If I condition on ‘Leverage staff have a high probability of succeeding here’, then I could imagine that a lot of the factors justifying confidence are things that I don’t know about (e.g., lots of people already in high-ranking positions who are quietly very Leverage-aligned). But absent a lot of hidden factors like that, this seems very overconfident to me, and I’m surprised if this really was a widespread Leverage view.
They seem to have believed that they can turn people into having Musk level competence. A hundred people with Musk level competence might execute a plan like the one Cummings proposed to successfully take over the US government.
If they really could transform people in that way, that might be reasonable. Stories like Zoe’s however suggests that they didn’t really have an ability to do that and instead their experiments dissolved into strange infighting and losing touch with reality.
They seem to have believed that they can turn people into having Musk level competence. A hundred people with Musk level competence might execute a plan like the one Cummings proposed to successfully take over the US government.
If they really could transform people in that way, that might be reasonable. Stories like Zoe’s however suggests that they didn’t really have an ability to do that and instead their experiments dissolved into strange infighting and losing touch with reality.