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I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, becoming a zinc salesman is costly evidence that they truly believe that zinc will sell like hotcakes in the future, due to everyone wanting to avoid those terrible consequences. Getting any work in the zinc industry or just investing lots of money into it would also serve the same role.
However, it's hard to figure out, even by the person himself, if their belief of the value of zinc tablets was what led them to become a zinc salesman or if their desire to become rich, possibly by becoming a successful zinc salesman, was what led them to believe in the value of zinc tablets.
On the other hand, everyone knows that a zinc salesman is not credible when it comes to informing you about the value of taking zinc; as such someone who believes that it's his ethical duty to convince everyone to take zinc every day, lest there be some terrible consequences for the human race, would understand that becoming a zinc salesman would reduce his capability to fulfill his ethical duty. And, in fact, he may be best served doing the opposite: credibly make un-hedged bets against the zinc industry; by doing this, he proves to anyone willing to pay attention that he considers every human taking zinc every day to be of such great importance that he will consider his own personal bankruptcy a worthy cost to pay for it. Or that he believes that mass zinc-taking will be proven to be such a great benefit/prevention of harm to humanity that there will be enough grateful humans who will fund his lifestyle after he goes bankrupt.
However, short positions on zinc also provides a costly signal that he believes that zinc sales will go down in the future, which can reasonably look like it reflects a lack of belief in the actual value of zinc.
I propose a new law, the law of bulveristic recursion, if your bulverism can explain both sides of an argument you need to actually stop trying to read minds and address the actual fucking points. This shit is so exhausting. There are pages and pages of arguments that these people have produced about why they're concerned about ai safety, if they're wrong show that they're wrong, make a convincing argument that they wrong, but construction epicycle on epicycle about how they really must have been grifting for the last twenty years because of some subtle game theory to get rich on the off chance that AI became huge. If they had this much foresight they could have just invested in a couple companies and got rich anyways.
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