Geoffrey Irving says Scott Alexander's 'Against SURA' attacks a strawman
geoffreyirving · x · 2026-11-03
In a LessWrong post, safety researcher Geoffrey Irving argues Scott Alexander's "Against SURA" attacks a strawman version of unilateral pauses:
- Alexander's conclusions fail against stronger conditional/limited pause plans, where training resumes if the pause doesn't prompt others to follow, and staff are redirected to alignment and product work rather than fired.
- The game theory claim is wrong: getting companies to agree to conditional pauses is not strictly easier than convincing them to pause, since it requires commitments based on ambiguous, game-theoretically-informed evidence companies rarely act on.
- Companies can define pauses in terms of their own internal structure, then adapt agreements over time.
A substantive exchange in the AI safety community over unilateral capability pauses.
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