One natural category of answer, is that humans are scared of risking social stability. Alignment research is not an avenue that is old and safe within the institutions where most research-like things happen (universities), nor is it really an avenue at all. Most of the places where it happens are weird and new and not part of any establishment.

Then again, OpenAI and DeepMind are exciting-yet-fairly-safe places, and it's not like the best mathematicians of our day are knocking down their doors looking for a prestigious job where they can also work on alignment. I guess for those people I do think that this type of optimisation is a somewhat alien thought process. They primarily pick topics that they find interesting, not important. It's one thing to argue that they should be working in a field, it's another thing to get them fascinated by it.

(I do think the Embedded Agency sequence is one of the best things that exists for building curiosity about bounded rationality, and am curious to hear of any good mathematicians/computer scientists/physicists who read it and what they feel about the problems contained therein.)

Example answers which strike me as plausible:

• Most members of this set simply haven’t yet encountered one of the common attractors—LessWrong, CFAR, Superintelligence, HPMOR, 80k, etc. Perhaps this is because they don’t speak English, or because they’re sufficiently excited about their current research that they don’t often explore beyond it, or because they’re 16 and can’t psychologically justify doing things outside the category “prepare for college,” or because they’re finally about to get tenure and are actively trying to avoid getting nerd sniped by topics in other domains, or because they don’t have many friends so only get introduced to new topics they think to Google, or simply because despite being exactly the sort of person who would get nerd sniped by this problem if they’d ever encountered it they just… never have, not even the basic “maybe it will be a problem if we build machines smarter than us, huh?”, and maybe it shouldn’t be much more surprising that there might still exist pockets of extremely smart people who’ve never thought to wonder this than that there presumably existed pockets of smart people for millennia who never thought to wonder what effects might result from more successful organisms reproducing more?
• Most members of this set have encountered one of the common attractors, or at least the basic ideas, but only in some poor and limited form that left them idea inoculated. Maybe they heard Kurzweil make a weirdly-specific claim once, or the advisor they really respect told them the whole field is pseudoscience that assumes AI will have human-like consciousness and drives to power, or they tried reading some of Eliezer’s posts and hated the writing style, or they felt sufficiently convinced by an argument for super-long timelines that investigating the issue more didn’t feel decision-relevant.
• The question is ill-formed: perhaps because there just aren’t 50 people who could helpfully contribute who aren't doing so already, or because the framing of the question implies the “50” is the relevant thing to track whereas actually research productivity is power law-ey and the vast majority of the benefit would come from finding just one or three particular members of this set and finding them would require asking different questions.

Discounting. There is no law of nature that can force me to care about preventing human extinction years from now, more than eating a tasty sandwich tomorrow. There is also no law that can force me to care about human extinction much more that about my own death.

There are, of course, more technical disagreements to be had. Reasonable people could question how bad unaligned AI will be or how much progress is possible in this research. But unlike those questions, the reasons of discounting are not debatable.