Richard: I'll stick with your original example. In your hypothetical, I gather, programmers build a seed AI (a not-yet-superintelligent AGI that will recursively self-modify to become superintelligent after many stages) that includes, among other things, a large block of code I'll call X.

The programmers think of this block of code as an algorithm that will make the seed AI and its descendents maximize human pleasure. But they don't actually know for sure that X will maximize human pleasure — as you note, 'human pleasure' is an unbelievably complex concept, so no human could be expected to actually code it into a machine without making any mistakes. And writing 'this algorithm is supposed to maximize human pleasure' into the source code as a comment is not going to change that. (See the first few paragraphs of Truly Part of You.)

Now, why exactly should we expect the superintelligence that grows out of the seed to value what we really mean by 'pleasure', when all we programmed it to do was X, our probably-failed attempt at summarizing our values? We didn't program it to rewrite its source code to better approximate our True Intentions, or the True Meaning of our in-code comments. And if we did attempt to code it to make either of those self-modifications, that would just produce a new hugely complex block Y which might fail in its own host of ways, given the enormous complexity of what we really mean by 'True Intentions' and 'True Meaning'. So where exactly is the easy, low-hanging fruit that should make us less worried a superintelligence will (because of mistakes we made in its utility function, not mistakes in its factual understanding of the world) hook us up to dopamine drips? All of this seems crucial to your original point in 'The Fallacy of Dumb Superintelligence':

This is what a New Yorker article has to say on the subject of “Moral Machines”: “An all-powerful computer that was programmed to maximize human pleasure, for example, might consign us all to an intravenous dopamine drip.”

What they are trying to say is that a future superintelligent machine might have good intentions, because it would want to make people happy, but through some perverted twist of logic it might decide that the best way to do this would be to force (not allow, notice, but force!) all humans to get their brains connected to a dopamine drip.

It seems to me that you've already gone astray in the second paragraph. On any charitable reading (see the New Yorker article), it should be clear that what's being discussed is the gap between the programmer's intended code and the actual code (and therefore actual behaviors) of the AGI. The gap isn't between the AGI's intended behavior and the set of things it's smart enough to figure out how to do. (Nowhere does the article discuss how hard it is for AIs to do things they desire to. Over and over again is the difficulty of programming AIs to do what we want them to discussed — e.g., Asimov's Three Laws.)

So all the points I make above seem very relevant to your 'Fallacy of Dumb Superintelligence', as originally presented. If you were mixing those two gaps up, though, that might help explain why you spent so much time accusing SIAI/MIRI of making this mistake, even though it's the former gap and not the latter that SIAI/MIRI advocates appeal to.

Maybe it would help if you provided examples of someone actually committing this fallacy, and explained why you think those are examples of the error you mentioned and not of the reasonable fact/value gap I've sketched out here?