āIām not persuaded, although this is mainly owed to the common challenge that noting considerations āforā or āagainstā in principle does not give a lot of evidence of what balance to strike in practice.ā
I basically agree with this, with the proviso that Iām currently trying to work out what the considerations to be weighed even are in the first place. I currently feel like I have a worse explicit handle on the considerations mitigating in favour of openness than those mitigating in favour of secrecy. I do think these higher-level issues (around incentives, institutional quality, etc) are likely to be important, but I donāt yet know enough to put a number on that.
I think the points each of you make there are true and important.
As a further indication of the value of Willās point, I think a big part of the reason weāre having this discussion at all is probably Bostromās paper on information hazards, which is itself much more a list of considerations than an attempt to weigh them up. Bostrom makes this explicit:
The aim of this paper is to catalogue some of the various possible ways in which information can cause harm. We will not here seek to determine how common and serious these harms are or how they stack up against the many benefits of informationāquestions that would need to be engaged before one could reach a considered position about potential policy implications.
(We could describe efforts such as Bostromās as āmapping the spaceā of consequences worth thinking about further, without yet engaging in that further thought.)
It seems possible to me that weāve had more cataloguing of the considerations against openness than those for it, and thus that posts like this one can contribute usefully to the necessary step that comes before weighing up all the considerations in order to arrive at a well-informed decision. (For the same reason, it could also help slightly-inform all the other decisions we unfortunately have to make in the meantime.)
One caveat to that is that a post that mostly covers just the considerations that point in one direction could be counterproductive for those readers who havenāt seen the other posts that provide the counterbalance, or who saw them a long time ago. But that issue is hard to avoid, as you canāt cover everything in full detail in one place, and it also applies to Bostromās paper and to a post Iāll be making on this topic soon.
Another caveat in this particular case is that there are two related reasons why decisions on whether to develop/āshare (potentially hazardous) information may demand somewhat more caution than the average decision: the unilateralistās curse, and the fact that hard-to-reverse decisions destroy option value.
I personally think that itās still a good idea to openly discuss the reasons for openness, even if a post has to be somewhat lopsided in that direction for brevity and given that other posts were lopsided in the other direction. But I also personally think it might be good to explicitly note those extra reasons for caution somewhere within the āmostly-proā post, for readers who may come to conclusions on the basis of that one post by itself.
(Just to be clear, I donāt see this as disagreeing with Greg or Willās comments.)
I think the points each of you make there are true and important.
As a further indication of the value of Willās point, I think a big part of the reason weāre having this discussion at all is probably Bostromās paper on information hazards, which is itself much more a list of considerations than an attempt to weigh them up. Bostrom makes this explicit:
(We could describe efforts such as Bostromās as āmapping the spaceā of consequences worth thinking about further, without yet engaging in that further thought.)
It seems possible to me that weāve had more cataloguing of the considerations against openness than those for it, and thus that posts like this one can contribute usefully to the necessary step that comes before weighing up all the considerations in order to arrive at a well-informed decision. (For the same reason, it could also help slightly-inform all the other decisions we unfortunately have to make in the meantime.)
One caveat to that is that a post that mostly covers just the considerations that point in one direction could be counterproductive for those readers who havenāt seen the other posts that provide the counterbalance, or who saw them a long time ago. But that issue is hard to avoid, as you canāt cover everything in full detail in one place, and it also applies to Bostromās paper and to a post Iāll be making on this topic soon.
Another caveat in this particular case is that there are two related reasons why decisions on whether to develop/āshare (potentially hazardous) information may demand somewhat more caution than the average decision: the unilateralistās curse, and the fact that hard-to-reverse decisions destroy option value.
I personally think that itās still a good idea to openly discuss the reasons for openness, even if a post has to be somewhat lopsided in that direction for brevity and given that other posts were lopsided in the other direction. But I also personally think it might be good to explicitly note those extra reasons for caution somewhere within the āmostly-proā post, for readers who may come to conclusions on the basis of that one post by itself.
(Just to be clear, I donāt see this as disagreeing with Greg or Willās comments.)