On a meta note, IF proposition 2 is true, THEN the best way to tell this would be if people had been saying so AT THE TIME. If instead, actually everyone at the time disagreed with proposition 2, then it’s not clear that there’s someone “we” know to hand over decision making power to instead. Personally, I was pretty new to the area, and as a Yudkowskyite I’d probably have reflexively decried giving money to any sort of non-X-risk-pilled non-alignment-differential capabilities research. But more to the point, as a newcomer, I wouldn’t have tried hard to have independent opinions about stuff that wasn’t in my technical focus area, or to express those opinions with much conviction, maybe because it seemed like Many Highly Respected Community Members With Substantially Greater Decision Making Experience would know far better, and would not have the time or the non-status to let me in on the secret subtle reasons for doing counterintuitive things. Now I think everyone’s dumb and everyone should say their opinions a lot so that later they can say that they’ve been saying this all along. I’ve become extremely disagreeable in the last few years, I’m still not disagreeable enough, and approximately no one I know personally is disagreeable enough.
On a meta note, IF proposition 2 is true, THEN the best way to tell this would be if people had been saying so AT THE TIME. If instead, actually everyone at the time disagreed with proposition 2, then it’s not clear that there’s someone “we” know to hand over decision making power to instead. Personally, I was pretty new to the area, and as a Yudkowskyite I’d probably have reflexively decried giving money to any sort of non-X-risk-pilled non-alignment-differential capabilities research. But more to the point, as a newcomer, I wouldn’t have tried hard to have independent opinions about stuff that wasn’t in my technical focus area, or to express those opinions with much conviction, maybe because it seemed like Many Highly Respected Community Members With Substantially Greater Decision Making Experience would know far better, and would not have the time or the non-status to let me in on the secret subtle reasons for doing counterintuitive things. Now I think everyone’s dumb and everyone should say their opinions a lot so that later they can say that they’ve been saying this all along. I’ve become extremely disagreeable in the last few years, I’m still not disagreeable enough, and approximately no one I know personally is disagreeable enough.