Statements made to the media pass through an extremely lossy compression channel, then are coarse-grained, and then turned into speech acts.
That lossy channel has maybe one bit of capacity on the EA thing. You can turn on a bit that says “your opinions about AI risk should cluster with your opinions about Effective Altruists”, or not. You don’t get more nuance than that.[1]
If you have to choose between outputting the more informative speech act[2] and saying something literally true, it’s more cooperative to get the output speech act correct.
(This is different from the supreme court case, where I would agree with you)
I’m not sure you could make the other side of the channel say “Dan Hendrycks is EA adjacent but that’s not particularly necessary for his argument” even if you spent your whole bandwidth budget trying to explain that one message.
Statements made to the media pass through an extremely lossy compression channel, then are coarse-grained, and then turned into speech acts.
That lossy channel has maybe one bit of capacity on the EA thing. You can turn on a bit that says “your opinions about AI risk should cluster with your opinions about Effective Altruists”, or not. You don’t get more nuance than that.[1]
If you have to choose between outputting the more informative speech act[2] and saying something literally true, it’s more cooperative to get the output speech act correct.
(This is different from the supreme court case, where I would agree with you)
I’m not sure you could make the other side of the channel say “Dan Hendrycks is EA adjacent but that’s not particularly necessary for his argument” even if you spent your whole bandwidth budget trying to explain that one message.
See Grice’s Maxims