Jacob’s comment does not count, since it’s not addressing the “actually consider whether the project will net decrease chance of extinction” or the “could the answer have plausibly been ‘no’ and then the project would not have happened” part.
Paul’s comment does address both of those, especially this part at the end:
To be clear, this is not post hoc reasoning. I talked with WebGPT folks early on while they were wondering about whether these risks were significant, and I said that I thought this was badly overdetermined. If there had been more convincing arguments that the harms from the research were significant, I believe that it likely wouldn’t have happened.
That does indeed falsify my position, and I have updated the top-level comment accordingly. Thankyou for the information.
Jacob’s comment does not count, since it’s not addressing the “actually consider whether the project will net decrease chance of extinction” or the “could the answer have plausibly been ‘no’ and then the project would not have happened” part.
Paul’s comment does address both of those, especially this part at the end:
That does indeed falsify my position, and I have updated the top-level comment accordingly. Thankyou for the information.