When you get down to it, all politics is about conflict resolution. That’s not particular to democracy.
Democracy can be viewed as a government in which policy decisions are intended to reflect the will of the people, as opposed to, for example, the will of the nobility, or a single ruler. When people say that a set of decisions should be made democratically, they mean that the conflict resolution mechanism should be such that the decisions made are reflective of the will of the people.
I think the speaker advocating for a democratic, multinational push for AGI was saying A. that we need to push for AGI and B. that if we do so, our decisions about it should reflect the will of the people. This leaves the particular conflict resolution mechanism an open question but constrains it to the set of mechanisms that are intended to reflect the will of the people.
It’s not particularly surprising that this speaker wouldn’t have an opinion on which democratic conflict resolution mechanism to use. I imagine that sort of thing is usually left to political scientists.
The speaker’s statement is also non-obvious. It may be clear that such a push should be democratic, but it’s not at all clear that it would be. The speaker is advocating for making sure that the push happens, and that it’s democratic, as opposed to pushing for the AGI movement whilst leaving the conflict resolution entirely up to others who may not have the interests of the people at heart.
There are many different implementations of democracy, but they are all very different from oligarchies. It is meaningful to say that a set of decisions should be made democratically. Your criticism of this speaker is analogous to someone saying, “We should believe true things, not things that make us feel good,” and you responding, “You’d better know how to find true beliefs or you’re just virtue signaling.” It is both poor manners and invalid criticism.
That is not to say that I disagree with your overall point; I just don’t think this person’s statement was an example of it. Perhaps, if I’d been there, there would have been some noncommunicable social cues that would lead me to your conclusion, but the text alone does not.
Is that true? Does the discovery of a non-mysterious explanation serve as negative evidence of a mysterious one? If by “mysterious” we mean “not strongly predicting any outcomes” then when a theory that is strongly predictive is discovered, the available evidence will shift probability from the mysterious explanation to the predictive one. And I do think that’s what you mean by “mysterious”, so that’s a good observation.
However, I’m not sure that this is the case with Elan vital. I’m not sure that Elan vital was weakened by virtue of being nonpredictive and thereby losing some of its credibility to a more predictive explanation. It may also be the case that Elan vital predicted something which was contradicted by the synthesis of urea. If this was the case, then it is inaccurate to say that Elan vital served only as a curiosity-stopper or was a fake explanation. It would, in fact, be a perfectly fine explanation.
So what was the theory of Elan vital, and did it prohibit urea synthesis? The theory was that the matter of living bodies has a property that non-living bodies can’t have. This is clearly a predictive theory. It prohibits any living matter from being identical to non-living matter because if two things are identical then there aren’t any properties that one has that the other doesn’t.
The synthesis of urea showed that at least one type of biological matter could be produced using purely mechanical means. Is this evidence that the synthetic urea and the natural urea are identical? No. One could postulate that there was a non-material difference between them. However, this would make that difference impossible to observe, and thus make the theory nonpredictive.
According to your post:
The fact that this synthesis served as negative evidence implies that the proponents of Elan vital believed that the difference between biological matter and non-biological matter would be observable. Therefore, the theory of Elan vital, as portrayed in your post, was predictive. Admittedly, not very predictive, but also not merely a curiosity stopper. Rather, it was a sufficiently vague theory to reflect the lack of evidence that they had at the time.
On the other hand, it’s a self-contradictory theory. If they thought the difference would be observable, they must have also thought that it was physical. Yet they thought that the processes of life could not be explained with physical interactions. Yet they clearly thought that those processes were caused by the physical structure of biological matter. How can something be caused entirely by physical matter but not be explainable by a physical explanation?
In conclusion, there are valid criticisms of Elan vital, as portrayed by your post, but not the ones you leveled against it.