“Epistemic advantages of working as a moderate” by Buck

Many people who are concerned about existential risk from AI spend their time advocating for radical changes to how AI is handled. Most notably, they advocate for costly restrictions on how AI is developed now and in the future, e.g. the Pause AI people or the MIRI people. In contrast, I spend most of my time thinking about relatively cheap interventions that AI companies could implement to reduce risk assuming a low budget, and about how to cause AI companies to marginally increase that budget. I'll use the words "radicals" and "moderates" to refer to these two clusters of people/strategies. In this post, I’ll discuss the effect of being a radical or a moderate on your epistemics. I don’t necessarily disagree with radicals, and most of the disagreement is unrelated to the topic of this post; see footnote for more on this.[1] I often hear people claim that being [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: August 20th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9MaTnw5sWeQrggYBG/epistemic-advantages-of-working-as-a-moderate --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.