Could you expand on what you mean by 'less automation'? I'm taking it to mean some combination of 'bounding the space of controller actions more', 'automating fewer levels of optimisation', 'more of the work done by humans' and maybe 'only automating easier tasks' but I can't quite tell which of these you're intending or how they fit together.

(Also, am I correctly reading an implicit assumption here that any attempts to do automated research would be classed as 'automated ai safety'?)

if you think timelines are short for reasons unrelated to biological anchors, I don't think Bio Anchors provides an affirmative argument that you should change your mind.

Eliezer:  I wish I could say that it probably beats showing a single estimate, in terms of its impact on the reader.  But in fact, writing a huge careful Very Serious Report like that and snowing the reader under with Alternative Calculations is probably going to cause them to give more authority to the whole thing.  It's all very well to note the Ways I Could Be Wrong and to confess one's Uncertainty, but you did not actually reach the conclusion, "And that's enough uncertainty and potential error that we should throw out this whole deal and start over," and that's the conclusion you needed to reach.

I would be curious to know what the intended consequences of the forecasting piece were.

A lot of Eliezer's argument seems to me to be pushing at something like 'there is a threshold for how much evidence you need before you start putting down numbers, and you haven't reached it', and I take what I've quoted from your piece to be supporting something like 'there is a threshold for how much evidence you might have, and if you're above it (and believe this forecast to be an overestimate) then you may be free to ignore the numbers here', contra the Humbali position. I'm not particularly confident on that, though.

Where this leaves me is feeling like you two have different beliefs about who will (or should) update on reading this kind of thing, and to what end, which is probably tangled up in beliefs about how good people are at holding uncertainty in their mind. But I'm not really sure what these beliefs are.