One thing that me more comfortable with making statements that are less nuanced in some circumstances is Wittgenstein’s idea of language games. Rationalists have a tendency of taking words literally, whilst Wittgenstein views statements as moves in a language games where there are a host of different language games for different situations and people can generally figure it out. Specifically, there seems to be some distinct language games associated with protests where people understand that your sign or slogan doesn’t cover everything in complete nuance. At the same time, I think we should be trying to raise the bar in terms of the epistemics/openness of our advocacy work and I do see risks in people taking this reasoning too far.
There is a massive tradeoff between nuance/high epistemic integrity and reach. The general population is not going to engage in complex nuanced arguments about this, and prestigious or high-power people who are able to understand the discussion and potentially steer government policy in a meaningful way won’t engage in this type of protest for many reasons, so the movement should be ready for dumbing-down or at least simplifying the message in order to increase reach, or risk remaining a niche group (I think “Pause AI” is already a good slogan in that sense).
a) Dumbing down the message will cost us support from ML engineers and researchers. b) If the message is dumbed down too much, then the public is unlikely to create pressure towards the kinds of actions that will actually help as opposed to pressuring politicians to engage in shallow, signaling-driven responses.
I think the idea we’re going to be able to precisely steer government policy to achieve nuanced outcomes is dead on arrival—we’ve been failing at that forever. What’s in our favor this time is that there are many more ways to cripple advance than to accelerate it, so it may be enough for the push to be simply directionally right for things to slow down (with a lot of collateral damage).
Our inner game policy efforts are already bearing fruit. We can’t precisely define exactly what will happen, but we certainly can push for nuance via this route than we would be able to through the public outreach route.
I can see why you would be a lot more positive on advocacy if you thought that crippling advances is a way out of our current crisis. Unfortunately, I fear that will just result in AI being built by whichever country/actor cares the least about safety. So I think we need more nuance than this.
One thing that me more comfortable with making statements that are less nuanced in some circumstances is Wittgenstein’s idea of language games. Rationalists have a tendency of taking words literally, whilst Wittgenstein views statements as moves in a language games where there are a host of different language games for different situations and people can generally figure it out. Specifically, there seems to be some distinct language games associated with protests where people understand that your sign or slogan doesn’t cover everything in complete nuance. At the same time, I think we should be trying to raise the bar in terms of the epistemics/openness of our advocacy work and I do see risks in people taking this reasoning too far.
There is a massive tradeoff between nuance/high epistemic integrity and reach. The general population is not going to engage in complex nuanced arguments about this, and prestigious or high-power people who are able to understand the discussion and potentially steer government policy in a meaningful way won’t engage in this type of protest for many reasons, so the movement should be ready for dumbing-down or at least simplifying the message in order to increase reach, or risk remaining a niche group (I think “Pause AI” is already a good slogan in that sense).
I agree that there is a trade-off here, however:
a) Dumbing down the message will cost us support from ML engineers and researchers.
b) If the message is dumbed down too much, then the public is unlikely to create pressure towards the kinds of actions that will actually help as opposed to pressuring politicians to engage in shallow, signaling-driven responses.
I think the idea we’re going to be able to precisely steer government policy to achieve nuanced outcomes is dead on arrival—we’ve been failing at that forever. What’s in our favor this time is that there are many more ways to cripple advance than to accelerate it, so it may be enough for the push to be simply directionally right for things to slow down (with a lot of collateral damage).
Our inner game policy efforts are already bearing fruit. We can’t precisely define exactly what will happen, but we certainly can push for nuance via this route than we would be able to through the public outreach route.
I can see why you would be a lot more positive on advocacy if you thought that crippling advances is a way out of our current crisis. Unfortunately, I fear that will just result in AI being built by whichever country/actor cares the least about safety. So I think we need more nuance than this.