Campaigning and Comms: getting everyone on board with x-risk and moratorium

Imagine 100 million people, including thousands of policymakers and journalists, spent at least 30 seconds on https://moratorium.ai, and this led to sane policies. How did it happen? Can we get closer to this? Let's brainstorm and plan!

dead-brownOP•10/21/23, 12:14 AM

My current model is that if policymakers/journalists/the general public understand the problem to some extent (and know what the closest thing to a scientific consensus around the problem is and expect they can learn about it in more detail somewhere), this robustly incentivises regulations that address the problem. The moratorium proposal with a persuasive (and technically correct) justification for it might serve as a reason for people to listen to the justification, and then hopefully understand something about AI and AI alignment (maybe even in a way that makes it hard for the labs to persuade policymakers that this is not really a problem/they can deal with without gov intervention).

I think this project might take off and go pretty well. If you have any thoughts on what might help with campaigning, let me know!

dead-brown•10/21/23, 7:00 AM

I think the main thing is to get more traffic for the site. If a% of readers agree with the message and there are b readers then the number of readers who agree is a x b. Another similar idea is that the percentage of the population concerned about x-risk is the percentage of people aware of it times the percentage of those who are concerned. So if 10% are aware and 10% are concerned given that they're aware then only 1% is concerned whereas the true value should be 10%. Given this argument, I think x-risk is underrepresented in public discourse and it would be good if there were more awareness of it.

sacred-rose•10/22/23, 12:42 AM

I feel like the best way to drive people to things like a webpage is through collaborations with all type of famous people in the internet / influencers that talk/ write about tech, politics, or miscellaneous stuff like lots of podcasts.

In general is more difficult to get to some people the more famous they are but not always, I feel like there's really good hanging fruits there that are not that high. For example Max Tegmark went to Lex Fridman advocating for pausing AI and was seen by 1.3M people. What if he would have redirected some of them to your page or https://pauseai.info/action ? I think that type of stuff would be massive and not that costly.

Ddead-brown My current model is that if policymakers/journalists/the general public understa...

full-green•10/22/23, 4:08 AM

I really like this as a resource. Are you involved with the site at all, or only promoting it?

Ffull-green I really like this as a resource. Are you involved with the site at all, or only...

dead-brownOP•10/22/23, 4:09 AM

Thanks a lot! I made approximately all of it

full-green•10/22/23, 4:10 AM

Nice! I'm the one who just sent the message about the typos.

dead-brownOP•10/22/23, 4:17 AM

Oh, hi! Yep, I saw it a couple of minutes ago, it prompted me to send a happy message to a friend (“hey, people are finding typos, cool!”), as it’s a good sign for the kind of future community engagement I’m hoping for, and then to open Discord to see whether there are any replies here. I planned to fix the typos and send an email tomorrow morning

Ffull-green Nice! I'm the one who just sent the message about the typos. 😄

dead-brownOP•10/22/23, 4:18 AM

Please suggest other edits & potential improvements as well, I expect that to be pretty helpful!

Ddead-brown Please suggest other edits & potential improvements as well, I expect that to be...

full-green•10/22/23, 4:38 AM

I'll set myself a reminder to put together a list of thoughts (probably a mix of concrete suggestions and vibes-based low-confidence criticisms). I'll plan to get back to you before Tuesday. Don't hesitate to ping me if it looks like I fell off the world. I'm a scattered person.

full-green•10/24/23, 3:35 PM

@Mikhail Samin
I wrote up all my edit suggestions for the main text of the site as comments on a copy in a Google Doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10IaN4DS0gCDnHH8AcbqgEsgxol1LWiEvoXx4yt3-eaI/edit?usp=sharing
(A total of 65 suggestions, most of them for grammar and clarity.)

Google Docs

Moratorium.ai Edit Suggestions

It’s reasonable to expect that without substantial effort, a smarter than humans general AI will be developed when we’ll still have no idea how to sufficiently align the goals it pursues with human values, so it will pose an existential threat: a threat of literally wiping out humanity. … Moder...

full-green•10/24/23, 3:37 PM

(I initially had one other thought, which was that the point about AI being a black box is kind of belabored. But I think that's probably a good thing. A lot of the general public has a very hard time understanding how it could be possible that the creators of this technology don't understand how it works.)

Ffull-green (I initially had one other thought, which was that the point about AI being a bl...

dead-brownOP•10/24/23, 3:44 PM

Can you tell more? I think it’s pretty important to be technically correct and honest and ideally don’t make simplifications without clearly stating it’s a simplification. Is AI not a black box in many relevant ways?

Ddead-brown Can you tell more? I think it’s pretty important to be technically correct and h...

full-green•10/24/23, 3:49 PM

Oh, I didn't mean it was unclear, I meant that the point was emphasized in several different ways in the same paragraph. It's possible there's some improvement to be made there, but the emphasis is probably appropriate.

Ffull-green Oh, I didn't mean it was unclear, I meant that the point was emphasized in sever...

dead-brownOP•10/24/23, 3:50 PM

Oh, right, sorry, makes sense

Ffull-green <@181837421489553410> I wrote up all my edit suggestions for the main text of t...

dead-brownOP•11/3/23, 11:53 AM

Hey, sorry, I don't think I see the comments with edits there- only the text

Ddead-brown Hey, sorry, I don't think I see the comments with edits there- only the text

full-green•11/3/23, 3:24 PM

Oh! Sorry about that. I had the permissions set to viewer rather than commenter. This should work:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10IaN4DS0gCDnHH8AcbqgEsgxol1LWiEvoXx4yt3-eaI/edit?usp=drivesdk

Google Docs

Moratorium.ai Edit Suggestions

dead-brownOP•11/3/23, 11:02 PM

Thanks a lot! I'm surprised how good the suggestions are, I already accepted most of the edits (https://github.com/Mihonarium/moratorium.ai/commits/main) and left comments on some, am going through the rest

dead-brownOP•11/5/23, 12:10 AM

Separately from editing, if anyone has any sort of campaigning experience or comms background, lmk!

Campaigning and Comms: getting everyone on board with x-risk and moratorium

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