> How’s culture, storytelling, arguing, etc. working for us so far?
Pretty well really (despite many obvious problems) - humanity has done and is doing great things. We also have a huge advantage though that the alignment has a shared evolutionary history so it really doesn't vary that much (most humans have a shared intuition on most things because of that, we also perceive the world very similarly). For the specific examples of countries, international incentives via trade have done a lot and things are a lot better than they have been historically.
> We’re talking about minds here, not machines that follow exact orders. How do you change minds?
We agree more than you probably think? You can change minds though and you can teach people to think critically and try to take an empirical approach to learning things in addition to built in intuition (which can be helpful, but is often flawed). Similarly there are probably ways to train artificial minds that lead to positive results.
> The point is that there is no simple recipe for "alignment"
I agree - I doubt it's simple (seems clear that it is definitely not simple), but like there are strategies to teach people how to think better, there are probably strategies to build an AGI such that it's aligned with human interests (at least that's the hope). If alignment is impossible then whatever initial conditions set an AGI's goal could lead to pretty bad outcomes - not by malevolence, but just by chance: https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer