Further observation about that second sentence.

I think deeply understanding top tier capabilities researchers' views on how to achieve AGI is actually extremely valuable for thinking about alignment. Even if you disagree on object level views, understanding how very smart people come to their conclusions is very valuable.

I think the first sentence is true (especially for alignment strategy), but the second sentence seems sort of... broad-life-advice-ish, instead of a specific tip? It's a pretty indirect help to most kinds of alignment.

Otherwise, this comment's points really do seem like empirical things that people could put odds or ratios on. Wondering if a more-specific version of those "AI Views Snapshots" would be warranted, for these sorts of "research meta-knowledge" cruxes. Heck, it might be good to have lots of AI Views Snapshot DLC Mini-Charts, from for-specific-research-agendas(?) to internal-to-organizations(?!?!?!?).

I can't make this one, but I'd love to be at future LessOnline events when I'm less time/budget-constrained! :)

"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.