EY in the New York Times

Reading the tweets...

GH: In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.

Someone Else: I read and interpreted Care Metz NY Times article the way you meant: you left Google to speak more freely about AI and its potential dangers, and at no point, I felt you criticised Google. For what it's worth.

GH: Maybe I over-reacted. When I read it I thought it could easily be interpreted as implying that I left so that I could criticize Google and that is certainly not the case.

...it seems to me like this specific case is not a strong evidence, if even GH thinks he might have overreacted.

(I don't want to defend NYT or Metz, and there is a lot of other evidence against them; I am just unimpressed by this one specific piece of evidence you chose to link.)

(I haven't read the article itself, only the tweets.)

Whoops! I only knew about him from the SSC situation a couple years ago, I had no idea that he was the one behind that NYT article; I guess some people never change (especially people who are living large, like journalists).

I still think it makes sense to give people opportunities to change their ways; if nothing else, so that decent researchers/interns could ghostwrite articles under Cade Metz's name, which is a common thing for major news outlets (journalist positions are plum jobs, so they tend to get occupied by incompetent status-maximizers, who reveal their disinterest with actual work as soon as they get a position at a level they feel satisfied with; and most of the work at news outlets is secretly done by interns since there's tons of competent college students desperate for a tiny number of positions, and news outlet staff lack the will and ability to actually evaluate them for competence).

Also, in terms of treating things as "anthropological curiosities", that's actually a really major tactic for major news corps; it creates the sense that all things are beneath the news outlet itself. There's a surprisingly large proportion of middle-class people out there who buy into the myth of news outlets as the last bastion of truth. Reputation maximization is something that news outlets take very seriously, especially nowadays since they're all on such thin ice.