Cooperating with aliens and AGIs: An ECL explainer

Can you say something about your motivation to work on this? Why not leave it to future AI and/or humanity to figure out? Or what are the most important questions in this area to answer now?

Doesn't this depend on what we value?

In particular, you appear to assume that we care about events outside of our lightcone in roughly the way we care about events in our near future. I'm guessing a good deal of skepticism of ECL is a result of people not caring much about distant events.

The model does not capture the fact that the total value you can provide to the commons likely scales with the diversity (and by proxy, fraction) of agents that have different values. In some models, this effect is strong enough to flip whether a larger fraction of agents with your values favors cooperating or defecting.

I'm curious to hear more about this, could you explain what these other models are?

I find myself arriving at a similar conclusion, but via a different path.

I notice that citizens often vote in the hopes that others will also vote and thus as a group will yield benefit.  the do this even when they know their vote alone will likely make no difference, and their voting does not cause others to vote.

So why do they do this?  My thought is that we are creatures that have evolved instincts that are adaptive for causally-interacting, social creatures.  In a similar way I expect other intelligence may have evolved in causally interacting social contexts and thus have developed similar instincts.  So this is why I expect distant aliens may behave in this way.

This conclusion is similar to yours, but I think the reasoning chain is a bit different:
(1) non-self-benefiting cooperation is evolutionarily preferred for "multi-turn" causally-interacting social agents.
(2) Thus such social agents (even distant alien ones) may evolve such behavior and apply it instinctively.
(3) As a result we (and they) find ourselves/themselves applying such in cooperative behavior in contexts that are known to ourselves/themselves to be provably a-causal.

Interestingly, I can imagine such agents using your argument as their post-hoc explanation of their own behavior even if the actual reason is rooted in their evolutionary history.

How does this argument fit into or with your framework?