I think my crux is ‘how much does David’s plan resemble the plans labs actually plan to pursue?’
I read Nate and Eliezer as baking in ‘if the labs do what they say they plan to do, and update as they will predictably update based on their past behavior and declared beliefs’ to all their language about ‘the current trajectory’ etc etc.
I don’t think this resolves ‘is the tittle literally true’ in a different direction if it’s the only crux, and agree that this should have been spelled out more explicitly in the book (e.g. ‘in detail, why are the authors pessimistic about current safety plans’) from a pure epistemic standpoint (although think it was reasonable to omit from a rhetorical standpoint, given the target audience) and in various Headline Sentences throughout the book, and The Problem.
One generous way to read Nate and Eliezer here is to say ‘current techniques’ is itself intending to bake in ‘plans the labs currently plan to pursue’. I was definitely reading it this way, but think it’s reasonable for others not to. If we read it that way, and take David’s plan above to be sufficiently dissimilar from real lab plans, then I think the title’s literal interpretation goes through.
[your post has updated me from ‘the title is literally true’ to ‘the title is basically reasonable but may not be literally true depending on how broadly we construe various things’, which is a significantly less comfortable position!]
I think my crux is ‘how much does David’s plan resemble the plans labs actually plan to pursue?’
I read Nate and Eliezer as baking in ‘if the labs do what they say they plan to do, and update as they will predictably update based on their past behavior and declared beliefs’ to all their language about ‘the current trajectory’ etc etc.
I don’t think this resolves ‘is the tittle literally true’ in a different direction if it’s the only crux, and agree that this should have been spelled out more explicitly in the book (e.g. ‘in detail, why are the authors pessimistic about current safety plans’) from a pure epistemic standpoint (although think it was reasonable to omit from a rhetorical standpoint, given the target audience) and in various Headline Sentences throughout the book, and The Problem.
One generous way to read Nate and Eliezer here is to say ‘current techniques’ is itself intending to bake in ‘plans the labs currently plan to pursue’. I was definitely reading it this way, but think it’s reasonable for others not to. If we read it that way, and take David’s plan above to be sufficiently dissimilar from real lab plans, then I think the title’s literal interpretation goes through.
[your post has updated me from ‘the title is literally true’ to ‘the title is basically reasonable but may not be literally true depending on how broadly we construe various things’, which is a significantly less comfortable position!]