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I always got the sense that LW was, and the AI alignment movement continues to be, stuck with the idealistic memeplex that '70s economics and classical AI had about the nature of intelligence and reasoning. The sense is that uncertainty and resource limitations are surely just a temporary hindrance that will disappear in the limit and can therefore simply be abstracted away, so you can get an adequate intuition for the dynamics of the "competing intelligences" game by looking at results like Aumann agreement.
It's not at all clear that this is the case; the load to model the actions of a 0.1% dumber competitor, or even just the consequences of the sort of mistakes a superintelligence could make in its superintelligent musings (to a sufficient degree of confidence to satisfy its superhuman risk aversion), may well outscale the advantages of being 0.1% more intelligent (whatever the linear measure of intelligence there is), to the point where there is nothing like a stable equilibrium that has the intellectually rich getting richer. Instead, as you are ahead, you have more to lose, and your 0.1% advantage does not protect you against serendipity or collusion or the possibility that one of those narrowly behind you gets lucky and pulls ahead, or simply exploits the concavity of your value functions to pull a "suicide bombing" on you, in the end forcing you to actually negotiate an artificial deadlock and uplift competitors that fall behind. Compare other examples of resource possession where in a naive model the resource seems like it would be reinvestable to obtain more of the same resource - why did the US not go FOOM among nations, or Bill Gates go FOOM among humans?
Malthusianism reigned until 80s works like Simon's Ultimate Resource revived cornicopian thought.
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It is also (hilariously) possible that the most intelligent model may lose to much dumber more streamlined models that are capable of cycling their OODA loops faster.
(Of course seems quite plausible that any gap in AI intelligence will be smaller than the known gaps in human intelligence and smart humans get pwned by stupid humans regularly.)
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