There are a lot of possible plans which I can imagine some group feasibly having which would meet one of the following criteria:
contains critical elements which are illegal
Contains critical elements which depends on an element of surprise / misdirection
Benefit from the actor bring first mover on the plan. Others can strategy copy, but can’t lead.
If one of these criteria or similar applies to the plan, then you can’t discuss it openly without sabotaging it. Making strategic plans with all your cards laid out on the table (whole open-ended hide theirs) makes things substantially harder.
I partially agree, but I think this must only be a small part of the issue.
- I think there’s a whole lot of key insights people could raise that aren’t info-hazards. - If secrecy were the main factor, I’d hope that there would be some access-controlled message boards or similar. I’d want the discussion to be intentionally happening somewhere. Right now I don’t really think that’s happening. I think a lot of tiny groups have their own personal ideas, but there’s surprisingly little systematic and private thinking between the power players. - I think that secrecy is often an excuse not to open ideas to feedback, and thus not be open to critique. Often, what what I see, this goes hand-in-hand with “our work just really isn’t that great, but we don’t want to admit it”
In the last 8 years or so, I’ve kept on hoping there would be some secret and brilliant “master plan” around EA, explaining the lack of public strategy. I have yet to find one. The closest I know of is some over-time discussion and slack threads with people at Constellation and similar—I think these are interesting in terms of understanding the perspectives of these (powerful) people, but I don’t get the impression that there’s all too much comprehensiveness of genius that’s being hidden.
That said, - I think that policy orgs need to be very secretive, so agree with you regarding why those orgs don’t write more big-picture things.
There are a lot of possible plans which I can imagine some group feasibly having which would meet one of the following criteria:
contains critical elements which are illegal
Contains critical elements which depends on an element of surprise / misdirection
Benefit from the actor bring first mover on the plan. Others can strategy copy, but can’t lead.
If one of these criteria or similar applies to the plan, then you can’t discuss it openly without sabotaging it. Making strategic plans with all your cards laid out on the table (whole open-ended hide theirs) makes things substantially harder.
I partially agree, but I think this must only be a small part of the issue.
- I think there’s a whole lot of key insights people could raise that aren’t info-hazards.
- If secrecy were the main factor, I’d hope that there would be some access-controlled message boards or similar. I’d want the discussion to be intentionally happening somewhere. Right now I don’t really think that’s happening. I think a lot of tiny groups have their own personal ideas, but there’s surprisingly little systematic and private thinking between the power players.
- I think that secrecy is often an excuse not to open ideas to feedback, and thus not be open to critique. Often, what what I see, this goes hand-in-hand with “our work just really isn’t that great, but we don’t want to admit it”
In the last 8 years or so, I’ve kept on hoping there would be some secret and brilliant “master plan” around EA, explaining the lack of public strategy. I have yet to find one. The closest I know of is some over-time discussion and slack threads with people at Constellation and similar—I think these are interesting in terms of understanding the perspectives of these (powerful) people, but I don’t get the impression that there’s all too much comprehensiveness of genius that’s being hidden.
That said,
- I think that policy orgs need to be very secretive, so agree with you regarding why those orgs don’t write more big-picture things.