The “obvious thing” that I have done is state my views on doom to people when it comes up and point them to IABIED, and I think it has largely been successful in causing ~20 people I have personal relationships with to arrive at p(doom) > 5%.
The next “obvious thing” is to scale this up by a factor of 10 to people I’m only vaguely acquainted with, and to write more publicly in a mathematician-facing way as you suggested. These feel both costly, risky, and less effective in ways that the previous thing was not. I am still considering doing it, but need to sit down with my aversions for a while. Some examples: these conversations sometimes require me to be forceful/activist to keep people in my frame instead of sliding off into more comfortable topics, and they plausibly only work because I have significant personal rapport already with a colleague or student.
I would certainly prefer to live in a world where 1 in 20 mathematicians are already awake and I can just create common knowledge that the private conversation thing works, and then not do anything more effortful. As far as I know the only other academic mathematician who writes about Doom is Jacob Tsimerman, who just won the Fields Medal and left to do safety at OpenAI. He would certainly be a person who could do the broadcasting thing (and is doing it already, but in a less forceful way than I’m imagining).
(This is probably not helpful, but just want to note that I’m interested, in a “hobbyist” sense, in the problem of the general kind of confrontation you’re mentioning, under the moniker “confrontation-worthy empathy”; if you happen to want to chat about it I’m interested, e.g. to consider different ideas for making the process more wholesome and similar.)
I would be interested in having this conversation! It seems to me that the kind of confrontation I’m mentioning is a much easier version of the thing you’re pointing to? I tend to just point amateur levels of unconditional positive regard at people and under pre-conditions of existing trust conversations mostly go well. I imagine scaling up the operation requires more finesse, but even so it’s hard to imagine needing the amount of skill you describe there. I’ll message you.
The “obvious thing” that I have done is state my views on doom to people when it comes up and point them to IABIED, and I think it has largely been successful in causing ~20 people I have personal relationships with to arrive at p(doom) > 5%.
The next “obvious thing” is to scale this up by a factor of 10 to people I’m only vaguely acquainted with, and to write more publicly in a mathematician-facing way as you suggested. These feel both costly, risky, and less effective in ways that the previous thing was not. I am still considering doing it, but need to sit down with my aversions for a while. Some examples: these conversations sometimes require me to be forceful/activist to keep people in my frame instead of sliding off into more comfortable topics, and they plausibly only work because I have significant personal rapport already with a colleague or student.
I would certainly prefer to live in a world where 1 in 20 mathematicians are already awake and I can just create common knowledge that the private conversation thing works, and then not do anything more effortful. As far as I know the only other academic mathematician who writes about Doom is Jacob Tsimerman, who just won the Fields Medal and left to do safety at OpenAI. He would certainly be a person who could do the broadcasting thing (and is doing it already, but in a less forceful way than I’m imagining).
(This is probably not helpful, but just want to note that I’m interested, in a “hobbyist” sense, in the problem of the general kind of confrontation you’re mentioning, under the moniker “confrontation-worthy empathy”; if you happen to want to chat about it I’m interested, e.g. to consider different ideas for making the process more wholesome and similar.)
I would be interested in having this conversation! It seems to me that the kind of confrontation I’m mentioning is a much easier version of the thing you’re pointing to? I tend to just point amateur levels of unconditional positive regard at people and under pre-conditions of existing trust conversations mostly go well. I imagine scaling up the operation requires more finesse, but even so it’s hard to imagine needing the amount of skill you describe there. I’ll message you.
Yeah, I think it should be much less hard for people not already embedded in working on AI; just seems kinda related.