I guess math very much isn’t like this. You can generally make at least some progress on a problem, but you can’t really make a problem worse except by giving bad advice to others working on it?
I think there’s something especially bad about AI, where people disagree a lot or are confused about what exactly the problems are, and have a lot of motivated cognition towards thinking “if they’re working on it, it’ll go better instead of worse.”
(i.e. if people were right that the main problem is misuse, going to work at a lab is more reasonable)
There’s something additionally hard about the existential stakes, where it’s hard to admit the problem is real if you don’t feel like you have some way of engaging with it.
E.g. Musk seems like mega-biased toward taking action, with bad results (responsible for like a quarter of frontier AI lab stuff, in some sense). The politician’s syllogism bites real hard when accelerating bad stuff is 1. convergent and 2. much easier than accelerating good stuff.
I guess math very much isn’t like this. You can generally make at least some progress on a problem, but you can’t really make a problem worse except by giving bad advice to others working on it?
I think there’s something especially bad about AI, where people disagree a lot or are confused about what exactly the problems are, and have a lot of motivated cognition towards thinking “if they’re working on it, it’ll go better instead of worse.”
(i.e. if people were right that the main problem is misuse, going to work at a lab is more reasonable)
There’s something additionally hard about the existential stakes, where it’s hard to admit the problem is real if you don’t feel like you have some way of engaging with it.
E.g. Musk seems like mega-biased toward taking action, with bad results (responsible for like a quarter of frontier AI lab stuff, in some sense). The politician’s syllogism bites real hard when accelerating bad stuff is 1. convergent and 2. much easier than accelerating good stuff.