I think people have started to stretch the “missing mood” concept a bit too far for my taste.
What actual mood is missing here?
If you think that the default path of AI development leads towards eventual x-risk safety, but that rash actions like an AI pause could plausibly push us off that path and into catastrophe, then your default moods would be “fervent desire to dissuade people from doing the potentially disastrous thing”, and “happy that the disastrous thing probably won’t happen”. I think this matches with the mood the OP has provided.
I worry that these sort of meta-critiques can inadvertently be used to pressure people into one side of object-level disagreements. This isn’t a dig at you in particular, and I acknowledge that you made object level points as well, which really should be higher than this comment.
Noticing the irony that this very natural AI safety idea is (in Nora’s view) actually counterproductive and so constructively searching for ways to modify it and for adjacent ideas that don’t have its downsides
Sympathy with the pro-pause position and its proponents
Also feeling more conflicted in general—there are several real considerations in favor of pausing and Nora doesn’t grapple with them. (But this is a debate and maybe Nora is deliberately one-sidedly arguing for a particular position.)
Maybe “missing mood” isn’t exactly the right concept.
So the point of the “missing mood” concept was that it was an indicator for motivated reasoning. If someone reports to you that “lithuanians are genetically bad at chess” with a mood of unrestrained glee, you can rightly get suspicious of their methods. If they weren’t already prejudiced against lithuanians, they would find the result about chess ability sad and unfortunate.
I see no similar indicators here. From nora’s perspective, the AI pause and similar proposals are a bomb that will hurl us much closer to catastrophe. Why, (from their perspective) would there be a requirement to show sympathy for the bomb-throwers, or propose a modified bomb design?
Now of course, as a human being nora will have pre-existing biases towards one side or the other, and you can pick apart the piece if you want to find evidence of that (like using the phrase “heavy handed government regulation”). But having some bias towards one side doesn’t mean your arguments are wrong. The meta can have some uses if it’s truly blatant, but it’s the object level that actually matters.
I think people have started to stretch the “missing mood” concept a bit too far for my taste.
What actual mood is missing here?
If you think that the default path of AI development leads towards eventual x-risk safety, but that rash actions like an AI pause could plausibly push us off that path and into catastrophe, then your default moods would be “fervent desire to dissuade people from doing the potentially disastrous thing”, and “happy that the disastrous thing probably won’t happen”. I think this matches with the mood the OP has provided.
I worry that these sort of meta-critiques can inadvertently be used to pressure people into one side of object-level disagreements. This isn’t a dig at you in particular, and I acknowledge that you made object level points as well, which really should be higher than this comment.
Noticing the irony that this very natural AI safety idea is (in Nora’s view) actually counterproductive and so constructively searching for ways to modify it and for adjacent ideas that don’t have its downsides
Sympathy with the pro-pause position and its proponents
Also feeling more conflicted in general—there are several real considerations in favor of pausing and Nora doesn’t grapple with them. (But this is a debate and maybe Nora is deliberately one-sidedly arguing for a particular position.)
Maybe “missing mood” isn’t exactly the right concept.
So the point of the “missing mood” concept was that it was an indicator for motivated reasoning. If someone reports to you that “lithuanians are genetically bad at chess” with a mood of unrestrained glee, you can rightly get suspicious of their methods. If they weren’t already prejudiced against lithuanians, they would find the result about chess ability sad and unfortunate.
I see no similar indicators here. From nora’s perspective, the AI pause and similar proposals are a bomb that will hurl us much closer to catastrophe. Why, (from their perspective) would there be a requirement to show sympathy for the bomb-throwers, or propose a modified bomb design?
Now of course, as a human being nora will have pre-existing biases towards one side or the other, and you can pick apart the piece if you want to find evidence of that (like using the phrase “heavy handed government regulation”). But having some bias towards one side doesn’t mean your arguments are wrong. The meta can have some uses if it’s truly blatant, but it’s the object level that actually matters.