I’m worried that when people say gradual disempowerment they often mean “some scenario in which humans are disempowered gradually over time”, but many readers will interpret this as “the threat model in the paper called ‘Gradual Disempowerment’”. These things can differ substantially and the discussion in this paper is much more specific than encompassing all scenarios in which humans slowly are disempowered!
(You could say “disempowerment which is gradual” for clarity.)
I think when people use the term “gradual disempowerment” predominantly in one sense, people will also tend to understand it in that sense. And I think that sense will be rather literal and not the one specifically of the original authors. Compare the term “infohazard” which is used differently (see comments here) from how Yudkowsky was using it.
(You could say “disempowerment which is gradual” for clarity.)
I feel like there is a risk of this leading to a never-ending sequence of meta-communication concerns. For instance, what if a reader interprets “gradual” to mean taking more than 10 years, but the writer thought 5 would be sufficient for “gradual” (and see timelines discussions around stuff like continuity for how this keeps going). Or if the reader assumes “disempowerment” means complete disempowerment, but writer only meant some unspecified “significant amount” of disempowerment. Its definitely worthwhile to try to be clear initially, but I think we also have to accept that clarification may need to happen “on the backend” sometimes. This seems like a case where one could simply clarify they have a different understanding compared to the paper. In fact, Its not all that clear to me that people won’t implicitly translate “disempowerment which is gradual” to “gradual disempowerment”. It could be that the paper stands in just as much for the concept as for the literal words in people’s minds.
Sure, communication will always be imperfect and there is a never ending cascade of possible clarifications. But, sometimes it seems especially good to improve communication even at some cost. I just thought this was a case where there might be particular large miscommunciations.
In particular case, I was worried there was some problematic conflationary alliance style dynamics where a bunch of people might think there is a broader consensus for some idea than there actually is.
Consider Tabooing Gradual Disempowerment.
I’m worried that when people say gradual disempowerment they often mean “some scenario in which humans are disempowered gradually over time”, but many readers will interpret this as “the threat model in the paper called ‘Gradual Disempowerment’”. These things can differ substantially and the discussion in this paper is much more specific than encompassing all scenarios in which humans slowly are disempowered!
(You could say “disempowerment which is gradual” for clarity.)
I think when people use the term “gradual disempowerment” predominantly in one sense, people will also tend to understand it in that sense. And I think that sense will be rather literal and not the one specifically of the original authors. Compare the term “infohazard” which is used differently (see comments here) from how Yudkowsky was using it.
I feel like there is a risk of this leading to a never-ending sequence of meta-communication concerns. For instance, what if a reader interprets “gradual” to mean taking more than 10 years, but the writer thought 5 would be sufficient for “gradual” (and see timelines discussions around stuff like continuity for how this keeps going). Or if the reader assumes “disempowerment” means complete disempowerment, but writer only meant some unspecified “significant amount” of disempowerment. Its definitely worthwhile to try to be clear initially, but I think we also have to accept that clarification may need to happen “on the backend” sometimes. This seems like a case where one could simply clarify they have a different understanding compared to the paper. In fact, Its not all that clear to me that people won’t implicitly translate “disempowerment which is gradual” to “gradual disempowerment”. It could be that the paper stands in just as much for the concept as for the literal words in people’s minds.
Sure, communication will always be imperfect and there is a never ending cascade of possible clarifications. But, sometimes it seems especially good to improve communication even at some cost. I just thought this was a case where there might be particular large miscommunciations.
In particular case, I was worried there was some problematic conflationary alliance style dynamics where a bunch of people might think there is a broader consensus for some idea than there actually is.