Don't Burn the Boats for Slower Worlds

[Epistemic Status: Fairly confident that this is a problem, low confidence on what to do about it] TL;DR: Updates towards short timelines based on METR's November 2026 report on AI R&D acceleration at Anthropic are rational, but based on limited public evidence. If things take longer than currently expected, the appearance of consensus in the AI safety community will likely be used by skeptics to (attempt to) discredit AI safety and justify unsafe policy. If timelines are off by only a few years, this discrediting will come right before the intelligence explosion actually happens. Because a large chunk of survival mass remains in worlds where things move slowly, it is important to come up with ways to mitigate this dynamic. Short timelines are in. The AI Futures Project declared that it "Looks Like the Intelligence Explosion Will Happen in 2027 After All," Jake Mendel of Coefficient Giving (who explicitly described himself as having had "substantially longer timelines than my friends at Anthropic" and conditioned his update on "if METR is correct here") said he expects a >50% chance of ASI in the next 18 months without a slowdown, and Buck Shlegeris of Redwood said that he now believes there is "about a one in three chance" of ASI within a year, primarily because of "research released this week by METR." These updates seem reasonable to me. My timelines were already fairly short, and got shorter as a result of METR's report, which found a 1.9x speedup to progress on Anthropic's internal version of the Epoch Capabilities Index, and attributed it largely to AI involvement in the R&D process. While the METR report points towards shortened timelines, the publicly available info does not necessitate them. Toby Ord, for instance, put out a case that the speedup shrinks to 1.4x once you account for a one-time bump from Mythos Preview's larger pretrain. (METR found a slope change accounted for the data better than a one-time jump, but did not publicly reject Ord's hypothes