What audience are you writing for?
People who expect that careful thought is useful for world-bettering, and are specifically looking for it (to guide decisions, validate a community, or seed higher quality discussions). I am not willing to trade objectivity for emotion at the usual exchange rate, though I think it's worth keeping your point in mind---right now I'm probably passing up very cheap opportunities to be more engaging.
I don't really understand your argument about progress. Right now it reads to me like "assuming that net progress is approximately zero, we conclude that net progress is approximately zero."
My argument seems to be poorly articulated and perpetually confusing. I'll take another pass at clarifying it.
But I don't see how it assumes that net progress is approximately zero---all of the assumptions concern the intrinsic value of the events of the next year, which seems orthogonal to "progress." But I agree that the argument does somehow feel like question-begging (though I think it does no such thing).
ETA: I updated that post, if you want to take another look at it.
Increasing the scale of civilization increases the scale of the coordination problems you need to solve, which is not obviously a good thing.
Yes. I explicitly disavowed this view (that progress for progress' sake is good) in the earlier post you mentioned.
This line probably has an extra comma---"which can then direct its action..." is an extra quality, and I'm packing a lot into that + "stable."
With respect to sculpting social values, I mention this as a pressing question. Other than that, do you disagree with the substance of what I've written? It was intended to be a concise statement of the basic principle (building a stable civilization that reflects our values is good, whatever those values turn out to entail), though I'll make it more careful.
(My confusion with the post is that I'm not sure what do you mean by "value". Today and tomorrow are not alternatives in any straightforward decision problem ("waiting a day" doesn't make them into alternatives either, it doesn't even seem to be a relevant decision, more of a personal identity word game; if you wait for tomorrow, today still happens). One possibility is that you might compare their potential as optimization targets, so that the decision in question is where to focus your optimization effort, but the wording of the post doesn't seem to naturally fit this interpretation.)
Over the last few months I've started blogging about effective altruism more broadly, rather than focusing on AI risk. I'm still focusing on abstract considerations and methodological issues, but I hope it is of interest to others here. Going forward I intend to cross-post more often to LW, but I thought I would post the backlog here anyway. With luck, I'll also have the opportunity to post more than bi-weekly.
I welcome thoughts, criticisms, etc.