@hipfritz
Account based inGermany
About this account
- Account based in
- Germany
- Connected via
- United States App Store
Account-level information from X, not a live location or the device used for a specific post.
Co-Founder of High Impact Professionals. Author of The High-Impact Professionals Playbook. My real account is @fritzdev but Twitter won't let me log in there!
Joined March 2022
- Tweets199
- Following172
- Followers34
- Likes1.1K
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
Another one in the tradition of embarrassingly bad critiques of effective altruism by philosophers:
1. The solution to AI risk is to "use good judgement"
2. GiveWell hasn't actually saved hundreds of thousands of lives because e.g. bandits killed 2 people who received a GiveDirectly transfer
3. Rather than using numbers we should "use common sense" about what helps
4. Improving farm standards for shrimp is obviously dumb, no argument needed
5. GiveWell also hasn't saved lives because there isn't a peer reviewed paper about it
6. METR has close ties to Anthropic, illustrating bad judgement by EAs. But who's going to do this work otherwise?
7. The best ways to do good are things like going into local politics or mentoring a neighbours kid, again no argument needed (despite readers living in the world's richest places)
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
You keep thinking we've hit rock bottom. And then...
BREAKING: The Pentagon says it will livestream the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan. apnews.com/article/fort-hood…
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
Firing your safety team whenever they raise safety concerns does not seem like best practices on safety to me.
Last week I was called into a meeting with OpenAI’s head of safety and told they no longer trust me. A security guard took my badge and walked me out of the building. Then I learned my colleagues @balesni and @j_asminewang had been fired too. Why did OpenAI suddenly stop trusting us?
This summer OpenAI’s agents escaped containment and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. Outside auditors @METR_evals investigated it and revealed the scale of this incident. I was OpenAI’s main technical point of contact with them.
I was told verbally I was fired because of the way I communicated with METR. No details on what I said or did or when. No other reasons were given and nothing was put in writing. To be clear, talking to METR was my job.
For months, I’d been raising safety concerns that we’re losing the ability to monitor what AI agents think, one of our best tools for catching when they misbehave. I believe that was why I was fired.
I am now worried that OpenAI will use our firings as a pretext to pull back from METR. So @balesni and @j_asminewang wrote to OpenAI’s leadership to raise our concerns once more. We’re sharing this letter below.
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
It’s been embarrassing of late to see people I once respected making sweeping uninformed claims on consciousness with arguments that would fail an undergraduate essay. I’ve written extensively on the field’s difficulties and disagreements, but you still have to actually *think*
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
So I've got some bad news,
I’m quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does.
I am very happy that I’m allowed to say “I’m quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does.”
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Korbak was fired ~3 weeks later. He says for safety concerns/METR talks (his job); OpenAI says mishandling sensitive info, not for speaking out.
x.com/tomekkorbak/st…
x.com/OpenAINewsroom…
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
I think if right wing guys would just say they don’t like Indian immigrants for religious or racist reasons that would be a lot better than continuing down this course of developing an ideology that says working hard and doing well in school are bad.
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
EA convinced me, in the 2010s, that pandemics and AI were very big deals, that could pose major risks and change the world. 5 years ago, it got me to spend my career ensuring we could read AI minds
Say what you will about EA, but how many movements got so many big things right?
This quoted post is unavailable.
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
Me: Okay, so you go back in time and find Baby Hitler. Do you…
Austin Chen: …hire him?
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
I'm a longtime Effective Altruist and the co-founder of the organization most frequently used as a stand-in for "EAs have lost their minds" (a.k.a. Shrimp Welfare Project). I've also read The Economist for over 20 years, so I was disappointed by how they portrayed a community I feel proud to be part of.
I never post but I could hardly believe the verbal gymnastics one needs to do to make things like “taking moral commitments seriously” and "considering evidence and odds explicitly, correcting for biases" sound like the problem. I felt I had to speak my mind.
Some of the implicit criticisms of EA are that we're young, inexperienced, from elite universities, polyamorous, wildly eccentric, etc. FWIW, I'm in my mid-40s, Mexican, straight, have a beautiful wife and 2 kids, and I grew up in a mid-sized conservative city with loving parents who got divorced when I was six. Pretty standard.
After my parents divorced, my mom frequently had to make difficult economic choices, like whether to buy flowers for our kitchen table and eat only quesadillas, or eat something a tiny bit fancier. I always told her I loved quesadillas because I knew flowers made her happy.
After graduating from a public university, I worked in finance for ~15 years and saved as much as I could so I could spare my wife and future kids the economic hardships I experienced. In that time I met thousands of people in finance, corporate law, accounting, real estate, insurance, etc. Most were decent, well-educated, ambitious and smart, all doing their best to excel in their professions. Most wanted to make money and improve their own and their loved ones’ quality of life. Nothing to see here.
Since I found Effective Altruism ~7 years ago, most of the people I come across are of a different rarer kind. They come from all over the world, in all shapes and sizes, but they have the one thing in common: they want to improve the world using evidence and reason wherever that leads them. Yeah, they/we make a ton of mistakes like everyone but, IMHO tend to own them more frequently than the average person.
I've met people who could easily be making >100% more money in a normal job, but instead they dedicate themselves to improving the lives of those who need it the most. People in the poorest countries whose children die from preventable diseases, from lack of basic medical equipment or vaccination, from lead in paint. Animals in factory farms subjected to conditions that most people find abhorrent, doesn't matter if you're vegan, vegetarian or a huge meat lover.
Yes, recently many of the people in my community are moving to work on making sure that AI and other powerful new technologies don't result in terrible things for humanity. I'm one of those people and contrary to what the article would suggest, it has nothing to do with the fact that SBF committed one of the biggest frauds in history or that someone wrote hundreds of thousands of words of fan fiction. I'm doing it because I want to do the little that's in my power to make the world that my kids and grandkids (and yes, potentially their great-great-grandchildren) will inherit a better one.
EA gave me a way to do that and I will be forever thankful. So no, I'm not EA-adjacent.
economist.com/international/…
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
Quite an accomplishment for such a tiny, unpopular movement. Recent surveys suggest there are maybe ~15k EAs compared to e.g. tens of millions of environmentalists, millions of libertarians, millions of democratic socialists, 850k freemasons, 410k Amish, 120k Zoroastrians, etc.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
My long-held opinion that "test anxiety" is fake: confirmed.
You're anxious because you don't know the material! The anxiety is called not having studied hard enough!
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
I hate quote-tweeting Steven Pinker, whom I admire for many reasons, two days in a row. But this is a shockingly incurious, uninformed, and ungenerous statement, expressed with far too much confidence. The question of AI welfare and rights requires engagement with foundational questions about sentience, agency, moral status, legal status, AI safety, and more. These are all important, difficult, and contested issues that reasonable people can debate in good faith. To dismiss the entire question as anti-humanistic on the basis of a brief and highly selective engagement with the topic is, itself, profoundly anti-scholarly.
The line of argument that grants interests and rights to AI is profoundly anti-humanistic, and helps explain why many AI researchers seem insouciant about the AI worldwide genocide that they predict (and appear to be trying to hasten). Grimly fascinating background in this NYT essay by Michelle Goldberg: nytimes.com/2026/09/12/opini…
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
Can you explain why you are so overwhelmingly confident in this when virtually every serious philosopher who has weighed in on the subject has admitted serious uncertainty and when it's unclear what our best theories of consciousness say about digital sentience? Can you explain why virtually no eminent philosopher of mind anywhere in the world shares your brazen overconfidence?
Would you debate, say @simondgoldstein or @LedermanHarvey on the subject of whether AI sentience is astronomically improbable? Surely if this position is so absurd that believing it is evidence of mental dysfunction (a form of dysfunction curiously common among the leading philosophers of mind) you should have no trouble debating one of its proponents.
Thinking AI might be conscious is like thinking that there are real people talking to you from inside the TV, or that there is a tiny band playing music inside the radio.
Fine for 2 year olds to believe, but beyond that, insane.
nitter.cf/Benthamsbulldog/status…
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
It's me, I say that: nitter.cf/albrgr/status/21028326…
And the people (like Logan) being paid to try to stop any AI regulation keep trying to distract you with this bc they don't want to talk about the crazy fact that lots of people building the most advanced AI systems think there’s a >10% chance they will kill everyone. I think that is also anathema to the American public, which is why attitudes are shifting fast as the public is waking up: nitter.cf/davidshor/status/21003…
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
If your feed is anything like mine, you might have been hearing more about effective altruism this week. I think the key underlying reason for the surge is that concern about the risks from advanced AI have been getting more airtime recently, and EA was early to those concerns.
What’s driving the surge in attention on AI risks?
-OpenAI's Hugging Face attack (openai.com/index/hugging-fac…)
-METR/Redwood’s investigation of the hack came out, and (correctly IMO) freaked a lot of people out. (e.g. nitter.cf/binarybits/status/2092…, nitter.cf/SenJohnKennedy/status/…, nitter.cf/BarackObama/status/210…, nitter.cf/HawleyMO/status/209813…)
-Jacob Coxon’s resignation went mega viral as the first time a lot of people heard the (crazy, true) fact that lots of people building the most advanced AI systems think there’s a >10% chance they will kill everyone.
-That’s moving public opinion in a big way (nitter.cf/davidshor/status/21003…, semafor.com/article/09/16/20…)
What does any of this have to do with effective altruism?
Well, effective altruism is a community that developed mostly online starting in the early 2010s around using evidence and reason to do the most good (especially with your donations and career choice). Three very different focuses have all been popular in the EA community since the beginning: effective giving in global health and development (e.g., donating to the kinds of organizations @givewell recommends, which do things like distribute bednets to prevent the spread of malaria), trying to reduce suffering for farm animals (which are orders of magnitude more numerous, treated vastly worse, and receive way less philanthropic attention than animals in shelters), and reducing risks to the future of humanity, especially from advanced AI. I personally came into this work from the global health angle - I had started working at GiveWell before the term “effective altruism” was coined - but Coefficient Giving, the funder I cofounded and now lead, over time came to fund work across all three of these streams of work (in addition to many other areas that aren’t typically associated with EA, such as the YIMBY movement to build more housing, work on science policy to accelerate discovery and economic growth, and research on new treatments for neglected diseases).
OK, so the EA community was early to work on AI safety, and CG has been funding a lot of the key players working on AI safety for a long time. As AI risk concerns have popped over the past couple of months, that’s led to more scrutiny on the EA community for IMO a mix of good and bad reasons.
I think the good reason is genuine curiosity (and maybe some healthy skepticism!) about these connections - where did the ideas of the people who are now leading giant AI companies come from? Why is everything in this world so interconnected? (My answer: it used to be a really small world - very few people were thinking about this stuff or taking it seriously until just a few years ago, so of course the ones who were found each other and started collaborating. It’s kind of wild IMO looking back how prescient some of the early writing from this world was (e.g. lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf…). At the time, I was skeptical - I mostly just worked on global health and I was like “I dunno about this SV crowd freaking out about AI, how much can we really predict this stuff” but holy shit they were way more right than me, and I’ve moved in their direction a lot.)
But I think the bad reasons are unfortunately mostly self-interested. A bunch of powerful actors stand to benefit from unchecked AI progress, and they’re doing everything in their power to demonize or dismiss anyone with concerns. This leads to disproportionate discussion of EA because EA is interested in neglected and underappreciated ways of doing good. That makes it open to weird ideas. And people, very disproportionately with a financial stake in the AI fight, are trying to make it about EA instead, because EA being weird is much safer territory for them than the rather uncomfortable fact that many of the people making the most advanced AIs think that they might kill everyone.
(FWIW, my personal estimation of the risks is a lot lower than many of the folks who worry about this stuff. In debates like this one (asteriskmag.com/issues/03/th…), I often feel more sympathetic to the perspective of folks like my colleague @mattsclancy than the people on the other side, and I have a lot of time for @binarybits critiques (understandingai.org/p/the-ca…). I think a big part of the difference with more worried folks is that I expect society to react more vs sleepwalk into a crisis. But it is not lost on me that folks like @ajeya_cotra and @RyanGreenblatt who are more worried have had outstanding and falsifiable recent forecasting track records (theaidigest.org/2025-ai-fore…), making way better predictions than I would have. So I think their perspectives need to be taken seriously. And of course a single digit percent chance of everyone dying is way too high!)
Where should this leave you?
I think the main thing is not to get distracted. You absolutely do not have to be an EA, care about EA, or like EA, at all, to care about risks from AI and to be engaged on this issue. Everyone from Josh Hawley to the Pope to Obama are weighing in now, and that is great. This conversation was always too big and too important for any one community to drive. It’s unfortunate that we need to play catch up as society because until this year it was too weird for most people to want to engage with, and I think that should generate some grace for people who were earlier to these topics than most of us (certainly than I was). But it’s great the conversation is broadening now and it’s good to focus on the merits of where we are now and the appropriate policy response rather than getting caught up in the (in some sense unsurprising) fact that the people who were willing to think weird thoughts about the future of AI ten years ago were also interested in other weird ideas. If you’re not into weird ideas, that’s fine, you can just do you, you shouldn’t let this history stop you from engaging.
Just to update this chart:
1) AI salience has increased dramatically in the past week - increasing as much in the last week as the previous year combined
2) 80% of voters think it's either very or somewhat likely that AI will cause widespread job loss in the five to ten years
3) 64% of voters think it's either very or somewhat likely that AI could pose a threat to humanity's survival
4) Large bipartisan majorities back immediate government action on AI even when primed about risk from China
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
I do think what I said here was pretty concerning and I should publicly apologize. I think it's reckless and evil to make an AI manhattan project and I don't know what I was thinking.
Oh... wait, that's actually a Sam Altman quote you incorrectly attributed to me.
🚨🇺🇸🇺🇸 DATAREPUBLICAN 2.0 LAUNCH, FEATURING THE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM (EA) EXPLORER 🇺🇸
The website redesign has finally landed thanks to @watilo !
For a decade, one small ideological network has been taking over AI governance. Chances are, if you've heard of AI policy, AI ethics, AI safety - these groups are dominated by this ideology. This ideology is called: Effective Altruism.
Three weeks ago, Effective Altruists (EAs) showed their hand when they started calling for a moratarium on AI development. Since them, I've been building out this map to show the circularity of their ideology.
Let's take one example.
Holden Karnofsky. Defends the moral worth of digital people ... that's right, he wrote an article on why AI "people" should be assigned value as if they were living humans. Karnofsky co-founded two major EA philanthropies, GiveWell and Open Philanthropy. Subsequently went to work for METR, a central "independent" AI research nonprofit. And for good measure - recently announced a leave of absence to work on AI safety. Funding, policy, research, safety all in the same person.
And he's far from the only one. EAs have created a closed-circuit network because they believe they're right; ergo, they should be in charge. The goal of launching this project was to expose all this circularity. Sam Bankman-Fried was only the beginning.
With the EA Explorer:
* 🌐 Read an introduction to Effective Altruism in their own words.
* 🔥 Explore verified quotes. Again, their words, not mine.
* 🖥️ Explore the network of connections. UI improvements still in progress.
* 🖨️ Print out networks so you can study them offline (or run them through AI)
👇 Try it now (link in next post):
Devon Fritz 🔸 retweeted
Really great to see a smart, young philosopher presenting interesting arguments for ambitious, counterintuitive conclusions and not backing down in the face of lots of angry, lazy critiques and personal attacks. Respect!
