A man sits in a jail cell, condemned to die. In the morning he will face a firing squad; this is his last night on earth. What should he do?

Should he try to forget his impending execution, pretending to himself that a pardon must certainly be on the way, that he surely must soon be reprieved? Should he rattle on the bars of his cell all night, helplessly begging and pleading for mercy? Should he tirelessly chip at the concrete walls with the battered remnants of a spoon, despite the impossibility a successful escape?

None of those sound all that great, do they? Each is pathetic, in its own way. Perhaps the third most of all: going through the motions of an escape attempt with no actual hope of success is not "actually trying". It's just as much of a refusal to face reality as the first is, or more so.

Perhaps he should compose himself, try to get a good night's sleep, then in the morning wake up and walk calmly to his execution with his head held high. I must admit, I don't particularly like that option either, but it is better than the first three. There is something brave and noble in it that there isn't in the others, though the man ends up just as dead.

I prefer not to judge people's coping strategies as pathetic because it feels unpleasant to do so and I think I can rescue anything good about that with a strategy that doesn't feel bad or cause others to feel bad.

“To the man in the condemned cell, awaiting the day of his execution, only one thing is serious—how to escape. Nothing else is serious.”

Gurdjieff, as recounted by Ouspensky.

If the mouse were to reason to itself, I am doomed. What use is struggling, I shall present my neck to the cat, so it can end me with minimal fuss. I would call that a pathetic mouse. And if the mouse ran and struggled, and scratched and bit, and hung onto every scrap of life it could get, I would call it a brave little mouse.  

You call it an aesthetic choice, but it comes across as a moral one nonetheless, since "pathetic" and "brave" are judgment of character, not description of degree of beauty. You also use the words like "worthy". You are definitely entitled to your view of ethics, just like your hedge fund friend is entitled to theirs. Not sure why you feel the urge to disguise your ethics as aesthetics. 

That said, both yours and your friend's ethics make sense and are perfectly compatible, given that you are convinced there is a chance of survival and he is convinced that there is not. If you want to crux it with the him, then the first step is to go through the possible worlds that lead him to conclude that there is no path to survival he can affect (and effect) and lead you to conclude that there is. Or maybe it is an ethical difference, his hedonistic approach and your "go out fighting" one.

I'd certainly prefer that smart people work to save me (and humanity, though I'm less sure that I care about future biological human-like entities all that much more than future electronic intelligent entities).  And I very much appreciate your appeal to esthetics rather than trying to call it logically or ethically required.

But I can definitely sympathize with the choice to get $millions for the next few years, usable for a finite-but-not-irrelevant time, over dedicating one's life to a very small chance of delaying or avoiding disastrous unaligned AI.  I don't much like the mouse who rolls over and intentionally dies, but I'm not sure I root for the mouse who sacrifices and hurts itself and then still gets eaten either.  I do have some respect for the mouse that runs on it's wheel and enjoys some cheese until the cat eats it.

I've read about so many horrible scenarios here on LW alone that it seems to me the highest universal law should be that euthanasia should always be allowed. So I'm definitely not going to criticize the mouse whatever it does.

Let’s say doom is inevitable (this is true for all living humans, for we are mortal). Is it not nonetheless the case that working to make other’s lives better is a good thing? If your friend doesn’t think working on alignment will help, that’s fine, but they can still do a lot to make the world a better place in other ways. It just means maximizing your short-term rather than long-term impact.

AI doom seems to fit the category "races to the bottom with unintended consequences" (and it isn't the only existential risk in that category). As such, its desperate urgency is downstream from the metacrisis (or the meaning crisis as John Vervaeke called it). Resolving or mitigating the metacrisis would give much-needed breathing room for studying AI alignment and exacerbating the metacrisis would seem to increase AI risk further.

I personally happened to fall into studying the metacrisis rather than AI, and it is my estimate that the metacrisis is more solvable and has aspects to it that seem relevant to understanding cognitive agency and intelligence in general. The linkage is such that I believe both problems merit attention and may benefit from cross pollination.

ETA: As this seems to potentially have more general relevance, I crossposted it to the open thread here [LW(p) · GW(p)]. Feel free to reply to whichever seems more on-topic for the direction you're taking.