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Lumifer comments on Snowdenizing UFAI - Less Wrong Discussion
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I am getting the impression that they were a good start, probably the best that he -- a single guy -- could have done. Certainly many more people are aware of it and many of them are pissed. Big companies are unhappy too.
It's certainly a great deal for one person to have accomplished (and most of the data he leaked hasn't been released yet). Nevertheless, we don't yet know if government surveillance and secrecy will be reduced as a result.
This is a pretty much impossible criterion to satisfy.
Just as with AGI defectors, what you get might not be ideal or proper or satisfying or even sufficient -- but that's what you got. Working with that is much preferable to waiting for perfection.
The criterion of "will surveillance and secrecy be reduced as a result" is the only relevant one. Naturally we can't know results in advance for certain, and that means we can't grade actions like Snowden's in advance either. We do the best we can, but it's still legitimate to point out that the true impact of Snowden's actions is not yet known, when the discussion is about how much you expect to benefit from similar actions taken by others in the future.