Some ways of giving third parties Bayesian evidence that you have some secret without revealing it:
Demos, show off the capability somehow
Have the idea evaluated by a third party who doesn’t share it with the public
Do public work that is impressive the way you’re claiming the secret is (so it’s a closer analogy)
I’m not against “tenure” in this case. I don’t think it makes sense for people to make their plans around the idea that person X has secret Y unless they have particular reason to think secret Y is really important and likely to be possessed by person X (which is related to what you’re saying about trusting opinions and taking instructions). In particular, outsiders should think there’s ~0 chance that a particular AI researcher’s secrets are important enough here to be likely to produce AGI without some sort of evidence. Lots of people in the AI field say they have these sorts of secrets and many have somewhat impressive AI related accomplishments, they’re just way less impressive than what would be needed for outsiders to assign a non-negligible chance to possession of enough secrets to make AGI, given base rates.
Some ways of giving third parties Bayesian evidence that you have some secret without revealing it:
Demos, show off the capability somehow
Have the idea evaluated by a third party who doesn’t share it with the public
Do public work that is impressive the way you’re claiming the secret is (so it’s a closer analogy)
I’m not against “tenure” in this case. I don’t think it makes sense for people to make their plans around the idea that person X has secret Y unless they have particular reason to think secret Y is really important and likely to be possessed by person X (which is related to what you’re saying about trusting opinions and taking instructions). In particular, outsiders should think there’s ~0 chance that a particular AI researcher’s secrets are important enough here to be likely to produce AGI without some sort of evidence. Lots of people in the AI field say they have these sorts of secrets and many have somewhat impressive AI related accomplishments, they’re just way less impressive than what would be needed for outsiders to assign a non-negligible chance to possession of enough secrets to make AGI, given base rates.