Love this post. I've also used the five-minute technique at work, especially when facilitating meetings. In fact, there's a whole technique called think-pair-share that goes something like: 

1. Everyone think about it for X minutes. Take notes. 
2. Partner up and talk about your ideas for 2X minutes. 
3. As a group, discuss the best ideas and takeaways for 4X minutes. 

There's an optional step involving groups of four, but I'd rarely bother with that one unless it's a really huge meeting (and at that point I'm actively trying to shrink it because huge committees are shit decision-makers). 

This was a good post, and shifted my view slightly on accelerating vs halting AI capabilities progress.

I was confused by your "overhang" argument all the way until footnote 9, but I think I have the gist. You're saying that even if absolute progress in capabilities increases as a result of earlier investment, progress relative to safety will be slower.

A key assumption seems to be that we are not expecting doom immediately; i.e. the next major jump in capabilities is deemed nearly impossible to kill us all with misaligned AI. I'm not sure I buy this assumption fully; it seems to have non-negligible probability to me and that seems relevant to the wisdom of endorsing faster progress in capabilities.

But if we assume the next jump in capabilities, or the next low-hanging fruit plucked by investment, won't be the beginning of the end...then it does sorta make sense that accelerating capabilities in the short run might accelerate safety and policy enough to compensate. 

I found this a very useful post. I would also emphasize how important it is to be specific, whether one's project involves a grand x-risk moonshot or a narrow incremental improvement. 

• There are approximately X vegans in America; estimates of how many might suffer from nutritional deficiencies range from Y to Z; this project would...
• An improvement in epistemic health on [forum] would potentially affect X readers, which include Y donors who gave at least $Z to [forum] causes last year...
• A 1-10% gain in productivity for the following people and organizations who use this platform...

For any project, large or small, even if the actual benefits are hard to quantify, the potential scope of impact can often be bounded and clarified. And that can be useful to grantmakers too. Not everything has to be convertible to "% reduction in x-risk" or "$ saved" or "QALYs gained", but this shouldn't stop us from specifying our actual expected impact as thoroughly as we can. 

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