What I sense from this is that what you’re not getting is that my value system is made of tradeoff of let’s call it “Primitive Values” (ie one that are at least sufficiently universal in human psychology that you kind of can describe them with compact words).
I obviously don’t value failure. If I did I would plan for failure. I don’t. I value/plan for success.
But if all plans ultimately lead to success, what of use/fun/value is planning ?
So failure has to be part of the territory, if I want my map-making skills to… matter ? make sense ? make a difference ?
It feels to me like a weird need to make your whole life into some kind of game to be “won” or “lost”, or some kind of gambling addiction or something.
My first reaction was “no, no, gambling addiction and speaking of Winning at Life like Trump could looks like terribly uncharitable”.
My second reaction is you’re pretty much directionaly right and into the path of understanding ? Just put it in a bit more charitable way ? We have been shaped by Evolution at large. By winners in the great game of Life, red in blood and claws. And while playing don’t mean winning, not playing certainly means losing. Schematically, I can certainly believe that “Agency” is the shard inside of me that comes out of that outer (intermediate) objective “enjoy the game, and play to win”. I have the feeling that you have pretty much lost the “enjoy the game” shard, possibly because you have a mutant variant “enjoy ANY game” (and you know what ? I can certainly imagine a “enjoy ANY game” variant enjoying UBI paradise).
Well, the big stakes are already gone. If you’re on Less Wrong, you probably don’t have much real chance of failing so hard that you die, without intentionally trying. Would your medieval farmer even recognize that your present stakes are significant?
This gives me another possible source/model of inspiration, the good old “It’s the Journey that matters, not the Destination”.
Many video games have a “I win” cheatcode. Players at large don’t use it. Why not, if winning the game is the goal ? And certainly all of their other actions are consistent with the player want to win the game. He’s happy when things go well, frustrated when they go wrong, At the internet age, they look at guides, tips. They will sometimes hand the controller to a better player after being stuck. And yet they don’t press the “I win” button.
You are the one saying “do you enjoy frustration or what ? Just press the I Win button”. I’m the one saying “What are you saying ? He’s obviously enjoying the game, isn’t he ?”.
I agree that the Destination of Agency is pretty much “there is no room left for failure” (and pretty much no Agency left). This is what most of our efforts go into : better plans for a better world with better odds for us. There’s some Marxist vibes “competition tend to reduce profit over time in capitalist economies, therefore capitalism will crumble under the weight of its own contradiction”. If you enjoy entrepreneurship in a capitalistic economy, the better you are at it, the stronger you drive down profits. “You: That seems to indicate that entrepreneurs hate capitalism and profits, and would be happy in a communist profit-less society. Me: What ?”. Note we have the same thing as “will crumble under the weights…” in the game metaphor : when the player win, it’s also the end of the game.
So let’s go a bit deeper into that metaphor : the game is Life. Creating an ASI-driven UBI paradise is discovering that the developer created a “I Win” button. Going into that society is pressing that button. Your position I guess is “well, living well in an UBI paradise is the next game”. My position is “no, the UBI paradise is still in the same game. It’s akin to the Continue Playing button in a RTS after having defeated all opponents on the map. Sure, you can play in the sense you can still move units around gather resources and so on but c’mon, it’s not the same, and I can already tell how much it’s going to be much less fun, simply because it’s not what the game was designed for. There is no next game. We have finished the only game we had. Enjoy drawing fun patterns with your units while you can enjoy it ; for me I know it won’t be enjoyable for very long.”
… and if you care, your social prestige, among whoever you care about, can always be on the table, which is already most of what you’re risking most of the time.
Oh, this is another problem I thought of, then forgot.
This sounds like a positive nightmare to me.
It seems a hard-to-avoid side-effect of losing real stakes/agency.
In our current society, you can improve the life of others around you in the great man-vs-nature conflict. AKA economics is positive-sum (I think you mentioned something about some people talking about Meaningfulness giving you an altruistic definition ? There we are !).
Remove this and you only have man-vs-man conflicts (gamified so nobody get hurt). Those are generally zero-sum, just positional. When you gain a rank in the Chess ladder, another one lose one.
No place for positive-sum games seems a bad place to live. Don’t know at what extent it is fixable in the UBI-paradise (does cooperative, positive-sum games fix this ? I’m not sure how much the answer is “obviously yes” or “it’s just a way to informally make a ranking of who is the best player, granting status, so it’s actually zero sum”), or how much is it just going to end up Agency in another guise.
Forces mostly unknown and completely beyond your control have made a universe in which you can exist, and fitted you for it. You depend on the fine structure constant. You have no choice about whether it changes. You need not and cannot act to maintain the present value. I doubt that makes you feel your agency is meaningless.
My first reaction is “the shard of Agency inside me has been created by Evolution ; the definition of the game I’m supposed to enjoy and its scope draws from there. Of course it’s not going to care about that kind of stuff”.
My second reaction is : “I certainly hope my distant descendants will change the fine-structure constant of the universe, it looks possible and a way to avoid the heat death of the universe” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhB3qH_TFds&list=PLd7-bHaQwnthaNDpZ32TtYONGVk95-fhF&index=2). I don’t know how much it’s a nitpick (I certainly notice that I prefer “my distant descendants” to “the ASI supervisor of UBI-paradise”).
More likely, other humans could kill you, still in a way you couldn’t influence, for reasons you couldn’t change and might never learn. You will someday die of some probably unchosen cause.
This is the split between Personal Agency and Collective Agency. At our current level at capabilities, it doesn’t differentiate very much. It will certainly, later.
Since we live in society, and much people tend to not like being killed, we shape societies such that such events tend not to happen (mostly via punishment and socialization). Each individual try to steer society at the best of its capabilities. If we collectively end up in a place where there’s no murders, people like me consider this a success. Otherwise, a failure.
Politics, advocacy, leading-by-example, guided by things like Game Theory, Ethics, History. Those are very much not out of the scope of Agency. It would be if individuals had absolutely 0 impact on society.
It’s all very nice to talk about being able to fail, but you don’t fail in a vaccuum. You affect others. Your “agentic failure” can be other people’s “mishap they don’t control”. It’s almost impossible to totally avoid that. Even if you want that, why do you think you should get it?
That’s why, for me and at my current speculation level, I think there is two Red Bright Lines for a post-ASI future.
One : if there is no recognizable Mormons society in a post-ASI future, something Has Gone Very Wrong. Mormons tend to value their traditional way of life pretty heavily (which includes agency). Trampling those in particular probably indicate that we are generally trampling a awful lot of values actually held by a lot of actual people.
Two : if there is no recognizable UBI paradise in a post-ASI future, something Has Gone Very Wrong. For pretty much the same reason.
(there is plausibly a similar third red line for transhumanists, but they cause serious security/safety challenges for the rest of the universe, so it’s getting more complicated there, so I found no way to articulate such a red line for them).
The corollary being is : the (non-terribly-gone-wrong) pot-ASI future is almost inevitably a patchwork of different societies with different tradeoffs. Unless One Value System wins, one which is low on Diversity on top of that. Which would be terrible.
To answer you : I should get that because I’m going to live with other people who are okay that I get that, because they want to get it too.
“But don’t you see, Sparklebear? The value was inside of YOU all the time!”
I entirely agree with you here. It’s all inside us. If there was some Real Really Objectively Meaningful Values out there, I would believe a technically aligned ASI to be able to recognize this and would be much less concerned by the potential loss of Agency/Meaningfulness/whatever we call it. Alas, I don’t believe it’s the case.
Mostly some self-description, since you seem want a model of me. I did add an actual disagreement (or something) at the end, but I don’t think there’ll be much more for me to say about it if you don’t accept it. I will read anything you write.
I have the feeling that you have pretty much lost the “enjoy the game” shard, possibly because you have a mutant variant ” enjoy ANY game”.
More like “enjoy the process”. Why would I want to set a “win” condition to begin with?
I don’t play actual games at all unless somebody drags me into them. They seem artificial and circumscribed. Whatever the rules are, I don’t really care enough about learning them, or learning to work within them, unless it gives me something that seems useful for whatever random conditions may come up later, outside the game. That applies to whatever the winning condition is, as much as to any other rule.
Games with competition tend to be especially tedious. Making the competition work seems to tends to further constrain the design of the rules, so they’re more boring. And the competition can make the other people involved annoying.
As far as winning itself… Whee! I got the most points! That, plus whatever coffee costs nowadays, will buy me a cup of coffee. And I don’t even like coffee.
I study things, and I do projects.
While I do evaluate project results, I’m not inclined to bin them as “success” or “failure”. I mean, sure, I’ll broadly classify a project that way, especially if I have to summarize it to somebody else in a sentence. But for myself I want more than that. What exactly did I get out of doing it? The whole thing might even be a “success” if it didn’t meet any of its original goals.
I collect capabilities. Once I have a capability, I often, but not always, lose interest in using it, except maybe to get more capabilities. Capabilities get extra points for being generally useful.
I collect experiences when new, pleasurable, or interesting ones seem to be available. But just experiences, not experiences of “winning”.
I’ll do crossword puzzles, but only when I have nothing else to do and mostly for the puns.
Many video games have a “I win” cheatcode. Players at large don’t use it. Why not, if winning the game is the goal ?
Even I would understand that as not, actually, you know, winning the game. I mean, a game is a system with rules. No rules, no game, thus no win. And if there’s an auto-win button that has no reason to be in the rules other than auto-win, well, obvious hole is obvious.
It’s just that I don’t care to play a game to begin with.
If something is gamified, meaning that somebody has artificially put a bunch of random stuff I don’t care about between me and something I actually want in real life, then I’ll try to bypass the game. But I’m not going to do that for points, or badges, or “achievements” that somebody else has decided I should want. I’m not going to push the “win” button. I’m just not gonna play. I loathe gamification.
Creating an ASI-driven UBI paradise is discovering that the developer created a “I Win” button.
I see it not as an “I win” button, but as an “I can do the stuff I care about without having to worry about which random stupid bullshit other people might be willing to pay me for, or about tedious chores that don’t interest me” button.
Sure, I’m going to mash that.
And eventually maybe I’ll go more transcendent, if that’s on offer. I’m even willing to accept certain reasonable mental outlooks to avoid being too “unaligned”.
This is the split between Personal Agency and Collective Agency.
I don’t even believe “Collective Agency” is a thing, let alone a thing I’d care about. Anything you can reasonably call “agency” requires preferences, and intentional, planned, directed, well, action toward a goal. Collectives don’t have preferences and don’t plan (and also don’t enjoy, or even experience, either the process or the results).
Which, by the way, brings me to the one actual quibble I’m going to put in this. And I’m not sure what to do with that quibble. I don’t have a satisfactory course of action and I don’t think I have much useful insight beyond what’s below. But I do know it’s a problem.
One : if there is no recognizable Mormons society in a post-ASI future, something Has Gone Very Wrong.
I was once involved in a legal case that had a lot to do with some Mormons. Really they were a tiny minority of the people affected, but the history was such that the legal system thought they were salient, so they got talked about a lot, and got to talk themselves, and I learned a bit about them.
These particular Mormons were a relatively isolated polygynist splinter sect that treated women, and especially young women, pretty poorly (actually I kind of think everybody but the leaders got a pretty raw deal, and I’m not even sure the leaders were having much of a Good Time(TM)). It wasn’t systematic torture, but it wasn’t Fun Times either. And the people on the bottom had a whole lot less of what most people would call “agency” than the people on the top.
But they could show you lots of women who truly, sincerely wanted to stay in their system. That was how they’d been raised and what they believed in. And they genuinely believed their Prophet got direct instructions from God (now and then, not all the time).
Nobody was kept in chains. Anybody who wanted to leave was free to walk away from their entire family, probably almost every person they even knew by name, and everything they’d ever been taught was important, while defying what at least many of them truly believed was the literal will of God. And of course move somewhere where practically everybody had a pretty alien way of life, and most people were constantly doing things they’d always believed were hideously immoral, and where they’d been told people were doing worse than they actually were.
They probably would have been miserable if they’d been forcibly dragged out of their system. They might never have recovered. If they had recovered, it might well have meant they’d had experiences that you could categorize as brainwashing.
It would have been wrong to yank them out of their system. So far I’m with you.
But was it right to raise them that way? Was it right to allow them to be raised that way? What kind of “agency” did they have in choosing the things that molded them? The people who did mold them got agency, but they don’t seem to have gotten much.
As I think you’ve probably figured out, I’m very big on individual, conscious, thinking, experiencing, wanting agents, and very much against giving mindless aggregates like institutions, groups, or “cultures”, anywhere near the same kind of moral weight.
From my point of view, a dog has more right to respect and consideration than a “heritage”. The “heritage” is only important because of the people who value it, and that does not entitle it to have more, different people fed to it. And by this I specifically mean children.
A world of diverse enclaves is appealing in a lot of ways. But, in every realistic form I’ve been able to imagine, it’s a world where the enclaves own people.
More precisely, it’s a world where “culture” or “heritage”, or whatever, is used an excuse for some people not only to make other people miserable, but to condition them from birth to choose that misery. Children start to look suspiciously like they’re just raw material for whatever enclave they happen to be born in. They don’t choose the enclave, not when it matters.
It’s not like you can just somehow neutrally turn a baby into an adult and then have them “choose freely”. People’s values are their own, but that doesn’t mean they create those values ex nihilo.
I suppose you could fix the problem by switching to reproduction by adult fission, or something. But a few people might see that as a rather abrupt departure, maybe even contrary to their values. And kids are cute.
What I sense from this is that what you’re not getting is that my value system is made of tradeoff of let’s call it “Primitive Values” (ie one that are at least sufficiently universal in human psychology that you kind of can describe them with compact words).
I obviously don’t value failure. If I did I would plan for failure. I don’t. I value/plan for success.
But if all plans ultimately lead to success, what of use/fun/value is planning ?
So failure has to be part of the territory, if I want my map-making skills to… matter ? make sense ? make a difference ?
My first reaction was “no, no, gambling addiction and speaking of Winning at Life like Trump could looks like terribly uncharitable”.
My second reaction is you’re pretty much directionaly right and into the path of understanding ? Just put it in a bit more charitable way ? We have been shaped by Evolution at large. By winners in the great game of Life, red in blood and claws. And while playing don’t mean winning, not playing certainly means losing. Schematically, I can certainly believe that “Agency” is the shard inside of me that comes out of that outer (intermediate) objective “enjoy the game, and play to win”. I have the feeling that you have pretty much lost the “enjoy the game” shard, possibly because you have a mutant variant “enjoy ANY game” (and you know what ? I can certainly imagine a “enjoy ANY game” variant enjoying UBI paradise).
This gives me another possible source/model of inspiration, the good old “It’s the Journey that matters, not the Destination”.
Many video games have a “I win” cheatcode. Players at large don’t use it. Why not, if winning the game is the goal ? And certainly all of their other actions are consistent with the player want to win the game. He’s happy when things go well, frustrated when they go wrong, At the internet age, they look at guides, tips. They will sometimes hand the controller to a better player after being stuck. And yet they don’t press the “I win” button.
You are the one saying “do you enjoy frustration or what ? Just press the I Win button”. I’m the one saying “What are you saying ? He’s obviously enjoying the game, isn’t he ?”.
I agree that the Destination of Agency is pretty much “there is no room left for failure” (and pretty much no Agency left). This is what most of our efforts go into : better plans for a better world with better odds for us. There’s some Marxist vibes “competition tend to reduce profit over time in capitalist economies, therefore capitalism will crumble under the weight of its own contradiction”. If you enjoy entrepreneurship in a capitalistic economy, the better you are at it, the stronger you drive down profits. “You: That seems to indicate that entrepreneurs hate capitalism and profits, and would be happy in a communist profit-less society. Me: What ?”. Note we have the same thing as “will crumble under the weights…” in the game metaphor : when the player win, it’s also the end of the game.
So let’s go a bit deeper into that metaphor : the game is Life. Creating an ASI-driven UBI paradise is discovering that the developer created a “I Win” button. Going into that society is pressing that button. Your position I guess is “well, living well in an UBI paradise is the next game”. My position is “no, the UBI paradise is still in the same game. It’s akin to the Continue Playing button in a RTS after having defeated all opponents on the map. Sure, you can play in the sense you can still move units around gather resources and so on but c’mon, it’s not the same, and I can already tell how much it’s going to be much less fun, simply because it’s not what the game was designed for. There is no next game. We have finished the only game we had. Enjoy drawing fun patterns with your units while you can enjoy it ; for me I know it won’t be enjoyable for very long.”
Oh, this is another problem I thought of, then forgot.
This sounds like a positive nightmare to me.
It seems a hard-to-avoid side-effect of losing real stakes/agency.
In our current society, you can improve the life of others around you in the great man-vs-nature conflict. AKA economics is positive-sum (I think you mentioned something about some people talking about Meaningfulness giving you an altruistic definition ? There we are !).
Remove this and you only have man-vs-man conflicts (gamified so nobody get hurt). Those are generally zero-sum, just positional. When you gain a rank in the Chess ladder, another one lose one.
No place for positive-sum games seems a bad place to live. Don’t know at what extent it is fixable in the UBI-paradise (does cooperative, positive-sum games fix this ? I’m not sure how much the answer is “obviously yes” or “it’s just a way to informally make a ranking of who is the best player, granting status, so it’s actually zero sum”), or how much is it just going to end up Agency in another guise.
My first reaction is “the shard of Agency inside me has been created by Evolution ; the definition of the game I’m supposed to enjoy and its scope draws from there. Of course it’s not going to care about that kind of stuff”.
My second reaction is : “I certainly hope my distant descendants will change the fine-structure constant of the universe, it looks possible and a way to avoid the heat death of the universe” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhB3qH_TFds&list=PLd7-bHaQwnthaNDpZ32TtYONGVk95-fhF&index=2). I don’t know how much it’s a nitpick (I certainly notice that I prefer “my distant descendants” to “the ASI supervisor of UBI-paradise”).
This is the split between Personal Agency and Collective Agency. At our current level at capabilities, it doesn’t differentiate very much. It will certainly, later.
Since we live in society, and much people tend to not like being killed, we shape societies such that such events tend not to happen (mostly via punishment and socialization). Each individual try to steer society at the best of its capabilities. If we collectively end up in a place where there’s no murders, people like me consider this a success. Otherwise, a failure.
Politics, advocacy, leading-by-example, guided by things like Game Theory, Ethics, History. Those are very much not out of the scope of Agency. It would be if individuals had absolutely 0 impact on society.
That’s why, for me and at my current speculation level, I think there is two Red Bright Lines for a post-ASI future.
One : if there is no recognizable Mormons society in a post-ASI future, something Has Gone Very Wrong. Mormons tend to value their traditional way of life pretty heavily (which includes agency). Trampling those in particular probably indicate that we are generally trampling a awful lot of values actually held by a lot of actual people.
Two : if there is no recognizable UBI paradise in a post-ASI future, something Has Gone Very Wrong. For pretty much the same reason.
(there is plausibly a similar third red line for transhumanists, but they cause serious security/safety challenges for the rest of the universe, so it’s getting more complicated there, so I found no way to articulate such a red line for them).
The corollary being is : the (non-terribly-gone-wrong) pot-ASI future is almost inevitably a patchwork of different societies with different tradeoffs. Unless One Value System wins, one which is low on Diversity on top of that. Which would be terrible.
To answer you : I should get that because I’m going to live with other people who are okay that I get that, because they want to get it too.
I entirely agree with you here. It’s all inside us. If there was some Real Really Objectively Meaningful Values out there, I would believe a technically aligned ASI to be able to recognize this and would be much less concerned by the potential loss of Agency/Meaningfulness/whatever we call it. Alas, I don’t believe it’s the case.
Mostly some self-description, since you seem want a model of me. I did add an actual disagreement (or something) at the end, but I don’t think there’ll be much more for me to say about it if you don’t accept it. I will read anything you write.
More like “enjoy the process”. Why would I want to set a “win” condition to begin with?
I don’t play actual games at all unless somebody drags me into them. They seem artificial and circumscribed. Whatever the rules are, I don’t really care enough about learning them, or learning to work within them, unless it gives me something that seems useful for whatever random conditions may come up later, outside the game. That applies to whatever the winning condition is, as much as to any other rule.
Games with competition tend to be especially tedious. Making the competition work seems to tends to further constrain the design of the rules, so they’re more boring. And the competition can make the other people involved annoying.
As far as winning itself… Whee! I got the most points! That, plus whatever coffee costs nowadays, will buy me a cup of coffee. And I don’t even like coffee.
I study things, and I do projects.
While I do evaluate project results, I’m not inclined to bin them as “success” or “failure”. I mean, sure, I’ll broadly classify a project that way, especially if I have to summarize it to somebody else in a sentence. But for myself I want more than that. What exactly did I get out of doing it? The whole thing might even be a “success” if it didn’t meet any of its original goals.
I collect capabilities. Once I have a capability, I often, but not always, lose interest in using it, except maybe to get more capabilities. Capabilities get extra points for being generally useful.
I collect experiences when new, pleasurable, or interesting ones seem to be available. But just experiences, not experiences of “winning”.
I’ll do crossword puzzles, but only when I have nothing else to do and mostly for the puns.
Even I would understand that as not, actually, you know, winning the game. I mean, a game is a system with rules. No rules, no game, thus no win. And if there’s an auto-win button that has no reason to be in the rules other than auto-win, well, obvious hole is obvious.
It’s just that I don’t care to play a game to begin with.
If something is gamified, meaning that somebody has artificially put a bunch of random stuff I don’t care about between me and something I actually want in real life, then I’ll try to bypass the game. But I’m not going to do that for points, or badges, or “achievements” that somebody else has decided I should want. I’m not going to push the “win” button. I’m just not gonna play. I loathe gamification.
I see it not as an “I win” button, but as an “I can do the stuff I care about without having to worry about which random stupid bullshit other people might be willing to pay me for, or about tedious chores that don’t interest me” button.
Sure, I’m going to mash that.
And eventually maybe I’ll go more transcendent, if that’s on offer. I’m even willing to accept certain reasonable mental outlooks to avoid being too “unaligned”.
I don’t even believe “Collective Agency” is a thing, let alone a thing I’d care about. Anything you can reasonably call “agency” requires preferences, and intentional, planned, directed, well, action toward a goal. Collectives don’t have preferences and don’t plan (and also don’t enjoy, or even experience, either the process or the results).
Which, by the way, brings me to the one actual quibble I’m going to put in this. And I’m not sure what to do with that quibble. I don’t have a satisfactory course of action and I don’t think I have much useful insight beyond what’s below. But I do know it’s a problem.
I was once involved in a legal case that had a lot to do with some Mormons. Really they were a tiny minority of the people affected, but the history was such that the legal system thought they were salient, so they got talked about a lot, and got to talk themselves, and I learned a bit about them.
These particular Mormons were a relatively isolated polygynist splinter sect that treated women, and especially young women, pretty poorly (actually I kind of think everybody but the leaders got a pretty raw deal, and I’m not even sure the leaders were having much of a Good Time(TM)). It wasn’t systematic torture, but it wasn’t Fun Times either. And the people on the bottom had a whole lot less of what most people would call “agency” than the people on the top.
But they could show you lots of women who truly, sincerely wanted to stay in their system. That was how they’d been raised and what they believed in. And they genuinely believed their Prophet got direct instructions from God (now and then, not all the time).
Nobody was kept in chains. Anybody who wanted to leave was free to walk away from their entire family, probably almost every person they even knew by name, and everything they’d ever been taught was important, while defying what at least many of them truly believed was the literal will of God. And of course move somewhere where practically everybody had a pretty alien way of life, and most people were constantly doing things they’d always believed were hideously immoral, and where they’d been told people were doing worse than they actually were.
They probably would have been miserable if they’d been forcibly dragged out of their system. They might never have recovered. If they had recovered, it might well have meant they’d had experiences that you could categorize as brainwashing.
It would have been wrong to yank them out of their system. So far I’m with you.
But was it right to raise them that way? Was it right to allow them to be raised that way? What kind of “agency” did they have in choosing the things that molded them? The people who did mold them got agency, but they don’t seem to have gotten much.
As I think you’ve probably figured out, I’m very big on individual, conscious, thinking, experiencing, wanting agents, and very much against giving mindless aggregates like institutions, groups, or “cultures”, anywhere near the same kind of moral weight.
From my point of view, a dog has more right to respect and consideration than a “heritage”. The “heritage” is only important because of the people who value it, and that does not entitle it to have more, different people fed to it. And by this I specifically mean children.
A world of diverse enclaves is appealing in a lot of ways. But, in every realistic form I’ve been able to imagine, it’s a world where the enclaves own people.
More precisely, it’s a world where “culture” or “heritage”, or whatever, is used an excuse for some people not only to make other people miserable, but to condition them from birth to choose that misery. Children start to look suspiciously like they’re just raw material for whatever enclave they happen to be born in. They don’t choose the enclave, not when it matters.
It’s not like you can just somehow neutrally turn a baby into an adult and then have them “choose freely”. People’s values are their own, but that doesn’t mean they create those values ex nihilo.
I suppose you could fix the problem by switching to reproduction by adult fission, or something. But a few people might see that as a rather abrupt departure, maybe even contrary to their values. And kids are cute.