Wasted opportunity to guarantee this post keeps getting holywar comments for the next hundred years.

This is pretty inspiring to me. Thank you for sharing.

The other day I was trying to think of information leaks that a competent conspiracy couldn't prevent, regarding this. I just thought of one small one: people will sometimes randomly die or have their homes raided. If the slavery is common, then sometimes the slaves will be discovered during these events. Even if the escapees wanted to silence the story out of shame, cops would probably gossip to the press.

So you can probably tally such events, crunch the numbers, and get a decent conspiracy-resistant estimate.

As a layman, I have not seen much unrealistic hype. I think the hype-level is just about right.

You should not bury such a good post in a shortform

Yeah I just wanted to check that nobody is giving away money before I go do the exact opposite thing I've been doing. I might try to tidy something up and post it first

Yes.

I do think I could put a good team together and make decent contributions quickly

I can only find capabilities jobs right now. I would be interested in starting a tiny applied research org or something. How hard is it to get funding for that? I don't have a strong relevant public record, but I did quite a lot of work at METR and elsewhere.