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alyssavance comments on Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions - Less Wrong
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"If it is, it would be surprising if nobody in the powerful organizations I'm talking about realizes it, especially if a few breakthroughs are made public and as we get closer to AGI."
Nobody in powerful organizations realizes important things all the time. To take a case study, in 2001, Warren Buffett and Ted Turner just happened to notice that there were hundreds of nukes in Russia, sitting around in lightly guarded or unguarded facilities, which anyone with a few AK-47s and a truck could have just walked in and stolen. They had to start their own organization, called the Nuclear Threat Initiative, to take care of the problem, because no one else was doing anything.
The existence of historical examples where people in powerful organizations failed to realize important things is not evidence that it is the norm or that it can be counted on with strong confidence.
Yes, it is. How could examples of X not be evidence that the "norm is X"? It may not be sufficiently strong evidence, but if this one example is not sufficiently damning, there are certainly plenty more.
Yes, of course it is weak evidence. But I can come up with a dozen examples off the top of my head where powerful organizations did realize important things, so you're examples are very weak evidence that this behavior is the norm. So weak that it can be regarded as negligible.
Important things that weren't recognized by the wider populace as important things? Do you have citations? Even for much more mundane things, governments routinely fail to either notice them, or to act once they have noticed. Eg., Chamberlain didn't notice that Hitler wanted total control of Europe, even though he said so in his publicly-available book Mein Kampf. Stalin didn't notice that Hitler was about to invade, even though he had numerous warnings from his subordinates.