I won’t comment on the overall advisability of this piece, but I think you’re confused about the decision theory (I’m about ten years behind state of the art here, and only barely understood it ten years ago, so I might be wrong).
The blackmail situation seems analogous to the Counterfactual Mugging, which was created to highlight how Eliezer’s decision theories sometimes (my flippant summary) suggest you make locally bad decisions in order to benefit versions of you in different Everett branches. Schwartz objecting “But look how locally bad this decision is!” isn’t telling Eliezer anything he doesn’t already know, and isn’t engaging with the reasoning. I think I would pay Omega in Counterfactual Mugging; I agree Schwartz’s case is harder, but provisionally I think it unintentionally adds a layer of Pascal’s Wager + torture vs. dust specks by making the numbers so extreme, which are two totally unrelated reasoning vortices.
I think the “should you procreate to make your father procreate?” question only works if your father’s cognitive algorithms are perfectly correlated with yours, which no real father’s are. To make the example fair, it should be more like “You were created by Omega, a god who transcends time. It resolved to created you if and only if It predicted that you would procreate, and It is able to predict everything perfectly. Now should you procreate?” I would also accept “You were created by a clone of yourself in the exact same situation, down to the atom, that you find yourself in now, including worrying about being created by a clone of yourself and so on. Should you procreate?” In both of these, the question seems much more open than with a normal human father.
If Eliezer’s decision theories make no sense and are ignoring easy disproofs, then everyone else who finds them compelling (or at least not obviously wrong) after long study, including people like Wei Dai, Abram Demski, Scott Garrabrant, Benya Fallenstein, etc, is also bizarrely and inexplicably wrong. This is starting to sound less like “Eliezer is a uniquely bad reasoner” and more like “there’s something in the water supply here that makes extremely bright people with math PhDs make simple dumb mistakes that any rando can notice.”
I don’t want to get into a long back-and-forth here, but for the record I still think you’re misunderstanding what I flippantly described as “other Everett branches” and missing the entire motivation behind Counterfactual Mugging. It is definitely not supposed to directly make sense in the exact situation you’re in. I think this is part of why a variant of it is called “updateless”, because it makes a principled refusal to update on which world you find yourself in in order to (more flippant not-quite-right description) program the type of AIs that would weird games played against omniscient entities.
If the demon would only create me conditional on me cutting off my legs after I existed, and it was the specific class of omniscient entity that FDT is motivated by winning games with, then I would endorse cutting off my legs in that situation.
(as a not-exactly-right-but-maybe-helpful intuition pump, consider that if the demon isn’t omniscient—but simply reads the EA Forum—or more strictly can predict the text that will appear on the EA Forum years in the future—it would now plan to create me but not you, and I with my decision theory would be better off than you with yours. And surely omniscience is a stronger case than just reads-the-EA-Forum!)
If this sounds completely stupid to you, and you haven’t yet read the LW posts on Counterfactual Mugging. I would recommend starting there; otherwise, consider finding a competent and motivated FDT proponent (ie not me) and trying to do some kind of double-crux or debate with them, I’d be interested in seeing the results.