Shared with permission, a google doc exchange confirming Eliezer still finds the arguments for alignment optimism, slower takeoffs, etc. unconvincing:

Daniel Filan: I feel like a bunch of people have shifted a bunch in the type of AI x-risk that worries them (representative phrase is "from Yudkowsky/Bostrom to What Failure Looks Like part 2 part 1") and I still don't totally get why.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: My bitter take:  I tried cutting back on talking to do research; and so people talked a bunch about a different scenario that was nicer to think about, and ended up with their thoughts staying there, because that's what happens if nobody else is arguing them out of it.

That is: this social-space's thought processes are not robust enough against mildly adversarial noise, that trying a bunch of different arguments for something relatively nicer to believe, won't Goodhart up a plausible-to-the-social-space argument for the thing that's nicer to believe.  If you talk people out of one error, somebody else searches around in the space of plausible arguments and finds a new error.  I wasn't fighting a mistaken argument for why AI niceness isn't too intractable and takeoffs won't be too fast; I was fighting an endless generator of those arguments.  If I could have taught people to find the counterarguments themselves, that would have been progress.  I did try that.  It didn't work because the counterargument-generator is one level of abstraction higher, and has to be operated and circumstantially adapted too precisely for the social-space to be argued into it using words.

You can sometimes argue people into beliefs.  It is much harder to argue them into skills.  The negation of Robin Hanson's rosier AI scenario was a belief.  Negating an endless stream of rosy scenarios is a skill.

Caveat: this was a private reply I saw and wanted to share (so people know EY's basic epistemic state, and therefore probably the state of other MIRI leadership). This wasn't an attempt to write an adequate public response to any of the public arguments put forward for alignment optimism or non-fast takeoff, etc., and isn't meant to be a replacement for public, detailed, object-level discussion. (Though I don't know when/if MIRI folks plan to produce a proper response, and if I expected such a response soonish I'd probably have just waited and posted that instead.)