because I made an error in my original press release
This was, indeed, an honest mistake that you corrected. It is not at all what I’m talking about in the post. I want the community to pay attention to the final messaging being deceptive about the nature of OpenAI’s relationship with the Pentagon.
I am extremely saddened by the emotional impact this has on you. I did not wish that to happen and was surprised and confused by your reaction. Unfortunately, it seems that you still don’t understand the issue I’m pointing at; it is not the “charter” being in the original announcement, it’s the final wording misleading people.
the final messaging being deceptive about the nature of OpenAI’s relationship with the Pentagon.
Have I got this right? You’re saying that me saying they have a contract with the Pentagon is deceptive because people will assume it’s to do with weapons?
You are accusing me of deception in a very important arena. That is predictably emotionally devastating. Your writing is confusing and many people will come away thinking that what you’re saying is that I lied. The very thing I think you’re claiming I did to OpenAI you are doing to me.
But you think you’re expressing yourself clearly. I, too, thought I was expressing myself clearly and honestly. If people were confused, I regret that, and I would prefer they weren’t. I want them to have accurate impressions. One constraint you may not understand with advocacy is that you can’t just keep adding more text like on LessWrong. There’s only so much that can fit and it has to be comprehensible to lots of different people. I thought it would be confusing to add a bunch of stuff saying that maybe this particular contract with the military would be good (I’m not saying that, but I’m granting your take) when my point was that we don’t want certain boundaries to be crossed at all, because working with the military on something benign is a foot in the door to something more. I don’t think you understand what I meant to communicate with the protest small ask, and that is a failure on my part as the organizer, but it’s not a deception. For some reason you seem convinced I was trying to trick people into coming to this protest because I wouldn’t pitch the messaging to rationalist sensibilities (I suspect this is what you would consider “deontologically good”), but if I had, almost no one else would have understood it or paid attention to it.
There’s only so much that can fit and it has to be comprehensible to lots of different people.
I wonder if this relates to one of the takeaway lessons—perhaps we should give additional priority to showing drafts to people in different portions of the target audience, and discerning whether the message is conveying fair and accurate impressions to those different audience segments.
In my day job, I often write about niche topics for which I have much greater background knowledge than certain important audience segments will have. My immediate teammates often have a similar kind of background knowledge and understandings (although usually at a lower level by the time I’ve invested tons of time into a case!). So showing them my draft helps, but still leaves me open to blind spots. Better to also show my draft to some generalists, or specialists in unrelated areas of the law to figure out whether they are comprehending it accurately.
A mini-redteaming exercise might also help: Are there true, non-misleading one-sentence statements that my adversary could offer as a response that would have some reasonable readers feeling mislead? I see this issue in legal work too—a brief that could be seen as hiding the ball on key unfavorable facts or legal authorities is just not effective, because the judge may well feel the author was either of low competence or attempted to pull the wool over their eyes. After this happens ~two or three times, the judge now knows to view any further work product from that attorney (or on behalf of that client) with a jaundiced eye.
I should acknowledge that how much to engage with bad facts/law in one’s own legal advocacy brief is a tough balancing act on which the lawyers on a team often disagree. I assume that will be true in AI pause advocacy as well.
Left a comment there, but to repeat:
This was, indeed, an honest mistake that you corrected. It is not at all what I’m talking about in the post. I want the community to pay attention to the final messaging being deceptive about the nature of OpenAI’s relationship with the Pentagon.
I am extremely saddened by the emotional impact this has on you. I did not wish that to happen and was surprised and confused by your reaction. Unfortunately, it seems that you still don’t understand the issue I’m pointing at; it is not the “charter” being in the original announcement, it’s the final wording misleading people.
Have I got this right? You’re saying that me saying they have a contract with the Pentagon is deceptive because people will assume it’s to do with weapons?
You are accusing me of deception in a very important arena. That is predictably emotionally devastating. Your writing is confusing and many people will come away thinking that what you’re saying is that I lied. The very thing I think you’re claiming I did to OpenAI you are doing to me.
But you think you’re expressing yourself clearly. I, too, thought I was expressing myself clearly and honestly. If people were confused, I regret that, and I would prefer they weren’t. I want them to have accurate impressions. One constraint you may not understand with advocacy is that you can’t just keep adding more text like on LessWrong. There’s only so much that can fit and it has to be comprehensible to lots of different people. I thought it would be confusing to add a bunch of stuff saying that maybe this particular contract with the military would be good (I’m not saying that, but I’m granting your take) when my point was that we don’t want certain boundaries to be crossed at all, because working with the military on something benign is a foot in the door to something more. I don’t think you understand what I meant to communicate with the protest small ask, and that is a failure on my part as the organizer, but it’s not a deception. For some reason you seem convinced I was trying to trick people into coming to this protest because I wouldn’t pitch the messaging to rationalist sensibilities (I suspect this is what you would consider “deontologically good”), but if I had, almost no one else would have understood it or paid attention to it.
I wonder if this relates to one of the takeaway lessons—perhaps we should give additional priority to showing drafts to people in different portions of the target audience, and discerning whether the message is conveying fair and accurate impressions to those different audience segments.
In my day job, I often write about niche topics for which I have much greater background knowledge than certain important audience segments will have. My immediate teammates often have a similar kind of background knowledge and understandings (although usually at a lower level by the time I’ve invested tons of time into a case!). So showing them my draft helps, but still leaves me open to blind spots. Better to also show my draft to some generalists, or specialists in unrelated areas of the law to figure out whether they are comprehending it accurately.
A mini-redteaming exercise might also help: Are there true, non-misleading one-sentence statements that my adversary could offer as a response that would have some reasonable readers feeling mislead? I see this issue in legal work too—a brief that could be seen as hiding the ball on key unfavorable facts or legal authorities is just not effective, because the judge may well feel the author was either of low competence or attempted to pull the wool over their eyes. After this happens ~two or three times, the judge now knows to view any further work product from that attorney (or on behalf of that client) with a jaundiced eye.
I should acknowledge that how much to engage with bad facts/law in one’s own legal advocacy brief is a tough balancing act on which the lawyers on a team often disagree. I assume that will be true in AI pause advocacy as well.