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'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.'
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.
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- Arguments from moral realism, fully robust alignment, that ‘good enough’ alignment is good enough in practice, and related concepts.
What is moral realism doing in the same taxon with fully robust and good-enough alignment? (This seems like a huge, foundational worldview gap; people who think alignment is easy still buy the orthogonality thesis.)
- Arguments from good outcomes being so cheap the AIs will allow them.
If you're putting this below the Point of No Return, then I don't think you've understood the argument. The claim isn't that good outcomes are so cheap that even a paperclip maximizer would implement them. (Obviously, a paperclip maximizer kills you and uses the atoms to make paperclips.)
The claim is that it's plausible for AIs to have some human-regarding preferences even if we haven't really succeeded at alignment, and that good outcomes for existing humans are so cheap that AIs don't have to care about the humans very much in order to spend a tiny fraction of their resources on them. (Compare to how some humans care enough about animal welfare to spend an tiny fraction of our resources helping nonhuman animals that already exist, in a way that doesn't seem like it would be satisfied by killing existing animals and replacing them with artificial pets.)
There are lots of reasons one might disagree with this: maybe you don't think human-regarding preferences are plausible at all, maybe you think accidental human-regarding preferences are bad rather than good (the humans in "Three Worlds Collide" didn't take the Normal Ending lying down), maybe you think it's insane to have such a scope-insensitive concept of good outcomes—but putting it below arguments from science fiction or blind faith (!) is silly.
in a world where the median person is John Wentworth [...] on Earth (as opposed to Wentworld)
Who? There's no reason to indulge this narcissistic "Things would be better in a world where people were more like meeeeeee, unlike stupid Earth [i.e., the actually existing world containing all actually existing humans]" meme when the comparison relevant to the post's thesis is just "a world in which humans have less need for dominance-status", which is conceptually simpler, because it doesn't drag in irrelevant questions of who this Swentworth person is and whether they have an unusually low need for dominance-status.
(The fact that I feel motivated to write this comment probably owes to my need for dominance-status being within the normal range; I construe statements about an author's medianworld being superior to the real world as a covert status claim that I have an interest in contesting.)
2019 was a more innocent time. I grieve what we've lost.
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.)