I don’t like the number of links that you put into your first paragraph. The point of developing a vocabulary for a field is to make communication more efficient so that the field can advance. Do you need an acronym and associated article for ‘pretty obviously unintended/destructive actions,’ or in practice is that just insularizing the discussion?
I hear people complaining about how AI safety only has ~300 people working about it, and how nobody is developing object level understandings and everyone’s thinking from authority, but the more sentences you write like: “Because HFDT will ensure that it’ll robustly avoid POUDA?” the more true that becomes.
Thanks for the feedback, I’ll try to keep this in mind in the future. I imagine you’d prefer me to keep the links, but make the text use common-sense language instead of acronyms so that people don’t need to click on the links to understand what I’m saying?
I also think there’s an important distinction between using links in a debate frame and in a sharing frame.
I wouldn’t be bothered at all by a comment using acronyms and links, no matter how insular, if the context was just ‘hey this reminds me of HDFT and POUDA,’ a beginner can jump off of that and get down a rabbit hole of interesting concepts.
But if you’re in a debate frame, you’re introducing unnecessary barriers to discussion which feel unfair and disqualifying. At its worst it would be like saying: ‘youre not qualified to debate until you read these five articles.’
In a debate frame I don’t think you should use any unnecessary links or acronyms at all. If you’re linking a whole article it should be because it’s necessary for them to read and understand the whole article for the discussion to continue and it cannot be summarized.
I think I have this principle because in my mind you cannot not debate so therefore you have to read all the links and content included, meaning that links in a sharing context are optional but in a debate context they’re required.
I think on a second read your comment might have been more in the ‘sharing’ frame than I originally thought, but to the extent you were presenting arguments I think you should maximize legibility, to the point of only including links if you make clear contextually or explicitly to what degree the link is optional or just for reference.
Thanks for that feedback as well—I think I didn’t realize how much my comment comes across as ‘debate’ framing, which now on second read seems obvious. I genuinely didn’t intend my comment to be a criticism of the post at all; I genuinely was thinking something like “This is a great post. But other than that, what should I say? I should have something useful to add. Ooh, here’s something: Why no talk of misalignment? Seems like a big omission. I wonder what he thinks about that stuff.” But on reread it comes across as more of a “nyah nyah why didn’t you talk about my hobbyhorse” unfortunately.
I don’t like the number of links that you put into your first paragraph. The point of developing a vocabulary for a field is to make communication more efficient so that the field can advance. Do you need an acronym and associated article for ‘pretty obviously unintended/destructive actions,’ or in practice is that just insularizing the discussion?
I hear people complaining about how AI safety only has ~300 people working about it, and how nobody is developing object level understandings and everyone’s thinking from authority, but the more sentences you write like: “Because HFDT will ensure that it’ll robustly avoid POUDA?” the more true that becomes.
I feel very strongly about this.
Thanks for the feedback, I’ll try to keep this in mind in the future. I imagine you’d prefer me to keep the links, but make the text use common-sense language instead of acronyms so that people don’t need to click on the links to understand what I’m saying?
That seems like a useful heuristic-
I also think there’s an important distinction between using links in a debate frame and in a sharing frame.
I wouldn’t be bothered at all by a comment using acronyms and links, no matter how insular, if the context was just ‘hey this reminds me of HDFT and POUDA,’ a beginner can jump off of that and get down a rabbit hole of interesting concepts.
But if you’re in a debate frame, you’re introducing unnecessary barriers to discussion which feel unfair and disqualifying. At its worst it would be like saying: ‘youre not qualified to debate until you read these five articles.’
In a debate frame I don’t think you should use any unnecessary links or acronyms at all. If you’re linking a whole article it should be because it’s necessary for them to read and understand the whole article for the discussion to continue and it cannot be summarized.
I think I have this principle because in my mind you cannot not debate so therefore you have to read all the links and content included, meaning that links in a sharing context are optional but in a debate context they’re required.
I think on a second read your comment might have been more in the ‘sharing’ frame than I originally thought, but to the extent you were presenting arguments I think you should maximize legibility, to the point of only including links if you make clear contextually or explicitly to what degree the link is optional or just for reference.
Thanks for that feedback as well—I think I didn’t realize how much my comment comes across as ‘debate’ framing, which now on second read seems obvious. I genuinely didn’t intend my comment to be a criticism of the post at all; I genuinely was thinking something like “This is a great post. But other than that, what should I say? I should have something useful to add. Ooh, here’s something: Why no talk of misalignment? Seems like a big omission. I wonder what he thinks about that stuff.” But on reread it comes across as more of a “nyah nyah why didn’t you talk about my hobbyhorse” unfortunately.