I think this post is quite important because it is about Skin in the Game. Normally we love it, but here is the doubly-interesting case of wanting to reduce the financial version in order to allow the space for better thinking.
The content of the question is good by itself as a moment in time of thinking about the problem. The answers to the question are good both for what they contain, and also for what they do not contain, by which I mean what we want to see come up in questions of this kind to answer them better.
As a follow-up, I would like to see a more concrete exploration of options for how to deal with this kind of situation. Sort of like an inverse of the question “how does one bet on AI profitably?” In this case it might be the question “how does one neutralize implicit bets on AI?” By options I mean specific financial vehicles and legal maneuvers.
This is a fantastic post, immediately leaping into the top 25 of my favorite LessWrong posts all-time, at least.
I have a concrete suggestion for this issue:
I propose switching gears at this point to make “Why is the problem impossible?” the actual focus of their efforts for the remainder of the time period. I predict this will consistently yield partial progress among at least a chunk of the participants.
I suggest thinking about the question of why it is impossible deliberately because I experienced great progress on an idea I had through exactly that mechanism, in a similar condition of not having the relevant physics knowledge. The short version of the story is that I had the idea, almost immediately hit upon a problem that seemed impossible, and then concluded it would never work. Walking down the stairs after right after having concluded it was impossible, I thought to myself “But why is it impossible?” and spent a lot of time following up on that thread. The whole investigation was iterations of that theme—an impossible blocker would appear, I would insist on understanding the impossibility, and every time it would eventually yield (in the sense of a new path forward at least; rarely was it just directly possible instead). As it stands I now have definite concrete angles of attack to make it work, which is the current phase.
My core intuition for why this worked:
Impossibility requires grappling with fundamentals; there is no alternative.
It naturally distinguishes between the problem the approach to the problem.
I gesture in the direction of things like the speed of light, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, and the halting problem to make the claim that fundamental limits are good practice to think about.