(Semi-dumb LW category suggestion: Posts That Could Have [LW · GW] Made You Good Money [LW · GW] In Hindsight)

The majority of the entries are crappy 6-word slogans precisely because the contest is explicitly asking for one-liners to slap in the face of the audience. If the most effective strategy to solve something really is shouting one-liners to the policymakers, then I am the one who doesn't want to live on this planet anymore.

For what's worth, I strongly upvoted the first comment by johnswentworth [LW(p) · GW(p)] on that post:

I'd like to complain that this project sounds epistemically absolutely awful. It's offering money for arguments explicitly optimized to be convincing (rather than true), it offers money only for prizes making one particular side of the case (i.e. no money for arguments that AI risk is no big deal), and to top it off it's explicitly asking for one-liners.

Thank you for this post. I wish I had seen it earlier, but in the time I did have I had a lot of fun both coming up with my own stuff and binging a bunch of AI content and extracting the arguments that I found most compelling into a format suitable for the contest.

Meta: I endorse attempts to signal boost things that posters feel are neglected, especially things already on LessWrong. Upvoted.

I would guess that the resistance in Washington, is not so much resistance to the basic idea of risk from AI, but resistance to the idea that anyone in particular has the answer, especially a group not directly affiliated with a major technology company. Does that sound right?

This is important! We need higher-quality entries (although, due to the Pareto principle, I've submitted a good chunk of the low-quality 6-word slogans :/ )

Point is: you can easily do better in this market.

When you tell someone that you think a supercomputer will one day spawn an unstoppable eldritch abomination, which proceeds to ruin everything for everyone forever, and the only solution is to give some people in SF a ton of money... the person you're talking to, no matter who, tends to reevaluate associating themself with you (especially compared to their many alternatives in the DC networking scene).

I suspect that the best way of solving this problem is via social proof: get reputable people to acknowledge the problem and then say to the DC people "Look, Alice, Bob and Carol are all saying it's a big deal".

My understanding is that there are people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates who have said something like that, but I think we probably need something with more substance than "we should pay more attention to it". Hopefully something like "I think there is a >20% chance that humanity will be wiped out from unfriendly AI some time in the next 50 years."

It also seems worth doing some research into what sorts of statements the DC people would find convincing. Ie asking them "If I told you X how would you feel? What about Y? Z?" And also what sort of reputable people they would be influenced by. Professors? Tech CEOs? Public figures?

I threw in a few, I wasn't expecting to win, and I'm expecting probability of win to correlate with overall forum karma. Aka, it's not what's said, it's who's saying it.