“The Sorry State of AI X-Risk Advocacy, and Thoughts on Doing Better” by Thane Ruthenis

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

First, let me quote my previous ancient post on the topic:
Effective Strategies for Changing Public Opinion
The titular paper is very relevant here. I'll summarize a few points.

• The main two forms of intervention are persuasion and framing.
• Persuasion is, to wit, an attempt to change someone's set of beliefs, either by introducing new ones or by changing existing ones.
• Framing is a more subtle form: an attempt to change the relative weights of someone's beliefs, by empathizing different aspects of the situation, recontextualizing it.
• There's a dichotomy between the two. Persuasion is found to be very ineffective if used on someone with high domain knowledge. Framing-style arguments, on the other hand, are more effective the more the recipient knows about the topic.
• Thus, persuasion is better used on non-specialists, and it's most advantageous the first time it's used. If someone tries it and fails, they raise [...]

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Outline:
(02:23) Persuasion
(04:17) A Better Target Demographic
(08:10) Extant Projects in This Space?
(10:03) Framing
The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
February 21st, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6dgCf92YAMFLM655S/the-sorry-state-of-ai-x-risk-advocacy-and-thoughts-on-doing
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.