The central thing he is trying to do in that sentence is to paint one position as extreme in order to justify dismissing it. The sentence “The idea that we can confidently argue that there is no way to make these systems safe by just continuing to do the same kind of research we’ve already been doing at Anthropic, that seems like nonsense to me” is a sentence with a hugely different connotative and semantic content that would not remotely land the same way.
The whole thing he is saying there is dependent on him using extreme language, and that extreme language only really lands if you use the “kind of logically prove” construction.
(Edit: Rephrased the hypothetical quote a bit since what I originally said was a bit muddled)
OK, I think I see it: the revised sentence “The idea that we can confidently argue that there’s no way to make them safe, that seems like nonsense to me” wouldn’t land, because it’s more natural to say that the arguments are nonsense (or “gobbledegook”) than that the idea of such arguments is nonsense.
I… disagree?
The central thing he is trying to do in that sentence is to paint one position as extreme in order to justify dismissing it. The sentence “The idea that we can confidently argue that there is no way to make these systems safe by just continuing to do the same kind of research we’ve already been doing at Anthropic, that seems like nonsense to me” is a sentence with a hugely different connotative and semantic content that would not remotely land the same way.
The whole thing he is saying there is dependent on him using extreme language, and that extreme language only really lands if you use the “kind of logically prove” construction.
(Edit: Rephrased the hypothetical quote a bit since what I originally said was a bit muddled)
OK, I think I see it: the revised sentence “The idea that we can confidently argue that there’s no way to make them safe, that seems like nonsense to me” wouldn’t land, because it’s more natural to say that the arguments are nonsense (or “gobbledegook”) than that the idea of such arguments is nonsense.