Most civilizations in the past have had “bad values” by our standards. People have been in preference falsification equilibria where they feel like they have to endorse certain values or face social censure. They probably still are falsifying preferences and our civilizational values are probably still bad. E.g. high incidence of people right now saying they’re traumatized. CEV probably tends more towards the values of untraumatized than traumatized humans, even from a somewhat traumatized starting point.
The idea that civilization is “oppressive” and some societies have fewer problems points to value drift that has already happened. The Roman empire was really, really bad and has influenced future societies due to Christianity and so on. Civilizations have become powerful partly through military mobilization. Civilizations can be nice to live in in various ways, but that mostly has to do with greater satisfaction of instrumental values.
Some of the value drift might not be worth undoing, e.g. value drift towards caring more about far-away people than humans naturally would.
Most civilizations in the past have had “bad values” by our standards. People have been in preference falsification equilibria where they feel like they have to endorse certain values or face social censure. They probably still are falsifying preferences and our civilizational values are probably still bad. E.g. high incidence of people right now saying they’re traumatized. CEV probably tends more towards the values of untraumatized than traumatized humans, even from a somewhat traumatized starting point.
The idea that civilization is “oppressive” and some societies have fewer problems points to value drift that has already happened. The Roman empire was really, really bad and has influenced future societies due to Christianity and so on. Civilizations have become powerful partly through military mobilization. Civilizations can be nice to live in in various ways, but that mostly has to do with greater satisfaction of instrumental values.
Some of the value drift might not be worth undoing, e.g. value drift towards caring more about far-away people than humans naturally would.