Fantastic post. This is really a criminally underdiscussed issue relative to how important it is.
My one relatively minor critique is the same one I often have for Eliezer's economics-related posts: he's a little too trapped in the 40,000 foot theory level rather than how any of this works in practice. Particularly this bit here:
"Q. Yeah… I've been wondering if maybe my currency is pretty much interchangeable with government bonds, now. Maybe when I buy government bonds from the sort of people who own government bonds in the first place...
" Part of our civilization was being, in a certain sense, stupid: there were trillion-dollar bills lying around for the taking. But they weren’t trillion-dollar bills that just anyone could walk over and pick up. "
This is a great explanation for the appeal of politics: it's about trying to take over those parts of our civilization that are displaying this kind of stupidity in order to get them to not do that so much.
Depends on what value the FAI places on human flourishing in hypothetical alternate realities I guess. If it's focused on the universe it's in then there's no reason to waste half of it on paperclips. If it's trying to help out the people living in a universe where the paperclip maximizer got activated then it should cooperate. I guess a large part of that is also about whether it determines there really are parallel universes or not to be concerned about.