Does the stuff about pushiness make sense to you? What do you think of it? I think as is, the letter, if Tao reads it, would be mildly harmful, for the reasons described by other commenters.
I think I get it, but even if I didn’t now I know that’s how it sounds, and I think I know how to improve it. That will be for other mathematicians though (at least Maxim Kontsevich), see the edit to the post. Does the tone in the email to Demis seem like the right one to you?
In terms of tone it seems considerably less bad. I definitely like it more than the other one because it seems to make arguments rather than give social cues. It might be improved by adding links giving technical descriptions about the terms you use (e.g. inner alignment (Hubinger’s paper), IRL (maybe a Russell paper on CIRL)). I still don’t think it would work, simply because I would guess Hassabis gets a lot of email from randos who are confused and the email doesn’t seem to distinguish you from that (this may be totally unfair to you, and I’m not saying it’s correct or not, it’s just what I expect to happen). I also feel nervous about talking about arms races like that, enforcing a narrative where they’re not only real but the default (this is an awkward thing to think because it sounds like I’m trying to manage Hassabis’s social environment deceptively, and usually I would think that worrying about “reinforcing narratives” isn’t a main thing to worry about and instead one should just say what one thinks, but, still my instincts say to worry about that here, which might be incorrect).
Does the stuff about pushiness make sense to you? What do you think of it? I think as is, the letter, if Tao reads it, would be mildly harmful, for the reasons described by other commenters.
I think I get it, but even if I didn’t now I know that’s how it sounds, and I think I know how to improve it. That will be for other mathematicians though (at least Maxim Kontsevich), see the edit to the post. Does the tone in the email to Demis seem like the right one to you?
In terms of tone it seems considerably less bad. I definitely like it more than the other one because it seems to make arguments rather than give social cues. It might be improved by adding links giving technical descriptions about the terms you use (e.g. inner alignment (Hubinger’s paper), IRL (maybe a Russell paper on CIRL)). I still don’t think it would work, simply because I would guess Hassabis gets a lot of email from randos who are confused and the email doesn’t seem to distinguish you from that (this may be totally unfair to you, and I’m not saying it’s correct or not, it’s just what I expect to happen). I also feel nervous about talking about arms races like that, enforcing a narrative where they’re not only real but the default (this is an awkward thing to think because it sounds like I’m trying to manage Hassabis’s social environment deceptively, and usually I would think that worrying about “reinforcing narratives” isn’t a main thing to worry about and instead one should just say what one thinks, but, still my instincts say to worry about that here, which might be incorrect).