In case it's not obvious: I think the "long reflection" is an excellent, super important concept, and I'm delighted that it's become a core EA discussion topic (thanks eg to Toby Ord).
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Replying to @robbensinger
I see the intuitive appeal, but the descriptions of it that I've seen seem—ahistorical? Our current values aren't the product of collective deliberation, but free-for-all memetic/economic/military/biological competition, after which the winners wrote the history books. 1/2
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Replying to @zackmdavis @robbensinger
Just so - for a good reason; values that allow for smoother cooperation are superior values and superior cooperation wins wars. The ideal solution would be to have low stakes warfare (low stakes not meaning "fought with fake weapons" but low stakes meaning regional warfare).
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Every value that doesn't produce better war bands is fake and
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Replying to @CovfefeAnon @robbensinger
The concern is that humanity is fake and gay in your sense. Given a sufficiently precise definition of what constitutes a "better" "war band", the actual optimum (if you could search over all possible configurations of matter) isn't going to be what you really want. 1/3
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If a "war band" is just anything targetable & destructive, the answer is probably going to be nanobot disassemblers. If a "war band" has to be made of men, then anything that's not built into your def'n of "man" will be scrapped if it doesn't make a more lethal super-soldier. 2/3
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You might be tempted to bite the bullet, imagining valiant soldiers according to your concept of martial virtue, but the actual result would be soulless killing machines that happen to be made out of flesh (and that, only because the problem statement ruled out the nanobots). 3/3
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You might reply, "Nuh-uh, that wouldn't happen; evolution gave us souls", but that's only because (a) the environment of evolutionary adaptedness was more complicated (war was just one of many adaptive problems), and (b) evolution is a terrible engineer. 4/3
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Replying to @zackmdavis @robbensinger
The actual tip of the spear is only a minor part of what makes an effective war band. The main problem with the near future mil tech scenarios you're describing is that they're *scalable* - better to be big (to produce more of them) and absorb *everything*
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Once a single society absorbs all the others then it is free to spin into madness as status maximizers short circuit all the evolved systems for keeping them out (and there's no threat of external system destruction to keep them under control).
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Curtis Yarvin had an interesting proposal on his substack that when an orbital power emerges it should allow unrestricted, constant pre-industrial warfare (no chemical explosives, no compressed gasses).
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Closed systems tend to break down as people prioritize rising up in the system over the good of the system as a whole - there needs to be some kind of check on that tendency.
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Replying to @CovfefeAnon @robbensinger
My guys (I'll say "guys" when talking to you, but we don't call ourselves that because we're fake and gay) are worried about a more radical problem. The entire paradigm of some values being more "fit", only applies to a world where evolution is the only optimization process. 1/3
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