LW and related blogs are basically spoiling fantasy fiction to me. DAE have an experience like this? How to overcome it?

That which can be destroyed by the truth...

Am I no the first one to notice the all-improving Philosopher's Stone could not exist in principle because improvement is a mental category and not real, right?

To some extent the "value aligned agents" problem, formerly known as "friendly AI," boils down to "how would we actually check our 'improvement-map' for validity and create agents that will actually enforce that improvement-map on reality, rather than something else?"