My concern is less your email, and more the precedent. Having the rationality community model and encourage obviously undesired forms of contact with high-prestige figures seems like it could lead to intrusions of privacy. One person sending an email is ignorable. If emails, phone calls, unsolicited office visits, etc. start piling up under the banner of “AI risk,” it could feel quite invasive to those on the receiving end. My concern in particular is that people doing as you’re doing may not have the capacity to coordinate their actions. We may not even know whether or how much “randomly emailing Terry Tao about X risk” is going on.
That’s part of the point of the post, to coordinate so that fewer emails are sent. I asked if anyone tried something similar and asked people not to send their own emails without telling the rest of us.
My concern is less your email, and more the precedent. Having the rationality community model and encourage obviously undesired forms of contact with high-prestige figures seems like it could lead to intrusions of privacy. One person sending an email is ignorable. If emails, phone calls, unsolicited office visits, etc. start piling up under the banner of “AI risk,” it could feel quite invasive to those on the receiving end. My concern in particular is that people doing as you’re doing may not have the capacity to coordinate their actions. We may not even know whether or how much “randomly emailing Terry Tao about X risk” is going on.
That’s part of the point of the post, to coordinate so that fewer emails are sent. I asked if anyone tried something similar and asked people not to send their own emails without telling the rest of us.