I haven’t had time to write my thoughts on when strategy research should and shouldn’t be public, but I note that this recent post by Spiracular touches on many of the points that I would touch on in talking about the pros and cons of secrecy around infohazards.
The main claim that I would make about extending this to strategy is that strategy implies details. If I have a strategy that emphasizes that we need to be careful around biosecurity, that implies technical facts about the relative risks of biology and other sciences.
For example, the US developed the Space Shuttle with a justification that didn’t add up (ostensibly it would save money, but it was obvious that it wouldn’t). The Soviets, trusting in the rationality of the US government, inferred that there must be some secret application for which the Space Shuttle was useful, and so developed a clone (so that when the secret application was unveiled, they would be able to deploy it immediately instead of having to build their own shuttle from scratch then). If in fact an application like that had existed, it seems likely that the Soviets could have found it by reasoning through “what do they know that I don’t?” when they might not have found it by reasoning from scratch.
I haven’t had time to write my thoughts on when strategy research should and shouldn’t be public, but I note that this recent post by Spiracular touches on many of the points that I would touch on in talking about the pros and cons of secrecy around infohazards.
The main claim that I would make about extending this to strategy is that strategy implies details. If I have a strategy that emphasizes that we need to be careful around biosecurity, that implies technical facts about the relative risks of biology and other sciences.
For example, the US developed the Space Shuttle with a justification that didn’t add up (ostensibly it would save money, but it was obvious that it wouldn’t). The Soviets, trusting in the rationality of the US government, inferred that there must be some secret application for which the Space Shuttle was useful, and so developed a clone (so that when the secret application was unveiled, they would be able to deploy it immediately instead of having to build their own shuttle from scratch then). If in fact an application like that had existed, it seems likely that the Soviets could have found it by reasoning through “what do they know that I don’t?” when they might not have found it by reasoning from scratch.