I want to note I had a different experience. All of the paperclip maximizer ethical problems seemed similar to a human ethical problems, so I did not experience that I had no intuition for Clippies.
1: This seems similar to the Mere addition paradox. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox.
2: This seems similar to the Robin Hanson space or time civilization question. http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/06/space-v-time-allies.html
3: This seems similar to the problem of given a finite number as a maximum population, is it better to have the population be immortal, or to have the oldest die and the new younger ones take their place.
4: This seems similar to the problem of whether there are circumstances where it's important to sacrifice a single person for the good of the many.
Are these just problems that apply to most self reproducing patterns, regardless of what they happen to be called?
I do also want to note, that the paperclip maximizer doesn't begin as a self reproducing pattern, but it doesn't seem like it would go very far if it didn't build more paperclip maximizers in addition to building more paperclips. And it would probably want to have it's own form have some value as well, or it might self destruct into paperclips, which means it would be a paperclip, since that is explicitly the only thing it values, which seems to mean it is very likely it resolves into building copies of itself.
My problem with this is easily summed up: that makes sense, if you simply transform the Clippy problem into human problems, by replacing 'paperclip' with 'human'. I don't even know how Clippy problems map onto human problems, so I can't smuggle my intuitions the other way into the Clippy problems (assuming the mapping is even bijective).
(Why? Because it's fun.)
1) Do paperclip maximizers care about paperclip mass, paperclip count, or both? More concretely, if you have a large, finite amount of metal, you can make it into N paperclips or N+1 smaller paperclips. If all that matters is paperclip mass, then it doesn't matter what size the paperclips are, as long as they can still hold paper. If all that matters is paperclip count, then, all else being equal, it seems better to prefer smaller paperclips.
2) It's not hard to understand how to maximize the number of paperclips in space, but how about in time? Once it's made, does it matter how long a paperclip continues to exist? Is it better to have one paperclip that lasts for 10,000 years and is then destroyed, or 10,000 paperclips that are all destroyed after 1 year? Do discount rates apply to paperclip maximization? In other words, is it better to make a paperclip now than it is to make it ten years from now?
3) Some paperclip maximizers claim want to maximize paperclip <i>production</i>. This is not the same as maximizing paperclip count. Given a fixed amount of metal, a paperclip count maximizer would make the maximum number of paperclips possible, and then stop. A paperclip production maximizer that didn't care about paperclip count would find it useful to recycle existing paperclips, melting them down so that new ones could be made. Which approach is better?
4) More generally, are there any conditions under which the paperclip-maximizing thing to do involves destroying existing paperclips? It's easy to imagine scenarios in which destroying some paperclips causes there to be more paperclips in the future. (For example, one could melt down existing paperclips and use the metal to make smaller ones.)