Those who would caution people that it might be counter-productive to work against the arms race - unless they believe one should work for the arms race - are in effect counseling paralysis. But would they do so in other areas of life? You never know if that car trip to the grocery store won’t be the last thing you do in your life. All life is a gamble.
Those links were interesting. Thanks! It is weird how one of the articles you linked to is only at three. Also, Rain's play should be an article.
Possibly the main and original inspiration for Yudkowsky's various musings on what advanced game theories should do (eg. cooperate in the Prisoner's Dilemma) is a set of essays penned by Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach) 1983. Unfortunately, they were not online and only available as part of a dead-tree collection. This is unfortunate. Fortunately the collection is available through the usual pirates as a scan, and I took the liberty of transcribing by hand the relevant essays with images, correcting errors, annotating with links, etc: http://www.gwern.net/docs/1985-hofstadter
The 3 essays:
I hope you find them educational. I am not 100% confident of the math transcriptions since the original ebook messed some of them up; if you find any apparent mistakes or typos, please leave comments.