This is roughly what seems to have happened in DC, where the internal influence approach was swept away by a big Overton window shift after ChatGPT.
In what sense was the internal influence approach “swept away”?
Also, it feels pretty salient to me that the ChatGPT shift was triggered by public, accessible empirical demonstrations of capabilities being high (and social impacts of that). So in my mind that provides evidence for “groups change their mind in response to certain kinds of empirical evidence” and doesn’t really provide evidence for “groups change their mind in response to a few brave people saying what they believe and changing the overton window”.
If the conversation changed a lot causally downstream of the CAIS extinction letter or FLI pause letter, that would be better evidence for your position (though also consistent with a model that put less weight on preference cascades and model the impact more like “policymakers weren’t aware that lots of experts were concerned, this letter communicated that experts were concerned”). I don’t know to what extent this was true. (Though I liked the CAIS extinction letter a lot and certainly believe it had a good amount of impact — I just don’t know how much.)
In what sense was the internal influence approach “swept away”?
Also, it feels pretty salient to me that the ChatGPT shift was triggered by public, accessible empirical demonstrations of capabilities being high (and social impacts of that). So in my mind that provides evidence for “groups change their mind in response to certain kinds of empirical evidence” and doesn’t really provide evidence for “groups change their mind in response to a few brave people saying what they believe and changing the overton window”.
If the conversation changed a lot causally downstream of the CAIS extinction letter or FLI pause letter, that would be better evidence for your position (though also consistent with a model that put less weight on preference cascades and model the impact more like “policymakers weren’t aware that lots of experts were concerned, this letter communicated that experts were concerned”). I don’t know to what extent this was true. (Though I liked the CAIS extinction letter a lot and certainly believe it had a good amount of impact — I just don’t know how much.)