I upvoted, because these are important concerns overall, but this sentence stuck out to me:
The fact that Yudkowsky doesn’t even know enough about Chollet to pronounce his name displays a troubling lack of effort to engage seriously with opposing views.
I’m not claiming that Yudkowsky does display a troubling lack of effort to engage seriously with opposing views or he does not display such, but surely this can be decided more accurately by looking at his written output online than at his ability to correctly pronounce names in languages he is not native in. I, personally, skip names while reading after noticing it is a name and I wouldn’t say that I never engaged seriously with someone’s arguments.
Furthermore, It is also not inconceivable to me that an adversary might be able to use the hash itself without cracking it. For example, the sha256 hash of some information is commonly used to prove that someone has that information without revealing it, so an adversary, using the hash, could credibly lie that he already possesses a launch code and in a possible counterfactual world where no one found about the client side leaking the hash except this adversary, use this lie to acquire an actual code with some social engineering.
Like:
“Attention Lesswrong! With trickery I have acquired a launch code capable of destroying your site. As proof here is the sha256 hash of it: <hash>.
This is not a trick, I will leave plenty of time for you to check with your EA buddies that the hash is valid before you need to meet my demands.
I demand a launch code capable of destroying the EA forum sent to me until <time> or I will nuke this site and to this I precommitted. I won’t reveal what I plan to do with the launch code you will send to me, but by basic game theory your interest is in sending it to me as your site’s destruction is not certain that way.
I can’t prove it to you, but irl I precommitted to nuking the site if my demands are not met and also that I won’t send any more messages to prevent useless debating.
I hope you will make the correct choice!”