So Gish gallop is not the ideal phrasing, although denotatively that is what I think it is.
A more productive phrasing on my part would be, when arguing it is charitable to only put forth the strongest arguments you have, rather than many questionable arguments.
This helps you persuade other people, if you are right, because they won’t see a weaker argument and think all your arguments are that weak.
This helps you be corrected, if you are wrong, because it’s more likely that someone will be able to respond to one or two arguments that you have identified as strong arguments, and show you where you are wrong—no one’s going to do that with 20 weaker arguments, because who has the time?
Put alternately, it also helps with epistemic legibility. It also shows that you aren’t just piling up a lot of soldiers for your side—it shows that you’ve put in the work to weed out the ones which matter, and are not putting weird demands on your reader’s attention by just putting all those which work.
You have a lot of sub-parts in your argument for 1, 2, 3 above. (Like, in the first section there are ~5 points I think are just wrong or misleading, and regardless of whether they are wrong or not are at least highly disputed). It doesn’t help to have succession of such disputed points—regardless of whether your audience is people you agree with or people you don’t!
The way I see the above post (and it’s accompaniment) is knocking down all the soldiers that I’ve encountered talking to lots of people about this over the last few weeks. I would appreciate it if you could stand them back up (because I’m reallytrying to not be so doomy, and not getting any satisfactory rebuttals).
It’s really not intended as a gish gallop, sorry if you are seeing it as such. I feel like I’m really only making 3 arguments:
1. AGI is near
2. Alignment isn’t ready (and therefore P(doom|AGI is high)
3. AGI is dangerous
And then drawing the conclusion from all these that we need a global AGI moratorium asap.
So Gish gallop is not the ideal phrasing, although denotatively that is what I think it is.
A more productive phrasing on my part would be, when arguing it is charitable to only put forth the strongest arguments you have, rather than many questionable arguments.
This helps you persuade other people, if you are right, because they won’t see a weaker argument and think all your arguments are that weak.
This helps you be corrected, if you are wrong, because it’s more likely that someone will be able to respond to one or two arguments that you have identified as strong arguments, and show you where you are wrong—no one’s going to do that with 20 weaker arguments, because who has the time?
Put alternately, it also helps with epistemic legibility. It also shows that you aren’t just piling up a lot of soldiers for your side—it shows that you’ve put in the work to weed out the ones which matter, and are not putting weird demands on your reader’s attention by just putting all those which work.
You have a lot of sub-parts in your argument for 1, 2, 3 above. (Like, in the first section there are ~5 points I think are just wrong or misleading, and regardless of whether they are wrong or not are at least highly disputed). It doesn’t help to have succession of such disputed points—regardless of whether your audience is people you agree with or people you don’t!
The way I see the above post (and it’s accompaniment) is knocking down all the soldiers that I’ve encountered talking to lots of people about this over the last few weeks. I would appreciate it if you could stand them back up (because I’m really trying to not be so doomy, and not getting any satisfactory rebuttals).