Wait, wait, wait.
To clarify when I said abandon their folly, I mean abandon their in the long term (possibly) doomed endeavour. I did not say I would approve of the total victory of farmer values.
I will however say that I have no interest at all in shifting my own values more towards farmer or forager values. So if the current of history is towards one direction I will probably work towards the other.
There is always a dialectic between "farmer" and "forager" values, but it leads in one direction only.
I have just pointed out that historically this isn't true. Else there would have never been something to call "farmer values" in the first place. I have also given you a scenario that suggest in the future it might not be so.
And in very specific kinds of ways we have, even in modern times, been becoming more and more farmer rather than more and more forager. When it comes to violence we are still pretty clearly moving towards the domesticated farming human rather the violent wild forager (Check out this paper and Pinker's book Better angels of our nature ). To cite another example, when it comes to our workplace we are hyper-farmer in our behaviour compared to say people from the 18th century.
Also it stands to reason that natural selection has significantly and perhaps rapidly shifted humans towards farmer values compared to humans before farming in the last 10 000 years.
Our common dream will either reign or destroy us.
Perhaps LessWrong posters basically do. But Humans do not have a common dream. Values differ.
What does your morality say - not calculation, but intuition?
My moral intuitions are frustrated by the mere addition paradox. They are fundamentally broken. Robin Hanson is I think right that a Malthusian em world would be glorious. It is not the best of worlds by a long shot, yet neither is it the worst of worlds, it is a possible outcome and it is a better outcome than most uFAIs.
What if we just shut up and calculate?
EY and RH claim to have done this, but differ in their result. To RH this is a possible future we should be pretty much ok with, while EY thinks he should invest superhuman effort to avoid it. I think we would all be better off if more people on LW thought long and hard about this.
Thanks for the answer. You're certainly wiser than me. Damn, I have so many posts in the pipeline right now; the one with the Warhammer 40k communist eutopia; the one about how "democracy" as in "the rule of the People" is, while being quite real and attainable, a primarily economical and partly cultural matter and has nothing to do with surface ideology and political window-dressing; the one about how I'll likely end up choosing partial wireheading as an answer to whatever tomorrow throws at me... unfortunately, there are real life concerns in the way, but I promise I'll deliver someday.
You folks probably know how some posters around here, specifically Vladimir_M, often make statements to the effect of:
"There's an opinion on such-and-such topic that's so against the memeplex of Western culture, we can't even discuss it in open-minded, pseudonymous forums like Less Wrong as society would instantly slam the lid on it with either moral panic or ridicule and give the speaker a black mark.
Meanwhile the thought patterns instilled in us by our upbringing would lead us to quickly lose all interest in the censored opinion"
Going by their definition, us blissfully ignorant masses can't even know what exactly those opinions might be, as they would look like basic human decency, the underpinnings of our ethics or some other such sacred cow to us. I might have a few guesses, though, all of them as horrible and sickening as my imagination could produce without overshooting and landing in the realm of comic-book evil:
- Dictatorial rule involving active terror and brutal suppression of deviants having great utility for a society in the long term, by providing security against some great risk or whatever.
- A need for every society to "cull the weak" every once in a while, e.g. exterminating the ~0.5% of its members that rank as weakest against some scale.
- Strict hierarchy in everyday life based on facts from the ansectral environment (men dominating women, fathers having the right of life and death over their children, etc) - Mencius argued in favor of such ruthless practices, e.g. selling children into slavery, in his post on "Pronomianism" and "Antinomianism", stating that all contracts between humans should rather be strict than moral or fair, to make the system stable and predictable; he's quite obsessed with stability and conformity.
- Some public good being created when the higher classes wilfully oppress and humiliate the lower ones in a ceremonial manner
- The bloodshed and lawlessness of periodic large-scale war as a vital "pressure valve" for releasing pent-up unacceptable emotional states and instinctive drives
- Plain ol' unfair discrimination of some group in many cruel, life-ruining ways, likewise as a pressure valve
+: some Luddite crap about dropping to a near-subsistence level in every aspect of civilization and making life a daily struggle for survival
Of course my methodology for coming up with such guesses was flawed and primitive: I simply imagined some of the things that sound the ugliest to me yet have been practiced by unpleasant cultures before in some form. Now, of course, most of us take the absense of these to be utterly crucial to our terminal values. Nevertheless, I hope I have demonstrated to whoever might really have something along these lines (if not necessarily that shocking) on their minds that I'm open to meta-discussion, and very interested how we might engage each other on finding safe yet productive avenues of contact.
Let's do the impossible and think the unthinkable! I must know what those secrets are, no matter how much sleep and comfort I might lose.
P.S. Yeah, Will, I realize that I'm acting roughly in accordance with that one trick you mentioned way back.
P.P.S. Sup Bakkot. U mad? U jelly?
CONCLUSION:
Fuck this Earth, and fuck human biology. I'm not very distressed about anything I saw ITT, but there's still a lot of unpleasant potential things that can only be resolved in one way:
I hereby pledge to get a real goddamn plastic card, not this Visa Electron bullshit the university saddled us with, and donate at least $100 to SIAI until the end of the year. This action will reduce the probability of me and mine having to live with the consequences of most such hidden horrors. Dixi.
Sometimes it's so pleasant to be impulsive.
Amusing observation: even when the comments more or less match my wild suggestions above, I'm still unnerved by them. An awful idea feels harmless if you keep telling yourself that it's just a private delusion, but the moment you know that someone else shares it, matters begin to look much more grave.