(Cross-posted from the LW thread on this, not trying to double-post, but just to flag this concern here as well)
I think these people are trying to be good people in a tough situation.
But I don’t think it’s possibly tenable to evaluate PauseAI Global without understanding the actions of its US branch. I do not think this attempt to wave away widespread community discussions with a brief mention of “PauseAI US, which is a distinct entity with a different leadership team and approach”is remotely sufficient.
I also do not believe the history provided above is complete or candid without describing PauseAI Global’s co-evolution with PauseAI US in a much more substantive manner.
I would recommend greater candor and proactive disclosure while seeking funding.
In this post, we aim to provide a high-level overview of our approach. As you may have seen from the other comments people have been posting on LW, there was a lot to cover in numerous directions, and we want to be thoughtful in how we represent other entities. I appreciate you raising this.
As we said at the top of our post, we want this to be the beginning of a conversation, and there’s a lot more we plan to say. We’ll work our way through comments as we go.
To be really candid with you, at least in American English and the business communications cultures I’m most familiar with, this reads like you’re trying to manage this situation, and manage me in an HR-ish or customer-service-y way, while making clear to onlookers that you absolutely will never answer this question.
Is that the effect you want me to take away from your reply? I’m guessing it isn’t; if that guess is right, you might want to course-correct.
Thanks, Dave. That would be pretty silly of me (I don’t like feeling I’m talking to a wall, and I don’t want you to either), and I’m glad you asked for clarification rather than just concluding that was what I meant to do.
I’m sad that landed this way for you. I’ll try and say this again, and I hope this lands as the appreciative and cooperative reply I aimed to write: - there were a lot of things to say in this post, and there are several important things we didn’t have space to go into (seriously, that post would have been unbearably long). - the whole PauseAI and PauseAI US ‘parallel ontogeny’ arc is not central to this overview, especially since PauseAI US are their own entity and we don’t want to muddle that distinction by including them in this already long overview of our own org (it’s already pretty confusing to people that there should be 2 orgs with a related name/brand that aren’t the same org). - we do want to say more about that whole arc, and we will. If politicians’ or customer service agents’ promises leave you expecting that we won’t honour what we’ve committed to doing, you have my commiserations, and I hope you’ll assume good faith for a few days.
We’re resource-constrained and have other things to attend to; we’re working through comments at the pace at which we can reply clearly and thoughtfully, and we want to make sure everything we say about our ~shared history and present with PauseAI US is accurate. I replied to you over the weekend because I got the sense that there was some urgency on your side in knowing whether we intended to say more about this, and it seemed like a reasonable thing to do to confirm that. I only joined PauseAI’s federation as a staff member a few months ago, so it wouldn’t make sense for me to try and address this area I’m not super familiar with in a comment, but we do want to answer you, as well as other people who’ve asked questions we haven’t yet got round to replying to (substantively or at all).
Please give us a few days to work through comments.
Thanks, I appreciate you following up. I admit that I have very little expectation that PauseAI will substantively respond here, but I hope that expectation to be proven wrong.
(Cross-posted from the LW thread on this, not trying to double-post, but just to flag this concern here as well)
I think these people are trying to be good people in a tough situation.
But I don’t think it’s possibly tenable to evaluate PauseAI Global without understanding the actions of its US branch. I do not think this attempt to wave away widespread community discussions with a brief mention of “PauseAI US, which is a distinct entity with a different leadership team and approach” is remotely sufficient.
I also do not believe the history provided above is complete or candid without describing PauseAI Global’s co-evolution with PauseAI US in a much more substantive manner.
I would recommend greater candor and proactive disclosure while seeking funding.
Thank you for this.
In this post, we aim to provide a high-level overview of our approach. As you may have seen from the other comments people have been posting on LW, there was a lot to cover in numerous directions, and we want to be thoughtful in how we represent other entities. I appreciate you raising this.
As we said at the top of our post, we want this to be the beginning of a conversation, and there’s a lot more we plan to say. We’ll work our way through comments as we go.
To be really candid with you, at least in American English and the business communications cultures I’m most familiar with, this reads like you’re trying to manage this situation, and manage me in an HR-ish or customer-service-y way, while making clear to onlookers that you absolutely will never answer this question.
Is that the effect you want me to take away from your reply? I’m guessing it isn’t; if that guess is right, you might want to course-correct.
Thanks, Dave. That would be pretty silly of me (I don’t like feeling I’m talking to a wall, and I don’t want you to either), and I’m glad you asked for clarification rather than just concluding that was what I meant to do.
I’m sad that landed this way for you. I’ll try and say this again, and I hope this lands as the appreciative and cooperative reply I aimed to write:
- there were a lot of things to say in this post, and there are several important things we didn’t have space to go into (seriously, that post would have been unbearably long).
- the whole PauseAI and PauseAI US ‘parallel ontogeny’ arc is not central to this overview, especially since PauseAI US are their own entity and we don’t want to muddle that distinction by including them in this already long overview of our own org (it’s already pretty confusing to people that there should be 2 orgs with a related name/brand that aren’t the same org).
- we do want to say more about that whole arc, and we will. If politicians’ or customer service agents’ promises leave you expecting that we won’t honour what we’ve committed to doing, you have my commiserations, and I hope you’ll assume good faith for a few days.
We’re resource-constrained and have other things to attend to; we’re working through comments at the pace at which we can reply clearly and thoughtfully, and we want to make sure everything we say about our ~shared history and present with PauseAI US is accurate. I replied to you over the weekend because I got the sense that there was some urgency on your side in knowing whether we intended to say more about this, and it seemed like a reasonable thing to do to confirm that. I only joined PauseAI’s federation as a staff member a few months ago, so it wouldn’t make sense for me to try and address this area I’m not super familiar with in a comment, but we do want to answer you, as well as other people who’ve asked questions we haven’t yet got round to replying to (substantively or at all).
Please give us a few days to work through comments.
Thanks, I appreciate you following up. I admit that I have very little expectation that PauseAI will substantively respond here, but I hope that expectation to be proven wrong.