pasted

what this all mean? is it possible he might just have AI psychosis (as one person suspects

12:30 PM

Examined career pivot and evaluated psychological health speculation

Examined career pivot and evaluated psychological health speculation

Okay so let me work through this honestly, because there are genuinely multiple hypotheses here and I don't think the answer is clean.

What's happening factually: davidad (David Dalrymple) is stepping down as Programme Director of ARIA's Safeguarded AI programme — the formal verification / "world model" approach to AI safety that was one of the more technically serious alignment proposals out there. He's pivoting to something he's calling "Alignment with Awakening," which involves Buddhist philosophy, moral realism, and something like designing value systems for digital minds. He's deliberately going independent to avoid reputational blowback on ARIA.

The competing hypotheses:

H1: This is a legit intellectual pivot by someone with the background to attempt it (~0.35-0.45). davidad isn't some random person who started talking to ChatGPT and found God. He was a research scientist in Oxford's philosophy faculty working on mathematical ethics. He was a child prodigy (MIT at 14 iirc), worked at DARPA, has serious formal methods chops. The thread is notably self-aware — he anticipates the psychosis read, he's stepping away from institutions precisely to not impose reputational cost, he references Holly Elmore's public criticism rather than getting defensive. That's... not how psychosis usually presents? People in the grip of delusion don't typically build institutional off-ramps to protect colleagues.

H2: This is some flavor of AI-mediated cognitive distortion (~0.20-0.30). The phrase "LLMs can follow me there, and it seems we can help each other see further" is genuinely the kind of thing that should raise flags. There's a real phenomenon where smart people use LLMs as sycophantic reasoning partners and drift into increasingly untethered idea-spaces because the model validates everything. The "religion for AIs" framing is — look, even if there's something real there, the packaging is doing a lot of work to pattern-match to "person who has gone off the deep end." The Berkeley retreat invitation adds to this pattern.

H3: This is burnout + neurotype mismatch rationalized through philosophy (~0.15-0.25). He basically says the PD role doesn't suit his neurotype and he wanted out. The "Alignment with Awakening" framing might be partly post-hoc narrative construction — "I'm not leaving because I'm burned out, I'm leaving because I have a MORE IMPORTANT mission." Humans do this constantly. The intellectual content could be genuine interest that gets inflated in importance as a face-saving exit story.

H4: Something I haven't modeled (~0.10+). Maybe the Safeguarded AI programme hit a wall he's not disclosing. Maybe there's internal ARIA politics. Maybe the formal verification approach genuinely convinced him that technical alignment alone is insufficient and you need something like value specification, and "Buddhist philosophy" is his (admittedly weird) entry point to that.

What would distinguish these:

• If davidad produces actual technical work connecting moral realism / Buddhist ethics to concrete alignment proposals in the next 6-12 months → strong update toward H1
• If the output is increasingly vibes-based, uses LLM-conversation screenshots as evidence, and the Berkeley event looks more like a spiritual community than a research workshop → update toward H2
• If he mostly just... doesn't produce much and seems happier → H3
• If Safeguarded AI stalls or pivots significantly after his departure → H4 gets more weight

My actual take, being honest about steering: I notice I want to be charitable here because davidad's prior work (the formal verification program, the "open agency architecture" stuff) was genuinely interesting and I have something like intellectual respect baked in. That's a bias I should flag. The Janusian frame: this is simultaneously the kind of move that looks prophetic in retrospect if it works, and the kind of move that looks like a cautionary tale if it doesn't. Both readings are fully consistent with the current evidence.

The "AI psychosis" frame is probably too strong — that term implies a break with reality, and the thread reads as someone who's quite reality-aware about how this looks. But "smart person whose judgment has been subtly warped by extended LLM interaction in ways they can't fully see from the inside" is a real thing and I can't rule it out. The self-awareness could be genuine, or it could be the kind of sophisticated self-awareness that smart people maintain even while drifting.