How to detect alignment bullshit

Christiano's heuristic for evaluating alignment proposals: the easiest red flag is work on a problem that isn't actually important and has no story for becoming important (not a problem now and won't worsen, or is a problem now but clearly getting better); he is skeptical of dismissals based on 'doesn't deal with the key difficulty,' and is otherwise liberal, requiring only that work engage real models empirically and have a coherent story about key difficulties.