Commenting here, because I don’t have an account at the EA forum.
Seems like we have two debates in parallel:
whether the protest information was misleading (in a very important way)
whether the misleading information was intentional.
From my perspective, the answer to the former question is “definitely yes”. If I participated in a protest against OpenAI cooperating with Pentagon, I would feel really ashamed if I later learned that the cooperation was about veteran suicide prevention. That would go against… well, the things that make me want to be a rationalist.
(An argument could be made that the veteran suicide prevention is a “foot in the door”. Today it is preventing veteran suicide; tomorrow it could be increasing the troops morale, effective propaganda, psychological terror, who knows what else. But even in that case, I would like to make it clear that I am protesting against crossing a line that potentially leads to bad things, rather than the bad things already happening today.)
The second question is tricky—Mikhail feels justified at using stronger language, because he communicated his concerns to the organizers and was ignored. But maybe it was a honest mistake in the communication. So, even if the accusation is justified, it would have been better to make it more separated from the main point.
I find it baffling that the most upvoted comment as of now calls it “a massive storm in a teacup”. I am just an outsider here, but this is exactly the kind of a thing that would make someone lose a lot of credibility in my eyes. If you wanted me to update towards “whatever EA people tell me is probably misinformation optimized for maximum outrage”, this would be a good way to do it. And the priors for “activists exaggerate” are already high.
Commenting here, because I don’t have an account at the EA forum.
Seems like we have two debates in parallel:
whether the protest information was misleading (in a very important way)
whether the misleading information was intentional.
From my perspective, the answer to the former question is “definitely yes”. If I participated in a protest against OpenAI cooperating with Pentagon, I would feel really ashamed if I later learned that the cooperation was about veteran suicide prevention. That would go against… well, the things that make me want to be a rationalist.
(An argument could be made that the veteran suicide prevention is a “foot in the door”. Today it is preventing veteran suicide; tomorrow it could be increasing the troops morale, effective propaganda, psychological terror, who knows what else. But even in that case, I would like to make it clear that I am protesting against crossing a line that potentially leads to bad things, rather than the bad things already happening today.)
The second question is tricky—Mikhail feels justified at using stronger language, because he communicated his concerns to the organizers and was ignored. But maybe it was a honest mistake in the communication. So, even if the accusation is justified, it would have been better to make it more separated from the main point.
I find it baffling that the most upvoted comment as of now calls it “a massive storm in a teacup”. I am just an outsider here, but this is exactly the kind of a thing that would make someone lose a lot of credibility in my eyes. If you wanted me to update towards “whatever EA people tell me is probably misinformation optimized for maximum outrage”, this would be a good way to do it. And the priors for “activists exaggerate” are already high.