The alternative would have been to embed a small lecture about international relations into the article.
I don’t think that’s correct, there are cheap ways of making sentences like this one more effective as communication. (E.g. less passive/vague phrasing than “run some risk”, which could mean many different things.) And I further claim that most smart people, if they actually spent 5 minutes by the clock thinking of the places where there’s the most expected disvalue from being misinterpreted, would have identified that the sentences about nuclear exchanges are in fact likely to be the controversial ones, and that those sentences are easy to misinterpret (or prime others to misinterpret). Communication is hard in general, and we’re not seeing all the places where Eliezer did make sensible edits to avoid being misinterpreted, but I still think this example falls squarely into the “avoidable if actually trying” category.
habitually dumbing things down in that way would be catastrophic. Because we still need to discover a solution to AI alignment, and I don’t think it’s possible to do that without discussing a lot of high-complexity things that can’t be said at all under contextualizing norms
That’s why you do the solving in places that are higher-fidelity than twitter/mass podcasts/open letters/etc, and the communication or summarization in much simpler forms, rather than trying to shout sentences that are a very small edit distance from crazy claims in a noisy room of people with many different communication norms, and being surprised when they’re interpreted differently from how you intended. (Edit: the “shouting” metaphor is referring to twitter, not to the original Time article.)
I don’t think that’s correct, there are cheap ways of making sentences like this one more effective as communication. (E.g. less passive/vague phrasing than “run some risk”, which could mean many different things.) And I further claim that most smart people, if they actually spent 5 minutes by the clock thinking of the places where there’s the most expected disvalue from being misinterpreted, would have identified that the sentences about nuclear exchanges are in fact likely to be the controversial ones, and that those sentences are easy to misinterpret (or prime others to misinterpret). Communication is hard in general, and we’re not seeing all the places where Eliezer did make sensible edits to avoid being misinterpreted, but I still think this example falls squarely into the “avoidable if actually trying” category.
That’s why you do the solving in places that are higher-fidelity than twitter/mass podcasts/open letters/etc, and the communication or summarization in much simpler forms, rather than trying to shout sentences that are a very small edit distance from crazy claims in a noisy room of people with many different communication norms, and being surprised when they’re interpreted differently from how you intended. (Edit: the “shouting” metaphor is referring to twitter, not to the original Time article.)