While awesome math ability is a great thing to have, it would only complement whatever skills Eliezer needs to succeed in his AI goals. If Eliezer finds that he lacks the math skills at a certain point to develop some new piece of mathematics, he can find a math collaborator that will be thrilled about having a novel problem to work on.

I'm also not concerned about error rate. You write that the challenge is "getting the technical details right" -- this is simply not true. It's the main, big, mostly correct ideas we need to progress in science, not meticulousness.

(I recently submitted a paper where I was sloppy on some rounding of some of my results and I got slammed for it, science is all about precision and doing it right)

Publication is all about precision and doing it right, and it should be. But don't you feel like the science was done before the more careful rounding?