(Self-review.) I claim that this post is significant for articulating a solution to the mystery of disagreement (why people seem to believe different things, in flagrant violation of Aumann's agreement theorem): much of the mystery dissolves if a lot of apparent "disagreements" are actually disguised conflicts. The basic idea isn't particularly original, but I'm proud of the synthesis and writeup. Arguing that the distinction between deception and bias is less decision-relevant than commonly believed seems like an improvement over hang-wringing over where the boundary is.

Some have delusional optimism about [...]

I'm usually not a fan of tone-policing, but in this case, I feel motivated to argue that this is more effective if you drop the word "delusional." The rhetorical function of saying "this demo is targeted at them, not you" is to reassure the optimist that pessimists are committed to honestly making their case point by point, rather than relying on social proof and intimidation tactics to push a predetermined "AI == doom" conclusion. That's less credible if you imply that you have warrant to dismiss all claims of the form "Humans and institutions will make reasonable decisions about how to handle AI development and deployment because X" as delusional regardless of the specific X.

I don't think Vance is e/acc. He has said positive things about open source, but consider that the context was specifically about censorship and political bias in contemporary LLMs (bolding mine):

There are undoubtedly risks related to AI. One of the biggest:

A partisan group of crazy people use AI to infect every part of the information economy with left wing bias. Gemini can't produce accurate history. ChatGPT promotes genocidal concepts.

The solution is open source

If Vinod really believes AI is as dangerous as a nuclear weapon, why does ChatGPT have such an insane political bias? If you wanted to promote bipartisan efforts to regulate for safety, it's entirely counterproductive.

Any moderate or conservative who goes along with this obvious effort to entrench insane left-wing businesses is a useful idiot.

I'm not handing out favors to industrial-scale DEI bullshit because tech people are complaining about safety.

The words I've bolded indicate that Vance is at least peripherally aware that the "tech people [...] complaining about safety" are a different constituency than the "DEI bullshit" he deplores. If future developments or rhetorical innovations persuade him that extinction risk is a serious concern, it seems likely that he'd be on board with "bipartisan efforts to regulate for safety."

The next major update can be Claude 4.0 (and Gemini 2.0) and after that we all agree to use actual normal version numbering rather than dating?

Date-based versions aren't the most popular, but it's not an unheard of thing that Anthropic just made up: see CalVer, as contrasted to SemVer. (For things that change frequently in small ways, it's convenient to just slap the date on it rather than having to soul-search about whether to increment the second or the third number.)

'You acted unwisely,' I cried, 'as you see
By the outcome.' He calmly eyed me:
'When choosing the course of my action,' said he,
'I had not the outcome to guide me.'

—Ambrose Bierce

The claim is pretty clearly intended to be about relative material, not absolute number of pawns: in the end position of the second game, you have three pawns left and Stockfish has two; we usually don't describe this as Stockfish having given up six pawns. (But I agree that it's easier to obtain resources from an adversary that values them differently, like if Stockfish is trying to win and you're trying to capture pawns.)

This is a difficult topic (in more ways than one). I'll try to do a better job of addressing it in a future post.

Was my "An important caveat" parenthetical paragraph sufficient, or do you think I should have made it scarier?

Thanks, I had copied the spelling from part of the OP, which currently says "Arnalt" eight times and "Arnault" seven times. I've now edited my comment (except the verbatim blockquote).

if there's a bunch of superintelligences running around and they don't care about you—no, they will not spare just a little sunlight to keep Earth alive.

Yes, I agree that this conditional statement is obvious. But while we're on the general topic of whether Earth will be kept alive, it would be nice to see some engagement with Paul Christiano's arguments (which Carl Shulman "agree[s] with [...] approximately in full") that superintelligences might care about what happens to you a little bit, articulated in a comment thread on Soares's "But Why Would the AI Kill Us?" and another thread on "Cosmopolitan Values Don't Come Free".

The reason I think this is important is because "[t]o argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates": if you write 3000 words inveighing against people who think comparative advantage means that horses can't get sent to glue factories, that doesn't license the conclusion that superintelligence Will Definitely Kill You if there are other reasons why superintelligence Might Not Kill You that don't stop being real just because very few people have the expertise to formulate them carefully.

(An important caveat: the possibility of superintelligences having human-regarding preferences may or may not be comforting: as a fictional illustration of some relevant considerations, the Superhappies in "Three Worlds Collide" cared about the humans to some extent, but not in the specific way that the humans wanted to be cared for.)

Now, you are on the record stating that you "sometimes mention the possibility of being stored and sold to aliens a billion years later, which seems to [you] to validly incorporate most all the hopes and fears and uncertainties that should properly be involved, without getting into any weirdness that [you] don't expect Earthlings to think about validly." If that's all you have to say on the matter, fine. (Given the premise of AIs spending some fraction of their resources on human-regarding preferences, I agree that uploads look a lot more efficient than literally saving the physical Earth!)

But you should take into account that if you're strategically dumbing down your public communication in order to avoid topics that you don't trust Earthlings to think about validly—and especially if you have a general policy of systematically ignoring counterarguments that it would be politically inconvenient for you to address—you should expect that Earthlings who are trying to achieve the map that reflects the territory will correspondingly attach much less weight to your words, because we have to take into account how hard you're trying to epistemically screw us over by filtering the evidence.

No more than Bernard Arnalt, having $170 billion, will surely give you $77.

Bernald Arnault has given eight-figure amounts to charity. Someone who reasoned, "Arnault is so rich, surely he'll spare a little for the less fortunate" would in fact end up making a correct prediction about Bernald Arnault's behavior!

Obviously, it would not be valid to conclude "... and therefore superintelligences will, too", because superintelligences and Bernald Arnault are very different things. But you chose the illustrative example! As a matter of local validity, It doesn't seem like a big ask for illustrative examples to in fact illustrate what what they purport to.