One of the more interesting dynamics of the past eight-or-so years has been watching a bunch of the people who [taught me my values] and [served as my early role models] and [were presented to me as paragons of cultural virtue] going off the deep end.

I'm curious who these people are.

We should expect regression towards the mean only if the tasks were selected for having high "improvement from small to Gopher-7". Were they?

The reasoning was given in the comment prior to it, that we want fast progress in order to get to immortality sooner.

"But yeah, I wish this hadn't happened."

Who else is gonna write the article? My sense is that no one (including me) is starkly stating publically the seriousness of the situation. 

"Yudkowsky is obnoxious, arrogant, and most importantly, disliked, so the more he intertwines himself with the idea of AI x-risk in the public imagination, the less likely it is that the public will take those ideas seriously"
 

I'm worried about people making character attacks on Yudkowsky (or other alignment researchers) like this. I think the people who think they can probably solve alignment by just going full-speed ahead and winging it, they are arrogant. Yudkowsky's arrogant-sounding comments about how we need to be very careful and slow, are negligible in comparison. I'm guessing you agree with this (not sure) and we should be able to criticise him for his communication style, but I am a little worried about people publically undermining Yudkowsky's reputation in that context. This seems like not what we would do if we were trying to coordinate well. 

 

"We finally managed to solve the problem of deceptive alignment while being capabilities competitive"

??????

"But I don't think you even need Eliezer-levels-of-P(doom) to think the situation warrants that sort of treatment."

Agreed. If a new state develops nuclear weapons, this isn't even close to creating a 10% x-risk, yet the idea of airstrikes on nuclear enrichment facillities, even though it is very controversial, has for a long time very much been an option on the table.

"if I thought the chance of doom was 1% I'd say "full speed ahead!"

This is not a reasonable view. Not on Longtermism, nor on mainstream common sense ethics. This is the view of someone willing to take unacceptable risks for the whole of humanity. 

Also, there is a big difference between "Calling for violence", and "calling for the establishment of an international treaty, which is to be enforced by violence if necessary". I don't understand why so many people are muddling this distinction.

You are muddling the meaning of "pre-emptive war", or even "war". I'm not trying to diminish the gravity of Yudkowsky's proposal, but a missile strike on a specific compound known to contain WMD-developing technology is not a "pre-emptive war" or "war". Again I'm not trying to diminish the gravity, but this seems like an incorrect use of the term.