I think it's more likely to go the other way. There are FAR more people who pay attention to Trump and normal republican politics than are currently paying attention to Thiel and AI risk. A small fraction of these being interested in Thiel and looking into AI risk is probably going to outweigh any losses.

The friendliness problem isn't just about AGI but morality, which is something Harris studies.

Humans are in a very different situation than they were for most of their evolutionary lifespan.

For one: there is an abundance of resources: tweaks that increase brainpower at the cost of calories which might kill on the Savannah would be solid gold by today's standards. You'd be smarter AND hotter!

For two: the kind of things we want people to use their brainpower on are not the same things the brain was evolved to optimize to think about. For example, despite being dis-tractable, my girlfriend can concentrate on and pay attention to animals for hours, and has a strong desire to walk miles and miles every day. I'm sure this was very handy for persistence hunting, but it's a handicap when it comes to working in a bank. And so Vyvanse comes to the rescue: not as a PURE nootropic but one that allows us to make different neural tradeoffs than evolution was interested in.

For three: Human intelligence already varies quite a bit, much of it achieved by 'tweaking' a few chemicals (DNA, for one). We don't understand the neurological difference between John Von Neumann and an average person, but I think there's a decent chance that within that variation is not just genetic/developmental differences but ones in neurochemistry that can be duplicated in others.

Finally: evolution is incapable of exploring chemical-space by more than a few compounds per generation. Despite their utility, humans never naturally evolved to produce penicillin, or caffeine, or opiates when needed. There is a HUGE population of chemicals that the human body has never tried producing which we can utilize. The argument that "If this was possible, evolution would have done it" proves far too much.

Last time I checked you weren't arguing that your family was going to dominate the world through breeding.

They are parasitic on our infrastructure, healthcare system, and military. Amish reap the benefits of modern day road construction methods to transport their trade goods, but could not themselves construct modern day roads. Depending on the branch of Amish, a significant number of their babies are born in modern-day hospitals, something they could not build themselves and which contributes to their successful birth rate.

Aren't the Amish (and other fast-spawning tribes) a perfect example of how this doesn't lead to universal domination? They're all groups that either embrace primitivity or are stuck in it, and to a large extent couldn't maintain their high reproductive rate without parasitism on surrounding cultures.

Harry Potter and the Natural 20 has a lot of characters optimizing in interesting ways in response to the constraints of their universe, but their universe's laws are a lot less realistic than Worm or HPMOR. The Ethshar books by Lawrence Watt-Evans are not one coherent story but there are a lot of books set in the same world. Miles Vorkosigan has the whole "cunning main character thinks outside the box to beat impossible odds" dynamic and there are a bunch of books that follow him and his life, although the fact that he ages throughout them gives them a pretty different feel than the chronologically much shorter timespan of HPMOR.

And in a lot of places where that space exists it is illegal to live there. You could park a serviceable RV in a lot more places than you are allowed to live, for one example.

I really enjoyed The Great North Road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_North_Road_(book)

https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/record/NCT01287936 Personally interesting to me because it involves a treatment that is manufactured using our reagents, but also generally interesting to see progress made in treating brain damage.