I agree with your post overall and think that EA can be very pedantic, professorial, and overly averse to persuasion. I am very glad that you wrote this post and believe that EAs should credit more the importance of persuasion (and probably be more susceptible to positive persuasion as against criticism).
However, the title of your post suggested that the scout mindset is valuable only as a servant of persuasion. I think that it is important to note that scout mindset has other valuable applications.
Persuasion is my intervention at PauseAI US—never meant to imply it was the only intervention. Bednets, mentioned in the post, are soldiers that are not persuasion.
For a map (generated by a scout) to have value, you have to be able to do something with it (“doing” here being analogized to soldiers). It doesn’t have to be persuasion, but it also can’t be pure scoutly knowledge-seeking.
I agree with your post overall and think that EA can be very pedantic, professorial, and overly averse to persuasion. I am very glad that you wrote this post and believe that EAs should credit more the importance of persuasion (and probably be more susceptible to positive persuasion as against criticism).
However, the title of your post suggested that the scout mindset is valuable only as a servant of persuasion. I think that it is important to note that scout mindset has other valuable applications.
Persuasion is my intervention at PauseAI US—never meant to imply it was the only intervention. Bednets, mentioned in the post, are soldiers that are not persuasion.
For a map (generated by a scout) to have value, you have to be able to do something with it (“doing” here being analogized to soldiers). It doesn’t have to be persuasion, but it also can’t be pure scoutly knowledge-seeking.