This seems to be taking down a straw man, and far from “challenging a central tenet of LW: reductionism”, you perfectly describe it and expound on it, if a bit wordily. At least in my mind, it’s very obvious that physical ‘law’ is a map-level concept. Physicists themselves have noticed that for a map-level concept, physical ‘law’ fits the territory so amazingly well, that they have written articles such as “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
I laughed out loud as I was scrolling down, and the third major section item was “Eliezer Yudkowsky”. And you even included a little biography, “According to “Eliezer, the person,” Eliezer Yudkowsky (born 1979) was an exceptionally bright kid”
I’m not sure if that was honestly intended to be a joke, or if I’m completely missing it.
Elevating him to the pantheon of history seems a bit premature as of yet; why not retitle the section with a summary of his contributions to thinking on AI risk? The same goes for Robin Hanson. I’m just picking on Eliezer because people accuse us of worshipping Eliezer, and this is exactly why.