Conflationary Alliances — LessWrong
Sometimes large alliances form by conflating concepts that smaller alliances are already amenable to caring about. E.g., people have different notions of justice, but they agree that something-called-justice is very good, so they can agree to team up and fight for justice. The same may be true for ideas like "safety", "alignment", "interpretability, and other concepts relevant to readers of LessWrong and the Alignment Forum. When a conflationary alliance exists, there is a continual tension between Reading this sequence will hopefully give you more empathy for other people in cases where you feel like they're using concepts in a sloppy way. I have three motivations for writing it: By describing conflationary alliances, I am not intending to introduce some new kind of deception that people don't already do. Speaking for myself, I try not to build alliances based on conflation except in cases where I'm genuinely willing to say something acknowledging the conflation, like "Many people