Responsible scaling policies (RSPs) seem like a robustly good compromise with people who have different views from mine
2. It seems like it’s empirically wrong based on the strong pushback RSPs received so that at least you shouldn’t call it “robustly”, unless you mean a kind of modified version that would accommodate the most important parts of the pushback.
FWIW, my read here was that “people who have different views from mine” was in reference to these sets of people:
Some people think that the kinds of risks I’m worried about are far off, farfetched or ridiculous.
Some people think such risks might be real and soon, but that we’ll make enough progress on security, alignment, etc. to handle the risks—and indeed, that further scaling is an important enabler of this progress (e.g., a lot of alignment research will work better with more advanced systems).
Some people think the risks are real and soon, but might be relatively small, and that it’s therefore more important to focus on things like the U.S. staying ahead of other countries on AI progress.
That may be right but then the claim is wrong. The true claim would be “RSPs seem like a robustly good compromise with people who are more optimistic than me”.
That may be right but then the claim is wrong. The true claim would be “RSPs seem like a robustly good compromise with people who are more optimistic than me”.
IDK man, this seems like nitpicking to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Though I do agree that, on my read, it’s technically more accurate.
My sense here is that Holden is speaking from a place where he considers himself to be among the folks (like you and I) who put significant probability on AI posing a catastrophic/existential risk in the next few years, and “people who have different views from mine” is referring to folks who aren’t in that set.
(Of course, I don’t actually know what Holden meant. This is just what seemed like the natural interpretation to me.)
FWIW, my read here was that “people who have different views from mine” was in reference to these sets of people:
That may be right but then the claim is wrong. The true claim would be “RSPs seem like a robustly good compromise with people who are more optimistic than me”.
And then the claim becomes not really relevant?
IDK man, this seems like nitpicking to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Though I do agree that, on my read, it’s technically more accurate.
My sense here is that Holden is speaking from a place where he considers himself to be among the folks (like you and I) who put significant probability on AI posing a catastrophic/existential risk in the next few years, and “people who have different views from mine” is referring to folks who aren’t in that set.
(Of course, I don’t actually know what Holden meant. This is just what seemed like the natural interpretation to me.)
Why?
Because it’s meaningless to talk about a “compromise” dismissing one entire side of the people who disagree with you (but only one side!).
Like I could say “global compute thresholds is a robustly good compromise with everyone who disagrees with me”
*Footnote: only those who’re more pessimistic than me.