My best guess as to why it might feel like this is that you think I’m laying groundwork for some argument of the form “P(doom) is very high”, which you want to nip in the bud, but are having trouble nipping in the bud here because I’m building a motte (“cosmopolitan values don’t come free”) that I’ll later use to defend a bailey (“cosmopolitan values don’t come cheap”).
I expect that you personally won’t do a motte-and-bailey here (except perhaps insofar as you later draw on posts like these as evidence that the doomer view has been laid out in a lot of different places, when this isn’t in fact the part of the doomer view relevant to ongoing debates in the field).
But I do think that the “free vs cheap” distinction will obscure more than it clarifies, because there is only an epsilon difference between them; and because I expect a mob-and-bailey where many people cite the claim that “cosmopolitan values don’t come free” as evidence in debates that should properly be about whether cosmopolitan values come cheap. This is how weak men work in general.
Versions of this post that I wouldn’t object to in this way include:
A version which is mainly framed as a conceptual distinction rather than an empirical claim
A version which says upfront “this post is not relevant to most informed debates about alignment, it’s instead intended to be relevant in the following context:”
A version which identifies that there’s a different but similar-sounding debate which is actually being held between people informed about the field, and says true things about the positions of your opponents in that debate and how they are different from the extreme caricatures in this post
I expect that you personally won’t do a motte-and-bailey here (except perhaps insofar as you later draw on posts like these as evidence that the doomer view has been laid out in a lot of different places, when this isn’t in fact the part of the doomer view relevant to ongoing debates in the field).
But I do think that the “free vs cheap” distinction will obscure more than it clarifies, because there is only an epsilon difference between them; and because I expect a mob-and-bailey where many people cite the claim that “cosmopolitan values don’t come free” as evidence in debates that should properly be about whether cosmopolitan values come cheap. This is how weak men work in general.
Versions of this post that I wouldn’t object to in this way include:
A version which is mainly framed as a conceptual distinction rather than an empirical claim
A version which says upfront “this post is not relevant to most informed debates about alignment, it’s instead intended to be relevant in the following context:”
A version which identifies that there’s a different but similar-sounding debate which is actually being held between people informed about the field, and says true things about the positions of your opponents in that debate and how they are different from the extreme caricatures in this post