Your principles #3 and #5 are in a weak conflict - generating hypothesis without having enough information to narrow the space of reasonable hypotheses would too often lead to false positives. When faced with an unknown novel phenomena, one put to collect information first, including collecting experimental data without a fixed hypothesis, before starting to formulate any hypotheses.

Option 5: the questioner is optimizing a metric other than what appears to be the post's implicit "get max info with minimal number of questions, ignoring communication overhead", which is IMHO a weird metric to optimize to begin with - not only it does not take length/complexity of each question into account, but is also ignoring things like maintaining answerer wilingness to continue answering questions, not annoying the answerer, ensuring proper context so that a question is not misunderstood, and this is not even taking into account the possiblity that while the questioner does care about getting the information, they might also simultaneously care about other things.

Looks like a good summary of their current positions, but how about willingness to update their position and act decisively and based on actual evidence/data? De Santis's history of anti-mask/anti-vaccine stances have to be taken into account, perhaps? Same for Kennedy?

I am not working on X because it's so poorly defined that I dread needing to sort it out.

I not working on X because I am at a loss where to start

I feel like admiring the problem X and considering all the ways I could theoretically start solving it, so I am not actually doing something to solve it.

For a professor at a top university, this would be easily 60+ hrs/week. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/09/research-shows-professors-work-long-hours-and-spend-much-day-meetings claims 61hrs/week is average, and something like 65 for a full Professor. The primary currency is prestige, not salary, and prestige is generated by research (high-profile grants, high-profile publications, etc), not teaching. For teaching, they would likely care a lot more about advanced classes for students getting closer to potentially joining their research team, and a lot less about the intro classes (where many students might not even be from the right major) - those would often be seen as a chore to get out of the way, not as a meaningful task to invest actual effort into.

So what system selects the best leader out of the entire population?

None - as Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Still, should be realistic when explaining the benefits.

One theory of democracy’s purpose is to elect the “right” leaders. In this view, questions such as “Who is best equipped to lead this nation?” have a correct answer, and democracy is merely the most effective way to find that answer.

I think this is a very limiting view of instrumental goals of democracy. First, democracy has almost no chance of selecting the best leader - at best, it could help select a better one out of a limited set of options. Second, this ignores a key, IMHO the key, feature of democracy - keeping leaders accountable after they are elected. Democracy does not just start backsliding when a bad leader is elected, it starts backsliding when the allies of that leader become too willing to shield the "dear leader" from accountability.

Ensuring the leaders change is another important feature.

This makes assumptions that make no sense to me. Auto-GPT is already not passively safe, and there is no reason to be sure LLMs would remain myopic as they are scaled. LLMs are inscrutable matrixes of floating points that we are barely learning how to understand and interpret. We have no reliable way to predict when LLMs might hallucinate or misbehave in some other way. There is also no "human level" - LLMs are way faster than humans and are way more scalable than humans - there is no way to get LLMs that are as good as humans without having something that's way better than humans along a huge number of dimensions.