In my opinion this post is problematic for the following reasons.
1. The post doesn’t practice what it preaches: The post urges AI safety activists to not develop a partisan public image, yet it argues overwhelmingly with ‘mistakes’ by the left leaning side. We first have Turner and ICE. Turner states the ICE incidents as the starting point of his activism. Should he just omit this information although it is vital for understanding his story? Then Ngo. Here, the side that denied him the job because of his tweets was criticised. You could similarly argue that his tweets were partisan and that this was the original mistake. Aella was mentioned to. Here the claim was purely speculative and no source was given that actually demonstrated that the image was perceived in a controversial way.
Conservatives, by default, will be very happy to support policies to slow or pause AI development… unless those policies become Left-coded.
Again, only the left-coding is identified as the problem. The article ends with the following suggestion:
I suggest someone buys Eliezer a Ford F-150 and a cowboy hat, and organizes a road trip where he drives around to remote rural towns to spread the word of AI safety.
This sounds quite red-coded for me.
Overall, for me the article is making less of a point about ‘AI safety should not be partisan’ and more about ‘left leaning voices in the AI safety discourse should self censor’.
2. The article doesn’t clearly separate facts from personal opinions:
While anti-Trump rhetoric is not the main point of his essay, in some places he uses accusatory language such as “federal agents should not be able to kill citizens in the street”—as if the agents had just walked up to two hapless bystanders and executed them in cold blood.
Most Red tribe members find this kind of emotional, logically unexamined accusations to be deeply offensive (though they of course produce similarly illogical retaliatory accusations).
What exactly makes the accusations emotional and logically unexamined?
While it’s completely valid to argue against Ngo’s tweet, the point of mentioning it is to highlight that he cannot possibly be considered so far out-of-bounds politically as to make rescinding a job offer a reasonable response.
Cannot possibly. Why not?
3. It misses the opportunity to list counterarguments: I believe that by keeping everything neutral, you might lose most of your credibility and actually won’t land well with any political spectrum. I think, we should want to sound like normal people that can be related with in their concerns regarding AI safety. Normal people seldom only have one singular political concern. As an example, the ICE part of Alex Turners article was something important for me and it kept me more engaged with the article. There might very well be different posts regarding AI safety that cater more to a different political spectrum.
Another point:
Entrenched, systemic racism in our country has led to disproportionate impacts of pollution on communities of color… The need for climate action is bound together with the struggle for racial equality and liberation.
This statement lends support to the Red suspicion that climate change activism is really a Trojan horse for far more wide-ranging progressive and socialist reforms.
Well, but what if this is true and both are in fact bound together? Should you just ignore the connection?
As a last point, I want to question the relevance of the proposed analogy between the Culture War and religious conflict for the core claim of the post. Is this analogy necessary/helpful for the post? Especially the point about the duration is unclear for me. Why should an analogy to events in medieval times tell us anything about the relevant time scales? Social networks could dramatically influence the speed of the conflict.
In my opinion this post is problematic for the following reasons.
1. The post doesn’t practice what it preaches: The post urges AI safety activists to not develop a partisan public image, yet it argues overwhelmingly with ‘mistakes’ by the left leaning side. We first have Turner and ICE. Turner states the ICE incidents as the starting point of his activism. Should he just omit this information although it is vital for understanding his story? Then Ngo. Here, the side that denied him the job because of his tweets was criticised. You could similarly argue that his tweets were partisan and that this was the original mistake. Aella was mentioned to. Here the claim was purely speculative and no source was given that actually demonstrated that the image was perceived in a controversial way.
Again, only the left-coding is identified as the problem. The article ends with the following suggestion:
This sounds quite red-coded for me.
Overall, for me the article is making less of a point about ‘AI safety should not be partisan’ and more about ‘left leaning voices in the AI safety discourse should self censor’.
2. The article doesn’t clearly separate facts from personal opinions:
What exactly makes the accusations emotional and logically unexamined?
Cannot possibly. Why not?
3. It misses the opportunity to list counterarguments: I believe that by keeping everything neutral, you might lose most of your credibility and actually won’t land well with any political spectrum. I think, we should want to sound like normal people that can be related with in their concerns regarding AI safety. Normal people seldom only have one singular political concern. As an example, the ICE part of Alex Turners article was something important for me and it kept me more engaged with the article. There might very well be different posts regarding AI safety that cater more to a different political spectrum.
Another point:
Well, but what if this is true and both are in fact bound together? Should you just ignore the connection?
As a last point, I want to question the relevance of the proposed analogy between the Culture War and religious conflict for the core claim of the post. Is this analogy necessary/helpful for the post? Especially the point about the duration is unclear for me. Why should an analogy to events in medieval times tell us anything about the relevant time scales? Social networks could dramatically influence the speed of the conflict.