I do not think that such a theoretically possible effort is comparable to site moderators summarizing and publishing the information in an argument.

This is another comment where I do not understand the downvoting.

Why do people downvote such a comment, exactly?

I confirm that my understanding of top author was close to what Said describes here.

I am surprised that user data is analyzed that way, and then also that it is published here when someone has left or declared intention to do so.

Heaving read the post "Does Trump's AI Action plan have what it takes to win?" by Peter Wildeford, I realize that I do not understand what the word "winning" means here. I searched the Whitehouse document for the word and found it almost exclusively in the introduction. What is that race? What does it mean to win it? What happens next?

The reference to the space race in the introduction does not help ("Just like we won the space race, it is imperative that the United States and its allies win this race."). Acoording to Wikipedia, the Soviets "achieved the first successful satellite launch, Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957. It gained momentum when the USSR sent the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space with the orbital flight of Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961. These were followed by a string of other firsts achieved by the Soviets over the next few years." Then the US were the first country to land someone onthe moon. So they won the moon race, but that did not mean that the space race ended decisively. There were other space "firsts", and being first was mostly symbolic. Maybe there are better comparisons? In the case of nuclear weapons, being first to build them was important, but making that an end point to other countries' nuclear programmes would have required very unscrupulous behavior; therefore the "race" was conditional on the war against the Axis, or maybe even conditional on the war against the Nazis. The race was mainly ended by winning the war.

So what does it mean to win the AI race? Peter Wildeford writes: "I do expect some geopolitical ‘winner takes all’ or ‘winner takes most’ dynamics to achieving AGI, so in that sense the racing is very accurate. Whoever has a lead in developing AGI will have a significant say in shaping the post-AGI society, and it’s important for that to be shaped with freedom and American values, as opposed to authoritarianism." What does it mean to "have a significant say in shaping the post-AGI society"? Is it like being the first country to have a nuclear bomb and then ending other countries' efforts? Or Is it like being the first country to have a nuclear bomb and then not doing that? Or is it like being the country that has Apple and Meta and Alphabet and Microsoft? What does this "significant say" mean, concretely?

PW writes that "1. The Plan shows refreshing optimism" because "Historically, scientific progress has brought much wealth and opportunity to all of humanity. If AI becomes capable of automating this scientific progress and innovating across many domains, it is genuinely plausible we could enter into a true Golden Age. If done right, this would create a world where everyone is fully free and empowered to self-determine and self-actuate, without any barriers to living the lives they want to live." I do not see the plan's recipe for that, though maybe I am just overlooking it. How does this work if "3. The Plan acknowledges AI’s transformative potential but not its unique challenges" and "The problem is that the Plan focuses solely on the familiar risks from AI and ignores far more pressing future AGI problems."? In context of the whole post, the section under Heading 8, "8. Retraining might not be enough to handle AGI-driven disemployment" reads as though PW sees a severe risk of social catastrophe and at the same time as though he thinks we should think about that somewhat more while not letting it reduce our optimism. All in all, the post seems like "let's make sure we can win this race by really speeding up a lot! And then maybe we should also think a bit whether we are moving in the right direction."

As a side note, with respect to the renewable-energy part, I don't understand why pointing out that climate change is an important problem should be called a "crusade for climate change awareness".

When someone makes a list of claims and some of the words are clickable, I expect the link to lead to some evidence for the claim, or at least a very clear example if the claim is based on common knowledge. Instead, the claim "Europe’s war against air conditioning continues to be truly absurd." does not lead to anything that would illustrate a "war" (not even a metaphorical war) against air conditioning, it does not show anything about "Europe’s" current policy at all but instead just leads to a tweet by Rob Wiblin who says "European countries with hot summers should have AC in most buildings, and we should install solar panels that supply the necessary electricity just fine on hot and sunny days. It's crazy AC is uncommon in the UK — doubly so in France." (It is unclear what is controversial in the first sentence. The second sentence may be based on an accurate description of the situation, but it is unclear in the tweet.), who retweets a statement by French nationalist M. Le Pen about air conditioning. That statemen is a mix of some policy intention and claims about French "leaders" and "elites". 

I think the old norms according to which politics content was seen as potentially problematic and therefore should at least be based on good epistemics had their advantages. But maybe I misremember those times. 

I won’t discuss tpoasiwid here, but I note that your claim is completely different from alleging that (1) there is a cult of pain that (2) is rooted in ethics that developed in malthusian times and (3) now drives policy choices. If everything that is relevant is tpoasiwid, then we do not need to claim anything about motivations driving policies.

Thanks. The French example sounds like a regulatory definitions problem? I do not know the motivation for the Geneva one. I do not see how this substantiates the cultural scepticism point, and there seem to be many explanations that are more likely than a "cult of pain". Your point about Zurich demonstrates that innovations and changes in buildings are often complex due to institutions, laws and market environments.

If a "cult of pain" or a positive attitude towards suffering was the driver behind European policies, I would expect to see policy documents approving e.g. of death during heatwaves. Instead, EU documents usually emphasize this as a severe problem and a motivation to promote climate adaptation policy (see e.g. this one by the EEA).

I agree that thinking about positive-sum situations as zero-sum is bad, but one should be cautious about assuming other people's motivations. You make the strong claim that the policies that you list as examples are motivated by a cult of pain that developed due to a moral heuristic that developed during Malthusian times. This seems strange because there are more recent developments that should have a stronger, or at least equal impression on moral intuitions, like the suffering during the industrial revolution, or carbon emissions and climate change. The "cult of pain" explanation does not seem like a straightforward explanation for what you see as irrational collective/societal behavior. 

Your question about "Germans silently suffering in their overheated apartments with no air conditioning" seems to be why they have no AC units. Possible answers are: because of the typical problems in housing markets, because of imperfect regulation, because of high electricity prices, because heat waves were perceived as less of a problem a while ago. Who said he or she does not own an AC unit in order to do "repentance for the carbon footprint of their holiday in Turkey the other year"?

Of course there are people who "believe in degrowth", but it is not a dominant attitude. The European Commission, for example, framed the European Green Deal as a "growth strategy that protects the climate".