What wheels do EAs and rationalists reinvent?

I'm not sure I take a throwaway comment by someone closely socially tied to the author of the comment as evidence that it isn't equivalent. 

Also it doesn't need to be literally equivalent to them. The criticism, if there is one, would be that Scott's concept doesn't add anything to the work done by academics - although that criticism would be false if it unified hitherto un-unified fields in a useful way.

I agree with Linch that the idea that "a game can have multiple equilibria that are Pareto-rankable" is trivial. Then the existence of multiple equilibria automatically means players can get trapped in a suboptimal equilibrium – after all, that's what an equilibrium is.

What specific element of "coordination traps" goes beyond that core idea?

Not really; rationalist jargon is often more memetically fit than academic jargon so it's often hard for me to remember the original language even when I first learned something from non-rationalist sources. But there's a sense in which the core idea (Nash equilibria may not be Pareto efficient) is ~trivial, even if meditating on it gets you something deep/surprising eventually.

I don't really think of presenting this as Moloch as "reinventing the wheel," more like seeing the same problem from a different angle, and hopefully a pedagogically better one. 

That still does not seem like reinventing the wheel to me. My read of that post is that it's not saying "EAs should do these analyses that have already been done, from scratch" but something closer to "EAs should pay more attention to strategies from development economics and identify specific, cost-effective funding opportunities there". Unless you think development economics is solved, there is presumably still work to be done, e.g., to evaluate and compare different opportunities. For example, GiveWell definitely engages with experts in global health, but still also needs to rigorously evaluate and compare different interventions and programs.

And again, the article mentions development economics repeatedly and cites development economics texts -- why would someone mention a field, cite texts from a field, and then suggest reinventing it without giving any reason?

I’m not sure I understood your point. What charities or programs do you think GiveWell should be funding, but aren’t, that are supported by “existing literature in institutional development economics”?

I happen to strongly agree that moral discount rate should be 0, but a) it's still worth acknowledging that as an assumption, and b) I think it's easy for both sides to equivocate it with risk-based discounting. It seems like you're de facto doing when you say 'Under that assumption, the work done is indeed very different in what it accomplishes' - this is only true if risk-based discounting is also very low. See e.g. Thorstad's Existential Risk Pessimism and the Time of Perils and Mistakes in the Moral Mathematics of Existential Risk for formalisms of why it might not be - I don't agree with his dismissal of a time of perils, but I do agree that the presumption that explicitly longtermist work is actually better for the long term than short-to-medium-term focused work is is based on little more than Pascalian handwaving.

I'm confused by your paragraph about insurance. To clarify:

• I don't expect insurance companies to protect against either extinction catastrophes or collapse-of-civilisation catastrophes, since as you say such catastrophes are uninsurable.
• I suspect they also don't protect against medium-damage-to-civilisation catastrophes for much the same reason - I don't think insurance has the capacity to handle more than very mild civilisational shocks.
• I do think government organisations, NGOs and academics have done very important work in the context of reducing risks of civilisation-harming events.
• I think that if you assign a high risk of a post-catastrophe civilisation struggling to flourish (as I do), these events look comparably as bad from a long-term perspective as extinction once you also account for their greater likelihood. I suggested a framework for this analysis here and built some tools to implement it described here.

Of course you can disagree about the high risk to flourishing from non-existential catastrophes but that's going to be a speculative argument about which people might reasonably differ. To my knowledge, no-one's made the positive case in depth, and the few people who've looked seriously into our post-catastrophe prospects seem to be substantially more pessimistic than those who haven't. See e.g.:

• Dartnell - 'we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake'
• Rodriguez - 'humanity might be stagnant for millennia'
• Jebari - 'the development of industrialisation depends on more factors, and is more of a "lucky shot", than we might otherwise think'