First, ‘well played, my friend’ re: your interaction with Thane Ruthenis. Perhaps like Thane, I saw red when reading your analogy, but then I remembered that this was sorta exactly your point: analogies are weak evidence, you can use them fairly easily to argue for all sorts of things, and so the various pro-AI-risk-concern analogies you dislike can be mirrored by anti-AI-risk-concern analogies as well. (Here I’ll also remind the reader of Yann LeCun’s analogy of AI to ballpoint pens...)
Here’s a suggestion for rule of thumb about how to use analogies; would you agree with this?
(1) People are free to make them but they are generally considered low-tier evidence, trumped by models and reference classes.
(2) NOTE: If you find yourself playing reference class tennis, what you are doing is analogy, not reference classes. Or rather the difference between analogy and reference class is a spectrum, and it’s the spectrum of how hard it is to play tennis. Something is a good reference class insofar as it’s uncontroversial.
(3) It is valid to reply to analogies with counter-analogies. “An eye for an eye.” However, it is usually best to do so briefly and then transition the dialogue into evaluating the analogies, i.e. pointing out ways in which they are relevantly similar or dissimilar to the case in question.
(4) And as said in point #1, even better is having actual models. But bandying about analogies and analyzing them is often a good first step towards having actual models!
Here are my thoughts about this post:
First, ‘well played, my friend’ re: your interaction with Thane Ruthenis. Perhaps like Thane, I saw red when reading your analogy, but then I remembered that this was sorta exactly your point: analogies are weak evidence, you can use them fairly easily to argue for all sorts of things, and so the various pro-AI-risk-concern analogies you dislike can be mirrored by anti-AI-risk-concern analogies as well. (Here I’ll also remind the reader of Yann LeCun’s analogy of AI to ballpoint pens...)
Here’s a suggestion for rule of thumb about how to use analogies; would you agree with this?
(1) People are free to make them but they are generally considered low-tier evidence, trumped by models and reference classes.
(2) NOTE: If you find yourself playing reference class tennis, what you are doing is analogy, not reference classes. Or rather the difference between analogy and reference class is a spectrum, and it’s the spectrum of how hard it is to play tennis. Something is a good reference class insofar as it’s uncontroversial.
(3) It is valid to reply to analogies with counter-analogies. “An eye for an eye.” However, it is usually best to do so briefly and then transition the dialogue into evaluating the analogies, i.e. pointing out ways in which they are relevantly similar or dissimilar to the case in question.
(4) And as said in point #1, even better is having actual models. But bandying about analogies and analyzing them is often a good first step towards having actual models!