Without the paper these problems are only implicitly clear to people who are paying attention in a particular way, while with the paper it becomes easier to notice for more people. The value of transparency is in being transparent about doing the wrong thing, or about mitigating disaster in an ineffectual way. It’s less important for others to learn that you are not doing the wrong thing, or succeeding in mitigating problems. Similarly with arguments, the more useful arguments are those that show you to be wrong, or change your mind, not those that reiterate your correctness.
(Also, some of the things that are likely strategically ineffective can still help in the easy worlds, and a document like this makes it easier to deploy those mitigations. But security theater has its dangers, on balance it’s unclear.)
So I think it’s a good thing for a terrifying paper to get published. And similarly a good thing for a criticism of it to be easy to notice in association with it. Strongly upvoted. Replies in the direction of the parent comment would be appropriate in an appendix to the paper, but alas that’s not the form.
Without the paper these problems are only implicitly clear to people who are paying attention in a particular way, while with the paper it becomes easier to notice for more people. The value of transparency is in being transparent about doing the wrong thing, or about mitigating disaster in an ineffectual way. It’s less important for others to learn that you are not doing the wrong thing, or succeeding in mitigating problems. Similarly with arguments, the more useful arguments are those that show you to be wrong, or change your mind, not those that reiterate your correctness.
(Also, some of the things that are likely strategically ineffective can still help in the easy worlds, and a document like this makes it easier to deploy those mitigations. But security theater has its dangers, on balance it’s unclear.)
So I think it’s a good thing for a terrifying paper to get published. And similarly a good thing for a criticism of it to be easy to notice in association with it. Strongly upvoted. Replies in the direction of the parent comment would be appropriate in an appendix to the paper, but alas that’s not the form.