There are so many side-effects this overlooks. Winning $110 complicates my taxes by more than $5. In fact, once gambling winnings taxes are considered, the first bet will likely have a negative EV!
Your last figure should have behaviours on the horizontal axis, as this is what you are implying - you are effectively saying, any intelligence capable of understanding "I don't know what I don't know" will on.y have power seeking behaviours, regardless of what its ultimate goals are. With that correction, your third figure is not incompatible with the first.
I buy your argument that power seeking is a convergent behavior. In fact, this is a key part of many canonical arguments for why an unaligned AGI is likely to kill us all.
But, on the meta level you seem to argue that this is incompatible with orthogonally thesis? If so, you may be misunderstanding the thesis - the ability of an AGI to have arbitrary utility functions is orthogonal (pun intended) to what behaviors are likely to result from those utility functions. The former is what orthogonality thesis claims, but your argument is about the latter.
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.
I'm not involved in politics or the military action, but I can't help but feel implicated by my government's actions as a citizen here
Please consider the implications of not only being a citizen, but also taxpayer, and customer to other taxpayers. Through taxes, you work indirectly supports the Russian war effort.
I'm interested in building global startups,
If you succeed while still in Russia, what is stopping those with powerful connections from simply taking over from you? From what you say, it does not sound like you have connections of your own that would allow you to protect yourself?
You do not mention you eligibility for getting drafted, but unless you have strong reasons to believe you would not be (e.g. you are female), you also need to consider that possibility.
Chances are things in Russia will become worse before they become better. Have you considered how Putin's next big stupid move might affect you? What happens next time something like the Prigozhin/Wagner rebellion is a bit less of a farse? Or how it might affect you if Putin dies and Kadyrov decides it's his chance to take over?
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.
After finishing any task/subtask and before starting the next one, go up the hierarchy at least two levels, and ask yourself - is moving onto the next subtask still the right way to achieve the higher-level goal, and is it still the highest priority thing to tackle next. Also do this anytime there is a significant unexpected difficulty/delay/etc.
Periodically (with period defined at the beginning) do this for the top-level goal regardless of where you are in the [sub]tasks.