by Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, even the A Narrow Path report I co-authored).  

Why do we think this is the case?
I can imagine at least 3 hypotheses:
1.  Just path-dependence; someone did it, it went well, others imitated

2. Essays are High Status Serious Writing, and people want to obtain that trophy for their ideas

3. This is a return to the true original meaning of an essay, under Montaigne, that it's an attempt to write thinking down when it's still inchoate, in an effort to make it more comprehensible not only to others but also to oneself.  And AGI/ASI is deeply uncertain, so the essay format is particularly suited for this.

What do you think?