My guess is still that calling folks “moderates” and “radicals” rather some more specific name (perhaps “marginalists” and “reformers”) is a mistake and fits naturally into conversations about things it seems you didn’t want to be talking about.
Relatedly, calling a group of people ‘radicals’ seems straightforwardly out-grouping to me, I can’t think of a time where I would be happy to be labeled a radical, so it feels a bit like tilting the playing field.
Agreed. Also, I think the word “radical” smuggles in assumptions about the risk, namely that it’s been overestimated. Like, I’d guess that few people would think of stopping AI as “radical” if it was widely agreed that it was about to kill everyone, regardless of how much immediate political change it required. Such that the term ends up connoting something like “an incorrect assessment of how bad the situation is.”
My guess is still that calling folks “moderates” and “radicals” rather some more specific name (perhaps “marginalists” and “reformers”) is a mistake and fits naturally into conversations about things it seems you didn’t want to be talking about.
Relatedly, calling a group of people ‘radicals’ seems straightforwardly out-grouping to me, I can’t think of a time where I would be happy to be labeled a radical, so it feels a bit like tilting the playing field.
Agreed. Also, I think the word “radical” smuggles in assumptions about the risk, namely that it’s been overestimated. Like, I’d guess that few people would think of stopping AI as “radical” if it was widely agreed that it was about to kill everyone, regardless of how much immediate political change it required. Such that the term ends up connoting something like “an incorrect assessment of how bad the situation is.”