Listing what you care about doesn’t answer the question.
There is a subtext to this question, which is that I believe we typically assume—until it is demonstrated otherwise—that our values are similar or overlap significantly, so it is natural to ask ‘why do you value this’ when maybe we really mean ‘what terminal value do you think you’re optimizing with this’? Disagreements about policy or ‘what we should care about’ are then often based on different beliefs about what achieves what than different values. It is true that if our difference in caring turns out to be based upon different values, or weighting values differently, then there’s nothing much to discuss. Since I do value knowledge too, I wanted to further qualifyhow Wei Dai values knowledge, because I don’t see how nudging the far future one way or another is going to increase Wei Dei’s total knowledge.
There is a subtext to this question, which is that I believe we typically assume—until it is demonstrated otherwise—that our values are similar or overlap significantly, so it is natural to ask ‘why do you value this’ when maybe we really mean ‘what terminal value do you think you’re optimizing with this’? Disagreements about policy or ‘what we should care about’ are then often based on different beliefs about what achieves what than different values. It is true that if our difference in caring turns out to be based upon different values, or weighting values differently, then there’s nothing much to discuss. Since I do value knowledge too, I wanted to further qualify how Wei Dai values knowledge, because I don’t see how nudging the far future one way or another is going to increase Wei Dei’s total knowledge.