I don’t think the placement of fault is causally related to whether communication is difficult for him, really. To refer back to the original claim being made, Adam Schollsaid that
My guess is that this seems so stressful mostly because Anthropic’s plan is in fact so hard to defend… [I]t seems unsurprising (and good) that people might sometimes strongly object; if Anthropic had more reassuring things to say, I’m guessing it would feel less stressful to try to reassure them.
I think the amount of stress incurred when doing public communication is nearly orthogonal to these factors, and in particular is, when trying to be as careful about anything as Zac is trying to be about confidentiality, quite high at baseline. I don’t think Adam Scholl’s assessment arose from a usefully-predictive model, nor one which was likely to reflect the inside view.
Ben Pace has said that perhaps he doesn’t disagree with you in particular about this, but I sure think I do.[1]
I think the amount of stress incurred when doing public communication is nearly orthogonal to these factors, and in particular is, when trying to be as careful about anything as Zac is trying to be about confidentiality, quite high at baseline.
I don’t see how the first half of this could be correct, and while the second half could be true, it doesn’t seem to me to offer meaningful support for the first half either (instead, it seems rather… off-topic).
As a general matter, even if it were the case that no matter what you say, at least one person will actively misinterpret your words, this fact would have little bearing on whether you can causally influence the proportion of readers/community members that end up with (what seem to you like) the correct takeaways from a discussion of that kind.
Moreover, in a spot where you have something meaningful and responsible, etc, that you and your company have done to deal with safety issues, the major concern in your mind when communicating publicly is figuring out how to make it clear to everyone that you are on top of things without revealing confidential information. That is certainly stressful, but much less so than the additional constraint you have in a world in which you do not have anything concrete that you can back your generic claims of responsibility with, since that is a spot where you can no longer fall back on (a partial version of) the truth as your defense. For the vast majority of human beings, lying and intentional obfuscation with the intent to mislead are significantly more psychologically straining than telling the truth as-you-see-it is.
Overall, I also think I disagree about the amount of stress that would be caused by conversations with AI safety community members. As I have said earlier:
AI safety community members are not actually arbitrarily intelligent Machiavellians with the ability to convincingly twist every (in-reality) success story into an (in-perception) irresponsible gaffe;[1] the extent to which they can do this depends very heavily on the extent to which you have anything substantive to bring up in the first place.
[1] Quite the opposite, actually, if the change in the wider society’s opinions about EA in the wake of the SBF scandal is any representative indication of how the rationalist/EA/AI safety cluster typically handles PR stuff.
In any case, I have already made all these points in a number of ways in my previous response to you (which you haven’t addressed, and which still seem to me to be entirely correct).
Yeah, I totally think your perspective makes sense and I appreciate you bringing it up, even though I disagree.
I acknowledge that someone who has good justifications for their position but just has made a bunch of reasonable confidentiality agreements around the topic should expect to run into a bunch of difficulties and stresses around public conflicts and arguments.
I think you go too far in saying that the stress is orthogonal to whether you have a good case to make, I think you can’t really think that it’s not a top-3 factor to how much stress you’re experiencing. As a pretty simple hypothetical, if you’re responding to a public scandal about whether you stole money, you’re gonna have a way more stressful time if you did steal money than if you didn’t (in substantial part because you’d be able to show the books and prove it).
Perhaps not so much disagreeing with you in particular, but disagreeing with my sense of what was being agreed upon in Zac’s comment and in the reacts, I further wanted to raise my hypothesis that a lot of the confidentiality constraints are unwarranted and actively obfuscatory, which does change who is responsible for the stress, but doesn’t change the fact that there is stress.
Added: Also, I think we would both agree that there would be less stress if there were fewer confidentiality restrictions.
I don’t think the placement of fault is causally related to whether communication is difficult for him, really. To refer back to the original claim being made, Adam Scholl said that
I think the amount of stress incurred when doing public communication is nearly orthogonal to these factors, and in particular is, when trying to be as careful about anything as Zac is trying to be about confidentiality, quite high at baseline. I don’t think Adam Scholl’s assessment arose from a usefully-predictive model, nor one which was likely to reflect the inside view.
Ben Pace has said that perhaps he doesn’t disagree with you in particular about this, but I sure think I do.[1]
I don’t see how the first half of this could be correct, and while the second half could be true, it doesn’t seem to me to offer meaningful support for the first half either (instead, it seems rather… off-topic).
As a general matter, even if it were the case that no matter what you say, at least one person will actively misinterpret your words, this fact would have little bearing on whether you can causally influence the proportion of readers/community members that end up with (what seem to you like) the correct takeaways from a discussion of that kind.
Moreover, in a spot where you have something meaningful and responsible, etc, that you and your company have done to deal with safety issues, the major concern in your mind when communicating publicly is figuring out how to make it clear to everyone that you are on top of things without revealing confidential information. That is certainly stressful, but much less so than the additional constraint you have in a world in which you do not have anything concrete that you can back your generic claims of responsibility with, since that is a spot where you can no longer fall back on (a partial version of) the truth as your defense. For the vast majority of human beings, lying and intentional obfuscation with the intent to mislead are significantly more psychologically straining than telling the truth as-you-see-it is.
Overall, I also think I disagree about the amount of stress that would be caused by conversations with AI safety community members. As I have said earlier:
In any case, I have already made all these points in a number of ways in my previous response to you (which you haven’t addressed, and which still seem to me to be entirely correct).
He also said that he thinks your perspective makes sense, which… I’m not really sure about.
Yeah, I totally think your perspective makes sense and I appreciate you bringing it up, even though I disagree.
I acknowledge that someone who has good justifications for their position but just has made a bunch of reasonable confidentiality agreements around the topic should expect to run into a bunch of difficulties and stresses around public conflicts and arguments.
I think you go too far in saying that the stress is orthogonal to whether you have a good case to make, I think you can’t really think that it’s not a top-3 factor to how much stress you’re experiencing. As a pretty simple hypothetical, if you’re responding to a public scandal about whether you stole money, you’re gonna have a way more stressful time if you did steal money than if you didn’t (in substantial part because you’d be able to show the books and prove it).
Perhaps not so much disagreeing with you in particular, but disagreeing with my sense of what was being agreed upon in Zac’s comment and in the reacts, I further wanted to raise my hypothesis that a lot of the confidentiality constraints are unwarranted and actively obfuscatory, which does change who is responsible for the stress, but doesn’t change the fact that there is stress.
Added: Also, I think we would both agree that there would be less stress if there were fewer confidentiality restrictions.