I tried to make a similar argument here, and I’m not sure it landed. I think the argument has since demonstrated even more predictive validity with e.g. the various attempts to build and restart nuclear power plants, directly motivated by nearby datacenter buildouts, on top of the obvious effects on chip production.
I’ve just read this post and the comments. Thank you for writing that; some elements of the decomposition feel really good, and I don’t know that they’ve been done elsewhere.
I think discourse around this is somewhat confused, because you actually have to do some calculation on the margin, and need a concrete proposal to do that with any confidence.
The straw-Pause rhetoric is something like “Just stop until safety catches up!” The overhang argument is usually deployed (as it is in those comments) to the effect of ‘there is no stopping.’ And yeah, in this calculation, there are in fact marginal negative externalities to the implementation of some subset of actions one might call a pause. The straw-Pause advocate really doesn’t want to look at that, because it’s messy to entertain counter-evidence to your position, especially if you don’t have a concrete enough proposal on the table to assign weights in the right places.
Because it’s so successful against straw-Pausers, the anti-pause people bring in the overhang argument like an absolute knockdown, when it’s actually just a footnote to double check the numbers and make sure your pause proposal avoids slipping into some arcane failure mode that ‘arms’ overhang scenarios. That it’s received as a knockdown is reinforced by the gearsiness of actually having numbers (and most of these conversations about pauses are happening in the abstract, in the absence of, i.e., draft policy).
But… just because your interlocutor doesn’t have the numbers at hand, doesn’t mean you can’t have a real conversation about the situations in which compute overhang takes on sufficient weight to upend the viability of a given pause proposal.
You said all of this much more elegantly here:
Arguments that overhangs are so bad that they outweigh the effects of pausing or slowing down are basically arguing that a second-order effect is more salient than the first-order effect. This is sometimes true, but before you’ve screened this consideration off by examining the object-level, I think your prior should be against.
...which feels to me like the most important part. The burden is on folks introducing an argument from overhang risk to prove its relevance within a specific conversation, rather than just introducing the adversely-gearsy concept to justify safety-coded accelerationism and/or profiteering. Everyone’s prior should be against actions Waluigi-ing, by default (while remaining alert to the possibility!).
I tried to make a similar argument here, and I’m not sure it landed. I think the argument has since demonstrated even more predictive validity with e.g. the various attempts to build and restart nuclear power plants, directly motivated by nearby datacenter buildouts, on top of the obvious effects on chip production.
I’ve just read this post and the comments. Thank you for writing that; some elements of the decomposition feel really good, and I don’t know that they’ve been done elsewhere.
I think discourse around this is somewhat confused, because you actually have to do some calculation on the margin, and need a concrete proposal to do that with any confidence.
The straw-Pause rhetoric is something like “Just stop until safety catches up!” The overhang argument is usually deployed (as it is in those comments) to the effect of ‘there is no stopping.’ And yeah, in this calculation, there are in fact marginal negative externalities to the implementation of some subset of actions one might call a pause. The straw-Pause advocate really doesn’t want to look at that, because it’s messy to entertain counter-evidence to your position, especially if you don’t have a concrete enough proposal on the table to assign weights in the right places.
Because it’s so successful against straw-Pausers, the anti-pause people bring in the overhang argument like an absolute knockdown, when it’s actually just a footnote to double check the numbers and make sure your pause proposal avoids slipping into some arcane failure mode that ‘arms’ overhang scenarios. That it’s received as a knockdown is reinforced by the gearsiness of actually having numbers (and most of these conversations about pauses are happening in the abstract, in the absence of, i.e., draft policy).
But… just because your interlocutor doesn’t have the numbers at hand, doesn’t mean you can’t have a real conversation about the situations in which compute overhang takes on sufficient weight to upend the viability of a given pause proposal.
You said all of this much more elegantly here:
...which feels to me like the most important part. The burden is on folks introducing an argument from overhang risk to prove its relevance within a specific conversation, rather than just introducing the adversely-gearsy concept to justify safety-coded accelerationism and/or profiteering. Everyone’s prior should be against actions Waluigi-ing, by default (while remaining alert to the possibility!).