members of those groups do not regularly sit down and make extensive plans about how to optimize other people’s beliefs in the same way as seems routine around here
Is this not common in politics? I thought this was a lot of what politics was about. (Having never worked in politics.)
Is this not common in politics? I thought this was a lot of what politics was about.
I have been very surprised by how non-agentic politics is! Like, there certainly is a lot of signaling going on, but when reading stuff like Decidingtowin.org it becomes clear how little optimization actually goes into saying things that will get you voters and convince stakeholders.
I do think a lot of that is going on there, and in the ranking above I would probably put the current political right above AI safety and the current political left below AI safety. Just when I took the average it seemed to me like it would end up below, largely as a result of a severe lack of agency as documented in things like deciding-to-win.
Re corporate campaigns: I think those are really very milquetoast. Yes, you make cool ads, but the optimization pressure here seems relatively minor (barring some intense outliers, like Apple and Disney, which I do think are much more agentic here than others, and have caused pretty great harm in doing so, like Disney being responsible for copyright being far too long in the US because Disney was terribly afraid of anyone re-using their characters and so tainting Disney’s image).
Is this not common in politics? I thought this was a lot of what politics was about. (Having never worked in politics.)
And corporate PR campaigns too for that matter.
I have been very surprised by how non-agentic politics is! Like, there certainly is a lot of signaling going on, but when reading stuff like Decidingtowin.org it becomes clear how little optimization actually goes into saying things that will get you voters and convince stakeholders.
I do think a lot of that is going on there, and in the ranking above I would probably put the current political right above AI safety and the current political left below AI safety. Just when I took the average it seemed to me like it would end up below, largely as a result of a severe lack of agency as documented in things like deciding-to-win.
Re corporate campaigns: I think those are really very milquetoast. Yes, you make cool ads, but the optimization pressure here seems relatively minor (barring some intense outliers, like Apple and Disney, which I do think are much more agentic here than others, and have caused pretty great harm in doing so, like Disney being responsible for copyright being far too long in the US because Disney was terribly afraid of anyone re-using their characters and so tainting Disney’s image).