Interesting post!
To what extent do you think this being useful / important is correlated with the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis? This feels like the crux to me.
If some version of NAH is correct, then maybe desirable personas cluster around the natural form of goodness / alignment we desire, and so extrapolating from them will likely be very useful. It might even be the ways in which they don’t cluster around this might be correctable in some natural way that still makes personas a useful starting point.
However, if NAH doesn’t hold, or at least doesn’t hold between humans/personas and superintelligences, then it does seem like personas are much less useful and are very unlikely to meaningfully capture / guide ASI towards the target we want.
I really want to write more LessWrong posts and I have a few ideas / things sketched out. I thought it might be fun to use Manifold to allow people to bet on how well they might do or whether I’ll get round to writing them: https://manifold.markets/Jasonb/how-interesting-are-my-different-id.