I always thought he was fired for making crackpot statements to the press in reference to his professional capacity, and thus creating bad PR and embarrassing spectacle for his employer. Seems like legitimate reasons to me.
The other guy worked on Google's AI safety team where one would expect he'd have a basic grasp of how the technology works before making outlandish claims.
It makes me wonder if there's a wrong turn in the road that I too might fall in the same pit.
I can't find it right now, but something came up a few years ago (probably on HN) about highly intelligent people being more adept at making up arguments to rationalize beliefs and actions that they had taken for other reasons entirely.
Sort of makes sense that wielding a more complex mind would offer more complex ways to go wrong, doesn't it?
Sounds more like “intelligence” isn’t the only defining metric for such behavior to occur in people, because that describes a lot of less intelligent people too. Though, I suspect highly intelligent people are at least somewhat more likely to end up on the “correct” side of the facts.
I have seen people I consider as much smarter than me fall for some very idiotic things. I certainly don't consider myself immune.
I think that the advice to try being intellectually flexible is a good one. Strive to learn new things, expose yourself earnestly to ideas that challenge your beliefs, exercise empathy, etc
Optimization on "Human Feedback", early exposure to high-effort experimental systems... I wouldn't be surprised it that turns into a bigger field than is generally recognized today.
Looking at it from the outside, I think it's still pretty hard to see how he came to end up in that position, but with a bit of individual vulnerability, arbitrary time to boil the frog slowly, and a fairly large number people exposed, maybe it would be stranger not to have the event occur with someone.