Except these "Ethics" researchers don't have the same level of skills. And involve in virtue signalling.
Hacker skills are a really long tailed distribution and the best are brilliant, the worst are just riding coattails. The ability to form an opinion about the implementation scope of a given variable for one of the many complicated functions required in ML puts you in some pretty rare air.
I work in security, where I need the breadth to argue the merits of the entropy of a diversification component or the choice of an elliptic curve in a protocol design and balance it with state level attackers - and regulatory policy and legislation, with the tedious compliance aspects as a theme.
The shape of the skills is weird. Where you need breadth first in a lot of areas, and depth first in ones that are not valuable outside very limited contexts. I can't vouch for where on the long tail the people involved in this controversy might be, but I don't like the odds on being dismissive of them.
Nuh huh. She was hired at her megacorp precisely because she was a researcher with an illustrious trajectory who had been involved in these circles for years, herself frustrated by the low technical level of the discussion.