The distinction between your post and Eliezer’s is more or less that he doesn’t trust anyone to identify or think sanely about [plans that they admit have negative expected value in terms of log odds but believe possess a compensatory advantage in probability of success conditional on some assumption].
Such plans are very likely to hurt the remaining opportunities in the worlds where the assumption doesn’t hold, which makes it especially bad if different actors are committing to different plans. And he thinks that even if a plan’s assumptions hold, the odds of its success are far lower than the planner envisioned.
Eliezer’s preferred strategy at this point is to continue doing the kind of AI Safety work that doesn’t blow up if assumptions aren’t met, and if enough of that work is complete and there’s an unexpected affordance for applying that kind of work to realistic AIs, then there’s a theoretical possibility of capitalizing on it. (But, well, you see how pessimistic he’s become if he thinks that’s both the best shot we have and also probability ~0.)
And he wanted to put a roadblock in front of this specific well-intentioned framing, not least because it is way too easy for some readers to round into support for Leeroy Jenkins strategies.
The distinction between your post and Eliezer’s is more or less that he doesn’t trust anyone to identify or think sanely about [plans that they admit have negative expected value in terms of log odds but believe possess a compensatory advantage in probability of success conditional on some assumption].
Such plans are very likely to hurt the remaining opportunities in the worlds where the assumption doesn’t hold, which makes it especially bad if different actors are committing to different plans. And he thinks that even if a plan’s assumptions hold, the odds of its success are far lower than the planner envisioned.
Eliezer’s preferred strategy at this point is to continue doing the kind of AI Safety work that doesn’t blow up if assumptions aren’t met, and if enough of that work is complete and there’s an unexpected affordance for applying that kind of work to realistic AIs, then there’s a theoretical possibility of capitalizing on it. (But, well, you see how pessimistic he’s become if he thinks that’s both the best shot we have and also probability ~0.)
And he wanted to put a roadblock in front of this specific well-intentioned framing, not least because it is way too easy for some readers to round into support for Leeroy Jenkins strategies.