+Also in early July 2019, Jessica published ["The AI Timelines Scam"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KnQs55tjxWopCzKsk/the-ai-timelines-scam), arguing that the recent popularity of "short" (_e.g._, 2030) AI timelines was better explained by political factors, rather than any technical arguments: just as in previous decades, people had incentives to bluff and exaggerate about the imminence of AGI in order to attract resources to their own project.
+
+(Remember, this was 2019. After seeing what GPT-3/PaLM/DALL-E/_&c._ could do during the ["long May 2020"](https://twitter.com/MichaelTrazzi/status/1635871679133130752), it's now looking to me like the short-timelines people had better intuitions than Jessica gave them credit for.)
+
+I still sympathized with the "mainstream" pushback against using "scam"/"fraud"/"lie"/_&c._ language to include motivated [elephant-in-the-brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain)-like distortions. I conceded that this was a _boring_ semantic argument, but I feared that until we invented better linguistic technology, the _boring_ semantic argument was going to _continue_ sucking up discussion bandwidth with others when it didn't need to.
+
+"Am I being too tone-policey here?" I asked the coordination group. "Is it better if I explicitly disclaim, 'This is marketing advice; I'm not claiming to be making a substantive argument'?" (Subject: "Re: reception of 'The AI Timelines Scam' is better than expected!")
+
+Ben replied, "What exactly is a scam, if it's not misinforming people systematically about what you have to offer, in a direction that moves resources towards you? Investigations of financial fraud don't inquire as to the conscious motives of the perp."
+
+I replied that the concept of [_mens rea_](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/mens_rea) did seem necessary for maintaining good incentives, at least in some contexts. The law needs to distinguish between accidentally hitting a pedestrian in one's car ("manslaughter") from premeditated killing ("first-degree murder"), because traffic accidents are significantly less disincentivizable than offing one's enemies. (Anyone who drives at all is probably going to have unlucky analogues in nearby possible worlds who are guilty of vehicular manslaughter.) The manslaughter case was simpler than misinformation-that-moves-resources,[^manslaughter-disanalogy] and it might not be _easy_ for the court to determine "intent", but I didn't see what would reverse the extremely weak principle that intent matters, sometimes.
+
+[^manslaughter-disanalogy]: For one extremely important disanalogy, perps don't _gain_ from committing manslaughter.
+
+Ben replied that what mattered in the determination of manslaughter _vs._ murder was whether there was long-horizon optimization power towards the outcome of someone's death; it wasn't about what sentiments the killer rehearsed in their working memory.
+
+On a phone call, Michael made an analogy between EA and Catholicism. The Pope was fraudulent, because the legitimacy of the Pope's position (and his claims to power and resources) rested on the pretense that he had a direct relationship with God, which wasn't true, and the Pope knew (he _had_ to know, at some level) that it asn't true. (I agreed that this usage of _fraud_ made sense to me.) In Michael's view, Ben's charges against GiveWell were similar: GiveWell's legitimacy rested on the pretense that they were making decisions based on numbers, and they [had to know at some level](https://blog.givewell.org/2011/08/18/why-we-cant-take-expected-value-estimates-literally-even-when-theyre-unbiased/) that they weren't doing that.
+
+------
+
+Ruby wrote a document about ways in which one's speech could harm people, which was discussed in the comments of a draft _Less Wrong_ post by some of our posse members and some of the _Less Wrong_ mods. (The draft was hidden, but the API apparently didn't filter out comments on hidden posts, and the thread was visible on the third-party [GreaterWrong](https://www.greaterwrong.com/) site; I [filed a bug](https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2/issues/2161).)
+
+Ben wrote:
+
+> What I see as under threat is the ability to say in a way that's actually heard, not only that opinion X is false, but that the process generating opinion X is untrustworthy, and perhaps actively optimizing in an objectionable direction. Frequently, attempts to say this are construed _primarily_ as moves to attack some person or institution, pushing them into the outgroup. Frequently, people suggest to me an "equivalent" wording with a softer tone, which in fact omits important substantive criticisms I mean to make, while claiming to understand what's at issue.
+
+Ray Arnold (another _Less Wrong_ mod) replied:
+
+> My core claim is: "right now, this isn't possible, without a) it being heard by many people as an attack, b) without people having to worry that other people will see it as an attack, even if they don't."
+>
+> It seems like you see this something as _"there's a precious thing that might be destroyed"_ and I see it as _"a precious thing does not exist and must be created, and the circumstances in which it can exist are fragile."_ It might have existed in the very early days of LessWrong. But the landscape now is very different than it was then. With billions of dollars available and at stake, what worked then can't be the same thing as what works now.
+
+(!!)[^what-works-now]
+
+[^what-works-now]: Ray qualifies this in the next paragraph:
+
+ > [in public. In private things are much easier. It's _also_ the case that private channels enable collusion—that was an update [I]'ve made over the course of the conversation. ]
+
+ Even with the qualifier, I still think this deserves a "(!!)".
+
+Jessica pointed this out as a step towards discussing the real problem (Subject: "progress towards discussing the real thing??"). She elaborated in the secret thread. Now that the "EA" scene was adjacent to real-world money and power, people were incentivized to protect their reputations (and beliefs related to their reputations) in anti-epistemic ways, in a way that they wouldn't if the scene was still just a philosophy club, catalyzing a shift of norms from "that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" towards protecting feelings—where "protecting feelings" was actually about protecting power. The fact that the scene was allocating billions of dollars made it strictly _more_ important for public discussions to reach the truth, compared to philosophy club—but it also increased the likelihood of obfuscatory action, which philosophy-club norms (like "assume good faith") didn't account for. We might need to extend philosophy-club norms to take into account the possibility of adversarial action: there's a reason that courts of law don't assume good faith.