Against strawmanning unilateral pauses

Summary: Scott Alexander’s Against SURA post is arguing against a strawman version of unilateral pauses. He admits as much deep into the post. I think his conclusions fail against stronger pause plans for conditional or limited unilateral pauses, where training resumes if the pause does not cause others to pause, and where personnel are redirected toward work on alignment and product, rather than simply fired. In addition, Scott’s post is incorrect about the simplicity of the game theory involved: getting companies to agree to conditional pauses is not strictly easier than convincing them to pause, as the former requires companies to (promise to) take actions based on ambiguous, game-theoretically-informed evidence. That is not the kind of evidence companies tend to act on. The good version of unilateral pausing is goodHere is the good version of unilateral pausing: • Capability pause: Some frontier lab (let’s call them OpenAI or Anthropic) says they have stopped capability research, either just all frontier training runs or both all frontier training runs and all low-scale capability-focused research. • Internal definition: The company gets to pause on its own terms, which is much easier than a generally coordinated pause since they can define the pause in terms of the existing structure of work and teams within the specific company, reducing disruption to other processes. They have said they would like to work with other companies and countries to adapt and strengthen this definition over time, in particular to make it gradually more compatible with actions by other actors. Importantly, we accept that it may be easiest for a company to pause according to its own, company-specific definition, and handle any asymmetry in their agreements via multiple rounds of negotiation with other actors. • Safety + security + product: In place of capability research, their efforts shift to alignment and other safety research, information security, and product. The product part is