Now, I think I see the answer. Basically, Eliezer_Yudkowsky doesn’t really have to convince the gatekeeper to stupidly give away $X. All he has to do is convince them that “It would be a good thing if people saw that the result of this AI-Box experiment was that the human got tricked, because that would stimulate interest in {Friendliness, AGI, the Singularity}, and that interest would be a good thing.”
That’s a pretty compelling theory as well, though it leaves open the question of why Eliezer is wringing his hands over ethics (since there seems to me to be nothing unethical about this approach). There seem to me to be two possibilities: either this is not how Eliezer actually did it (assuming he really did do it, which is far from clear), or it is how he did it and all the hand-wringing is just part of the act.
Gotta hand it to him, though, it’s a pretty clever way to draw attention to your cause.
That’s a pretty compelling theory as well, though it leaves open the question of why Eliezer is wringing his hands over ethics (since there seems to me to be nothing unethical about this approach). There seem to me to be two possibilities: either this is not how Eliezer actually did it (assuming he really did do it, which is far from clear), or it is how he did it and all the hand-wringing is just part of the act.
Gotta hand it to him, though, it’s a pretty clever way to draw attention to your cause.