Limited tractability is easily outweighed by a very high potential impact.
This is the case only if you make the assumption that protesting is incapable of having a negative impact on outcomes either directly by creating a negative impact or indirectly by causing people supporting the other, richer and better connected side to put more effort into regulatory capture. Other people have more made specific claims about the nature of PauseAI’s campaigns; I’m pointing out that this is a battle where their expected outcome isn’t necessarily positive even if they’re pretty good...
(Relevant context: the incoming US administration is ambivalent at best towards the likes of Altman but is extremely hostile to doom and safety narratives to the point it sees partisan advantage in being seen to rejecting them in favour of economic growth; it also sees arms races as things to participate in and win.)
And even if one ignores the abundance of evidence that protest movements often have negative impacts (particularly in the short term, which is what PauseAI care about) and that this might be one of those cases, the Pascalian argument that the payoffs are so high the lack of tractability is irrelevant to its effectiveness only works if there’s literally no plausibly more effective ways to achieve the same goal.
This is the case only if you make the assumption that protesting is incapable of having a negative impact on outcomes either directly by creating a negative impact or indirectly by causing people supporting the other, richer and better connected side to put more effort into regulatory capture. Other people have more made specific claims about the nature of PauseAI’s campaigns; I’m pointing out that this is a battle where their expected outcome isn’t necessarily positive even if they’re pretty good...
(Relevant context: the incoming US administration is ambivalent at best towards the likes of Altman but is extremely hostile to doom and safety narratives to the point it sees partisan advantage in being seen to rejecting them in favour of economic growth; it also sees arms races as things to participate in and win.)
And even if one ignores the abundance of evidence that protest movements often have negative impacts (particularly in the short term, which is what PauseAI care about) and that this might be one of those cases, the Pascalian argument that the payoffs are so high the lack of tractability is irrelevant to its effectiveness only works if there’s literally no plausibly more effective ways to achieve the same goal.