Hence, the policy should have an escape clause: You should feel free to talk about the potential exfohazard if your knowledge of it isn’t exclusively caused by other alignment researchers telling you of it. That is, if you already knew of the potential exfohazard, or if your own research later led you to discover it.
In an ideal world, it’s good to relax this clause in some way, from a binary to a spectrum. For example: if someone tells me of a hazard that I’m confident I would’ve discovered one my own one week later, then they only get to dictate me not-sharing-it for a week. “Knowing” isn’t a strict binary; anyone can rederive anything with enough time (maybe) — it’s just a question of how long it would’ve taken me to find it if they didn’t tell me. This can even include someone bringing my attention to something I already knew, but to which I wouldn’t as quickly have thought to pay attention if they didn’t bring attention to it.
In the non-ideal world we inhabit, however, it’s unclear how fraught it is to use such considerations.
In an ideal world, it’s good to relax this clause in some way, from a binary to a spectrum. For example: if someone tells me of a hazard that I’m confident I would’ve discovered one my own one week later, then they only get to dictate me not-sharing-it for a week. “Knowing” isn’t a strict binary; anyone can rederive anything with enough time (maybe) — it’s just a question of how long it would’ve taken me to find it if they didn’t tell me. This can even include someone bringing my attention to something I already knew, but to which I wouldn’t as quickly have thought to pay attention if they didn’t bring attention to it.
In the non-ideal world we inhabit, however, it’s unclear how fraught it is to use such considerations.