(I’m spinning this comment out because it’s pretty different in style and seems worth being able to reply to separately. Please let me know if this kind of chain-posting is frowned upon here.)
Another downside to declaring things empirically out of reach and relying on priors for your EV calculations and subsequent actions is that it more-or-less inevitably converts epistemic disagreements into conflict.
If it seems likely to you that this is the way things are (and so we should pause indefinitely) but it seems highly unlikely to me (and so we should not) then we have no choice but to just advocate for different things. There’s not even the prospect of having recourse to better evidence to win over third parties, so the conflict becomes no-holds-barred. I see this right now on Twitter and it makes me very sad. I think we can do better.
(apologies for slowness; I’m not here much) I’d say it’s more about being willing to update on less direct evidence when the risk of getting more direct evidence is high.
Clearly we should aim to get more evidence. The question is how to best do that safely. At present we seem to be taking the default path—of gathering evidence in about the easiest way, rather than going for something harder, slower and safer. (e.g. all the “we need to work with frontier models” stuff; I do expect that’s most efficient on the empirical side; I don’t expect it’s a safe approach)
(I’m spinning this comment out because it’s pretty different in style and seems worth being able to reply to separately. Please let me know if this kind of chain-posting is frowned upon here.)
Another downside to declaring things empirically out of reach and relying on priors for your EV calculations and subsequent actions is that it more-or-less inevitably converts epistemic disagreements into conflict.
If it seems likely to you that this is the way things are (and so we should pause indefinitely) but it seems highly unlikely to me (and so we should not) then we have no choice but to just advocate for different things. There’s not even the prospect of having recourse to better evidence to win over third parties, so the conflict becomes no-holds-barred. I see this right now on Twitter and it makes me very sad. I think we can do better.
(apologies for slowness; I’m not here much)
I’d say it’s more about being willing to update on less direct evidence when the risk of getting more direct evidence is high.
Clearly we should aim to get more evidence. The question is how to best do that safely. At present we seem to be taking the default path—of gathering evidence in about the easiest way, rather than going for something harder, slower and safer. (e.g. all the “we need to work with frontier models” stuff; I do expect that’s most efficient on the empirical side; I don’t expect it’s a safe approach)