In the context of your Twitter comments about biorisk, the relevant question for this post and the appropriateness theory is probably just about whether it would be better to conceptualize these risks as part of a theory that includes a single objective for all humanity (“make the world a better place”) versus a theory that doesn’t accept that. Our claim is that it’s easier to think about ‘stability of society’ and misuse type harms when using our theory. Nothing you said on Twitter is an argument for why it’s important to have anything resembling a single objective.
I do think you’re right to point out that the sentence you extracted from the long paper where we speculate about the future doesn’t really follow from the theory itself.
Yes, to be clear I’m mostly agreeing with your theory, I just got thrown off by the future extrapolation clashing with my own expectations. I think your theory is a valuable addition to the dialogue around value alignment! Thank you for writing it!
In the context of your Twitter comments about biorisk, the relevant question for this post and the appropriateness theory is probably just about whether it would be better to conceptualize these risks as part of a theory that includes a single objective for all humanity (“make the world a better place”) versus a theory that doesn’t accept that. Our claim is that it’s easier to think about ‘stability of society’ and misuse type harms when using our theory. Nothing you said on Twitter is an argument for why it’s important to have anything resembling a single objective.
I do think you’re right to point out that the sentence you extracted from the long paper where we speculate about the future doesn’t really follow from the theory itself.
Yes, to be clear I’m mostly agreeing with your theory, I just got thrown off by the future extrapolation clashing with my own expectations. I think your theory is a valuable addition to the dialogue around value alignment! Thank you for writing it!