Hot take: Please, do not make yourselves look like extremists.

Or: be aware that bad press does exist, and it might be harmful to the overall cause to provide quotable resources for adversaries; and thus refrain from calling a possible invasion of Taiwan an "act of God", at least not with your public account with your name on it, as one of the top five or so most prominent alignment figures right now, to be recorded in the Internet Archive for all posterity.

(Note that it's not just "don't be extremists", but also "don't look like one", which, unfortunately, is more of a PR than a morality problem. I have good faith that AI safety people mean well, and Daniel, with his positive, admirably considerate, and moderate vision for AI 2040, seems very unlikely to mean ill. This might heckle some very powerful people, but I think it's important to say clearly.)

As Eliezer said, only law can prevent extinction, and I struggle to believe that it'd provide the community with more respect or trust from the establishment, for it to be one of the few entities that actively want a war that might kill the most American troops since Vietnam, or "Hugging Face 2: This Time in a Hospital". (Sources: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-china-war-casualties/, https://ipdefenseforum.com/2026/01/pla-would-suffer-100000-casualties-in-failed-taiwan-invasion-study-says/.)

Call me a pessimist or inexperienced, but it seems very plausible to me that, even if we do indeed convince the establishments worldwide that AI safety is important and ASI safety is paramount, the proceeding effort to convince that fundamental alignment is more important than prosaic alignment would depend heavily on the perceived trustworthiness and morality of each involved faction.

It is plausible - though a stretch - for the world to forgo prosperity in favor of security; and certainly the arguments about prosaic alignment's insecurity have enough merit that cautious, self-preserving legislators might lean in favor of them, all else excluded. Even if that might slow down AI progress and forgo the numerous economic, military, and subsequent political benefits from it.

But that's "all else excluded"; if the perception of fundamental alignment theorists is that they are extremists, then that perception might undermine the security benefits - arguably the only thing we can offer the establishments over the existing approaches by Anthropic or OpenAI - perceived by legislators when trying to choose which experts to trust (and tip the balance back in favor of a less desirable faction).