I disagree with Dean on many issues — but this doesn’t surprise me at all, because it’s obvious he is a truth-seeker at his core who isn’t adopting beliefs because they are popular, nor because “his side” holds them, nor because they are professionally useful (obviously the opposite is true in many cases…) Instead he’s clearly thinking “what do I believe about this issue” and reasoning his way to an answer which will, in many cases, disagree with the answers around him. And as most Twitter users know, he doesn’t bite his tongue when his answer departs from orthodoxy/the party line. This has the effect of making him deeply unlikable to anyone especially sensitive to the ways in which his views diverge from their own, but everyone should be so lucky as to have a critic who will actually engage with the substance of the question rather than nodding along or falling in line. In particular OpenAI and the US Government, two of the most important institutions in history, who are tasked with a number of extremely thorny questions in the coming years. We’d be in a much worse world if people like Dean weren’t speaking their minds (and getting planted hit pieces as thanks).