"I started to post a comment, but it got long enough that I’ve turned my comment into a blog post."
So the study of second-order consequences is not logic at all; to tease out all the second-order consequences of your second-order axioms, you need to confront not just the forms of sentences but their meanings. In other words, you have to understand meanings before you can carry out the operation of inference. But Yudkowsky is trying to derive meaning from the operation of inference, which won’t work because in second-order logic, meaning comes first.
... it’s important to recognize that Yudkowsky has “solved” the problem of accounting for numbers only by reducing it to the problem of accounting for sets — except that he hasn’t even done that, because his reduction relies on pretending that second order logic is logic.
I think you're reading too much into what I'm saying. I'm not suggesting that second order arithmetic is useful as a mathematical framework to talk about reasoning, in the way that first-order logic can. I'm saying that second order arithmetic is a useful way to talk about what makes the natural numbers special.
I'm also not suggesting that second order arithmetic has anything deep to add relative to a naïve (but sufficiently abstract) understanding of induction, but given that many people don't have a sufficiently abstract understanding of induction, I think it usefully illustrates just how broadly induction has to be understood. (To be clear, I'm also not suggesting that second order arithmetic is the one true way to think about the natural numbers, only that it's a useful perspective.)
I'm not claiming there is any such benefit. This is the wrong question to ask; neither Eliezer's original post nor my comment were written for an audience of mathematicians concerned with the optimal way to do mathematics in practice.
No, I am not saying that.
If there are models where G is true and models where G is false then different models of set theory don't agree on what natural numbers are.
No, the ambiguity is not resolved by second-order arithmetic. The ambiguity is not resolved by anything, so that doesn't seem like a very useful objection.
Also, note that I didn't refer to either a unique model nor to pinpointing. (I'm aware that Eliezer did, but you're replying to me.) What I said was: "[S]econd order arithmetic gives us a universal way of picking the natural numbers out in any situation. Different models of set theory may end up disagreeing about what's true in the natural numbers, but second order arithmetic is a consistent way of identifying the notion in that model of set theory which lines up with our intuitions for the what the natural numbers are"