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Elite mountaineering, for example summiting Annapurna apparently has a 13.42% fatality rate.
Pre-modern infantry combat and modern battlefields if you're on the wrong side as a rebel or guerilla fighter would likely have a >10% casualty rate as well. We could also count things like suicide bombers and kamikaze pilots which would be obviously much much higher than 10%.
If we're counting lifetime rate, I believe free soloing and pre-modern childbirth would also exceed >10% lifetime as well.
I don't really disagree that 10% is very high, but I do also agree that many people have the demonstrated drive to risk 10% or even higher odds for causes they believe in.
But there are only about 600 ascents of Annapurna ever - this is not even a fringe hobby like BASE jumping. It cannot be that Anthropic and frontier developers are just chock full of these incredibly rare people and that this level of risk tolerance is also well-correlated with AI coding ability.
On war, the calculus on risk has drastically changed over time, at least for people in wealthy, developed countries. The US fatality rate for Vietnam, for example, was less than 3% - and this is the war that completely destroyed the political plausibility of a draft for anything except defending an invasion of American soil, and AI developers have very high opportunity costs for death since they would otherwise be well-compensated programmers.
I'm not so sure that's unlikely, given the degrees and decades of filtering, how they occurred, and general, ah, crackpot factors related to frontier discoveries. Think of, say, newon and alchemy, or Kary Mullis inventing PCR versus basically all of his ideas/beliefs that aren't PCR.
Anthropic in particular is an experiment in distilling down the people at the intersection of high coding ability and extreme AI neuroticism, so everyone that makes it through their filters is going to be kind of a crackpot from the pov of a normal human being.
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Why not? AI researcher bonafides are extremely correlated with IQ and autism, being into LessWrong / AI Safety is also extremely correlated with IQ and autism, and of course if you're into LessWrong / AI Safety you're much more likely to work in AI.
There's very few people in the world in absolute terms that are world-leading AI researchers, that believe in uppercase AI Safety, and that believe in the "we have to build it before anyone else does" strategy, but Anthropic likely employs the supermajority of these people out of technical and ideological alignment.
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