I'll just respond to part of your comment since I'm busy today. I'll respond to the rest later or when we meet.
I don't see why a singleton is necessary to avert value drift in any case; they seem mostly orthogonal. Is there a simple argument here?
Not sure if this argument is original to me. I may have read it from Nick Bostrom or someone else. When I said "value drift" I meant value drift of humanity in aggregate, not necessarily value drift of any individual. Different people have values that have different levels of difficulty of transmitting. Or some just think that their values are easy to transmit, for example those who think they should turn the universe into hedonium, or should maximize "complexity". Competitive evolution will favor (in the sense of maximizing descendents/creations of) such people since they can take advantage of new AGI or other progress more quickly than those who think their values are harder to transmit.
I think there's an additional argument that says people who have shorter planning horizons will take advantage of new AGI progress more quickly because they don't particularly mind not transmitting their values into the far future, but just care about short term benefits like gaining academic fame.
I'll respond to the rest later or when we meet.
Did you talk about this at the recent workshop? If you're willing to share publicly, I'd be curious about the outcome of this discussion.
On the subject of how an FAI team can avoid accidentally creating a UFAI, Carl Shulman wrote:
In the history of philosophy, there have been many steps in the right direction, but virtually no significant problems have been fully solved, such that philosophers can agree that some proposed idea can be the last words on a given subject. An FAI design involves making many explicit or implicit philosophical assumptions, many of which may then become fixed forever as governing principles for a new reality. They'll end up being last words on their subjects, whether we like it or not. Given the history of philosophy and applying the outside view, how can an FAI team possibly reach "very high standards of proof" regarding the safety of a design? But if we can foresee that they can't, then what is the point of aiming for that predictable outcome now?
Until recently I haven't paid a lot of attention to the discussions here about inside view vs outside view, because the discussions have tended to focus on the applicability of these views to the problem of predicting intelligence explosion. It seemed obvious to me that outside views can't possibly rule out intelligence explosion scenarios, and even a small probability of a future intelligence explosion would justify a much higher than current level of investment in preparing for that possibility. But given that the inside vs outside view debate may also be relevant to the "FAI Endgame", I read up on Eliezer and Luke's most recent writings on the subject... and found them to be unobjectionable. Here's Eliezer:
Does anyone want to argue that Eliezer's criteria for using the outside view are wrong, or don't apply here?
And Luke:
These ideas seem harder to apply, so I'll ask for readers' help. What reference classes should we use here, in addition to past attempts to solve philosophical problems? What inside view adjustments could a future FAI team make, such that they might justifiably overcome (the most obvious-to-me) outside view's conclusion that they're very unlikely to be in the possession of complete and fully correct solutions to a diverse range of philosophical problems?