Thanks for this, I appreciated the response and I’m a fan of your work!
On unions, I mentioned that as one of previous communications roles, but since you flagged it, I want to dive a bit deeper on what I would have written had I spent more time on this:
There’s a saying that if “you’re talking about dues, you’re losing” because the election then becomes about dues and not improving working conditions or wages. Union organizers combat that by inoculating workers in advance, then repeating the reason the workers started the drive. I was trying to convey that it’s stronger to operate in our desired frame instead of the opponent’s. Explaining feels like it can slide into a defensive posture.
If the goal is public persuasion, I’d redirect to what we want people talking about, ideally going on the offensive. One place this analogy may not transfer cleanly is that dues aren’t a “fake” concern. Workers care about money coming out of their paycheck, and organizers should give them a straight answer while still refusing the boss’ ability to make it the only question.
I realize now that perhaps we’re discussing different aims or stages? From my experience, the general public will not necessarily internalize the “correct” response over time, no matter how valid the argument (hence the illusory truth effect, though I’d want to read more research on this because I suspect on a longer time horizon you may be right). They’ll internalize whatever broke through and is easy to sample (re Zaller’s Receive-Accept-Sample framework). Right now the salient arguments in this discussion are “is METR independent” and “how biased is METR” instead of “who checks the labs if not organizations like this” and “what level of oversight should we actually demand?” Does that feel like a bad assessment?
Another framework that might be useful to consider is Martin’s Backfire framework. I’m not an expert in it, but it could be useful to help make the attacks on METR visible and frame them as unfair (which likely won’t happen on its own as you’re right they work). I was a bit sloppy in saying they “tend to backfire,” and that framework is one I wanted to discuss in a longer post.
Thank you for your critiques!
Ok, this definitely helps me understand where you’re coming from more. This will take a little to sink in since it’s very counter to the way I was trained and still think, so let me sit with it a bit before responding.