First link is broken.

"But my ideas are likely to fail! Can I share failed ideas?": If you share a failed idea, that saves the other person time/effort they would've spent chasing that idea. This, of course, speeds up that person's progress, so don't even share failed ideas/experiments about AI, in the status quo.

"So where do I privately share such research?" — good question! There is currently no infrastructure for this. I suggest keeping your ideas/insights/research to yourself. If you think that's difficult for you to do, then I suggest not thinking about AI, and doing something else with your time, like getting into factorio 2 or something.

"But I'm impatient about the infrastructure coming to exist!": Apply for a possibly-relevant grant and build it! Or build it in your spare time. Or be ready to help out if/when someone develops this infrastructure.

"But I have AI insights and I want to convert them into money/career-capital/personal-gain/status!": With that kind of brainpower/creativity, you can get any/all of those things pretty efficiently without publishing AI research, working at a lab, advancing a given SOTA, or doing basically (or literally) anything that differentially speeds up AI capabilities. This, of course, means "work on the object-level problem, without routing that work through AI capabilities", which is often as straightforward "do it yourself".

"But I'm wasting my time if I don't get involved in something related to AGI!": "I want to try LSD, but it's only available in another country. I could spend my time traveling to that country, or looking for mushrooms, or even just staying sober. Therefore, I'm wasting my time unless I immediately inject 999999 fentanyl."

How scarce are tickets/"seats"?

I will carefully hedge my investment in this company by giving it $325823e7589245728439572380945237894273489, in exchange for a board seat so I can keep an eye on it.

I have over 5 Twitter followers, I'll take my board seat when ur ready

Giving up on transhumanism as a useful idea of what-to-aim-for or identify as, separate from how much you personally can contribute to it.

More directly: avoiding "pinning your hopes on AI" (which, depending on how I'm supposed to interpret this, could mean "avoiding solutions that ever lead to aligned AI occurring" or "avoiding near-term AI, period" or "believing that something other than AI is likely to be the most important near-future thing", which are pretty different from each other, even if the end prescription for you personally is (or seems, on first pass, to be) the same.), separate from how much you personally can do to positively affect AI development.

Then again, I might've misread/misinterpreted what you wrote. (I'm unlikely to reply to further object-level explanation of this, sorry. I mainly wanted to point out the pattern. It'd be nice if your reasoning did turn out correct, but my point is that its starting-place seems/seemed to be rationalization as per the pattern.)

Yes, I think this post / your story behind it, is likely an example of this pattern.

That's technically a different update from the one I'm making. However, I also update in favor of that, as a propagation of the initial update. (Assuming you mean "good enough" as "good enough at pedagogy".)

This sure does update me towards "Yudkowsky still wasn't good enough at pedagogy to have made 'teach people rationality techniques' an 'adequately-covered thing by the community'".

• Person tries to work on AI alignment.
• Person fails due to various factors.
• Person gives up working on AI alignment. (This is probably a good move, when it's not your fit, as is your case.)
• Danger zone: In ways that sort-of-rationalize-around their existing decision to give up working on AI alignment, the person starts renovating their belief system around what feels helpful to their mental health. (I don't know if people are usually doing this after having already tried standard medical-type treatments, or instead of trying those treatments.)
• Danger zone: Person announces this shift to others, in a way that's maybe and/or implicitly prescriptive (example).

There are, depressingly, many such cases of this pattern. (Related post with more details on this pattern.)