The demonstration of the invalidity of the raised concern of this dialogue being treated legally as a death threat, and furthermore the insincerity of its being raised as a concern: after a larger than 24-hour window not one message has arrived at that address (unless it was removed between the intervals I checked it, somehow).
This, then, is evidence against the legitimacy of the complaint; evidence for the notion that what's really motivating these responses, then, isn't concerns that this dialogue would be treated as a death threat, but some other thing. What precisely that other thing is, my offer could not differentiate between.
Or maybe, you know, everyone here knows it wasn't actually a death threat and has no desire to get you in legal trouble for no reason, but wanted to warn you it could be perceived that way out of genuine concern?
Here's a poser that occurred to us over the summer, and one that we couldn't really come up with any satisfactory solution to. The people who work at the Singularity Institute have a high estimate of the probability that an Unfriendly AI will destroy the world. People who work for http://nuclearrisk.org/ have a very high estimate of the probability that a nuclear war will destroy the world (by their estimates, if you are American and under 40, then nuclear war is the single most likely way in which you might die next year).
It seems like there are good reasons to take these numbers seriously, because Eliezer is probably the world expert on AI risk, and Hellman is probably the world expert on nuclear risk. However, there's a problem - Eliezer is an expert on AI risk because he believes that AI risk is a bigger risk than nuclear war. Similarly, Hellman chose to study nuclear risks and not AI risk I because he had a higher than average estimate of the threat of nuclear war.
It seems like it might be a good idea to know what the probability of each of these risks is. Is there a sensible way for these people to correct for the fact that the people studying these risks are those that have high estimate of them in the first place?