But suppose I’m missing something, and there is a genuine non-arbitrary distinction between being convinced and being coerced.
There need not be a distinction between them. If you prefer, you could contrast an AI willing to “convince” its humans to behave in any way required, with one that is unwilling to sacrifice their happiness/meaningfulness/utility to do so. The second is still at a disadvantage.
Remember that my original point is that I believe appearing to be good correlates with goodness, even in extreme circumstances. Therefore, I expect restructuring humans to make the world appear tempting will be to the benefit of their happiness/meaningfulness/utility. Now, I’m willing to consider that are aspects of goodness which are usually not apparent to an inspecting human (although this moves to the borderline of where I think ‘goodness’ is well-defined). However, I don’t think these aspects are more likely to be satisfied in a satisficing search than in an optimizing search.
There need not be a distinction between them. If you prefer, you could contrast an AI willing to “convince” its humans to behave in any way required, with one that is unwilling to sacrifice their happiness/meaningfulness/utility to do so. The second is still at a disadvantage.
Remember that my original point is that I believe appearing to be good correlates with goodness, even in extreme circumstances. Therefore, I expect restructuring humans to make the world appear tempting will be to the benefit of their happiness/meaningfulness/utility. Now, I’m willing to consider that are aspects of goodness which are usually not apparent to an inspecting human (although this moves to the borderline of where I think ‘goodness’ is well-defined). However, I don’t think these aspects are more likely to be satisfied in a satisficing search than in an optimizing search.