This is a special post for quick takes by Maxwell Love. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Some quick observations on the attacks on METR, EA, and other AI safety orgs (from my perspective as a political campaigner and former Communications Director for a union and mayor during COVID):
- If you're explaining, you're losing: Every rebuttal repeats the accusation to people who haven't heard it yet. Answer the accusation once, link to it, and stop explaining. This is the "illusory truth" effect (information is true when it's repeated).
- Silence doesn't work either: Not responding on the record suggests something is being hidden. Make one clear statement rather than amplifying in multiple twitter threads.
- Concede what you can: A concept I know from political comms is the "admission against interest". This buys trust, disarms cynical voters, and establishes credibility. Saying "yes, AND here's what we're doing about it" will take some air out of the critique.
- Messenger > message: Ideally people who know the organization being attacked, are from outside the AI safety world, have independent standing, or better yet, have disagreed with the organization publicly will land the defense better.
- Going after people's personal lives or spouses is overreach: Ordinary people will obviously find this unfair and it's where their attacks will backfire.
- Don't quote tweet and rebut: You're just distributing their message for them.
I want to write something longer on this but don't have time right now. Lots of opportunity for good crisis comms here. Let me know what's wrong about this take and if you'd like to hear more!
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1I would not describe the communication policies of unions to have helped the world orient better to what unions are doing, as such, I wouldn't consider the lessons from that world to be good lessons to adopt. This also just really doesn't match my model of how discourse has played out over the last decade.
Here is the advice I would actually give as someone who has thought about public discourse for much of my professional life:
Your central job is to explain what is going on. Explain the same thing over and over and over again. Lead with understanding and patience. Within a single battle, explaining something repeatedly can often cause the "accusations" to propagate further, but people over time do actually internalize the correct responses and come to associate an argument with its counterargument. This takes time, have patience. Respond consistently with the highest quality counterarguments whenever you see someone making a bad accusation or attack.
Concede only what is actually fair to concede. Many of the worst blunders I've seen in the last decade were the result of people being overly conciliatory because they overestimated a threat and thought they should concede more to diffuse it. Mobs in-particular will often try to smell for blood based on political pressure. Giving into an unjustified threat often opens the floodgates to many more attackers as they see that their aggression is getting traction.
Get your best informed people in front of the cameras. Do not hope that just because someone is sympathetic, or charismatic, or has a good social background that they will make a good spokesperson. They will end up saying really dumb stuff, and then you have do paddle back, or be caught in a really awkward position. In the end, the people you trust to actually say good things will probably also be the people other people will trust to say good things. You will deeply regret basically every time you empower an uninformed spokesperson.
Quote tweeting is very high variance. Quote tweeting is the central way to dunk on people, and sometimes some things are worth dunking on. Seeing that a tweet has many more quotes than likes is among the standard ways to tell that a tweet is being badly received (also known as "getting ratioed"). I recommend mostly avoiding it because it's bad for discourse, but in contrast to the OP here, it certainly seems to be working as a way to spread counter-narratives to things.
I agree that "silence doesn't work" and "going after people's personal lives", though I think the latter is because it's bad for discourse, not because it doesn't work. It does unfortunately often work and often needs to be rebutted.
1I 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.
I think this very instinct is probably at the core of like 50% of the dysfunction of modern discourse. It's just people repeatedly insisting to have everything play out in their specific frame, and repeatedly trying to redirect everything towards that. I have a similar deep distaste for what people like to call "media training" the central lesson of which is to "not answer any question asked straightforwardly but instead use it as a jumping off point for talking about the things you want to talk about". "Media trained" people are obnoxious to talk to, and make communication and understanding of an issue reliably worse.
If the goal is public persuasion, I'd redirect to what we want people talking about, ideally going on the offensive
No, this is bad. Talk about what will help people understand the situation better. If you need to redirect, first answer the question that is being asked of you straightforwardly, even if it seems to you in bad faith, then explain something in return that you think is relevant. Conversation, including public conversation, is a give and take of different perspectives.
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)
People will definitely never all become world experts, but I do think good public communication requires an intention to help the audience genuinely understand. This is not always possible, but the intention is where approximately all the good things in public discourse come from.
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1As a datapoint, I think it can go very well when you have strong arguments even if the interviewer is hostile. Jordan Peterson on the BBC has had over 50 millions views and was successful while being interviewed by a somewhat hostile interviewer. Nate Soares is currently getting millions of views by also having far better arguments with this video, where the tone of the combative MIT research scientist softens substantially after Nate successfully rebuts his arguments over the course of 2 hours, going from phrases like "You are one-trick ponies" and "shockingly naive" and "lacking humility" to "This has been clarifying" and “If you're saying you predicted this, I believe you and good on you.” and noting points of agreement.
I think both of them have invested a lot of work into being able to handle themselves well in those situations, and for others it can of course backfire to try to earnestly answer questions when you're not prepared and the interviewer is trying to make you look silly. One popular example that comes to mind was when the founder of the r/antiwork subreddit went on Fox News and was embarrassed by what happened. I think there's a sort of 'media training' that they were lacking in, though I agree it wasn't in "avoiding answering questions". (And perhaps they should simply have refused such a hostile and short interview.)
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