"Against strawmanning unilateral pauses" by Geoffrey Irving

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 good

Here is the good version of unilateral pausing:

1. 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.
   
2. 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 [...]

---

Outline:

(00:57) The good version of unilateral pausing is good

(04:50) Scott thinks the good version of unilateral pausing is good, or at least exempts it from criticism

(06:28) Oversimplified game theory is bad, and you should feel bad

(07:51) "Some definition" hides dragons

(10:17) Promises can be harder than actions

(11:52) How many frontier labs are there?

(12:20) Definitional fairness is less important than survival

---

First published:
November 3rd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/enzpS72uDmomiWN7a/against-strawmanning-unilateral-pauses

---



Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.