Book a 1:1 with me: https://cal.com/tylerjohnston/book
Share anonymous feedback with me: https://www.admonymous.co/tylerjohnston
Tyler Johnston
Karma: 935
For what it’s worth, I have no affiliation with CE, yet I disagree with some of the empirical claims you make — I’ve never gotten the sense that CE has a bad reputation among animal advocacy researchers, nor is it clear to me that the charities you mentioned were bad ideas prior to launching.
Then again, I might just not be in the know. But that’s why I really wish this post was pointing at specific reasoning for these claims rather than just saying it’s what other people think. If it’s true that other people think it, I’d love to know why they think it! If there are factual errors in CE’s research, it seems really important to flag them publicly. You even mention that the status quo for giving in the animal space (CE excepted) is “very bad already,” which is huge if true given the amount of money at stake, and definitely worth sharing examples of what exactly has gone wrong.
I’ve been thinking about Emre’s comment since I read it — and given this event on the Forum, I eventually decided to go and read Marcus Rediker’s biography of Lay. I recommend it for anyone interested in learning more about him as a historical figure.
To share some thoughts on the questions you posed, my feeling is that his extreme protests weren’t based on any strategic thinking about social change, and I definitely don’t think he’d be an incrementalist if he were alive today. Rather, I think his actions were driven by his extremely firm, passionately felt, and often spiritually-derived moral convictions — the same ones that convinced him to live in a cave and practice radical self-sufficiency. Actually, it seems like he had what we might describe as an excessive degree of “soldier mindset.” From the Rediker text:
He was loving to his friends, but he could be a holy terror to those who did not agree with him. He was aggressive and disruptive. He was stubborn, never inclined to admit a mistake. His direct antinomian connection to God made him self-righteous and at times intolerant. The more resistance he encountered, or, as he understood it, the more God tested his faith, the more certain he was that he was right. He had reasons both sacred and self-serving for being the way he was. He was sure that these traits were essential to defeat the profound evil of slavery.
I don’t know if the EA community would be wrong to exclude him today. He turned out to be ahead of his time in so many ways, and probably did meaningfully influence the eventual abolition of slavery, but this is so much easier to celebrate ex post. What does it actually feel like from the inside, to have extreme personal convictions that society doesn’t share, and how do you know (1) that history will prove you right; and (2) that you are actually making a difference? I really worry that what it feels like to be Benjamin Lay, from the inside, isn’t so dissimilar from what it feels like to be a Westboro Baptist Church member today.
I do think the role of radicalism in driving social change is underrated in this community, and I think it played a big role in not only the slavery abolition movement but also the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, etc. It’s worth looking into the radical flank effect or Cass Sunstein’s writing on social change if you are curious about this. Maybe one thing I’d like to believe is that the world is antifragile and can tolerate radicals ranging the moral spectrum, and those who are on the right side of history will eventually win out, making radicalism a sort of asymmetric weapon that’s stronger when you are ahead of your time on the moral arc of history. But that’s a very convenient theory and I think it’s hard to know with any confidence, and the success of so many fascist and hateful ideologies in relatively recent history probably suggests otherwise.
In any case, I really admire Lay for his conviction and his empathy and his total dedication to living a principled life. But I also really admire communities like this one for their commitment to open debate and the scout mindset and earnest attempts to hear each other out and question our own assumptions. So I expect, and hope, that the EA community would ban Benjamin Lay from our events. But I also hope we wouldn’t laugh at him like so many Quakers did. I hope we would look at him, scowling at us through the glass, and ask ourselves with total sincerity, “What if he has a point?”
I’m not affiliated with 80k, but I would be surprised if the average reader who encounters their work comes away from it with higher regard for AI labs than they came in with — and certainly not that there is something like a brand partnership going on. Most of the content I’ve seen from them has (in my reading) dealt pretty frankly with the massive negative externalities that AI labs could be generating. In fact, my reading of their article “Should you work at a leading AI lab?” is that they don’t broadly recommend it at all. Here’s their 1-sentence summary verbatim:
Recommendation: it’s complicated
We think there are people in our audience for whom this is their highest impact option — but some of these roles might also be very harmful for some people. This means it’s important to take real care figuring out whether you’re in a harmful role, and, if not, whether the role is a good fit for you.
Hopefully this is helpful. It also sounds like these questions could be rhetorical / you have suspicions about their recommendation, so it could be worth writing up the affirmative case against working at labs if you have ideas about that. I know there was a post last week about this, so that thread could be a good place for this.
I’ll admit this only came to mind because of the dubious anthropomorphizing in the piece (“mental imagery” and “dreams”), but I’ve really enjoyed Stephen Wolfram’s writings on AI, including Generative AI Space and the Mental Imagery of Alien Minds. I’m guessing your students would enjoy it.
His write-up on ChatGPT is also a very good intro to LLMs and neural networks, touching on some of what’s going on behind the scenes while remaining approachable for non-technical readers.
Yeah, agreed that it’s an odd suggestion. The idea of putting it on a business card feels so counterintuitive to me that I wonder how literally it’s meant to be taken, or if the sentence is really just a rhetorical device the authors are using to encourage the reader.
The mention of “Pareto Productivity Pro” rang a bell, so I double-checked my copy of How to Launch a High-Impact Nonprofit — and sure enough, towards the end of the chapter on productivity, the book actually encourages the reader to add that title to their Linkedin verbatim. Not explicitly as a certification, nor with CE as the certifier, but just in general. I still agree that it could be misleading, but I imagine it was done in fairly good faith given the book suggests it.
However, I do think this sort of resume padding is basically the norm rather than the exception. Somewhat related anecode from outside EA: Harvard College has given out a named award for many decades to the “top 5% of students of the year by GPA.” Lots of people — including myself — put this award in their resume hoping it will help them stand out among other graduates.
The catch is that grade inflation has gotten so bad that something like 30-40% of students will get a 4.0 in any given year, and they all get the award on account of having tied for it (despite it now not signifying anything like “top 5%.”) But the university still describes it as such, and therefore students still describe it that way on resumes and social media (you can actually search “john harvard scholar” in quotes on LinkedIn and see the flexing yourself). Which just illustrates how even large, reputable institutions support this practice through fluffy, misleading awards and certifications.
This post actually spurred me to go and remove the award from my LinkedIn, but I still think it’s very easy and normal to accidentally do things that make yourself look better in a resume — especially when there is a “technically true” justificaiton for it (like “the school told me I’m in the top 5%” or “the book told me I could add this to my resume!”), whether or not this is really all that informative for future employers. Also, in the back of my mind, I wonder whether choosing to not do this sort of resume padding creates bad selection effects that lead to people with more integrity being hired less, meaning even high-integrity people should be partaking in resume padding so long as everyone else is (Moloch everywhere!). Maybe the best answer is just making sure hiring comittees have good bullshit detectors and lean more on work trials/demonstrated aptitude over fancy certifications/job titles.
Thank you for writing this! I think most people considering kidney donation should read something like this. That being said, I would hesitate to recommend this piece to a prospective donor, at least in its current form. I can’t respond in-depth, but maybe the most succinct way to explain why is that I think it has some elements of a soldier mindset. I’ll use the skin in the game sub-section as an example:
Many of the people in the “Harvard” school of Nutrition indeed eat vegetarian diets and limit protein intake, or at least avoid large amounts of saturated fat and fatty meat.
Why is Harvard in scare quotes? That’s just the name of the school. I noticed this throughout the piece, including in the title of section 1c. I don’t think this adds to your argument, and I worry it’s just a rhetorical attack against all medical and professional establishment.
Have most of the researchers looking at kidney donation donated a kidney? Have most nephrology researchers donated a kidney? Most surgeons doing kidney transplants? … Maybe they are all evil people? They will not take even a marginal risk to save a life. Maybe they are all insane and are unable to translate what they learn from data into reality. But then you at least have to accept that you’d be making your decision based on research done by evil and/or insane people.
Is believing that the entire medical establishment is “evil or insane” actually the most parsimonious explanation for one of many stated-revealed preference gaps in the world? I think I should exercise for 60 minutes a day, but I often fail to do that. Does that make me insane? Of course, I think your actual goal is to hint at medical professionals not even endorsing donation in theory:
… Or maybe, their understanding is nuanced enough that they don’t think the risk is marginal.
Nephrologists spill a lot of ink discussing the risks of kidney donation (which I take it you’ve read much of). Why can’t we just trust the things they say about what they think the risk is?
I might have some motivated reasoning here since I donated a kidney. But, for what it’s worth, my experience of the kidney donor evaluation process was basically a bunch of professionals trying to convince me that risks are real and non-negligible, that there are limits to what we can infer about them from the existing literature, that if I have any doubts I shouldn’t donate, etc.
But it wasn’t a screed against it by any means. It seems like the overall take that the vast majority of nephrologists and experts in the field have landed on is something like: “kidney donation is sufficiently safe for the healthy donor, and it provides such significant benefits for the average recipient, that we can, in good faith, devote much of our careers to facilitating it.” [1] And hospitals, notorious for taking overly conservative approaches to care as to avoid legal liability, at least in the US, have agreed with that assessment.
I still think it’s worth critically scrutinizing the purported risks, but I don’t think it’s necessary to postulate that medical professionals secretly think the operation isn’t worth it, nor that they are all “evil and/or insane.”
- ↩︎
They also seem to think it’s a terrific thing for someone to choose to do, and they tend to hold donors in very high regard.
- ↩︎
I think the lesson we can draw from climate and animal rights that you mention—the radical flank effect—shows that extreme actions concerning an issue in general might make incremental change more palatable to the public. But I don’t think it shows that extreme action attacking incremental change makes that particular incremental change more likely.
If I had to guess, the analogue to this in the animal activist world would be groups like PETA raising awareness about the “scam” that is cage-free. I don’t think there’s any reason to think this has increased the likelihood of cage-free reforms taking place — in fact, my experience from advocating for cage-free tells me that it just worsened social myths that the reform was meaningless despite evidence showing it reduced total hours spent suffering by nearly 50%.
So, I would like to see an activist ecosystem where there are different groups with different tactics—and some who maybe never offer carrots. But directing the stick to incremental improvements seems to have gone badly in past movements, and I wouldn’t want to see the same mistake made here.
I think just letting the public now about AI lab leaders’ p(dooms)s makes sense—in fact, I think most AI researchers are on board with that too (they wouldn’t say these things on podcasts or live on stage if not).
It seems to me this campaign isn’t just meant to raise awareness of X-risk though — it’s meant to punish a particular AI lab for releasing what they see as an inadequate safety policy, and to generate public/legislative opposition to that policy.
I think the public should know about X-risk, but I worry using soundbites of it to generate reputatonial harms and counter labs’ safety agendas might make it less likely they speak about it in the future. It’s kind of like a repeated game: if the behavior you want in the coming years is safety-oriented, you should cooperate when your opponent exhibits that behavior. Only when they don’t should you defect.
Being mindful of the incentives created by pressure campaigns
I’ve spent the past few months trying to think about the whys and hows of large-scale public pressure campaigns (especially those targeting companies — of the sort that have been successful in animal advocacy).
A high-level view of these campaigns is that they use public awareness and corporate reputation as a lever to adjust corporate incentives. But making sure that you are adjusting the right incentives is more challenging than it seems. Ironically, I think this is closely connected to specification gaming: it’s often easy to accidentally incentivize companies to do more to look better, rather than doing more to be better.
For example, an AI-focused campaign calling out RSPs recently began running ads that single out AI labs for speaking openly about existential risk (quoting leaders acknowledging that things could go catastrophically wrong). I can see why this is a “juicy” lever — most of the public would be pretty astonished/outraged to learn some of the beliefs that are held by AI researchers. But I’m not sure if pulling this lever is really incentivizing the right thing.
As far as I can tell, AI leaders speaking openly about existential risk is good. It won’t solve anything in and of itself, but it’s a start — it encourages legislators and the public to take the issue seriously. In general, I think it’s worth praising this when it happens. I think the same is true of implementing safety policies like RSPs, whether or not such policies are sufficient in and of themselves.
If these things are used as ammunition to try to squeeze out stronger concessions, it might just incentivize the company to stop doing the good-but-inadequate thing (i.e. CEOs are less inclined to speak about the dangers of their product when it will be used as a soundbite in a campaign, and labs are probably less inclined to release good-but-inadequate safety policies when doing so creates more public backlash than they were facing before releasing the policy). It also risks directing public and legislative scrutiny to actors who actually do things like speak openly about (or simply believe in) existential risks, as opposed to those who don’t.
So, what do you do when companies are making progress, but not enough? I’m not sure, but it seems like a careful balance of carrots and sticks.
For example, animal welfare campaigns are full of press releases like this: Mercy for Animals “commends” Popeye’s for making a commitment to broiler welfare reforms. Spoiler alert: it probably wasn’t written by someone who thought that Popeye’s had totally absolved themselves of animal abuse with a single commitment, but rather it served as a strategic signal to the company and to their competitors (basically, “If you lead relative to your competitors on animal welfare, we’ll give you carrots. If you don’t, we’ll give you the stick.” If they had reacted by demanding more (which in my heart I may feel is appropriate), it would have sent a very different message: “We’ll punish you even if you make progress.” Even when it’s justified [1], the incentives it creates can leave everybody worse off.
There are lots of other ways that I think campaigns can warp incentives in the wrong ways, but this one feels topical.
- ↩︎
Popeyes probably still does, in fact, have animal abuse in its supply chain
- ↩︎
My understanding is that screwworm eradication in North America has been treated by wild animal welfare researchers as a sort of paradigmatic example of what wild animal welfare interventions could look like, so I think it is on folks’ radar. And, as Kevin mentions, it looks like Uruguay is working on this now with hopes of turning it into a regional campaign across South America.
I’m guessing one of the main reasons there hasn’t been more uptake in promoting this idea is general uncertainty — both about the knock-on effects of something so large scale, and about whether saving the lives of animals who would have died from screwworm really results in higher net welfare for those animals (in many cases it’s probably trading off an excruciating death now for a painful death later with added months or years of life in-between that may themselves be net-negative). So I do think it’s a big overstatement for the guest to suggest that eradicating screwworm would be two orders of magnitude better than preventing the next 100 years of factory farming, which basically assumes that the wild animal lives saved directly trade-off (positively) against the (negative) lives of farmed animals.
@saulius might know more about this. One quote from a recent post of his: “To my surprise, most WAW researchers that I talked to agreed that we’re unlikely to find WAW interventions that could be as cost-effective as farmed animal welfare interventions within the next few years.”
Hey Benjamin! Thank you so much for the very detailed response to what I now, upon reflection, realize was a pretty offhand comment on a topic that I’m definitely not an expert in. I’ve looked more into the IPCC report and the paper from Sherwood et al (which were really interesting) and this has been on the back of my mind for a while.
I definitely better understand what you are getting at in the sentence I quoted. But I will say that I’m still not convinced the wording is quite right. [1] I’ll explain my reasoning below, but I also expect that I could be overlooking or misunderstanding key ideas.
As you explain, the IPCC report draws upon multiple lines of evidence when estimating climate sensitivity (process understanding, instrumental record, paleoclimates, and emergent constraints) and also makes a combined assessment drawing on each of these lines of evidence.
Since the climate system is so complex and our knowledge about it is limited, there are limits to how informative any individual line of evidence is. This gives us reason to add uncertainty to our estimates drawn from any individual line of evidence. Indeed, the authors address this when considering individual lines of evidence.
However, they decide that it is not necessary to add uncertainty to their combined assessment of equilibrium climate sensitivity (drawing from all of the lines of evidence together) since “it is neither probable that all lines of evidence assessed are collectively biased nor is the assessment sensitive to single lines of evidence.”
This is a pretty narrow claim. They are basically saying that they feel the combined assessment of ECS in the Sixth IPCC report is robust enough (drawing from multiple separate lines of evidence that are unlikely to be collectively biased) that they don’t need to account for unknown unknowns in framing it. [2] [3]
The combined assessment of ECS is only part of the full report. I worry it’s an overstatement to make a general claim that “The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report attempts to account for structural uncertainty and unknown unknowns” (and in doing so vindicates low probability estimates of existential catastrophe from climate change), when in reality, the report only says that accounting for structural uncertainty isn’t needed when framing a particular estimate (the combined assessment of ECS), which itself is only one component supporting the broader conclusions of the report, and the broader threat models from climate change.
What does accounting for unknown unknowns actually imply about whether “anthropogenic warming could heat the earth enough to cause complete civilisational collapse”? My take here is that it should actually decrease our credence in what I take to be otherwise strong evidence suggesting that such a catastrophe looks extremely unlikely.
Toby Ord makes a similar argument in The Precipice, actually. I quote it below:
“When we combine the uncertainties about our direct emissions, the climate sensitivity[4] and the possibility of extreme feedbacks, we end up being able to say very little to constrain the amount of warming.”
And:
“The runaway and moist greenhouse effects remain the only known mechanisms through which climate change could directly cause our extinction or irrevocable collapse. This doesn’t rule out unknown mechanisms. We are considering large changes to the Earth that may even be unprecedented in size or speed. It wouldn’t be astonishing if that directly led to our permanent ruin.”
I tend to agree that an existential catastrophe directly resulting from anthropogenic climate change is extremely unlikely, but I think accounting for unknown unknowns should make us less sure of that — and I don’t think we can say that “even when we try to account for unknown unknowns, nothing in the IPCC’s report suggests that civilization will be destroyed” based only on the IPCC report claiming that their combined assessment of climate sensitivity is robust to unknown unknowns.
- ↩︎
I’m thinking in particular of “But even when we try to account for unknown unknowns, nothing in the IPCC’s report suggests that civilization will be destroyed” and “The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, building on Sherwood et al.’s assessment of the Earth’s climate sensitivity attempts to account for structural uncertainty and unknown unknowns. Roughly, they find it’s unlikely that all the various lines of evidence are biased in just one direction — for every consideration that could increase warming, there are also considerations that could decrease it.”
- ↩︎
This is all my interpretation of the passage from the IPCC AR6 section 7.5, cited in the 80k article: “In the climate sciences, there are often good reasons to consider representing deep uncertainty, or what are sometimes referred to as ‘unknown unknowns’. This is natural in a field that considers a system that is both complex and at the same time challenging to observe. For instance, since emergent constraints represent a relatively new line of evidence, important feedback mechanisms may be biased in process-level understanding; pattern effects and aerosol cooling may be large; and paleo evidence inherently builds on indirect and incomplete evidence of past climate states, there certainly can be valid reasons to add uncertainty to the ranges assessed on individual lines of evidence. This has indeed been addressed throughout Sections 7.5.1–7.5.4. Since it is neither probable that all lines of evidence assessed here are collectively biased nor is the assessment sensitive to single lines of evidence, deep uncertainty is not considered as necessary to frame the combined assessment of ECS.”
- ↩︎
Also, I’m not sure if saying that they “account for unknown unknowns” is precisely what’s going on here — rather they feel their combined assessment of ECS is so robust that they don’t need to account for them. Maybe that is “accounting for them” in a very meta way.
- ↩︎
Note that it’s in estimating only climate sensitivity that (as far as I can tell) the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report to make the claim that “unknowns mostly to cancel out, and we should be surprised if they point in one direction or the other” (quoted from the 80k article).
- ↩︎
I’m also heartened by recent polling, and spend a lot of time time these days thinking about how to argue for the importance of existential risks from artificial intelligence.
I’m guessing the main difference in our perspective here is that you see including existing harms in public messaging as “hiding under the banner” of another issue. In my mind, (1) existing harms are closely related to the threat models for existential risks (i.e. how do we get these systems to do the things we want and not do the other things); and (2) I think it’s just really important for advocates to try to build coalitions between different interest groups with shared instrumental goals (e.g. building voter support for AI regulation). I’ve seen a lot of social movements devolve into factionalism, and I see the early stages of that happening in AI safety, which I think is a real shame.
Like, one thing that would really help the safety situation is if frontier models were treated like nuclear power plants and couldn’t just be deployed at a single company’s whim without meeting a laundry list of safety criteria (both because of the direct effects of the safety criteria, and because such criteria literally just buys us some time). If it is the case that X-risk interest groups can build power and increase the chance of passing legislation by allying with others who want to include (totally legitimate) harms like respecting intellectual property in that list of criteria, I don’t see that as hiding under another’s banner. I see it as building strategic partnerships.
Anyway, this all goes a bit further than the point I was making in my initial comment, which is that I think the public isn’t very sensitive to subtle differences in messaging — and that’s okay because those subtle differences are much more important when you are drafting legislation compared to generally building public pressure.
I appreciate you drawing attention to the downside risks of public advocacy, and I broadly agree that they exist, but I also think the (admittedly) exaggerated framings here are doing a lot of work (basically just intuition pumping, for better or worse). The argument would be just as strong in the opposite direction if we swap the valence and optimism/pessimism of the passages: what if, in scenario one, the AI safety community continues making incremental progress on specific topics in interpretability and scalable oversight but achieves too little too slowly and fails to avert the risk of unforeseen emergent capabilities in large models driven by race dynamics, or even worse, accelerates those dynamics by drawing more talent to capabilities work? Whereas in scenario two, what if the AI safety movement becomes similar to the environmental movement by using public advocacy to build coalitions among diverse interest groups, becoming a major focus of national legislation and international cooperation, moving hundreds of billions of $ into clean tech research, etc.
Don’t get me wrong — there’s a place for intuition pumps like this, and I use them often. But I also think that both technical and advocacy approaches could be productive or counterproductive, and so it’s best for us to cautiously approach both and evaluate the risks and merits of specific proposals on their own. In terms of the things you mention driving bad outcomes for advocacy, I’m not sure if I agree — feeling uncertain about paying for ChatGPT seems like a natural response for someone worried about OpenAI’s use of capital, and I haven’t seen evidence that Holly (in the post you link) is exaggerating any risks to whip up support. We could disagree about these things, but my main point is that actually getting into the details of those disagreements is probably more useful in service of avoiding the second scenario than just describing it in pessimistic terms.
It’s not obvious to me that message precision is more important for public activism than in other contexts. I think it might be less important, in fact. Here’s why:
My guess is that the distinction between “X company’s frontier AI models are unsafe” vs. “X company’s policy on frontier models is unsafe” isn’t actually registered by the vast majority of the public (many such cases!). Instead, both messages basically amount to a mental model that is something like “X company’s AI work = bad” And that’s really all the nuance that you need to create public pressure for X company to do something. Then, in more strategic contexts like legislative work and corporate outreach, message precision becomes more important. (When I worked in animal advocacy, we had a lot of success campaigning for nuanced policies with protests that had much vaguer messaging).
Also, I don’t think the news media is “likely” going to twist an activist’s words. It’s always a risk, but in general, the media seems to have a really healthy appetite for criticizing tech companies and isn’t trying to work against activists here. If anything, not mentioning the dangers of the current models (which do exist) might lead to media backlash of the “X-risk is a distraction” sort. So I really don’t think Holly saying “Meta’s frontier AI models are fundamentally unsafe” is evidence of a lack of careful consideration re: messaging here.
I do agree with the Open Source issue though. In that case, it seems like the message isn’t just imprecise, but instead pointing in the wrong direction altogether.
Given the already existing support of the public for going slowly and deliberately, there seems to be a decent case that instead of trying to build public support, we should directly target the policymakers.
I think “public support” is ambiguous, and by some definitions, it isn’t there yet.
One definition is something like “Does the public care about this when they are asked directly?” and this type of support definitely exists, per data like the YouGov poll showing majority support for AI pause.
But there are also polls showing that almost half of U.S. adults “support a ban on factory farming.” I think the correct takeaway from those polls is that there’s a gap between vaguely agreeing with an idea when asked vs. actually supporting specific, meaningful policies in a proactive way.
So I think the definition of “public support” that could help the safety situation, and which is missing right now, is something like “How does this issue rank when the public is asked what causes will inform their voting decisions in the next election cycle?”
I’m not an expert on this, but I agree with Rockwell; my impression was that EA animal orgs try pretty hard to make sure their undercover investigations are done legally, so I don’t know if that’s a good comparison case. I’d be curious to hear the others that you reference.
As for why I think EA orgs shouldn’t beak minor laws: I think following the rules of society — even the inefficent ones — is a really good heuristic to avoid accidentally causing harm, incurring unexpected penalties, or damaging your reputation. In the context of this article, an EA org admitting to knowingly breaking a low-income jurisdiction’s laws on driver licenses because the fines are correspondingly low makes it seem like they don’t care about the spirit of the law (which is to protect Puerto Ricans on the road) or the general principle that it’s good to follow the rules of the society in which you are a visitor.
It’s kind of a caricature of the meme that wealthy people are above the law because they can just pay the fines. I don’t think playing into that is a great way to build a reputatiuon as an altruist.
To some extent, I agree with this, but I also think it overlooks an important component of how defamation law is used in practice — which is not to hold people to high epistemic norms but instead to scare them out of harming your reputation regardless of the truth. This is something folks who work on corporate campaigns for farmed animal welfare run into all the time. And, because our legal system is imperfect, it often works. Brian Martin has a good write-up on the flaws in our legal system that contribute to this:
Cost: If you are sued for defamation, you could end up paying tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, even if you win. If you lose, you could face a massive pay-out on top of the fees.
The large costs, due especially to the cost of legal advice, mean that most people never sue for defamation. If you don’t have much money, you don’t have much chance against a rich opponent, whether you are suing them or they are suing you. Cases can go on for years. Judgements can be appealed. The costs become enormous. Only those with deep pockets can pursue such cases to the end.
The result is that defamation law is often used by the rich and powerful to deter criticisms. It is seldom helpful to ordinary people whose reputations are attacked unfairly.
Unpredictability: People say and write defamatory things all the time, but only a very few are threatened with defamation. Sometimes gross libels pass unchallenged while comparatively innocuous comments lead to major court actions. This unpredictability has a chilling effect on free speech. Writers, worried about defamation, cut out anything that might offend. Publishers, knowing how much it can cost to lose a case, have lawyers go through articles to cut out anything that might lead to a legal action. The result is a tremendous inhibition of free speech.
Complexity: Defamation law is so complex that most writers and publishers prefer to be safe than sorry, and do not publish things that are quite safe because they’re not sure. Judges and lawyers have excessive power because outsiders cannot understand how the law will be applied. Those who might desire to defend against a defamation suit without a lawyer are deterred by the complexities.
Slowness: Sometimes defamation cases are launched months after the statement in question. Cases often take years to resolve. This causes anxiety, especially for those sued, and deters free speech in the meantime. As the old saying goes, “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
I’m not saying this is what’s happening here — I have no idea about the details of any of these allegations. But what if someone did have additional private information about Nonlinear or the folks involved? Unless they are rich or have a sophisticated understanding of the law, the scary lawyer talk from Nonlinear here might deter them from talking about it at all, and I think that’s a really bad epistemic norm. This isn’t to say “the EA Forum should be completely insulated from defamation law” or anything, but in a high-trust community where people will respond to alternatives like publicly sharing counterevidence, threatening lawsuits seems like it might hinder, rather than help, epistemics.
Thank you for responding and sorry for the delayed reply.
I’m not totally sure what the distinction is between disrupting business as usual and encouraging meaningful corporate change — in my mind, corporate campaigns do both, the former in service of the latter. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the distinction there.
That being said, I am much less certain than I was a few weeks ago about the “no costs from disrupted business can be sufficiently high to trigger action on AI safety” take, primarily because of what you pointed out: the corporate race dynamics here might make small disruptions much more costly, rather than less. In fact, the higher the financial upside is, the more costly it could be to lose even a tiny edge on the competition. So even if the costs of meaningful safeguards go up in competitive markets, so too do the costs of PR damage or the other setbacks you mention. I hadn’t thought of this when I wrote my comment but it seems pretty obvious to me now, so thanks for pointing it out.
I’m hoping to think more rigorously about why corporate campaigns work in the upcoming weeks, and might follow up here with additional thoughts.
Are you highlighting this as just something like ‘here’s a risk corporate campaigns against AI labs/companies would need to look out for’, or ‘here’s something that makes these kinds of campaigns much less promising’? I agree with the former but not the latter.
Both, I think. I’m still working on this because I’m optimistic that meaningful + robust policies with really granular detail will be developed, but if they aren’t, it would make campaigns less promising in my mind. Maybe what’s going on is something like the Collingridge dilemma, where it takes time for meaningful safeguards to be identified, but time also makes it harder to implement those safeguards.
Curious to hear why you think campaigns are just as promising even if there aren’t detailed asks to make of labs, if I’m understanding you correctly.
Alignment Research Center evals? Apollo Research evals? Maybe you mean something more specific and I’m just not following the distinction you’re making.
Yeah, in my mind, the animal welfare to AI safety analogy is something like this, where (???) is the missing entity that I wish existed:
G.A.P : Cooks Venture :: (???) : ARC/Apollo
This is to say that ARC and Apollo are developing eval regimes in the same way Cooks Venture develops slower-growing breeds, but a lab would probably be very reluctant to commit to auditing with a single partner into perpetuity regardless of how demanding the audits are in the same way a food company wouldn’t want to commit to exclusively sourcing breeds developed by Cooks Venture. And activists, too, would have reason to be concerned about an arrangement like this since the chicken breed (or model eval) developer’s standards could drop in the future.
So I wish there was some nonprofit or govt committee with a high degree of trust and few COIs who was tasked with certifying the eval regimes developed by ARC and Apollo (or those developed by academics, or even by labs themselves) — hence why I refer to them as a sort of meta-certifier. Then a lab could commit to something like “all future models will undergo evaluation approved by (meta-certifying body) and the results will be publicly shared,” even if many of the specifics this would entail don’t exist today.
On reflection, though, I really don’t know enough about the AI safety landscape to say with confidence how useful this would be. So take it with a big grain of salt.
I broadly want to +1 this. A lot of the evidence you are asking for probably just doesn’t exist, and in light of that, most people should have a lot of uncertainty about the true effects of any overton-window-pushing behavior.
That being said, I think there’s some non-anecdotal social science research that might make us more likely to support it. In the case of policy work:
Anchoring effects, one of the classic Kahneman/Tversky biases, have been studied quite a bit, and at least one article calls it “the best-replicated finding in social psychology.” To the extent there’s controversy about it, it’s often related to “incidental” or “subliminal” anchoring which isn’t relevant here. The market also seems to favor a lot of anchoring strategies (like how basically everything on Amazon in “on sale” from an inflated MSRP), which should be a point of evidence that this genuinely just works.
In cases where there is widespread “preference falsification,” overton-shifting behavior might increase people’s willingness to publicly adopt views that were previously outside of it. Cass Sunstein has a good argument that being a “norm entrepreneur,” that is, proposing something that is controversial, might create chain-reaction social cascades. A lot of the evidence for this is historical, but there are also polling techniques that can reveal preference falsification, and a lot of experimental research that shows a (sometimes comically strong) bias toward social conformity, so I suspect something like this is true. Could there be preference falsification among lawmakers surrounding AI issues? Seems possible.
Also, in the case of public advocacy, there’s some empirical research (summarized here) that suggests a “radical flank effect” whereby overton-window shifting activism increases popular support for moderate demands. There’s also some evidence pointing the other direction. Still, I think the evidence supporting is stronger right now.
P.S. Matt Yglesias (as usual) has a good piece that touches on your point. His takeaway is something like: don’t engage in sloppy Overton-window-pushing for its own sake — especially not in place of rigorously argued, robustly good ideas.