The Alignment Agenda THEY Don't Want You to Know About

When this person goes to post the answer to the alignment problem to LessWrong, they will have low enough accumulated karma that the post will be poorly received.

I don't think this is accurate, it depends more on how it's presented.

In my experience, if someone posts something that's controversial to the general LW consensus, but argues carefully and in details, addressing the likely conflicts and recognizing where their position differs from the consensus, how, why, etc., in short, if they do the hard work of properly presenting it, it's well received. It may earn an agreement downvote, which is natural and expected, but it also earns a karma upvote for the effort put into exposing the point, plus those who disagreed engaging with the person explaining their points of disagreement.

Your point would be valid on most online forums, as people who aren't as careful about arguments as LWers tend to conflate disliking with disagreeing, which results in a downvote is a downvote is a downvote. Most LWers, in contrast, tend to be well skilled at treating the two axes as orthogonal, and it shows.

What the heck is “ethicophysics”?

Some thoughts since you ask for feedback elsewhere:

1) Part of the reason why this post is likely being downvoted is the clickbait title. This is not looked upon favorable on Less Wrong.
2) You make some pretty good points in this post, but you state it far too confidently, almost like a mathematical proof. If you want your posts to do well on Less Wrong, try not to make strong claims without correspondingly strong evidence.

Basically, people will reason, if this guy was about to knock a baseball into outer space, wouldn’t we already know his name and have his rookie card?

This is the crux for me. I think a person capable of making a significant contribution to alignment would probably also be capable of making some sort of smaller but more legible/uncontroversial contribution to show their competence. To go with the Einstein example, he got a PhD in physics before producing his groundbreaking results, and then was able to present those results in a format that was accepted by the physics establishment.

When this person goes to post the answer to the alignment problem to LessWrong, they will have low enough accumulated karma that the post will be poorly received.

Does the author having lower karma actually cause posts to be received more poorly? The author's karma isn't visible anywhere on the post, or even in the hover-tooltip by the author's name. (One has to click through to the profile to find out.) Even if readers did know the author's karma, would that really cause people to not just judge it by its content? I would be surprised.

Since predictions about the past are cheap, let's make some ethicophysical predictions about the future.

My work will remain unpopular until it is endorsed by someone who is high status (say, a comparable amount of karma to John Wentworth), and will not truly enter the LessWrong canon until Eliezer Yudkowsky seriously engages with it.

These predictions are pretty obviously true, so I don't claim many Brier points for making them. But I also can't claim many Brier points for many points in the ethicophysics, since it's really just a formalization of common sense applied to the moral domain.