The author is using “we” in several places and maybe not consistently. Sometimes “we” seems to be them and the readers, or them and the EA community, and sometimes it seems to be “the US”. Now you are also using an “us” without it being clear (at least to me) who that refers to.
Who do you mean by ‘The country with the community of people who have been thinking about this the longest’ and what is your positive evidence for the claim that other communities (e.g., certain national intelligence communities) haven’t thought about that for at least as long?
I took your comment to have two parts it was critiquing:
The floating use of the word ‘we’ (which I agree is ambiguous, but basically don’t care about).
The ‘us vs China’ frame as a whole (which has some surface area with the floating antecedent of the word ‘we’, but is a distinct and less pedantic point).
My response was addressing point 2, not point 1, and this was intentional. I will continue not to engage on point 1, because I don’t think it matters. If you’re devoted to thinking Lintz is a race-stoking war hawk due to antecedent ambiguity in a quickly-drafted post, and my bid to dissuade you of this was ineffective, that’s basically fine with me.
“Who do you mean by ‘The country with the community of people who have been thinking about this the longest’”
The US — where ~all the labs are based, where ~all the AI safety research has been written, where Chinese ML engineers have told me directly that, when it comes to AI and ML, they think exclusively in English. Where a plurality of users of this forum live, where the large models that enabled the development of DeepSeek were designed to begin with, where the world’s most powerful military resides, where....
Yes, a US-centric view is an important thing to inspect in all contexts, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that the US is the most important actor in the current setting (could change but probably not), and to (for a US-based person who works on policy… in the US, as Lintz does, speaking to a largely US-based audience) use ‘we’ to refer to the US.
“What is your positive evidence for the claim that other communities (e.g., certain national intelligence communities) haven’t thought about that for at least as long?”
I want to point out that this is unfair, since meeting this burden of proof would require comprehensive privileged knowledge of the activities over the past half century of every intelligence agency on the planet. My guess is you know that I don’t have that!
Things I do know:
People who’ve been in touch with US intelligence agencies since ~2017 have reported that getting them to take AI seriously has been an uphill battle (not only from an x-risk perspective, but as ‘a thing that will happen at all’).
US intelligence agencies are currently consulting with senior folks in our sphere, at least occasionally, which indicates that they may lack confident inside-view takes on the situation.
The US is currently dropping the ball relative to its stated goals (i.e. Taiwan tariffs), which indicates that the more informed parts of government either don’t have much power or aren’t all that informed actually! (probably mostly the former, but I’m sure the latter has weight, too)
Finally: “Positive evidence.… have not” is a construction I would urge you to reconsider — positive evidence for a negative assertion is a notoriously difficult thing to get.
The author is using “we” in several places and maybe not consistently. Sometimes “we” seems to be them and the readers, or them and the EA community, and sometimes it seems to be “the US”. Now you are also using an “us” without it being clear (at least to me) who that refers to.
Who do you mean by ‘The country with the community of people who have been thinking about this the longest’ and what is your positive evidence for the claim that other communities (e.g., certain national intelligence communities) haven’t thought about that for at least as long?
I took your comment to have two parts it was critiquing:
The floating use of the word ‘we’ (which I agree is ambiguous, but basically don’t care about).
The ‘us vs China’ frame as a whole (which has some surface area with the floating antecedent of the word ‘we’, but is a distinct and less pedantic point).
My response was addressing point 2, not point 1, and this was intentional. I will continue not to engage on point 1, because I don’t think it matters. If you’re devoted to thinking Lintz is a race-stoking war hawk due to antecedent ambiguity in a quickly-drafted post, and my bid to dissuade you of this was ineffective, that’s basically fine with me.
“Who do you mean by ‘The country with the community of people who have been thinking about this the longest’”
The US — where ~all the labs are based, where ~all the AI safety research has been written, where Chinese ML engineers have told me directly that, when it comes to AI and ML, they think exclusively in English. Where a plurality of users of this forum live, where the large models that enabled the development of DeepSeek were designed to begin with, where the world’s most powerful military resides, where....
Yes, a US-centric view is an important thing to inspect in all contexts, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that the US is the most important actor in the current setting (could change but probably not), and to (for a US-based person who works on policy… in the US, as Lintz does, speaking to a largely US-based audience) use ‘we’ to refer to the US.
“What is your positive evidence for the claim that other communities (e.g., certain national intelligence communities) haven’t thought about that for at least as long?”
I want to point out that this is unfair, since meeting this burden of proof would require comprehensive privileged knowledge of the activities over the past half century of every intelligence agency on the planet. My guess is you know that I don’t have that!
Things I do know:
People who’ve been in touch with US intelligence agencies since ~2017 have reported that getting them to take AI seriously has been an uphill battle (not only from an x-risk perspective, but as ‘a thing that will happen at all’).
US intelligence agencies are currently consulting with senior folks in our sphere, at least occasionally, which indicates that they may lack confident inside-view takes on the situation.
The US is currently dropping the ball relative to its stated goals (i.e. Taiwan tariffs), which indicates that the more informed parts of government either don’t have much power or aren’t all that informed actually! (probably mostly the former, but I’m sure the latter has weight, too)
Finally: “Positive evidence.… have not” is a construction I would urge you to reconsider — positive evidence for a negative assertion is a notoriously difficult thing to get.