I’m hopeful that a sufficiently convincing demo could convince politicians/military brass/wealthy powerful people/the public. Probably different demos could be designed to be persuasive to these different audiences.
Ideally, the demos could be designed early, and you could get buy-in from the target audience that if the describe demo were successful then they would agree that “something needed to be done”.
Even better would be concrete commitments, but I think there’s value even without that.
Also being as prepared as possible to act on a range of plausible natural warning shots seems good. Getting similar pre-negotiated agreements that if X did happen, it should be considered a tipping point for taking action.
It is also possible that the scope of evangelists would need to be sufficient to convince people who matter. Some people who can make decisions might listen to someone with an Exotic-Sounding PhD from Berkeley. Others who matter might not. Just as an example, I think some politicians and wealthy powerful types may be more willing to listen to engineers than mathematicians or pure theoreticians. And a normal engineer might also carry more clout than someone from such exotica as silicon valley communities where people are into open relationships and go to burning man.
By analogy, some of this is kind of along the lines where sometimes people trust a nurse practitioner more deeply than a doctor. There may be good/bad reasoning behind that, but for some people it just is what it is. The rest probably comes down to tribal shibboleths. But these get important when you want people to hear you. Remember how little it mattered to many people when “1500 people with PhDs all signed this thing saying climate change is real.” I bet one blue-collar Civil Engineer with the education in hydrology to know exactly what he was talking about, would have been more convincing than 1500 PhDs to that whole tribe. And there could have been (still could be) a campaign to let that voice be heard rather than dismissing vast swaths of people, including those categories you mentioned above, who would have listened to him.
Politicians in general are typically uninformed about and have difficulty with highly-technical matters, even so far as what we all might consider “basic” frequentist statistics, let alone holes in those models. Let alone “The model has exfiltrated its own network weights!”
So in some sense, if you want the full weight of government involved, we need people who speak common languages with each of those different types you mentioned: Politicians, Military, Wealthy powerful, the public.
To that end, maybe we should be assembling like minded and smart people to talk about this using different languages and different expertise. Yes, the people from the think tanks. But also, people who others can really hear. Maybe we should develop a structure and culture here on LW to evangelize a *broader pool of types of evangelists.*
I’m hopeful that a sufficiently convincing demo could convince politicians/military brass/wealthy powerful people/the public. Probably different demos could be designed to be persuasive to these different audiences. Ideally, the demos could be designed early, and you could get buy-in from the target audience that if the describe demo were successful then they would agree that “something needed to be done”. Even better would be concrete commitments, but I think there’s value even without that. Also being as prepared as possible to act on a range of plausible natural warning shots seems good. Getting similar pre-negotiated agreements that if X did happen, it should be considered a tipping point for taking action.
It is also possible that the scope of evangelists would need to be sufficient to convince people who matter. Some people who can make decisions might listen to someone with an Exotic-Sounding PhD from Berkeley. Others who matter might not. Just as an example, I think some politicians and wealthy powerful types may be more willing to listen to engineers than mathematicians or pure theoreticians. And a normal engineer might also carry more clout than someone from such exotica as silicon valley communities where people are into open relationships and go to burning man.
By analogy, some of this is kind of along the lines where sometimes people trust a nurse practitioner more deeply than a doctor. There may be good/bad reasoning behind that, but for some people it just is what it is. The rest probably comes down to tribal shibboleths. But these get important when you want people to hear you. Remember how little it mattered to many people when “1500 people with PhDs all signed this thing saying climate change is real.” I bet one blue-collar Civil Engineer with the education in hydrology to know exactly what he was talking about, would have been more convincing than 1500 PhDs to that whole tribe. And there could have been (still could be) a campaign to let that voice be heard rather than dismissing vast swaths of people, including those categories you mentioned above, who would have listened to him.
Politicians in general are typically uninformed about and have difficulty with highly-technical matters, even so far as what we all might consider “basic” frequentist statistics, let alone holes in those models. Let alone “The model has exfiltrated its own network weights!”
So in some sense, if you want the full weight of government involved, we need people who speak common languages with each of those different types you mentioned: Politicians, Military, Wealthy powerful, the public.
To that end, maybe we should be assembling like minded and smart people to talk about this using different languages and different expertise. Yes, the people from the think tanks. But also, people who others can really hear. Maybe we should develop a structure and culture here on LW to evangelize a *broader pool of types of evangelists.*