I agree with you but for reasons that are more basic and more heretical than you're going for. In general I'm critical that EA seems to have a prior that being in a relevant place at a relevant time is doing God's work. It's a little defensible from the viewpoint of early career path navigation, but now we're talking about 3 year timelines and still saying things like "so I guess you should 'work on' AI safety". I don't really grasp why this argument is unfolding such that you have the burden of proof.

The real plan on a three year timeline is to hike the Patagonia or something. But that conclusion is too radical so we try to commit to the outcome space being selecting a job like we always do. If you're early career you should probably assume AGI/SI won't happen, to maximize utility.

People defending work at AI + 3 year timeline should probably be talking about how easy it is to get to a staff+ engineer position from start date.

So say we have like, a finite amount of time, and there are probably better and worse compromises between "get the gist" and the main plot of history and "read thousands of pages of moderately difficult prose and probably miss the point anyway." (Like you're not mentioning that all these writers are writing against a context -- forex, we shouldn't assume Adam Smith would defend free markets in the Gilded Age, but he very much thought they were better than mercantile policy.)

Any thoughts on learning that way?