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Alignment Forum and LessWrong · Forum post · LessWrong

Scott Alexander’s Against SURA Seems Deeply Confused

Zvi · 2 Nov 2026

Read at lesswrong.com ↗Read at sourceNo licence statement found

Outline · 325 paragraphs

  1. Table of Contents¶7
  2. Scott Alexander’s Core Claims¶26
  3. My High Level Responses To Scott’s Core Claims¶53
  4. Briefly on Alignment¶70
  5. Probabilities and How They Work¶78
  6. Building a Thing That Might Kill Everyone is Deontologically Evil¶95
  7. People Quitting Major Labs While Raising Alarms Obviously Works¶123
  8. On AI Forecasting¶138
  9. Advancing Capabilities Burns Timeline¶149
  10. But China¶160
  11. Ethical People Can Disagree With You¶174
  12. There Are More Than Two Outcomes¶182
  13. Efforts Are Complementary, Not Mutually Exclusive¶198
  14. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies¶215
  15. Vaniver is Not Convinced¶223
  16. There Is No Consensus That We Should Exclusively Focus on Plan A¶240
  17. It’s Not the Incentives, It’s You¶275
  18. Anthropic Is Not Optimally Pursuing These Plans¶290
  19. Against Against Sura¶315