Ok, I think I misunderstood you earlier and thought “elite common sense” referred to the common sense of elite experts, rather than of elites in general. (I don’t share Eliezer’s “No True Elite” objection since that’s probably what you originally intended.)
In view of my new understanding I would revise my criticism a bit. If the Blu-ray and studio executives had asked the opinions of a broad coalition of smart people, they likely would have gotten back the same answer that they already had: “hire some expert consultants and ask them to evaluate the system”. An alternative would be to instead learn about Bayesian updating and the heuristics-and-biases literature (in other words learn LW-style rationality), which could have enabled the executives to realize that they’d probably be reading the same reports from their consultants even if BD+ was actually easily breakable by a handful of people with the right skills. At that point maybe they could have come up with some unconventional, outside-the-box ideas about how to confirm or rule out this possibility.
Ok, I think I misunderstood you earlier and thought “elite common sense” referred to the common sense of elite experts, rather than of elites in general. (I don’t share Eliezer’s “No True Elite” objection since that’s probably what you originally intended.)
In view of my new understanding I would revise my criticism a bit. If the Blu-ray and studio executives had asked the opinions of a broad coalition of smart people, they likely would have gotten back the same answer that they already had: “hire some expert consultants and ask them to evaluate the system”. An alternative would be to instead learn about Bayesian updating and the heuristics-and-biases literature (in other words learn LW-style rationality), which could have enabled the executives to realize that they’d probably be reading the same reports from their consultants even if BD+ was actually easily breakable by a handful of people with the right skills. At that point maybe they could have come up with some unconventional, outside-the-box ideas about how to confirm or rule out this possibility.