We urgently need to practice before we can pause

I've noticed two clusters of thought in how people expect a global AI pause to be shaped: • Single-shot global pause: the global AI pause will be implemented suddenly, with little pacing precedent before it, and we will need to do a lot of research before it's implemented so that we can get it right the first time around.• Incrementally-shaped global pause: the global AI pause will be implemented incrementally, with lots of pacing precedent before it, and we will improve the pause setup and get more parties to join in as we go.An incrementally-shaped global pause is both more likely and more tractable than the single-shot global pause. This is largely because the third-party ecosystem needs practice building trust, technical competency, and general experience doing lower-scale assessments before a global pause can be competently pulled off.  I also think that the concept of a single-shot global pause is an unhelpful red herring that people often implicitly use to discredit the possibility of a global pause in general. If a single-shot global pause is to happen, I think this would require substantial government buy-in, but it’s hard to build that sort of buy-in without precedent of similar things succeeding in the past. And if we just hack together a single-shot global pause without any precedent of similar things succeeding in the past, the chance that the pause falls apart due to defection, incompetence, and mistrust will be high. The basic building block of an AI pause is trustThe fundamental building block of an AI pause is that party A (a company or a country) can make a claim about sacrificing capability advancement for safety, and that party B can believe that claim. This is a public good, both between US AGI companies, and between countries, that is currently very scarce. Building more of this public good would generally make a pause much more likely to happen. I don't just mean trust in the sense of "party B doesn't think party A is blatantly lying," but als