This is a special post for quick takes by leogao. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
a corollary to the hazards of arguing against bad takes: please don't write things that are defined entirely by trying to avoid the reader coming away with specific bad takes or misunderstandings people often have.
you should write things primarily to nail down the concepts unambiguously for an audience of generic smart people. your idea should be defined by what it is, and not what it is not. it isn't SCP-055.
if you really need to, add a "things i don't mean" section to concretely describe and disavow some common misunderstandings. but it should be possible to delete this section and still understand precisely what you are saying.
relatedly: please don't let stupid and/or malicious people dictate your vibe. a common pattern i see is people being scared of saying anything that might sound optimistic, because someone will see it and think "oh, great, alignment is solved, thank goodness, i can keep accelerating capabilities / not doing anything to make things go well".
it's very easy to make clear to all sane people that you think things will not go well. anyone who is still confused is either stupid, in which case their opinion doesn't matter; or looking for some excuse to do the thing they wanted to do anyways, in which case you are not counterfactual in them doing whatever; or malicious, in which case they are trolling you and finding it amusing to mess with you, in which case you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists.
if it's too difficult to perceive this pattern in yourself, you can observe some of the climate change people and how they are often extremely upset by any suggestion that e.g solar is on track to solve big chunks of global warming. people will often refuse to engage on the object level question of whether solar really is enough, and say outright that if we adopt the attitude that climate change is on track then everyone will stop doing the things that need to be done, thereby throwing us off track.
I should put a reminder like this on top of my computer screen.
One reason I am often writing long comments is a feeling of defensiveness, as if I don't make my case perfectly ambiguous and bulletproof, by adding more and more words, of course someone will pick up the worst possible misinterpretation. (I had people like that in my life in the past.)