Haven’t read the draft, just this comment thread, but it seems to me the quoted section is somewhat unclear and that clearing it up might reduce the commenter’s concerns.
You write here about interpreting some objections so that they become “empirical disagreements”. But I don’t see you saying exactly what the disagreement is. The claim explicitly stated is that “true claims might be used to ill effect in the world”—but that’s obviously not something you (or EAs generally) disagree with.
Then you suggest that people on the anti-EA side of the disagreement are “discouraging people from trying to do good effectively,” which may be a true description of their behavior, but may also be interpreted to include seemingly evil things that they wouldn’t actually do (like opposing whatever political reforms they actually support, on the basis that they would help people too well). That’s presumably a misinterpretation of what you’ve written, but that interpretation is facilitated by the fact that the disagreement at hand hasn’t been explicitly articulated.
Terminological point: It sounds like you’re using the phrase “instrumental convergence” in an unusual way.
I take it the typical idea is just that there are some instrumental goals that an intelligent agent can expect to be useful in the pursuit of a wide range of other goals, whereas you seem to be emphasizing the idea that those instrumental goals would be pursued to extremes destructive of humanity. It seems to me that (1) those two two ideas are worth keeping separate, (2) “instrumental convergence” would more accurately label the first idea, and (3) that phrase is in fact usually used to refer to the first idea only.
This occurred to me as I was skimming the post and saw the suggestion that instrumental convergence is not seen in humans, to which my reaction was, “What?! Don’t people like money?”