However, a specific [doesn’t understand an author better than coworkers] → [unlikely there’s a superhuman persuasion strategy] argument seems weak.
Note that I wasn’t making this argument. I was just reponding to one specific story and then noting “I’m pretty skeptical of the specific stories I’ve heard for wildly superhuman persuasion emerging from pretraining prior to human level R&D capabilties”.
This is obviously only one of many possible arguments.
However, I’m still unclear what you meant by “This level of understanding isn’t sufficient for superhuman persuasion.”. If ‘this’ referred to [human coworker level], then you’re correct (I now guess you did mean this ??), but it seems a mildly strange point to make. It’s not clear to me why it’d be significant in the context without strong assumptions on correlation of capability in different kinds of understanding/persuasion.
I interpreted ‘this’ as referring to the [understanding level of current models]. In that case it’s not clear to me that this isn’t sufficient for superhuman persuasion capability. (by which I mean having the capability to carry out at least one strategy that fairly robustly results in superhuman persuasiveness in some contexts)
Note that I wasn’t making this argument. I was just reponding to one specific story and then noting “I’m pretty skeptical of the specific stories I’ve heard for wildly superhuman persuasion emerging from pretraining prior to human level R&D capabilties”.
This is obviously only one of many possible arguments.
Sure, understood.
However, I’m still unclear what you meant by “This level of understanding isn’t sufficient for superhuman persuasion.”. If ‘this’ referred to [human coworker level], then you’re correct (I now guess you did mean this ??), but it seems a mildly strange point to make. It’s not clear to me why it’d be significant in the context without strong assumptions on correlation of capability in different kinds of understanding/persuasion.
I interpreted ‘this’ as referring to the [understanding level of current models]. In that case it’s not clear to me that this isn’t sufficient for superhuman persuasion capability. (by which I mean having the capability to carry out at least one strategy that fairly robustly results in superhuman persuasiveness in some contexts)
Yep, I just literally meant, “human coworker level doesn’t suffice”. I was just making a relatively narrow argument here, sorry about the confusion.