In my sordid past I did plenty of “finding the three people for nuanced logical mind-changing discussions amidst a dozens of ‘hey hey ho ho outgroup has got to go’”, so I’ll do the same here (if I’m in town), but selection effects seem deeply worrying (for example, you could go down to the soup kitchen or punk music venue and recruit all the young volunteers who are constantly sneering about how gentrifying techbros are evil and can’t coordinate on whether their “unabomber is actually based” argument is ironic or unironic, but you oughtn’t. The fact that this is even a question, that if you have a “mass movement” theory of change you’re constantly temped to lower your standards in this way, is so intrinsically risky that no one should be comfortable that ML safety or alignment is resorting to this sort of thing).
This strikes me as the kind of political thinking I think you’re trying to avoid. Contempt is not good for thought. Advocacy is not the only way to be tempted to lower your epistemic standards. I think you’re doing it right now when you other me or this type of intervention.
This seems kinda fair, I’d like to clarify—I largely trust the first few dozen people, I just expect depending on how growth/acquisition is done if there are more than a couple instances of protests to have to deal with all the values diversity underlying the different reasons for joining in. This subject seems unusually fraught in potential to generate conflationary alliance https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6YHHWqmQ7x6vf4s5C sorta things.
Overall I didn’t mean to other you—in fact, never said this publicly, but a couple months ago there was a related post of yours that got me saying “yeah we’re lucky holly is on this / she seems better suited than most would be to navigate this” cuz I’ve been consuming your essays for years. I also did not mean to insinuate that you hadn’t thought it through—I meant to signal “here’s a random guy who cares about this consideration” just as an outside vote of “hope this doesn’t get triage’d out”. I basically assumed you had threatmodeled interactions with different strains of populism
Yeah, I’ve been weighing a lot whether big tent approaches are something I can pull off at this stage or whether I should stick to “Pause AI”. The Meta protest is kind of an experiment in that regard and it has already been harder than I expected to get the message about irreversible proliferation across well. Pause is sort of automatically a big tent because it would address all AI harms. People can be very aligned on Pause as a policy without having the same motivations. Not releasing model weights is more of a one-off issue and requires a lot of inferential distance crossing even with knowledgeable people. So I’ll probably keep the next several events focused on Pause, a message much better suited to advocacy.
In my sordid past I did plenty of “finding the three people for nuanced logical mind-changing discussions amidst a dozens of ‘hey hey ho ho outgroup has got to go’”, so I’ll do the same here (if I’m in town), but selection effects seem deeply worrying (for example, you could go down to the soup kitchen or punk music venue and recruit all the young volunteers who are constantly sneering about how gentrifying techbros are evil and can’t coordinate on whether their “unabomber is actually based” argument is ironic or unironic, but you oughtn’t. The fact that this is even a question, that if you have a “mass movement” theory of change you’re constantly temped to lower your standards in this way, is so intrinsically risky that no one should be comfortable that ML safety or alignment is resorting to this sort of thing).
This strikes me as the kind of political thinking I think you’re trying to avoid. Contempt is not good for thought. Advocacy is not the only way to be tempted to lower your epistemic standards. I think you’re doing it right now when you other me or this type of intervention.
This seems kinda fair, I’d like to clarify—I largely trust the first few dozen people, I just expect depending on how growth/acquisition is done if there are more than a couple instances of protests to have to deal with all the values diversity underlying the different reasons for joining in. This subject seems unusually fraught in potential to generate conflationary alliance https://www.lesswrong.com/s/6YHHWqmQ7x6vf4s5C sorta things.
Overall I didn’t mean to other you—in fact, never said this publicly, but a couple months ago there was a related post of yours that got me saying “yeah we’re lucky holly is on this / she seems better suited than most would be to navigate this” cuz I’ve been consuming your essays for years. I also did not mean to insinuate that you hadn’t thought it through—I meant to signal “here’s a random guy who cares about this consideration” just as an outside vote of “hope this doesn’t get triage’d out”. I basically assumed you had threatmodeled interactions with different strains of populism
Yeah, I’ve been weighing a lot whether big tent approaches are something I can pull off at this stage or whether I should stick to “Pause AI”. The Meta protest is kind of an experiment in that regard and it has already been harder than I expected to get the message about irreversible proliferation across well. Pause is sort of automatically a big tent because it would address all AI harms. People can be very aligned on Pause as a policy without having the same motivations. Not releasing model weights is more of a one-off issue and requires a lot of inferential distance crossing even with knowledgeable people. So I’ll probably keep the next several events focused on Pause, a message much better suited to advocacy.