Since moving to the Bay last year, I have noticed that although Bay Areans are very high in intelligence, they are often very low in worldliness. That is, they don't know how the world actually works. The pacing letter is yet another exhibit supporting this assessment. For purposes of this tweet, let's take for granted that anxiety about emerging risks from AI is warranted, particularly as AI research accelerates. What are "the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development?" Whatever else they may include, they likely include coercive measures whose form and administration remain unspecified. How do "international efforts" work? Unlike most of the signatories of the letter, I have been a State Department advisor and have participated in multiple treaty negotiations. I have also been a member of technical committees for UN technical agencies. The international sector is unbelievably dysfunctional. Every single treaty or international agreement is an opportunity for every participant to manipulate the much broader policy environment. Often the participants don't care about the object of the agreement, and are instead trying to use the agreement as leverage for something else. I have seen countries use their limited leverage in multilateral agreements to try to kneecap American industry, get around sanctions, create a pretense of international justification for domestic illiberalism, or steer technology in an authoritarian direction. The damage from this dysfunction is limited by the fact that there are zero major countries (and not that many smaller countries) who will actually bind themselves in meaningful ways that they don't narrowly want. If a previously signed treaty turns out to be inconvenient, it is often subtly ignored or reinterpreted. In addition, treaty delegations working on industrial issues generally reflect the full spectrum of special interests involved in an issue. A US AI treaty delegation might be led by a State Department ambassador, but he will be advised by representatives of the interagency, major labs, other major tech companies, tech investors, civil society, etc. “International efforts,” therefore, is not a reassuring answer to the governance problem; it is the name of another enormous, unresolved governance problem. So assume you survive this special interest circus and hell freezes over and you produce an agreement that narrowly does something to "pace the frontier" of AI development in an enforceable and effective way. The enforcement of that thing is still unspecified, and is probably bad. The fact that an AI researcher in the Bay Area can imagine a sensible, minimally coercive enforcement regime compatible with liberalism does not mean that is where we end up. The pacing letter therefore converts uncertainty about the future pace of AI development into a confident collective demand for an unspecified exercise of power determined through a dysfunctional international political system. Seems bad.