It's in the same direction, yea. Even if relocating on earth captured all the wins (I would guess in most scenarios not, due to very different selection effects), that is way better than a warm scarf.
I don't expect the very early colony to be any use in terms of directing AGI research. The full self-sustaining million person civilization made mostly of geniuses version which it seeds is the interesting part, but the early stage is a requisite for something valuable.
Yea, that's not obvious to me either. It's totally plausible that this happens on Earth in another form and we get SV 2.0 with strong enough network effects that Mars ends up not being attractive. However, "better than a warm scarf" is a low bar.
If this claim is clarified to something like "For mitigating AI x-risk, an early-stage off-Earth colony would be very unlikely to help", I would switch.
More general point: I feel like this claim (and all others we have) are insufficiently well-specified. I have the feeling of "this could be taken as a handful of claims, which I have very different credences for". Perhaps there should be a queue for claims where people can ask questions and make sure it's pinned down before being opened for everyone to vote on? Adds an annoying wait, but also saves people from running into poorly specified claims.
Oh, neat, I can use a claim. This is fun. Arbital claims are significantly more useful* when they are fairly well-specified and unambiguous** A clarification period for claims is net positive for Arbital