As Eliezer himself notes, Epstein do seem to have personally benefited from improving his image through philanthropy as social cover for his trafficking ring, so in this case in particular (not necessarily in all cases of felons or even sex offenders) taking money from him seems straightforwardly bad.
I tend to agree with you that it was in hindsight an error to even discuss with at all, but I don't think @Rob Bensinger is being dishonest here. "decided against pursuing the option" do mean they took some time to make the decision and didn't just ghost him without exchanging any more information (which I agree would have been preferable in hindsight).
It was new when it was published in 1995! Industrial Society and Its Future was explicitly cited in Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and then Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" (2000), the latter of which helped found modern existential risk research.
This is quite confusing to me. It was never my read in your slowdown scenario that the shareholders were supposed to have any relevance by the end of it. My read (which appear to align with what @williawa is saying elsewhere in this thread) as that the "Oversight Committee" emerged as the new ruling class supplanting the shareholders (let alone any random person who got rich trying to "escape the permanent underclass"), just like e.g. the barbarian lords replaced the Roman patricians, the industrial capitalists replaced the aristocracy, guild masters, and landed gentry, etc. Technological transitions are notoriously a common time for newly empowered elites to throw a revolution against old elites!
On the flip side the OpenAI foundation now have the occasion to do the funniest thing.
Émile Torres would be the most well-known person in that camp.
I think @rife is talking either about mutual cooperation betwen safety advocates and capabilities researchers, or mutual cooperation between humans and AIs.
1Pause AI is clearly a central member of Camp B? And Holly signed the superintelligence petition.
If it is a concern that your tool might be symmetric between truth and bullshit, then you should probably not have made the tool in the first place.
Surely if you're around those parts you should know that billionaire philanthropy is generally ineffective and not focused on effective interventions in global health and development. Epstein was primarily known as a philanthropist focused on academic and nonprofit scientific research, hence the high amount of famous/Ivy League scientists in his social circle. According to Eliezer's account he didn't understand SIAI's beliefs on alignment.