Scouts need soldiers for their work to be worth anything

This is a valuable post, but I don't think it engages with a lot of the concern about PauseAI advocacy. I have two main reasons why I broadly disagree:

1. Pausing AI development could be the wrong move, even if you don't care about benefits and only care about risks

AI safety is an area with a lot of uncertainty. Importantly, this uncertainty isn't merely about the nature of the risks but about the impact of potential interventions.

Of all interventions, pausing AI development is, some think, a particularly risky one. There are dangers like:

• Falling behind China
• Creating a compute overhang with subsequent rapid catch-up development
• Polarizing the AI discourse before risks are clearer (and discrediting concerned AI experts), turning AI into a politically intractable problem, and
• Causing AI lab regulatory flight to countries with lower state capacity, less robust democracies, fewer safety guardrails, and a lesser ability to mandate security standards to prevent model exfiltration

People at PauseAI are probably less concerned about the above (or more concerned about model autonomy, catastrophic risks, and short timelines).

Although you may have felt that you did your "scouting" work and arrived at a position worth defending as a warrior, others' comparably thorough scouting work has led them to a different position. Their opposition to your warrior-like advocacy, then, may not come (as your post suggests) from a purist notion that we should preserve elite epistemics at the cost of impact, but from a fundamental disagreement about the desirability of the consequences of a pause (or other policies), or of advocacy for a pause.

If our shared goal is the clichéd securing-benefits-and-minimizing-risks, or even just minimizing risks, one should be open to thoughtful colleagues' input that one's actions may be counterproductive to that end-goal. 

2. Fighting does not necessarily get one closer to winning. 

Although the analogy of war is compelling and lends itself well to your post's argument, in politics fighting often does not get one closer to winning. Putting up a bad fight may be worse than putting up no fight at all. If the goal is winning (instead of just putting up a fight), then taking criticism to your fighting style seriously should be paramount. 

I still concede that a lot of people dismiss PauseAI merely because they see it as cringe. But I don't think this is the core of most thoughtful people's criticism.

To be very clear, I'm not saying that PauseAI people are wrong, or that a pause will always be undesirable, or that they are using the wrong methods. I am answering to 

(1) the feeling that this post dismissed criticism of PauseAI without engaging with object-level arguments, and the feeing that this post wrongly ascribed outside criticism to epistemic purism and a reluctance to "do the dirty work," and

(2) the idea that the scout-work is "done" already and an AI pause is currently desirable. (I'm not sure I'm right here at all, but I have reasons [above] to think that PauseAI shouldn't be so sure either.)

Sorry for not editing this better, I wanted to write it quickly. I welcome people's responses though I may not be able to answer to them!

This analysis seems roughly right to me. Another piece of it I think is that being a 'soldier' or a 'bednet-equivalent' probably feels low status to many people (sometimes me included) because:

• people might feel soldiering is generally easier than scouting, and they are more replaceable/less special
• protesting feels more 'normal' and less 'EA' and people want to be EA-coded

To be clear I don't endorse this, I am just pointing out something I notice within myself/others. I think the second one is mostly just bad, and we should do things that are good regardless of whether they have 'EA vibes'. The first one I think is somewhat reasonable (e.g. I wouldn't want to pay someone to be a fulltime protest attendee to bring up the numbers) but I think soldiering can be quite challenging and laudable and part of a portfolio of types of actions one takes.

Love this!

Soldiers win wars. The most accurate map made by the most virtuous scout is worth nothing without soldiers to do something with it.

My experience in animal protection has shown me the immense value of soldiers and FWIW I think some of the most resolute soldiers I know are also the scouts I most look up to. Campaigning is probably the most mentally challenging work I have ever done. I think part of that is constantly iterating through the OODA loop, which is cycling through scout and soldier mindsets.

Most animal activists I know in the EA world, were activists first and EA second. It would be interesting to see more EAs tapping into activist actions, which often are a relatively low lift. And I think embracing the soldier mindset is part of that happening.

I think we have all the info we need to contradict the fear of not being a scout in her metaphor. Scouts are important for success in battle because accurate information is important to draw up a good battle plan. But those battle plans are worthless without soldiers to fight the battle! “Everyone Should be a Mapmaker and Fear that Using the Map to Actually Do Something Could Make Them a Worse Mapmaker” would be a much less rousing title, but this is how many EAs and rationalists have chosen to interpret the book.

seems locally invalid.^[1]

• argues from the meaning of terms in a metaphor
• "Everyone Should be a Mapmaker and Fear that Using the Map to Actually Do Something Could Make Them a Worse Mapmaker" is not a description of the position you want to argue against, because you can do things with information other than optimizing what you say to persuade people.

1. ^{^}

   'locally invalid' means 'this is not a valid argument', separate from the truth of the premises or conclusion