then you should strongly dislike lengthy analogies that depict one’s ideological opponents repeatedly through strawmen / weakman arguments.
I suspect I know what article inspired this. I am less sure that it was an actual argument, than something like an exhaustive catalog of other people’s annoyingly bad arguments. Had it been prefixed with “[Warning: Venting]” I would have found it unremarkable.
However, there is an annoying complication in certain discussions of AI safety where people argue that AI safety is really easy because of course we’ll all do X. X is typically some thing like “Lock the AI in a box.” Which of course would never work because someone would immediately give the AI full commit privs to production and write a blog post about how they never even read the code. And when you have argued against that plan working, then people propose plan X1, X2, X3, etc, all of which could be outsmarted by a small child. And everyone insists on a personal rebuttal, because their plan is different.
So you wind up with a large catalog of counterarguments to dumb plans. Which looks a lot like dunking on strawmen.
I suspect I know what article inspired this. I am less sure that it was an actual argument, than something like an exhaustive catalog of other people’s annoyingly bad arguments. Had it been prefixed with “[Warning: Venting]” I would have found it unremarkable.
However, there is an annoying complication in certain discussions of AI safety where people argue that AI safety is really easy because of course we’ll all do X. X is typically some thing like “Lock the AI in a box.” Which of course would never work because someone would immediately give the AI full commit privs to production and write a blog post about how they never even read the code. And when you have argued against that plan working, then people propose plan X1, X2, X3, etc, all of which could be outsmarted by a small child. And everyone insists on a personal rebuttal, because their plan is different.
So you wind up with a large catalog of counterarguments to dumb plans. Which looks a lot like dunking on strawmen.