I think you’re missing at least one strategy here. If we can get folks to agree that different societies can choose different combos, so long as they don’t infringe on some subset of rights to protect other societies, then you could have different societies expand out into various pieces of the future in different ways. (Yes, I understand that’s a big if, but it reduces the urgency/crux nature of value agreement).
I think the if condition is relying on either an impossibility as presented, or it requires you to exclude some human values, at which point you should at least admit that what values you choose to retain is a political decision, based on your own values.
Societies aren’t the issue; they’re mindless aggregates that don’t experience anything and don’t actually even have desires in anything like the way a human, or or even an animal or an AI, has desires. Individuals are the issue. Do individuals get to choose which of these societies they live in?
I’m not missing that strategy at all. It’s an almost certainty that any solution will have to involve something like that, barring some extremely strong commitment to Unity which by itself will destroy a lot of Values. But there are some pretty fundamental values that some people (even/especially) here care a lot about, like negative utilitarianism (“minimize suffering”), which are flatly incompatible with simple implementations of that solution. Negative utilitarians care very much about the total suffering in the universe and their calculus do not stop at the boundaries of “different societies”.
And if you say “screw them”, well, what about the guy who basically goes “let’s create the baby eaters society ?”. If you recoil at that, it means there’s at least a bit of negative utilitarianism in you. Which is normal, don’t worry, it’s a pretty common human value, even in people who doesn’t describe themselves as “negative utilitarians”.
Now you can recognize the problem, which is that every individual will have a different boundary in the Independence-Freedom-Diversity vs Negative-Utilitarianism tradeoff.
(which I do not think is the only tradeoff/conflict, but clearly one of the biggest one, if not THE biggest one, if you set aside transhumanism)
And if you double down on the “screw them” solution ? Well, you enter exactly in what I described with “even with perfect play, you are going to lose some Human Values”. For it is a non-negligible chunk of Human Values.
I think you’re missing at least one strategy here. If we can get folks to agree that different societies can choose different combos, so long as they don’t infringe on some subset of rights to protect other societies, then you could have different societies expand out into various pieces of the future in different ways. (Yes, I understand that’s a big if, but it reduces the urgency/crux nature of value agreement).
I think the if condition is relying on either an impossibility as presented, or it requires you to exclude some human values, at which point you should at least admit that what values you choose to retain is a political decision, based on your own values.
Societies aren’t the issue; they’re mindless aggregates that don’t experience anything and don’t actually even have desires in anything like the way a human, or or even an animal or an AI, has desires. Individuals are the issue. Do individuals get to choose which of these societies they live in?
I’m not missing that strategy at all. It’s an almost certainty that any solution will have to involve something like that, barring some extremely strong commitment to Unity which by itself will destroy a lot of Values. But there are some pretty fundamental values that some people (even/especially) here care a lot about, like negative utilitarianism (“minimize suffering”), which are flatly incompatible with simple implementations of that solution. Negative utilitarians care very much about the total suffering in the universe and their calculus do not stop at the boundaries of “different societies”.
And if you say “screw them”, well, what about the guy who basically goes “let’s create the baby eaters society ?”. If you recoil at that, it means there’s at least a bit of negative utilitarianism in you. Which is normal, don’t worry, it’s a pretty common human value, even in people who doesn’t describe themselves as “negative utilitarians”.
Now you can recognize the problem, which is that every individual will have a different boundary in the Independence-Freedom-Diversity vs Negative-Utilitarianism tradeoff.
(which I do not think is the only tradeoff/conflict, but clearly one of the biggest one, if not THE biggest one, if you set aside transhumanism)
And if you double down on the “screw them” solution ? Well, you enter exactly in what I described with “even with perfect play, you are going to lose some Human Values”. For it is a non-negligible chunk of Human Values.