I think my reaction here is to the implication that what actually happened was on the pareto frontier; that if we’re able to counterfact by sending back to a small group of people some reasonable amount of foreseeing-good-and-bad-outcomes, that the bad ones can’t be averted without preventing the good ones. Like, I don’t think the natives had to be screwed over so badly to get the good outcomes you’re talking about! explaining what the colonists meant by property and how their legal system worked would probably have done a lot of what I’m saying. the diseases would be harder to avoid but there might be some short message you can imagine someone figuring out at the time that we can counterfact on.
Besides the obvious direct moral cost, which was enormous, a lot of why people complain about the effects on today is that the natives were already pretty good at governance, they weren’t governing for expansion but they were pretty good at governing stability, so if they’d had more of a vote in governing for expansion there’s reason to expect it would have been slightly slower in exchange for much more stable. I doubt being nicer to natives results in no revolutionary war, the crown still was trying to stay in control pretty hard If they had been involved in setting up the USA after throwing off the crown; so most of the counterfactual of “find a way to warn natives about what’s coming” seems likely to produce a civ closer to NZ, which doesn’t seem like a particularly bad outcome. So like, the hint I’m getting isn’t like, “I accept tradeoffs”, it’s “I accept subpar tradeoffs where the negative side is hugely more negative than it needed to be in order to achieve what I see as good”.
I am reassured moderately, but I’m still confused by this pattern, and in particular, “conquer” still is setting off alarm bells for me that the representation in your head might be voting yes on things I think the natural abstraction of the good thing you’re trying to defend does not need to vote yes about.
I think my reaction here is to the implication that what actually happened was on the pareto frontier; that if we’re able to counterfact by sending back to a small group of people some reasonable amount of foreseeing-good-and-bad-outcomes, that the bad ones can’t be averted without preventing the good ones. Like, I don’t think the natives had to be screwed over so badly to get the good outcomes you’re talking about! explaining what the colonists meant by property and how their legal system worked would probably have done a lot of what I’m saying. the diseases would be harder to avoid but there might be some short message you can imagine someone figuring out at the time that we can counterfact on.
Besides the obvious direct moral cost, which was enormous, a lot of why people complain about the effects on today is that the natives were already pretty good at governance, they weren’t governing for expansion but they were pretty good at governing stability, so if they’d had more of a vote in governing for expansion there’s reason to expect it would have been slightly slower in exchange for much more stable. I doubt being nicer to natives results in no revolutionary war, the crown still was trying to stay in control pretty hard If they had been involved in setting up the USA after throwing off the crown; so most of the counterfactual of “find a way to warn natives about what’s coming” seems likely to produce a civ closer to NZ, which doesn’t seem like a particularly bad outcome. So like, the hint I’m getting isn’t like, “I accept tradeoffs”, it’s “I accept subpar tradeoffs where the negative side is hugely more negative than it needed to be in order to achieve what I see as good”.
I am reassured moderately, but I’m still confused by this pattern, and in particular, “conquer” still is setting off alarm bells for me that the representation in your head might be voting yes on things I think the natural abstraction of the good thing you’re trying to defend does not need to vote yes about.