I think in some significant subset of such situations, almost everyone present is aware of the problem, so you don't always have to describe the problem yourself or explicitly propose solutions (which can seem weird from a power dynamics perspective). Sometimes just drawing the group's attention to the meta level at all, initiating a meta-discussion, is sufficient to allow the group to fix the problem.
This is good and interesting. Various things to address, but I only have time for a couple at random.
I disagree with the idea that true things necessarily have explanations that are both convincing and short. In my experience you can give a short explanation that doesn't address everyone's reasonable objections, or a very long one that does, or something in between. If you understand some specific point about cutting edge research, you should be able to properly explain it to a lay person, but by the time you're done they won't be a lay person any more! If you restrict your explanation to "things you can cover before the person you're explaining to decides this isn't worth their time and goes away", many concepts simply cannot ever be explained to most people, because they don't really want to know.
So the core challenge is staying interesting enough for long enough to actually get across all of the required concepts. On that point, have you seen any of my videos, and do you have thoughts on them? You can search "AI Safety" on YouTube.
Similarly, do you thoughts on AISafety.info ?
Are we not already doing this? I thought we were already doing this. See for example this talk I gave in 2018
https://youtu.be/pYXy-A4siMw?t=35
I guess we can't be doing it very well though
Structured time boxes seem very suboptimal, steamrollering is easy enough to deal with by a moderator "Ok let's pause there for X to respond to that point"
Other tokens that require modelling more than a human:
Compare with this from Meditations on Moloch:
Imagine a country with two rules: first, every person must spend eight hours a day giving themselves strong electric shocks. Second, if anyone fails to follow a rule (including this one), or speaks out against it, or fails to enforce it, all citizens must unite to kill that person. Suppose these rules were well-enough established by tradition that everyone expected them to be enforced. So you shock yourself for eight hours a day, because you know if you don’t everyone else will kill you, because if they don’t, everyone else will kill them, and so on.
Seems to me a key component here, which flows naturally from "punish any deviation from the profile" is this pattern of 'punishment of non-punishers'.
The historical trends thing is prone to standard reference class tennis. Arguments like "Every civilization has collapsed, why would ours be special? Something will destroy civilisation, how likely is it that it's AI?". Or "almost every species has gone extinct. Something will wipe us out, could it be AI?". Or even "Every species in the genus homo has been wiped out, and the overwhelmingly most common cause is 'another species in the genus homo', so probably we'll do it to ourselves. What methods do we have available?".
These don't point to AI particularly, they remove the unusual-seemingness of doom in general
A slightly surreal experience to read a post saying something I was just tweeting about, written by a username that could plausibly be mine.