If so, this makes me worried that MIRI is overestimating the importance of its current results.
Plausible, but the sign of an impact is different from its magnitude. Is a modest result a small net positive, or a small net negative relative to the world, taking into account the long-term as well as short? If one rounds down to zero impacts that are not individually world-shaking, one should do the same for both positives and negatives, and then one wouldn’t ever do anything small, even though aggregate impacts of such acts are large.
Plausible, but the sign of an impact is different from its magnitude. Is a modest result a small net positive, or a small net negative relative to the world, taking into account the long-term as well as short? If one rounds down to zero impacts that are not individually world-shaking, one should do the same for both positives and negatives, and then one wouldn’t ever do anything small, even though aggregate impacts of such acts are large.