For singleton events (large-scale nuclear attack and counterattack), deception plays an important role.  This isn't a problem, apparently, in dath ilan - everyone has common knowledge of other's rationality.

It's not how the game would be played between dath ilan and true aliens

This is a very important caveat. Many humans or CDT agents could be classified as “true aliens” by someone not part of their ingroup.

Good discussion.  I don't think anyone (certainly not me) is arguing that consciousness isn't a physical thing ("real", in that sense).  I'm arguing that "consciousness" may not be a coherent category.   In the same sense that long ago, dolphins and whales were considered to be "fish", but then more fully understood to be marine mammals.  Nobody EVER thought they weren't real.  Only that the category was wrong.   

Same with the orbiting rock called "pluto".  Nobody sane has claimed it's not real, it's just that some believe it's not a planet.  "fish" and "planet" are not real, although every instance of them is real.  In fact, many things that are incorrectly thought to be them are real as well.  It's not about "real", it's about modeling and categorization. 

"Consciousness" is similar - it's not a real thing, though every instance that's categorized (and miscategorized) that way is real.  There's no underlying truth or mechanism of resolving the categorization of observable matter as "conscious" or "behavior, but not conscious" - it's just an agreement among taxonomists.

(note: personally, I find it easiest to categorize most complex behavior in brains as "conscious" - I don't actually know how it feels to be them, and don't REALLY know that they self-model in any way I could understand, but it's a fine simplification to make for my own modeling.  I can't make the claim that this is objectively true, and I can't even design theoretical tests that would distinguish it from other theories.  In this way, it's similar to MWI vs Copenhagen interpretations of QM - there's no testable distinction, so use whichever one fits your needs best.)

I don't know that "the AI doomer argument" is a coherent thing.  At least I haven't seen an attempt to gather or summarize it in an authoritative way.  In fact, it's not really an argument (as far as I've seen), it's somewhere between a vibe and a prediction.

For me, when I'm in a doomer mood, it's easy to give a high probability to the idea that humanity will be extinct fairly soon (it may take centuries to fully die out, but will be fully irreversible path in 10-50 years, if it's not already).  Note that this has been a common belief long before AI was a thing - nuclear war/winter, ecological collapse, pandemic, etc. are pretty scary, and humans are fragile.

My optimistic "argument" is really not better-formed.  Humans are clever, and when they can no longer ignore a problem, they solve it.  We might lose 90%+ of the current global population, and a whole lot of supply-chain and tech capability, but that's really only a few doublings lost, maybe a millennium to recover, and maybe we'll be smarter/luckier in the next cycle.

From your perspective, what do you think the argument is, in terms of thesis and support?  

The great insight though is that consciousness is part of reality. It is a real phenomenon.

That is somewhat contentious.  MY consciousness and internal experiences are certainly part of reality.  I do not know how to show that YOUR consciousness is similar enough to say that it's real.  You could be a p-zombie that does not have consciousness, even though you use words that claim you do.  Or you could be conscious, but in a way that feels (to you) so alien to my own perceptions that it's misleading to use the same word.

Because we're somewhat mechanically similar, it's probable that our conscious experiences (qualia) are also similar, but we're not identical and have no even theoretical way to measure which, if any, differences between us are important to that question.

In other words, consciousness is a real phenomenon, but it's not guaranteed that it's the SAME phenomenon for me as for anything else.  

This uncertainty flows into your thoughts on morals - there's no testable model for which variations in local reality cause what variations in morals, so no tie from individual experience to universal "should".

Does this require some sort of enforcement mechanism to ensure that neither party puts in a bad-faith bid as a discovery mechanism for what number to seek in their real negotiations?   In fact, does anyone have actual data on what negotiations are even available in most employment situations - many companies seem to have figured out how to reduce this quite a bit over the last decade or two.

What goals (for Metaculus, for observers, or for predictors) does that serve?  

I worry about concepts like this being discussed FAR too generally.  Some rich people deserve some of their wealth, surely.  But it's hard to have the detailed discussions and compromises needed to agree on WHICH specific assets are undeserved and are therefore candidates for redistribution.

So we fall back on collective punishment and assert that, since some part of some wealth is not deserved, we are justified in taking a bunch from everyone who has any legible, take-able things.  IMO, even if MOST wealth is undeserved, that doesn't justify taking anything without identifying that specific thing as correct to take.

Code link gives a 404, so I can't look and see, but I'm curious what the ratio is actually comparing.  Is that the percentage of removals that were an improvement the ratio of improved to degraded, ignoring irrelevant removals, or the mean change (unlikely, since all are positive), or something else?  Does >0.5 imply a benefit and <0.5 imply a harm (assuming so)?

It's interesting that removing random options from A is never beneficial to A, but is also harmful to B unless B starts out with more actions than A.   I presume these payouts weren't normalized to zero-sum, so that's down to the distribution of outcomes-to-actions, and who "has more control".

A lot depends on your definition of "matter".  Interesting and important debates are always on margins of disagreement.  The median member likely has a TON of important beliefs and activities that are uncontroversial and ignored for most things.  Those things matter, and they matter more than 95% of what gets debated and focused on.  

The question isn't whether the entities matter, but whether the highlighted, debated topics matter.