As I’ve talkedabout nowextensively, I think enacting RSPs in policy now makes it easier not harder to get even better future regulations enacted.
I appreciate the evidence you’ve provided on this, and in particular I think it’s more than has been provided for the opposite claim and would encourage Simeon and others criticizing RSPs along these lines to provide more evidence (as I commented on a draft of his post).
That being said, I don’t yet find the evidence you’ve provided particularly compelling. I believe you are referring mainly to this section of your posts:
In the theory of political capital, it is a fairly well-established fact that “Everybody Loves a Winner.” That is: the more you succeed at leveraging your influence to get things done, the more influence you get in return. This phenomenon is most thoroughlystudied in the context of the ability of U.S. presidents’ to get their agendas through Congress—contrary to a naive model that might predict that legislative success uses up a president’s influence, what is actually found is the opposite: legislative success engenders future legislative success, greater presidential approval, and long-term gains for the president’s party.
I don’t understand how the links in this section show that “Everybody Loves a Winner” is a fairly well-established fact that translates to the situation of RSPs. The first link is an op-ed that is paywalled. The second link is a 2013 paper with 7 citations. From the abstract it appears to show that US presidents get higher approval ratings when they succeed in passing legislation, and vice versa. The third link is a 2011 paper with 62 citations (which seems higher, not sure how high this is for its field). From the abstract it appears to show that Presidents which pass agendas in Congress help their party win more Congressional seats. These interpretations don’t seem too different from the way you summarized it.
Assuming that this version of “Everybody Loves a Winner” is in fact a well-established fact in the field, it still seems like the claims it’s making might not translate to the RSP context fairly well. In particular, RSPs are a legislative framework on a specific (currently niche) issue of AI safety. The fact that Presidents who in general get things done tend to get other benefits including perhaps getting more things done later doesn’t seem that relevant to the question of to what extent frameworks on a specific issue tend to be “locked in” after being enacted into law, vs. useful blueprints for future iteration (including potentially large revisions to the framework).
Again, I appreciate you at least providing some evidence but it doesn’t seem convincing to me. FWIW my intuitions lean a bit toward your claims (coming from a startup-y background of push out an MVP then iterate from there), but I have a lot of uncertainty.
(This comment is somewhat like an expanded version of my tweet, which also asked for “Any high-quality analyses on whether pushing more ambitious policies generally helps/hurts the more moderate policies, and vice/versa?”. I received answers like “it depends” and “unclear”.)
One reason why I haven’t provided much evidence is that I think it’s substantially harder to give evidence of a “for all” claim (my side of the claim) than a “there exists” (what I ask Evan). I claim that it doesn’t happen that a framework on a niche area evolves so fast without accidents based on what I’ve seen, even in domains with substantial updates, like aviation and nuclear.
I could potentially see it happening with large accidents, but I personally don’t want to bet on that and I would want it to be transparent if that’s the assumption. I also don’t buy the “small coordinations allow larger coordinations” for domain-specific policy. Beyond what you said above, my sense is that policymakers satisfice and hence tend to not come back on a policy that sucks if that’s sufficiently good-looking to stakeholders to not have substantial incentives to change.
GDPR cookies banner sucks for everyone and haven’t been updated yet, 7 years after GDPR. Standards in the EU are not even updated more rapidly than 5y by default (I’m talking about standards, not regulation), and we’ll have to bargain to try to bring it down to reasonable timeframes AI-specific.
IAEA & safety in nuclear upgraded substantially after each accident, likewise for aviation but we’re talking about decades, not 5 years.
I appreciate the evidence you’ve provided on this, and in particular I think it’s more than has been provided for the opposite claim and would encourage Simeon and others criticizing RSPs along these lines to provide more evidence (as I commented on a draft of his post).
That being said, I don’t yet find the evidence you’ve provided particularly compelling. I believe you are referring mainly to this section of your posts:
I don’t understand how the links in this section show that “Everybody Loves a Winner” is a fairly well-established fact that translates to the situation of RSPs. The first link is an op-ed that is paywalled. The second link is a 2013 paper with 7 citations. From the abstract it appears to show that US presidents get higher approval ratings when they succeed in passing legislation, and vice versa. The third link is a 2011 paper with 62 citations (which seems higher, not sure how high this is for its field). From the abstract it appears to show that Presidents which pass agendas in Congress help their party win more Congressional seats. These interpretations don’t seem too different from the way you summarized it.
Assuming that this version of “Everybody Loves a Winner” is in fact a well-established fact in the field, it still seems like the claims it’s making might not translate to the RSP context fairly well. In particular, RSPs are a legislative framework on a specific (currently niche) issue of AI safety. The fact that Presidents who in general get things done tend to get other benefits including perhaps getting more things done later doesn’t seem that relevant to the question of to what extent frameworks on a specific issue tend to be “locked in” after being enacted into law, vs. useful blueprints for future iteration (including potentially large revisions to the framework).
Again, I appreciate you at least providing some evidence but it doesn’t seem convincing to me. FWIW my intuitions lean a bit toward your claims (coming from a startup-y background of push out an MVP then iterate from there), but I have a lot of uncertainty.
(This comment is somewhat like an expanded version of my tweet, which also asked for “Any high-quality analyses on whether pushing more ambitious policies generally helps/hurts the more moderate policies, and vice/versa?”. I received answers like “it depends” and “unclear”.)
Thanks Eli for the comment.
One reason why I haven’t provided much evidence is that I think it’s substantially harder to give evidence of a “for all” claim (my side of the claim) than a “there exists” (what I ask Evan). I claim that it doesn’t happen that a framework on a niche area evolves so fast without accidents based on what I’ve seen, even in domains with substantial updates, like aviation and nuclear.
I could potentially see it happening with large accidents, but I personally don’t want to bet on that and I would want it to be transparent if that’s the assumption. I also don’t buy the “small coordinations allow larger coordinations” for domain-specific policy. Beyond what you said above, my sense is that policymakers satisfice and hence tend to not come back on a policy that sucks if that’s sufficiently good-looking to stakeholders to not have substantial incentives to change.
GDPR cookies banner sucks for everyone and haven’t been updated yet, 7 years after GDPR. Standards in the EU are not even updated more rapidly than 5y by default (I’m talking about standards, not regulation), and we’ll have to bargain to try to bring it down to reasonable timeframes AI-specific.
IAEA & safety in nuclear upgraded substantially after each accident, likewise for aviation but we’re talking about decades, not 5 years.