"Pivotal Acts" means something specific

I think the argument for thinking in terms of pivotal acts is quite strong. AGI destroys the world by default; a variety of deliberate actions can stop this, but there isn't a smooth and continuous process that rolls us from 2022 to an awesome future, with no major actions or events deliberately occurring to set us on that trajectory.

By contrast, the counter-arguments here seem weak to me, and overly insensitive to the specifics of the actual situation. "Complex situations don't get resolved via phase transitions" and "heroism never makes a big difference in real life" are extremely general objections; if there was a particular situation humanity found itself in that was the exception to this rule, the heuristic would provide no guidance that this is an exception. You just die if you over-rely on the heuristic.

"There hasn't been a past pivotal act" likewise seems like a very weak argument to me. AGI is a world-historical novelty, with its own causal dynamics. There's some weak similarity to the advent of human intelligence, but mostly, it's just a new event. There is no natural force pushing AGI toward being low-impact, just because non-AGI processes were low-impact. There is no natural force pushing for AGI to have better outcomes if no one ever does anything about it (no "heroes"), just because heroes are rare historically. The causal dynamics of AGI, and of the world in relation to AGI, are a product of the specifics of the situation (e.g., facts about CS and about how engineers work on ML), not a prophecy or echo of causally dissimilar past events.

At the level of abstraction "complex event", sure, complicated stuff is often continuous in various ways. But switching topics to "complex event" means fuzzing out all the details about the actual event we're talking about. It's throwing away nearly all information we have, and hoping that this one bit ("complex: y or n?") carries the day. I think fuzzing out details can be a neat exercise for doing Original Seeing at the problem, but I wouldn't put my weight down on that style of reasoning.

The problem is in my estimate the "reduced problem" is actually harder.

I don't think it's harder; i.e., I don't think a significant fraction of our hope rests on long-term processes that trend in good directions but include no important positive "events" or phase changes. (And, more strongly, I think humanity will in fact die if we don't leverage some novel tech to prevent the proliferation of AGI systems.)

I think the hardness is just easier to see and easier to emotionally appreciate, exactly because you're getting concrete about sequences of events in the world.

Rushing to premature concreteness is indeed an error. But I think EA thus far has mostly made the opposite error, refusing to go concrete and thereby avoiding the pressure and constraint of having to actually plan, face tradeoffs, entertain unpleasant realities, etc. If you stay in vagueness indefinitely, things may feel more optimistic, but I flatly doubt that this vague feeling, with little associated scenario analysis or chains of reasoning, is grounded in reality.

I actually don't necessarily disagree with this. (I'm generally pretty confused about how to think about pivotal acts, and AI strategy generally)

But, insofar as one doesn't think they should use the pivotal-act frame, I think the solution is to just not use it, rather than water-down the word. 

(I think an important thing that the pivotal act frame is getting at is that somehow you actually need to exist the Acute Risk Period. There are a lot of vague plans that sounds sorta helpful but don't actually add up to "we have left the acute risk period", and many of those vague plans won't work even if you stack them all up together. I think it is plausible you don't need the all-or-nothing implication of the Pivotal frame, but there is something important about plans that could possibly work, or be part of a constellation of plans that could possibly-work-together.)

I think I basically agree with this. I definitely generally think of it as the jargonist's job to come up with jargon that has a decent shot at weathering the forces of conversational pressure, and if you want an oddly specific term it's better to name it something that sounds oddly specific. (This still doesn't reliably work, people will shoehorn the oddly-specific jargon into things to sound smart, but it makes it less plausibly deniable)

I like "gigayear impact" or something similar.

I do think it's still helpful to have the concept of guarded terms.

I wish we had somehow adopted the practice of using lots of acronyms; I think they probably work much better at 1) preserving technical meanings and 2) not overloading words that people think they already understand. (You weren't using "CIA" for anything before you heard about the Central Intelligence Agency; you probably were using "pivotal" and "act" for something before you heard about pivotal acts.) Like, I think it's relatively unlikely that SEAI will drift in common usage, in part because it seems hard to mistakenly believe that you understand the common meaning of SEAI unless you know what the acronym stands for.

This is doomed.  Jargon appears and evolves, and is always context-specific in ways that conflict with other uses.  

The solution is not to pick less-common sound sequences, that just makes it hard to discuss in technical terms.  The solution is to use more words when the context calls for it (like when first using the phrase in a post, note that you mean this technical definition, not the more common layman's interpretation).

I haven't actually paid attention to this post, so I don't know if the complaint is that someone used it in the wrong context in a confusing way or if they're somehow expecting people to always have the right context.  The answer should be "use more words", not "it always means what I want it to mean".

Yeah, the people saying this are definitely not doing the "pair with actual solution", and when I've previously brought this up in person with them they kinda had an "oh...." reaction, like it was a real update to them that this was also required.

Came here to say this.

Specifically, the pivotal act I most often default to is something like:

1. Delay AGI by 10 years
2. Use those ten years to solve the alignment problem

Since I expect that the Alignment problem will be a lot easier once we know what AGI looks like.  But not so easy that you can solve it in in the ~6 month lead-time that OpenAI currently has over the rest of the world.

Okay, but how do we get technical terms with precise meanings that are analyzable using propositions that can be investigated and decided using logic and observation? If we're in a context where the meaning of words is automatically eroded by projection into low-dimensional, low-context concepts into whatever the surrounding political forces want, we're not going to get anywhere without being able to fix the meaning of words we need to have a non-obvious technically important use.

FWIW, I think this is an oversensitive frame-control reaction. Like, I agree there is (some) frame control* going on here, and there have been some other Eliezer-pieces that felt more-frame-control-y enough that I think it's reasonable to be watching out for. 

But it seems like you tapped out here at the slightest hint of it, and meanwhile... this term only exists at all because Eliezer thought it was an important concept to crystallize, and it's only in the public discourse right now because Eliezer started talking about it, and refusing to understand what he actually means when he says it just seems super weird to me. 

It was written on arbital which was always kinda in a weird beta state. Having read a fair amount of arbital posts, my sense is Eliezer was sort of privately writing the textbook/background reading that he thought was important for the AI Alignment community he wanted to build. Eliezer didn't crosspost it to LW as if it were written/ready for the LW audience, I did, so judging it on those terms feels weird.

(* note: I think frame control is moderately common, isn't automatically bad, I think it might be a good rationalist-norm to acknowledge when you're doing it but that norm isn't at all established and definitely wasn't established in 2015 when this was first written.)