I have two goals for this post:

Pose the question: Have overhang arguments been used successfully in other fields?
Lay out some of the reasons why I am suspicious of overhang arguments.

I've had the second of these on my mind for a few years now and am posting something rough rather than leaving it in drafts.

Intro

Within AI safety, people sometimes use overhang arguments to justify doing things that appear suspicious. The core of an overhang argument, as I see it is:

We are worried about some particular (dangerous) progress happening very quickly in the future.
We can push forward at least one of the inputs to that progress today. We expect doing so will both bring the dangerous thing sooner and slow down future progress toward the dangerous thing. We're trying to trade time now for time later.

A common form of this is a "compute overhang" argument: let's avoid situations where there is tons of compute lying around and drastically more efficient algorithms get developed, as that would allow these algorithms to scale rapidly to ASI. Therefore, we should push forward algorithm efficiency as much as we can [...]

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Outline:

(00:33) Intro

(01:40) Have overhang arguments been used successfully in other fields?

(04:56) Why I consider overhang arguments suspect

(07:26) List of relevant links

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 18th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aJSdGMzgFRFBcBhGp/quick-thoughts-on-overhang-arguments

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Quick Thoughts on Overhang Arguments” by Aaron_Scher

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Quick Thoughts on Overhang Arguments” by Aaron_Scher