Raising situational awareness is probably one of the most effective ways to make progress. It’s important to lay out object-level arguments clearly, and to support them as much as possible both theoretically and empirically.
Trying to make moves that ostensibly address A while the actual threat model in mind is B is epistemically bad, and from my experience, not even more effective in practice. It does take a bit of courage, but in practice the idea that people won’t take you seriously is mostly false, it’s largely a mental barrier. If you’ve genuinely understood the problem at the object level, and you make a real effort to transmit that understanding trying to maximize information transfer and helping others form the right intuitions, then it doesn’t come across as weird at all (even the contrary). Be honest, serious, and rigorous, don’t play a political game, people do understand.
Raising situational awareness is probably one of the most effective ways to make progress. It’s important to lay out object-level arguments clearly, and to support them as much as possible both theoretically and empirically.
Trying to make moves that ostensibly address A while the actual threat model in mind is B is epistemically bad, and from my experience, not even more effective in practice. It does take a bit of courage, but in practice the idea that people won’t take you seriously is mostly false, it’s largely a mental barrier. If you’ve genuinely understood the problem at the object level, and you make a real effort to transmit that understanding trying to maximize information transfer and helping others form the right intuitions, then it doesn’t come across as weird at all (even the contrary). Be honest, serious, and rigorous, don’t play a political game, people do understand.