My take is that in most cases it's probably good to discuss publicly (but I wouldn't be shocked to become convinced otherwise).

The main plausible reason I see for it potentially being bad is if it were drawing attention to a destabilizing technology that otherwise might not be discovered. But I imagine most thoughts are kind of going to be chasing through the implications of obvious ideas. And I think that in general having the basic strategic situation be closer to common knowledge is likely to reduce the risk of war. 

(You might think the discussion could also have impacts on the amount of energy going into racing, but that seems pretty unlikely to me?)

The way I understand it could work is that democratic leaders with "democracy-aligned AI" would get more effective influence on nondemocratic figures (by fine-tuned persuasion or some kind of AI-designed political zugzwang or etc), thus reducing totalitarian risks. Is my understanding correct? 

Not what I'd meant -- rather, that democracies could demand better oversight of their leaders, and so reduce the risk of democracies slipping into various traps (corruption, authoritarianism).

My mainline guess is that information about bad behaviour by Sam was disclosed to them by various individuals, and they owe a duty of confidence to those individuals (where revealing the information might identify the individuals, who might thereby become subject to some form of retaliation).

("Legal reasons" also gets some of my probability mass.)

OK hmm I think I understand what you mean.

I would have thought about it like this:

• "our reference class" includes roughly the observations we make before observing that we're very early in the universe
  • This includes stuff like being a pre-singularity civilization
• The anthropics here suggest there won't be lots of civs later arising and being in our reference class and then finding that they're much later in universe histories
• It doesn't speak to the existence or otherwise of future human-observer moments in a post-singularity civilization

... but as you say anthropics is confusing, so I might be getting this wrong.

I largely disagree (even now I think having tried to play the inside game at labs looks pretty good, although I have sometimes disagreed with particular decisions in that direction because of opportunity costs). I'd be happy to debate if you'd find it productive (although I'm not sure whether I'm disagreeable enough to be a good choice).

I think point 2 is plausible but doesn't super support the idea that it would eliminate the biosphere; if it cared a little, it could be fairly cheap to take some actions to preserve at least a version of it (including humans), even if starlifting the sun.

Point 1 is the argument which I most see as supporting the thesis that misaligned AI would eliminate humanity and the biosphere. And then I'm not sure how robust it is (it seems premised partly on translating our evolved intuitions about discount rates over to imagining the scenario from the perspective of the AI system).

Wait, how does the grabby aliens argument support this? I understand that it points to "the universe will be carved up between expansive spacefaring civilizations" (without reference to whether those are biological or not), and also to "the universe will cease to be a place where new biological civilizations can emerge" (without reference to what will happen to existing civilizations). But am I missing an inferential step?

I think that you're right that people's jobs are a significant thing driving the difference here (thanks), but I'd guess that the bigger impact of jobs is via jobs --> culture than via jobs --> individual decisions. This impression is based on a sense of "when visiting Constellation, I feel less pull to engage in the open-ended idea exploration vs at FHI", as well as "at FHI, I think people whose main job was something else would still not-infrequently spend some time engaging with the big open questions of the day".

I might be wrong about that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I feel awkward about trying to offer examples because (1) I'm often bad at that when on the spot, and (2) I don't want people to over-index on particular ones I give. I'd be happy to offer thoughts on putative examples, if you wanted (while being clear that the judges will all ultimately assess things as seem best to them). 

Will probably respond to emails on entries (which might be to decline to comment on aspects of it).

I don't really disagree with anything you're saying here, and am left with confusion about what your confusion is about (like it seemed like you were offering it as examples of disagreement?).