I'm sorry if my point wasn't made clearly. Things are taboos because of social customs & contexts, my point wasn't meant to be normative — just point out that the taboo isn't against violence against ai labs, it's against violence more broadly.
Yes but what I'm saying is that this isn't true - few people are absolute pacifists. So violence in general isn't taboo - I doubt most people object to things like laws (which ultimately rely on the threat of violence).
So why is it that violence in this specific context is taboo?
This is a commonly cited failure of deontology and in particular classical liberalism. Whether physical violence is morally justified, whether it's justified by local law, whether it's justified by international rules of war, whether it's effective, and whether it's a mechanistically understandable response from victims of harm a behaviorist perspective, are all different questions. I typically answer that most violence is ineffective and yet that the motivations can be mechanistically understood as arising from locally reasonable mechanisms of thought; most violence is illegal, but most legal systems commit large amounts of physical violence to which any form of retaliation at all is legally unavailable; and most legal systems are implemented by people who disobey their own laws regularly. Does this morally justify violence? I abstain, violence is always a tragedy even if morally justified and effective; but it morally compels immense effort to build a healthier network of locally empowered personal control of personal outcomes, which is absolutely contrary to how current orgs are designed, and orgs should fear mass violence from morally ambiguous but mechanistically understandable mass retaliation should mass unemployment result in mass death. Altman has even said similarly recently, though less directly!
I doubt violence is effective now, but we shouldn't encourage people to tie their hands behind their backs either, as strategic ambiguity on the part of the world's population is a critical component of the game theoretic pressure on labs to prevent harms themselves.
0ArisC
So, you would have advocated against war with Nazi Germany?
I'm sorry if my point wasn't made clearly. Things are taboos because of social customs & contexts, my point wasn't meant to be normative — just point out that the taboo isn't against violence against ai labs, it's against violence more broadly.