(I affirm this as my intended reading.)

It certainly bears upon AI, but it bears that way by making a point about the complexity of a task rather than talking about an intelligent mechanism which is purportedly aligned on that task.  It does this by talking about an unintelligent mechanism, which is meant to be a way of talking about the task itself rather than any particular machine for doing it.

Zac wins.

Well-checked.

Your distinction between "outer alignment" and "inner alignment" is both ahistorical and unYudkowskian.  It was invented years after this post was written, by someone who wasn't me; and though I've sometimes used the terms in occasions where they seem to fit unambiguously, it's not something I see as a clear ontological division, especially if you're talking about questions like "If we own the following kind of blackbox, would alignment get any easier?" which on my view breaks that ontology.  So I strongly reject your frame that this post was "clearly portraying an outer alignment problem" and can be criticized on those grounds by you; that is anachronistic.

You are now dragging in a very large number of further inferences about "what I meant", and other implications that you think this post has, which are about Christiano-style proposals that were developed years after this post.  I have disagreements with those, many disagreements.  But it is definitely not what this post is about, one way or another, because this post predates Christiano being on the scene.

What this post is trying to illustrate is that if you try putting crisp physical predicates on reality, that won't work to say what you want.  This point is true!  If you then want to take in a bunch of anachronistic ideas developed later, and claim (wrongly imo) that this renders irrelevant the simple truth of what this post actually literally says, that would be a separate conversation.  But if you're doing that, please distinguish the truth of what this post actually says versus how you think these other later clever ideas evade or bypass that truth.

The post is about the complexity of what needs to be gotten inside the AI.  If you had a perfect blackbox that exactly evaluated the thing-that-needs-to-be-inside-the-AI, this could possibly simplify some particular approaches to alignment, that would still in fact be too hard because nobody has a way of getting an AI to point at anything.  But it would not change the complexity of what needs to be moved inside the AI, which is the narrow point that this post is about; and if you think that some larger thing is not correct, you should not confuse that with saying that the narrow point this post is about, is incorrect.

I claim that having such a function would simplify the AI alignment problem by reducing it from the hard problem of getting an AI to care about something complex (human value) to the easier problem of getting the AI to care about that particular function (which is simple, as the function can be hooked up to the AI directly).

One cannot hook up a function to an AI directly; it has to be physically instantiated somehow.  For example, the function could be a human pressing a button; and then, any experimentation on the AI's part to determine what "really" controls the button, will find that administering drugs to the human, or building a robot to seize control of the reward button, is "really" (from the AI's perspective) the true meaning of the reward button after all!  Perhaps you do not have this exact scenario in mind.  So would you care to spell out what clever methodology you think invalidates what you take to be the larger point of this post -- though of course it has no bearing on the actual point that this post makes?

Wish there was a system where people could pay money to bid up what they believed were the "top arguments" that they wanted me to respond to.  Possibly a system where I collect the money for writing a diligent response (albeit note that in this case I'd weigh the time-cost of responding as well as the bid for a response); but even aside from that, some way of canonizing what "people who care enough to spend money on that" think are the Super Best Arguments That I Should Definitely Respond To.  As it stands, whatever I respond to, there's somebody else to say that it wasn't the real argument, and this mainly incentivizes me to sigh and go on responding to whatever I happen to care about more.

(I also wish this system had been in place 24 years ago so you could scroll back and check out the wacky shit that used to be on that system earlier, but too late now.)

I note that I haven't said out loud, and should say out loud, that I endorse this history.  Not every single line of it (see my other comment on why I reject verificationism) but on the whole, this is well-informed and well-applied.